This is a Living History interview with Bill Poe, class of 1962, conducted by Marilyn Summers on March the 6th, the year is 2012. We are at his home and in his recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee. And the subject of the interview today, his life in general, his experiences at Georgia Tech. Bill Poe, it's a treat to be here with you. Thanks so much for letting us drop in. 

Well, I'm looking forward to it. We are in the Apple... Apple Creek. Apple Creek Studio, which is behind your property here in Nashville, Tennessee. We're going to hear your whole story. It'll take a while. It's going to take us a while, you bet. I want to begin at the beginning. I want to know when you were born and where you were born. 1940. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, only about a year before we got into World War II. You were born in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Now, why? 

What was your mom and dad doing in Atlanta, Georgia at that time? 

My father was flying for Eastern Airlines, which was a fairly new company back then. And he and my mother had been married since 1936. 

So that was where he was stationed for his work then? 

Well, he wasn't in the service yet. He had been in the service. I meant that's where he was living for his Eastern Airlines. Yeah, he had learned to fly in the Army back in 1929. He learned fighter planes. And then when he got out, he got a job with Eddie Rickenbacker, who had just bought Eastern Airlines. 

So he was flying for Eastern Airlines at the time I was born, and he had been married to my mother for about three or four years. 

Okay, now let's go back to where was your father born? 

Where did he come from? 

He was born in Talladega, Alabama. He was from Alabama, okay. Do you remember his parents? 

Did you ever meet your grandparents? 

Oh, yes, yeah. I would go visit with them in the summertime. They lived in Birmingham, Alabama. 

What did you call them? 

Who were they to you? 

Grandma, Grandpa, or do you have another name? 

Granddaddy. Granddaddy? 

And grandmother. Okay. And granddaddy died when I was nine years old, but my grandmother lived on until I was in adulthood. 

So you remember her better than you do him. I remember her better, and I really loved going to Birmingham in the summertime. I think it's because she let me sleep late. I could do whatever I wanted to. In other words, she would spoil me. She spoiled you. That's what grandparents are for. 

And she did a good job of that, huh? 

How long had they, were they from Alabama, both of them? 

Your dad was born there. Where were they born? 

My dad was born in Alabama. I believe both of them were born in Georgia, but I don't know. I mean, I never knew them to live anywhere but in Alabama. 

But I think I've heard a talk about that. What did your grandfather do for a living? 

He had had a farm, but they lost it in the Depression. 

And he moved into town, I think Lincoln, Alabama, and he got a job in a department store or something selling shoes. Make a do, as they say. 

I remember, and that's when my father had been, had started college at, I believe it was Howard College in Birmingham. And he, you know, he went to the University of Alabama first. He came home to stay in Birmingham so he could help his parents out. And then he joined the Army as soon as he got out of college. Oh, did he? 

And learned to fly, yeah. That's where he learned how to fly. In the Army Air Force. 

Who knew that was going to be in their genes and they would be able to pass that down, huh? 

And my daughter does it too. 

Well, let's talk about your mama first. Your mother was from where? 

My mother was from New Orleans. My dad met her in Atlanta, but she had been born and raised in New Orleans. 

She was from an Irish family that had moved out of New York because there was so much prejudice against the Irish in New York that had signs that said N-I-N -A, which meant no Irish need apply. And she had told me about this. Her family had moved to New Orleans. And then her mother died when she was seven years old. And her father couldn't find enough work. They had three children then. And her father found a job in Atlanta. 

And the three children, they were from a big family, and the three children were raised for about two years by his family. And the Irish are really close together, that family, so she just sort of moved in. And then about two years later, he married again, and my mother went to live with them. 

She was the one that really called my grandmother on my mother's side because I never knew my mother's mother. She died before I was, even my mother was only seven years old when she died. 

But he married a girl named Lena, and she lived on up into the 1970s, well after I was an adult. 

So you knew her. 

But she always had us to call her Nana, not Grandmother. Yeah, Nana. She felt like our real grandmother was Eva, that had died before I was even born. What about your grandfather on that side? 

Did you know him? 

He died before I was born. He was kind of mysterious. Even my mother doesn't know a lot. He came over from Switzerland and met my mother, who was an Irish immigrant, and they got married. 

But his family back in Switzerland, he lost total touch. Maybe he didn't want it. Who knows? 

There might have been horse thieves in the family. That sounds like a real good detective opportunity. In fact, we never really knew where, you know, Switzerland has three different languages. And he spoke French. French was his native language. 

So we always assumed that he was from the French section of Switzerland. 

But when my father and my mother got married, my dad promised that he would take her to Europe sometime. 

Well, it was long after I was in the Navy and I was traveling. He finally did it, huh? 

He finally kept that promise. I was living over in Germany, and he brought her over. And while they were over in Europe, they went by Switzerland. They were going to check out to see where it was. Where he was born. Yeah, well, I think it was Logano was the name of the town. The town that was in the Italian part of Switzerland, not French. 

So we don't know why he always said he was, well, he said he was from the French part, spoke French, but he said his town was Lugano, which turned out to be an Italian city. 

So we don't know. A lot of mystery there. There's a lot of mystery there. We don't know. 

So really interesting grandparents on both sides when you think about it. I wish I had gotten to know them better. 

Well, we, you know, when we're young, we waste our time, and then we get old and we say, why didn't we, right? 

Well, my grandmother, of course, I knew her really, really well because I was well into adulthood until the time she passed. She was born in the 1880s, just sort of at the tail end of Reconstruction. 

And when I would visit my family in Alabama, of course, especially after the Civil Rights Movement started, there was a lot of turmoil going on. 

You know, after the Reconstruction, there wasn't that much animosity toward black people, but there was a lot of animosity toward northerners. They were occupied by Union troops, you know. And all her life she was, you know. She had no use for Yankees, huh? 

Prejudice against Yankees. 

But one time when we were, the whole family was sitting there and watching TV about some of the civil rights activities in the early 1960s. 

And all of a sudden, just out of nowhere, she said, somebody had said something, well, I think intermarriage is what people are afraid of. And she said, I don't see anything wrong with intermarriage. And then, you know, we all said, Grandmother, the matriarch of the family. I said, well, tell us about that, Grandmother. 

And she said, well, our son, Sidney, married a girl from Boston, and that seems to be working out all right. 

So she just felt she was really becoming liberal that she could accept a Yankee in the family. That's pretty much open-minded, Grandmother. Open-minded. You were born in Atlanta. 

To what neighborhood did your parents live in at the time? 

Where were you raised? 

Well, we moved from Atlanta when we got into World War II. I was born in December 1940. The war started in December 1941, so I don't remember anything about that set. I know they lived in an apartment off of Piedmont Park. I know they told me that. 

But then my earliest memories were my father had gone back into the Army and became a flight instructor. 

He wanted to go back in and fly fighter planes because that's what he had learned to fly in the 1920s. And they told me, they said, Mr. Poe, you would get shot down in a minute by these 20-year-old German or Japanese fighter pilots. You're too old for fighter planes. 

But we need multi-engine instructors, and you've got multi-engine experience flying for Eastern Airlines. 

So he came in as a flight instructor. Which is a wonderful thing. He had to train the others. And that way we could stay with him. And they would move him to one military base after another one six months to a year at a time. And we would move with him. And so I lived on a military basis. 

Did you have any brothers or sisters? 

Yeah, I had a sister that died before I was born of what they thought was whooping cough. She only lived a few weeks, and they had told me about her, but I'd never known her. 

And then my brother was born in 1945, and he had a respiratory disease too, but it turned out by that time they knew what it was. It was cystic fibrosis. 

So they were sure that that must have been cystic fibrosis that she had died of, but they didn't know that the disease existed back then, so there was no treatment for it. 

But there was treatment by 1945, but even then they said, you know, babies that are born with cystic fibrosis are not going to live more than a few years, and we want you to prepare yourselves. 

Well, by a few years later, they had developed more methods to work with the disease, and my brother finally got used to the doctors always telling him, You know, you're probably not going to live in a couple more years. 

But he kept doing it. He lived to be 19. 

He died at 19 after he had already gotten into his senior year in high school and been accepted at the University of Miami. He was going to major in marine biology. And you lost him then. And then we lost him, yeah. 

So you didn't have any other siblings. It was just you then. No, just those two, yeah. And I didn't know the first one, but I grew up with my brother. You started to tell me that your earliest memory was, and then you stopped. 

Where did you live that you first remember? 

I think this is what started my obsession with airplanes and with music. 

My father put me up on stage at the, I think it was Freeman Field in Indiana because I was only about two or three years old, but I can remember it. 

It might have been after we moved to the Smyrna Air Base here in Nashville, which I think was in 1944. 

But I was very young, three or four years old, and he put me up on stage and had me sing. Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder. You were performing, huh? 

And that was, I just loved the feeling of singing. I loved the feeling of, you know, just the words of the song. It's a great song. Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder. And you wanted to go into the Wild Blue Yonder and sing about it on the way. We live in fame, we go down in flame, nothing can stop the Army Air Corps. Yeah. And when they changed it to U. S. Air Force, it just didn't sound the same. It was the Army Air Corps. That's the way it started. Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps. That's just a musical sound. Yeah, yeah, it is. Yes, indeed. That's a great memory then. And I grew up wanting to fly. That's why I went to Georgia Tech, why I majored in aerospace engineering. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not go that fast. 

I want to know, where did you go to elementary school? 

Did you go to a lot of them because you were moving from base to base? 

Well, the war was over in 1945, and I was still only four years old. 

So when I started elementary school about a year or two later, 1946 or 47, we had bought a house in Decatur then. 

So you were back in Atlanta. Right outside Atlanta, yeah. 

So what school did you go to then? 

That was Decatur. The Decatur City School System. Decatur County School. Oh, no, not the city school then. 

My very first school that I went to was a private school because my birthday fell at an odd time of year in December. 

And I wasn't old enough in September to go to the first grade, but I had already gone to a kindergarten where I was going to have to repeat pentagon again if they wouldn't take me in first grade. 

So they had me go to a private school for first grade, and then they had to take me to public school after I got out of that. 

So my second grade was at Winona Park Elementary School in Decatur. It was a DeKalb County school. And where was the private school? 

In the same area? 

It was in the same area. 

Well, it was where we were living. We were living in Decatur. Were you a good student in school? 

I just remember I had a teacher named Mrs. Biles, And I think I just called it Mrs. Biles School. I don't know if that's the name of it or not. It's fun that you can remember her name, though. See, we always remember our early teachers. You know, I think one reason I can remember so much in my early years is because we moved so much. 

Like, you know, if you're born and you live in the same house in the same neighborhood, you might have a memory and you don't realize how far back you're remembering because the environment is the same. 

But if I'm thinking of something and I think of an Airfoil with snow on the ground, I know that had to be Seymour, Indiana, because that's the only place we were stationed where it was cold all the time. Yeah, that's a good way for you to recollect. Yeah, so I would remember, you know, we'd move about every six months or every year. Until you got ready for school, and then you stayed put. Did your dad go back to the airlines again after the war, when he got out of the Army? 

Yeah, yeah. He went back to Eastern? 

He had gone from first lieutenant when he went in to a lieutenant colonel. You know, promotions come fast in the war because so many people are getting killed. And after the war was over, they said he was going to have to go back to First Lieutenant. And he said, I don't want to do that. He said, I'm just going to go back to work with the airlines. 

So he did. And so he went back. Did he go back to Eastern? 

Back with Eastern Airlines, yeah. And he stayed with Eastern until he retired, when he was 60 years old. Then you had to retire at 60. 

Was he domestic flights or international flights? 

Well, Eastern was mainly domestic, but they did fly to Puerto Rico. I mean, that's U. S. territory, but it was overseas. 

He would fly a triangular route from, after we moved to Miami, he'd fly the route from Miami to New York to San Juan and back to Miami again, a triangular route. 

But when we lived in Atlanta, he would fly all the way to the south, Atlanta to Birmingham or sometimes Atlanta to New York. Did you ever get to go on a flight? 

Oh, gosh, yeah. One of his pilot friends let me fly the plane when I was seven years old. Oh, my word. 

Yeah, they would never let anybody do anything like that now, but they didn't have the kind of cockpit security they have now. And he took me up. He knew the pilot. He took me up to the front. It was a DC-3. He introduced me to the pilot. 

I said, do you want to fly the plane? 

And I said, yeah, can I do that bump? 

And he said, well, if he says, okay. 

So I sat on the pilot's lap. And he, of course, I couldn't reach the rudder pedals or anything. 

So I was holding the yoke of the plane, and he said, Just keep those wings, you know, there's like an artificial horizon. Just keep that level. And I was hanging on for dear right. 

I said, If I let go, is the plane going to crash? 

And he said, No, I don't think it'll crash, but don't let go. And, of course, he was working the rudders and the throttles and all that. What a great memory for you, though. 

If the passengers had known there was a seven-year-old flying the plane, I think they'd want to bail out. Yeah. 

So you did get to have some adventures like that in the air. And you knew you wanted to be a pilot. You knew you wanted to fly then, huh? 

Yeah, that was all I was around. 

I mean, before the war was even over, he put me up inside a B-25 bomber while it was on the ground, put me up through the bomb bay and took a leg and sat in the cockpit. It wasn't flying. They didn't let me take it off or anything. 

But I remember that as far back. 

Isn't that nice that your daddy let you have part of his career that way? 

You know, I just identified with it tremendously. 

I was in about, I believe it was maybe the fifth grade, when he got permission from the company to take the whole class up. How wonderful. On a sightseeing flight around Atlanta. Talk about a field trip, huh? 

Yeah, in Eastern Airlines DC-3. You could be pretty sure those kids had never flown before either on those days. Yeah, that's for sure. You must have been a popular young man in the fifth grade then. 

Well, I was after that. Yeah, yeah, your dad could take you in a big, oh, that would have been so exciting. Can you imagine? 

And I just saw myself as being a pilot and never thought of doing anything else. When did you, now you went through, you said you moved to Miami and things changed somewhat then. What year did you move to Miami? 1956. Remember I told you about my brother's cystic fibrosis. 

The doctors in Atlanta told us that with the pollen around Atlanta and the hay fever problem they have in Atlanta, that he would live longer if we moved to Miami. And Eastern did have a base in Miami. 

So they were willing to transfer your dad. 

So Pop put in for a transfer, and he transferred to Miami, and so we moved down there. I was in my junior year in high school when we moved down to Miami. 

So what high school did you go to first here? 

North Fulton in Atlanta. 

So you did go to North Fulton, okay. And then I went to Carl Gables High School in Miami. Let me ask you this. 

When you were a young man, teenager, coming into your middle school years, did you get involved in any kind of sports activities or anything? 

I liked to play tennis a lot. Okay. 

But I was already learning to play guitar, and I didn't want anything to interfere with my guitar playing. 

How did that start? 

Did somebody give you a guitar? 

Did you ask to take lessons or what? 

Well, I guess I was about 12 years old. 

We had moved from Decatur to Atlanta, but sometimes we'd go back to visit some of our friends that we'd known in Decatur. You know, they were only 10 or 12 miles, so the neighborhoods were close together. 

And these people had invited us over to their house, and we were having dinner on their back porch outdoors. And they said, you know, the people that bought your house, their boy plays guitar. I think you'd like to meet him. 

So they invited them over, and this boy, his name was Kenny Lee. He was about 18 or 19 years old, I guess, and I was about 12, you know, so he came over. 

They had a daughter about 16 or 17, and I noticed how much fun it was sitting around there with this guy playing guitar, and we were all singing country songs, Hank Williams songs and that kind of stuff. 

But I also noticed the way she really seemed to, he just gazed at him while he was playing. I was like, boy, that's cool. You don't have to be on the football team. And so maybe I better start learning how to play. She played guitar, huh? 

And she played guitar a little bit, and she taught me some chords on it. Okay. Even though, you know. 

But you didn't have your own yet. No, I got, well, I got my own pretty soon. I guess I was, I was about 9 or 10. It was about that time that we had been there. I guess I was 12 when I actually got my first guitar. You were 12, okay. 

But it was hard to play. My dad didn't know anything about guitars. 

He just bought one at a music store, Neither he nor I realized that it would have been unplayable by anybody. The strings were just too far from the neck. It wasn't a very good guitar. And I just thought, well, maybe I'm just too young to be learning. 

So I put it aside. 

And then one night he had one of his pilot friends over at the house have picked it up, and he said, nobody can play this guitar like it's set up, but you can play it this way. 

And he tuned it to an open cord and took his cigarette lighter and slid it on the strings like a Hawaiian guitar. and said that's you could play that any guitar and i love that sound i said that sounds better than a regular guitar he said but when can i get something like that for christmas and he did so the next christmas i was i just turned 13 years old and i got a steel guitar back then steel guitars didn't have pedals and all these extra necks and all they were just you sat them on your lap to play them a lap steel so i took lessons on that for about two years right there in atlanta And right there in Atlanta, yeah. And I was in high school. After I moved to Miami, I didn't take lessons anymore. By then, I learned to play pretty well. 

But at North Fulton High, you did? 

Yeah, yeah. Tell me what it was like to live in that area, because that's Buckhead, North Fulton High. Yeah, but we were not in the rich section of Buckhead. Yeah, but you were going to school with them. Yeah, but kids that age, we didn't pay that much attention. 

What was it like? 

What was life like at that time? 

Were you a good student? 

Did you like going to school? 

Yeah, I didn't like going to school much. 

I'd rather be home playing the guitar, but I made good grades, and I got along well with my friends, with my teachers. I didn't have any problem with that. 

Okay, so that was just, you took it for granted. You were going to go to school and you were going to learn. You were happy enough to be learning, taking the lessons with guitar. 

What about the airport? 

Did you ever go out to the airport to take pilot flying lessons, or when did that come around? 

No. Not at all in Atlanta then, huh? 

A little bit after we moved to Miami. There was a little neighborhood airport there, and there was a Civil Air Patrol squadron there. 

By that time I was a teenager, and some of the local kids in the neighborhood would go out there and fly. I went up with them sometimes in the Civil Air Patrol planes. 

Okay, but nothing in Atlanta like that. No. 

There's no other things you remember from high school that you want to talk about? 

No? 

From that area? 

I don't want to skip anything. Were you aware? 

I loved scuba diving. Were you getting to do that anywhere? 

And soon we moved to Miami. No, I meant in Atlanta. 

Was there anything else before we moved down there? 

Well, I liked, I was in Boy Scouts, and I loved, you know. 

Okay, that's a really good thing. 

You joined a Boy Scout troop somewhere? 

One time my father went with us, and I know he was miserable sleeping outside in tents, but he didn't, but he was a good sport. He was a good sport, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And we were gigging frogs. He would gig frogs with the rest of us. 

So he was, your daddy, you were pretty close to your dad. Oh, very close, yeah. He was your good friend in addition to being your dad, huh? 

He was my role model, really. You know, I wanted to be just like him. 

Well, he sounds like he was a remarkable gentleman. He really was, wasn't he? 

I have to agree with that, yeah. An apple of your eye. You were the apple of his eye, I'm sure. I'm sure you were. 

So how long were you in Boy Scouts? 

Well, let's see. Actually, I was in Cub Scouts before that. Cub Scouts is when you start with that when you're about nine years old. Yeah, so you... And then when I turned 11, I got into Boy Scouts. 

So my mother was a den mother for the Cub Scouts, you know, eight or ten kids coming over to the house and would be making things, and the mother would be more or less in charge of it. And she'd always have an assistant that was a Boy Scout. They called him a den chief, I think. Did you stay with it as you got to be older? 

Yeah, I did. As long as I was in Atlanta, I stayed with it. 

Eleven, I got into Boy Scouts, and I went all the way up through Eagle, and I loved going out to camp. Did you? 

So you got your ego? 

Yeah. Got your ego badge? 

Yeah. Bill, that's amazing and that's wonderful. And, you know, going out camping is where I worked on the merit badges. Where was the campgrounds for the Boy Scouts? 

Burt Adams Boy Scouts Camp. Oh, sure. And I go there every summer. 

And then there was a group called Order of the Arrow that I got selected for, which was my last year there. It was the summer after my sophomore year, and I was moving down to Miami. 

So when we moved to Miami, I didn't really get, you know, there was... Yeah, it's hard to start all over at that age. How did you feel about the move? 

You probably knew you had to do it for your brother. Yeah, I did. You might have made that clear. And I liked the idea of being the ocean, you know, that we were going to be down there in Florida. 

But I kind of hated to leave all my friends. 

Well, that's very traumatic, the last few years. 

It was a big school in Miami, Carl Gables High School, who had like 900 people in our senior class, which is not so big for today but back then a lot bigger than the school I'd gone to in Atlanta and I was already 16 years old you know everybody there had known each other since through junior high and elementary school so that my senior year was better than my junior year the junior year was just sort of getting to meet people senior year by that time I had met other guitar players and we had a little band isn't that funny how you can find people who want to do the same thing you would do. 

Now, did you stick with the steel guitar? 

Yeah. I played a session this last Sunday. 

So that's been your instrument for your whole lifetime. Yeah. Did your brother do better in Florida? 

Yes, he did. He probably wouldn't have survived that next winter if we hadn't moved. 

So it was worthwhile for his sake. Oh, definitely. 

And he would have a homebound teacher many times, but other times he would go to public schools, and if he had too much trouble then you know they would keep his grades in the public soo would have a homebound teacher coming out there and it got where he would go so often into into the hospital because he temporarily couldn't breathe they'd have to put him on a breathing apparatus that he just got where that was sort of they you know the doctors would tell him oh you know don't worry about it you're probably not going to live that long just enjoy it while you can well that's the philosophy we all ought to have anyway. We all know we're going to die. Yeah, sooner or later. 

And when he's been hearing that all his life since he was two years old, it wasn't, he didn't feel it as an immediate threat or anything. Yeah, yeah. And when he died, he was 19, and I was already out of college. I was 24. 

So you did have a whole growing up time with him. I had come back. 

I was still on that Navy recovery list, and I was at home, and it was during that time that I was experimenting with playing music. And I'd gotten a job in Fort Lauderdale. I'd go up there for three nights and play. And on one of those times, he had to go into the hospital. And that was when I was on my way down to Fort Lauderdale, up to Fort Lauderdale. And I got a call from my mother saying, Jerry's okay now. They said he'll probably come home tomorrow night. 

So I didn't worry about it. 

But it didn't turn out. He wasn't okay. He would have been, but he died while he was in the hospital. Oh, he did. It's an unexpected thing. 

But he did have a, considering the times, he had a fairly long life for a cystic fibrosis patient. 

There was never more than, there was always one or two children with cystic fibrosis that were a little older than him. Yeah, but not many. 

So that's why he always had the hope that he'd live another year or two because there were always people older. 

Now there are adults, people in their 40s and 50s. Yeah. 

Well, like you say, every year they learn new things about it. All right, let's go back to now. You moved to Miami, and you go to Coral Gables High School. You find some friends to play music with. That helps. That's right. You didn't go back to Boy Scouts at that point in time. No, no, I didn't. You were done with that. I was discovering girls. Aha. I wondered if that was going to come up. And you said something about scuba diving. 

So did you discover that down there, too? 

Yeah, well, the doctors said that that was a real good activity for *****. Oh. 

But it's not safe for him to go alone. 

And so my father bought a boat, a little outboard, and ***** and I would go out, or sometimes my father, all three of us, would go out. And there's times that my mother would go too, although she wasn't that crazy about it. 

But we'd go out in the boat and go down either skin diving, which means without the scuba equipment, or we'd go scuba diving. And I really enjoyed it. ***** learned, got real interested in collecting tropical fish that he'd catch while he was out there. And that would have been his career. And sell them to pet stores when he came back where they'd sell tropical fish. There's a big market in that kind of thing. I didn't care about catching the little tropical fish, but it's only safe to go down in pairs. 

So I'd go down with a spear gun and try to find supper for us. That was your job was to bring in the food. Get a red snapper or something. 

But you saw the best of the coral beds at that time. they were still very vibrant. It was still, yeah, it was clear. You could see forever. It was like in a swimming pool. Biscayne Bay was not nearly as, I don't know, just cluttered, as cluttered as it is now. 

So that was a happy time for you. 

Now, you're in the last two years of high school. 

When did you start thinking about going to college? 

You know, I never quit thinking about going to Georgia Tech. When I was at North Fulton, I wanted to go to Georgia Tech. 

And I think the The whole time I was in Miami, I wanted to go to Georgia Tech, because that's where all my friends were, back in Atlanta. 

So probably it was much homesick for Atlanta as it was a desire to go to Georgia Tech. I just wanted to be back in Atlanta. 

How did your folks feel about you going to an out-of-state college, though? 

It was going to be more expensive. 

Well, they... Your dad said he could manage? 

He didn't. He never complained about it. 

So how many schools did you apply to when you were a senior? 

Just one. You were super confident, huh? 

Yeah, that was going to be it. And you picked aerospace, aeronautical engineering is really what you picked at that time. That's what they call it in aeronautical engineering. Then our senior year. That was based mainly not on engineering, but on your love for airplanes and for the idea of flying. 

I felt like if I was going to be a pilot, that would be a good thing on my resume to say I had a degree in aerospace, or back then they called it aeronautical engineering. 

But I didn't want to be an aeronautical engineer. You weren't going to actually engineer anything. 

I liked being around airplanes, but I didn't, you know, I couldn't like the idea of having to wear a coat and tie to go to work every day and work with a slide roof for eight hours. 

So you knew what you were doing. You did this in a very calculated way. You knew what you were doing. 

But some roadblocks came up because when I joined Naval ROTC, I said, look. Wait, you came up by yourself. Your parents stayed down in Florida with your brother. How did you get here? 

Did you drive up? 

You couldn't have a car on campus probably. It seems like maybe my father and I drove up together that first year. Was it 1958 that you came to Tech? 

Yeah, yeah. 

Okay, 1958. And had you kept in touch with all of your friends in Atlanta at that time? 

Quite a few. 

So you were writing letters. We didn't have email and all that stuff. Most people didn't telephone either. You could have, but it would have been a big deal. It was expensive, yeah. Yeah. 

So mainly what you'd have to do is write notes, write letters, keep in touch that way. Write letters or maybe just remembering good times. And, you know, it was only two years that I was gone, so I went back. I called up all my friends that I'd known then. Guess what? 

I'm coming back. 

Now, in those days you just, you applied for school, you sent your transcript in, you took the, probably the SAT or the ACT, you don't remember. You know, the guidance counselor at the high school probably did all that. And Carmel Gables was a really good school. It was a progressive school. 

So I didn't. Next thing you know, your dad's bringing you to Atlanta. And you were excited about coming back home. You considered that home. Yeah. You got assigned. You probably arrived with a footlocker. All your worldly possessions, your dad would drop you off. Yeah, I think so. There wasn't a welcoming committee there. No. You were assigned. There was an orientation type thing, freshman orientation. Did you go to the camp? 

I don't remember. I went through some kind of an orientation program, but I don't think it was the camp. Sometimes they did it. 

You know, they had the Y-sponsored orientation, sometimes up in Toccoa, sometimes at Hard Rock, different places. And some folks didn't do it. It was just all confusing to me the first year, the first semester. You know, they were on the semester system back then, not the quarter system. They were on the quarter system back then, not the semester system. 

Now, you got assigned, you said, to Smith? 

Smith Dormitory, yeah. Smith Dorm. 

Okay, one of the old ones. And then right away was rush week. You know, I'd go around to all these different. You just got there and already they're rushing. Yeah, and going to all the different fraternity houses. And I didn't really know what I wanted to do. 

So it wasn't until the next quarter, the winter quarter, where I got to know people in a lot of the fraternities. 

Okay, so you didn't opt into anything that first quarter. I didn't want to commit to anything. That's probably a good idea. 

But then the second quarter, I got a bid to Sigma Nu and I joined that fraternity and I stayed there. 

Okay, you can tell me about that next, but first I want to know, did you have a roommate that you didn't know at Smith when you got there? 

You certainly didn't. No, no, it was a guy that had graduated from Carl Gables. I'd known him. Oh, for heaven's sakes. Yeah, so he and I had been good friends in school, and he was going to go to Georgia Tech, too. Two of you coming? 

Wow. We both roomed, shared an apartment at Smith Dorm. And then I guess we'd only been there a few weeks when they were pretty strict. 

You know, they had these counselors that would check around and make sure there wasn't any drinking or gambling going on. 

Well, there was a gambling party going on in our room, and I wasn't there. I probably would have been there. You just happened not to be. 

The counselor came in and caught them all with the alcohol and the plan cards, and everybody was in there and got kicked off. They didn't get expelled from school, but they got kicked out of the dormitory. 

So there you are. 

So I had a dormitory room to myself. Are you kidding me? 

The rest of my freshman year. Are you kidding me? 

That's unbelievable. Yeah, his name was Tolson Mears, and I still stay in touch with him occasionally from time to time. He lives in North Florida now. 

Now, you told me that it was at Smith Dorm that you were wandering around, and you heard somebody else making music. 

Well, it was actually, I'd gone, for some reason, I was over at Harris Dorm that day. Oh, at Harris Dorm, okay. And that's where I heard some people playing music in there, and it was these two guys right there. Yeah, yeah, you told them. And... What are their names? 

John Searcy and Wes Burton. 

Okay, so these two guys are playing, and you think, whoa, music. Yeah, that's... 

Did you bring your steel guitar with you? 

Yeah, first time I just brought my guitar, I had an acoustic guitar by then, too. 

But then when we'd have jam sessions, I had a four -neck steel guitar by then. It was more state-of-the-art steel guitar. 

So you impressed them a little bit, I think, probably. 

Well, we got some other players, too. We got a drummer and a bass player. 

So there was a band going on. Yeah, but we couldn't keep the same people in it. They'd either graduate or they'd flunk out. And so by our senior year... Oh, you're going too fast for me. I want to go back to the freshman first quarter. 

I want to know, did you guys get together like after classes? 

I mean, could you keep up your grade work and do the music too? 

We probably could have made a lot better grades if we weren't playing music. 

So you got obsessed with the idea of playing the music. It was such great fun. 

Yeah, I never really thought of it as making a living doing a career, but it was a great way to meet girls. 

Well, you attract attention. It was like my social life was playing music. It was playing music. 

Okay, now something else happened. and you got your first taste of academics at Georgia Tech. 

And how did you find them? 

Well, I sort of got a false sense of security because I had gone to such a good high school. 

It was like this year my kids went to Martin Luther King Magnet School here in Nashville, which is really like going to a freshman year in college. And that's the kind of school I had gone to. Carl Gables was like that. They were one of the top schools in the nation. 

So a lot of the material that I had had, you know, I'd taken physics and the math that I had, were things that they expected us to learn our freshman year at Georgia Tech, and I already knew it. 

So you got that false sense of security you called. 

It was so easy that first quarter, right? 

Yeah, it was, and it wasn't until I got into, like, my junior year that all of a sudden I began taking stuff I'd never heard of, aircraft structures and thermodynamics, and I thought I could do that and still play guitar all the time, too, and just go to class and absorb it in class. And I had real high grades, you know, from my first couple of years there. And for the dean's list, they average all your grades. 

But when they send out letters of probation, that's for your immediate, just preceding class. And one year my parents got, I think I was a junior, they got two letters from Georgia Tech. 

One of them, if I'm congratulating them for me being on the dean's list, the other one stands out on probation because I flunked an aircraft structures class. At least I made a C in it the second time I took it. It's funny how those things could happen. 

Okay, let's go back now to the second quarter. Second quarter, you said you'd been around, you knew people, so you decided to go to Sigma Nu. 

Why did you pick them? 

Do you know why? 

Was there any little thing about it? 

Well, I just liked the fraternity when I got out there. You felt welcome? 

Yeah, I felt welcome. They had a couple of guys that played guitar. There you go. I knew there was going to be something. See, that's why I was trying to dig out of you here. What was the connection? 

So you knew that there were some other players there. That helped. 

So did you go through the whole initiation, the whole everything? 

If you do it after rush, does it still have a full indoctrination? 

It wasn't the fall rush. It was winter, which is not a major rush time. 

So I got a better chance to know the people in the fraternity because I wasn't going through with 40 other freshmen like they do the first. Yeah. 

So you kind of could recommend that to folks. You might take it on a delayed basis, huh? 

Now, fraternity cost money. 

Did your dad not mind a little extra money? 

Well, it wasn't really costing very much because you didn't have, you know, they had a meal plan, and they always based it on whatever the dining hall was at Georgia Tech. They would charge less than that. 

So you thought you were saving money there. 

Your meals were less than if you ate at the dining hall, especially a lot less than if you ate out on your own, you know, in restaurants. 

Did they have any kind of interesting initiation that you had to go through, or was it pretty harmless? 

Well, it was probably, you know, they had what they call **** Week, and it was already getting rather politically incorrect to have a lot of hazing, you know. Yeah, yeah. 

But we did some of that anyway. 

I mean, it wasn't very bad, like you'd have, they had a little paddle that you had to write every brother's name on it, and you'd go through it, and he wouldn't sign his name until you You could tell him not only what his name was, but what town he was from, what his girlfriend's name was and all that, and if you didn't get him right, he'd give you a lick. 

If you got him right, then he'd sign it. You had to get all the brothers to sign it before you could be initiated. It's a little ritual you had to go through there. 

So it was a way to make sure that you knew everybody in the fraternity before you could And you knew them by name. Yeah, by name and what town they were from and what their girlfriend's name was. Does Sigma Nu get involved in homecoming stuff? 

Oh, yeah, yeah. We'd have a rambling wreck in there. Do you remember that first year, working on that? 

Well, we did it every year. I don't remember. I can't specifically remember which activity. They all kind of blurred together for you? 

Yeah, after 50 years. Yeah, but you got involved in all that. More than 50 years, because my freshman year was 53 or 54 years ago. Yeah, right, right, right. 

But you did get involved in all that. Can you tell me if you had a rat hat? 

Oh, yeah. 

I was reading in the thing here, something about the rat hats that this person that wrote, one of the things that you just gave me, somebody that said that the rat hats were discontinued in the early 1950s because the people coming home from the Korean War, they didn't want to humiliate. That's not true. I was there in 58, and I had to wear a rat hat. And they would shave people's heads if they caught them without the rat hat. And I never got my head shaved because I always wore my rat hat. I was with my friend, Tolson Mears, my roommate. He had joined another fraternity, but we were both downtown with our rat hats on. And it was after a football game. I don't remember what school it was. 

But anyway, some student from another school grabbed my hat and started running across the school. 

Tolson and I both took after him and circled around, and we were blocking traffic, running out in front of cars and everything, and I caught the guy. And by that time, he had thrown the hat away, and we couldn't find the hat. And so I had to write a report about it and get another hat. They did make you get another hat. Yeah, they did make me get another hat, and I had to write down what the information was. You know, you write football scores and everything, so I had to copy all that. Ah, that's interesting to me that they would make you duplicate it then. 

But you had to write a report to somebody so that you wouldn't get in big trouble. That's right, yeah, and tell them what happened. Yeah, I heard that they tried to steal. I'm surprised we didn't get, we got in a fight out there in the street in blocking traffic. I'm surprised we didn't get arrested. There would have been a police report about it. Those tech boys at it again, that kind of thing. 

But I don't think it was, I think what he was talking about after the Korean War, I don't believe that attitude really came about until after the Vietnam War. I know that they stopped. 

Vietnam lasted so long that I'm sure there was a lot of people at Georgia Tech who did time in Vietnam before they came to Georgia Tech, and they weren't going to go into that Mickey Mouse stuff with rat outs. 

But you didn't mind it. It was part of the deal for you. 

No, I didn't mind it, but I probably would have minded it if I was 28 years old and had been through seven or eight years of military. Yeah, there could be a difference. 

Now, we were an ROTC school, so you had to join at that time. It was still mandatory, and you chose the Navy ROTC. Yeah, and this is because I wanted to fly. And those recruiting officers will tell you anything to get you to join. And the Navy program at Georgia Tech was more prestigious than either the Army or the Air Force. 

And the reason was because if you signed up for Naval ROTC, you had to agree to sign a contract that you would do all four years. Georgia State law only required you to do two years of ROTC. 

So somebody who wanted to do only the minimum would sign up for either Air Force or Army so they could do two years. 

So the Navy was considered more elite. And I did want to go into the military anyway. I wanted to go into flight training. You didn't mind doing that. Yeah, and the reason I didn't take Air Force instead of Navy is because Air Force, it wasn't as... Prestigious. 

Yeah, Navy was a much more elite branch because everyone in the freshman class in the Navy was intending to stay four years in there. They had signed a contract. That was the commitment, yeah, so they would have had to do that. 

And anyway, I told this petty officer at the recruiting station when they're telling you which one to sign up for, Well, one reason I signed up for Navy instead of Air Force or Army is because I said, well, look, you know, I'm having to wear glasses now to read. 

Is that going to disqualify me from flying airplanes? 

Can I still get into Navy flight school? 

And he said, well, it is against the rules to have to wear glasses, but there's a test. 

If you take a test and make a highness thing on the test, you can get a waiver from that. And so I said, okay. 

So I signed up for it. 

Then when I took the test, I got the waiver, but the waiver said on it, this waiver is good for all naval activities except for underwater demolition and aviation. And, you know, two or three months had already gone by. Yeah, you got ahead. And I didn't want to be changing. And back then, you know, we had a draft, so I wanted to stay in some kind of ROTC. And I wanted to go into the military as an officer. 

So it was a good deal for you. 

So I stayed in the Navy, and after I got into the Navy, then I thought I really liked it. I was a communications officer on a destroyer. You're going too fast. I want you back at Georgia Tech. We're still in your freshman year. 

I want to know, did you meet any professor any time that first year you were there that you thought, that's pretty good, I can manage this? 

Do you remember anybody's name at all in any of the time? 

You know, I've reached the age where I don't remember a lot of names. I don't think it'll be too long before I can't remember my own name. Did you do Trowning Proofing with Freddy Lanue or Macaulay? 

I remember that, Trowning 101. 

If you hadn't said his name, I might not have remembered it. Fred Lanue, yeah. Freddy Lanue or it could have been Macaulay. That was a required course for Naval ROTC students. It was a required course for the whole kit and caboodle of Georgia Tech. I didn't remember that being required for everybody. Everybody had to take it. You could swim. Tim, you were a scuba diver, so you shouldn't have been intimidated by that at all. 

Well, I wasn't intimidated, but you had to be able to hold your breath. You had to swim underwater a huge distance. 

So you definitely had Freddie experience. Yeah, and I did. He gave you a pep talk where you'd feel like you were just a complete idiot if you couldn't do it. They called it Drowning 101, but I don't think anybody ever drowned. We had to hold our breath, and we were too scared not to hold our breath. We didn't want to be humiliated by saying, hey, we had to come up to breathe. And then you had your hands and feet tied, and you had to bob. 

But it did save lives, and it did build confidence. Yeah, and they emphasized that it was for survival swimming. 

If you were in a shipwreck, there might be flames burning on the water from oil. You had to be able to swim underwater. Right, right. 

So there was a good reason for all of it. It was good training. And I felt very well prepared. If our ship had sunk, I think I would have probably survived. You could have done okay. 

What about special people like Dean Griffin? 

Did you ever get to meet him? 

In our freshman year, you know, he'd speak to the whole group. And he should have been in show business. I mean, I never had any personal talks with him. 

But just that day I remembered that he was saying, You're all welcome to come to my office any time. If you're getting in trouble, just call me. People have called me and woke me up in the middle of the night and said, Dean Griffin, I'm in jail. 

But don't worry if that happens. Call me. I'll get you out. And he truly had. I really liked him. But, you know, I didn't know him personally except for him talking to us as a group. And you didn't get in any trouble. 

If I had gone to jail, I probably would have gotten to meet him personally. How about Dean Dole? 

Did you get to meet him? 

I remember the name, Dean Dole. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. I wouldn't have remembered that name. He was supervising the fraternities, so he may have come around. You know, if you guys messed up, he'd be over there on top of him. Yeah, I just remember the name. I can't remember any specific things. What about football games? 

Did you go? 

Football games? 

Oh, gosh, yeah. We went to all the football games because it was free. You know, we didn't have to pay to get in. 

But did you enjoy them? 

Yeah. 

So that was a good time? 

Mm-hmm. 

So overall, were you having a good collegiate experience at Georgia Tech? 

Yeah, I'd say I really did. Okay. 

So you get through the first year. Did you go home for the summer? 

Yeah. I went home every summer except between my junior and senior years. You must have had to go on a cruise one of those years. Yeah. It was a six-week cruise. 

But I went home before I went on the cruise. 

It was actually the only year I didn't go home was after, you know, I would have graduated in May of 62. 

But because I changed my major and then changed back, I had taken a few extra courses that I didn't need. 

Okay, you came in as A. E. and you changed? 

Yeah, and then I thought, you know, that's too narrow. I think maybe I better change to industrial engineering. 

And you did that for how long? 

I did that for only about a year, and then I decided to switch back to AE. 

So I'd taken a few courses, like economics and things like that, that I didn't need in AE, and I had missed a couple of things that I did need, so I wound up not graduating until December of 62 instead of May, and that summer I stayed at school because I'd already done my Naval ROTC, my crews. Right, right. I wondered if when you went home you got a job. Yeah, I was, one summer I got home with a job called Metallic Engineering Company. It sounds like I was an engineer, but I wasn't. It was a construction job. And I had to go out and, you know, haul stuff, chipped paint and this just general... Physical labor. Non-skilled, yeah, and did that. And then another year I worked, I did this two years in a row, I worked for a kid's camp. 

Well, now you would have enjoyed that. I got the job as sailing instructor at the camp. 

I was a camp counselor, but I didn't have to deal with a cabin full of kids because my job was on the waterfront. Oh, that sounds like a cool job. It really was. I loved doing that. Yeah, I think that's awesome. I did that two years in a row. 

Okay, so that took care of your suburbs. It was a lot more fun than the Metallic Engineering Company. 

When we go back to Georgia Tech and we think about what was going on at that time in the late 50s and getting into the early 60s. As you mentioned earlier, the integration process was going on. Yeah. Do you remember the integration at Georgia Tech? 

Yeah, I remember that. The fall of 1961. 

But before that, the president called everybody to the gym and they gave a talk about behaving yourself, that there wasn't going to be any trouble. Vaguely. 

I mean, I remember there was that emphasis that, look, we don't want to act like a bunch of ******** like they did at the University of Georgia. 

And, you know, that was the best way to motivate us so you don't be like people at the University of Georgia. And it worked, huh? 

They had had riots there. And that's not the only thing that worked. They had armored personnel carriers on all of the intersections. 

So if we had wanted to act like ********, we would have gotten arrested. Oh, really? 

Now tell me about that. 

Yeah, there was plenty of military presence and police presence on the campus when the first black people came because they wanted to make sure. 

They didn't have very much of that the year before in Georgia, and so there were firebombs and things had gone off. 

I don't think anybody was killed at the University of Georgia, but there was a lot of property destruction. 

And so they made sure that nobody got any ideas that they could get away with that at Georgia Tech the following year. One of the major things that happened was they didn't let the press come on the campus at all. That did make a difference. I didn't know that. 

Did you care anything about it at all, or were you too busy? 

Georgia Tech students were not nearly as politically minded as University of Georgia students are. You were too busy. 

You know, all we cared about was fraternity parties and the test for the Monday or whatever we had to do. You know, we weren't involved in politics. Yeah. You had a lot of responsibility with your classes alone, projects, whatever. Yeah. tech works and teams and all that kind of stuff so you remember being busy and not really caring one way or another about the whole thing huh that that's pretty much it was like a non-event for you yeah yeah it wasn't uh i didn't care if we had black students there at the school or not it wasn't going to affect me one way or another i wasn't a civil rights activist or anything i've kind of you know i'm old enough now that i probably wish that i had been but back then never even occurred to you yeah didn't never occurred to me you know i think most black students might didn't occur to them either you you tend to sort of accept what's going on around you except for a few special people of both races knew that you know what what the future was going to hold and what they needed to do and I remember that was when they had those those freedom rights where the buses you know when were burned in Mississippi even that didn't didn't set me off and make me think you know this this is wrong what we're doing well it It did to very few people. I mean, it really didn't have an impact on it. 

What finally got through to me that said, if this is what it takes to keep segregation, we don't need segregation. 

When they had that ******* in Birmingham where those four little black girls were killed, I was already out of college when that happened. That was in about 1963 or 64. I was still in the Navy, but I was on that disability recovery. That's where you realized that that was nonsense and had to stop. I knew it was going to have to stop then. And then later on, in 67, when I got the job working for Charlie Pride. You're way ahead of me. 

If it had been before 1964, we would have not been able to work together because by 67, segregation in motels and restaurants was against the law. 

But before that, we couldn't have gone to a restaurant or to a motel. 

And, you know, it made me think, you know, how did black people survive before that law was passed? 

And even then, we still had to make sure that we stayed in major, like Holiday Inns or Howard Johnson, something that we knew would be obeying the law. Rather than in small places. That some mom-and-pop truck stop, we might start a riot. 

Here, a black guy and a white guy with a big black car with northern license plates coming in, they might think we were civil rights workers who would have wound up getting shot. Let's go back to college now. 

I want to know, did you ever play music anywhere in the city of Atlanta when you were in college? 

Oh, yeah, all the time with those guys right there. 

Where? 

Where would you go play? 

Well, we played a lot at Crawford Long, you know, the nursing school. We liked playing there because it was a good way to meet girls whether we got paid or not. 

Did they have dances, you mean, Crawford Long? 

Yeah, dances every weekend at Crawford Long because we weren't the only band that played there. They'd hire bands there. What did you call yourselves when you got hired out? 

The Tech Trio. 

Even though there might have been more of it? 

No, with the Ramblers when we were working as a full bank. Because there have been Ramblers there since the very, very beginning. 

I mean, back in the, well, maybe not the beginning, beginning, but I've got things from the 1920s and 30s that were called the Ramblers. We probably didn't know they'd been. It's not a very original name for someone from Georgia Tech. For one from Georgia Tech, no. And for the Premiers, that was another name we used. Like I said, our personnel kept changing. You can't count on the same people coming back the following year. 

Well, did you have a business picture that booked you, or how would you, who would know to call? 

Well, we had business cards, and we just, it was mainly word of mouth, you know, when you'd play at a fraternity party that they'd want to know who the band was. 

We got more work at the University of Georgia, because the fraternities there had a lot more money to spend than the ones at Georgia Tech. 

So you got around, it wasn't just around Tech, you went to other places. Oh, all the way to Augusta? 

Yeah, sometimes, and then we'd go to Athens to play at the university. It's a wonder you had time to go to school. 

Well, if we had spent as much time on engineering as we'd done on music, we would have figured out how to send a man to Mars by now. Bill, when we look back at those days, music really was what was pulling you through school. I mean, but you did well in your studies. Like you said, you hit the brick wall in your junior year, but you recovered. 

So, you know, you were going to graduate. You were going to hang in there and graduate. 

You were getting a little bit of a stipend back from the Navy after you were in their third or fourth year. 

You were getting some money, probably not a lot of money, but a little bit of money back from all the music. A little bit, yeah. I mean, they had to pay you guys something. Would you split it up and get your expenses? 

Well, Wes found a thing in his own records. He showed it to me. It was an advertised flyer that we had made to put up at Crawford Long. It was to dance this week at Crawford Long. The premiers will be playing 50 cents admission. well 50 cents back then was about like five dollars now and five dollars is what the admission is right now at the square dance where i'm playing so the things haven't changed that much would you only get the money that they paid for admission or would you sign a contract to get like x number dollars i don't remember us having any contract no it was pretty loosey-goosey huh yeah i think just remember we were getting we we usually get a flat amount but you know it wasn't wasn't the door they were charging 50 cents admission i don't know how much we got paid for that Well, if you got like $25 for the night or something, you would split it then between us. We might get that and we'd split it between us. 

And it could be there could be six or eight people, so it might not be a whole lot of money, right? 

I think... It couldn't have supported you. You were just having fun with it. I think one time I went to some girl's school. We always like to play at girl's school. I bet you did. And that might have been Agnes Scott. I don't remember exactly, but when I gave them a price, they said, I don't know, maybe I said $50. And they said, well, I don't think I can afford that. There's three of you, right? 

And I said, well, I mean $50 for all three of us. Oh, she was thinking three of each of you, huh? 

She was thinking $50 a piece. 

So you played at schools and colleges and stuff like that. 

Did you ever play at any public venues? 

And what music were you playing? 

What kind of music? 

Well, when we played with college kids being the audience or nursing students being the audience, We'd play the typical pop songs of the day and stuff. And folk music was popular then, too. We'd do things like that. Oh, the Kingston Trio was a big deal, yeah. The Kingston Trio, we'd do them. 

But we also, the three of us, would go out to this place at East Point called the Dixie Jubilee. They'd have a talent show out there. You had to audition for the talent show. The people were pretty good, and they had a union band playing on the stage. 

It was kind of like the Grand Ole Opry, and they would have a different artist from the Grand Ole Opry come down every weekend, and the band would back them up. And so we entered the talent show, and I think we won it once or twice. 

But one time when we came there, we won the talent show, but we lost our piano player because it was right. The song Last Date had just come out. Do you remember that? 

It was a real popular instrumental called Last Date. It was a piano instrumental. You lost your piano player. Yeah, well, what happened was there was nobody in Atlanta had learned. It was a very unique style of piano that had come out, and nobody in Atlanta played that. 

But our piano player had learned that for that song, and we won the contest by him doing that song. 

Well, they had an artist come in the next week named Hank Lachlan that used a lot of that piano on his records. And so they hired our piano player. It was a union job, and I think like $25 a night was union scale back then. And they hired him. He deserted you, guys. 

The only time I got to work with him on a weekend was when we would get out there and enter the talent contest. 

Once they even used me on guitar, when their regular guitar player, his name was ***** Shook, when he couldn't make it. And they called me to play guitar for that night. 

So it sounds to me like when you have a talent like that and people get to know about it, you can keep yourself pretty doggone busy, right? 

Well, we weren't making much money with it. No, but you could keep busy. You can keep busy if playing for free is considered busy. Yeah, we can do that. 

Well, between the fraternities and all the schools around town and everything, it's a wonder you ever had time to study at all. I didn't do much study. 

In other words, it's a blessing you got through Georgia Tech because it ain't an easy school to go to. 

Well, it was stuff that I liked anyway. 

If it had been English or history, a lot of people say, oh, I don't want to do engineering because that's too much math. Math has always come real easy to me. Math and music, I think, are somehow very closely related. 

I really feel like when I'm improvising a solo, I'm using the same part of my brain is when I'm working an algebra problem. Yeah, you are. 

So I never had any problem with the math. 

When they got into things like aircraft structures that I never had in high school, that's the one that I flunked and I had to take it over. Do you remember anybody from the A. E. school at all? 

Have I what now? 

Do you remember any professors from A. E. school? 

Donald Dutton, do you remember him? 

Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was rather well known. You had Donald Dalton for us? 

He was my professor for what I'm... I remember a lot of others, but I can't recall their names now. Their names, yeah, you've known them yourself. Pretty much, we had a pretty strong AE faculty. Yeah. They were pretty involved in the industries and knew what they were doing. Yeah. 

So you felt like you were... 

We had a guy, a Greek guy that, you know, was hard to understand, but he was real funny, had a really good personality, and I can't remember his name. Was it Dr. Paris? 

No, it was a Greek sounding name. It's more than Paris. That's the beginning of it. I can't say it right. 

Well, maybe that was him. I don't know whether I even recognize his name or heard of it. I can't even tell you right now. I should be able to. Then there was a math professor too that was really sort of out of touch. I guess a lot of, I guess that way we study go that far in math, you do get out of touch in reality. I think that happens. 

There was also an industrial engineer, I think it was an industrial engineering professor, but I never had him for a class. 

But you may have heard of him if you've interviewed enough people. Have you ever heard of Batman Brown? 

Yeah, that was I. M. He was management. Oh, was he I. M.? 

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because one of the piano player up there had him for a class. Talked about it again. There were some really wild stories about Batman Brown. He was genuinely eccentric. There's no doubt about it. He is the only person, I think, in history that had gone through Georgia Tech with a 4.0 point average. I don't believe that. When he was at the college. No, don't even believe that. That would have been in the 1930s, I think. And then during World War II, and I saw this on the History Channel. I know it's not a fake story. There was a project that we had. This was before they had developed the atomic bomb. 

We're going to attack Japan by dropping bats with little incendiary cylinders put under their wings so that when they flew into these, there was a lot of thatched buildings in Japan. And the idea was that it was going to burn them to the ground. And he was involved in that project, and they said that he really kind of went off the deep end. That's when he did. 

And another thing that stopped it was because some of the bats got loose at a base in New Mexico where they had them and burned down a couple of barracks. and then the atomic bomb came along and we didn't need the bats I don't know, it sounds pretty batty to me well he was involved in that project he would tell people about it and we didn't believe him but now I've read about it it was on the History Channel not very long ago we have some wonderful pictures of him with his big hat on and his wires down his back oh yeah, a wire to ground himself against technical electricity yeah, and you wonder how but he was a brilliant man that's why I think it's quite possible that you can go through Georgia Tech and make a four-year-old grade and still not know how to relate to people. 

Well, he was definitely in the management college. We've had some characters over the years, that's for sure. And I didn't even have him. I just heard about him. When graduation came, everybody, they only had one graduation ceremony a year, and it was in May. And you weren't ready to get out yet. 

Well, I got my commission in May. 

So you did go to the service to get your commission? 

Not right then, because I requested a leave of absence so I could stay and take more classes because I'd switched my major. No, no, I mean you got commissioned then. I got my commission in the Navy, but I didn't go into active duty yet. Was it at the Fox Theater? 

Was it what now? 

At the Fox Theater? 

No. No? 

I don't remember where we had a commission. Graduation and commission usually were at the same time at the Fox Theater. I didn't. I know I think they are, but I didn't graduate in May. 

Well, I know you didn't, but I thought maybe you might have. 

But I did get my commission in May, and I don't remember there being a ceremony. We might have been maybe in the Naval Army T. C. building. We might have gone down there and got something. 

But I had requested a leave of absence so I could take more courses at Georgia Tech, and they gave it to me. 

So I was finished with the Navy in May of 62. 

But you stuck on to get your degree. Yeah, you had to finish that quarter. They granted my leave of absence. 

But then in October of 62, that Cuban Missile Crisis hit, and they canceled all the leaves of absence. And I might have stayed on and taken more courses. 

But I had enough then to, you know, I'd already gotten my commission. And that gave me enough courses where now I could get my degree from Georgia Tech, too. 

But then I had to report for duty. Okay. 

So the point is you never went to a graduation. You never walked. No. 

So your parents didn't get to come and see their investment, go across the stage. No, no. Just one of those things. They sent you your diploma by mail then, huh? 

That's right, yeah. Yeah, just one of those things. Yeah, there were a lot of things going on in the world back in that time. 

So a lot of changes and everything. And one of them was the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was almost World War III. Yes. And one of them was you went into the military. 

So you went active duty with the Navy. Yeah, yeah. 

Okay, now we're going to start. Before we leave Georgia Tech, think back now for a minute. 

Is there any other thing that was a highlight of your time there that you'd want to mention? 

Is there anything else before we leave there that stands out in your mind when you think of those four years? 

They were pretty much fun for you. You were having a great time with the music. Yeah, I was having a good time. And you managed to get enough of the credits to graduate. 

And I've reached the point where I can hardly remember what happened yesterday, much less 50 years ago. Actually, sometimes I remember more what happened 50 years ago than I remember yesterday. Yeah, that's happened to all of us. That's exactly it. 

So, okay, so you know you're going in the service right away. and because of all the action, you're activated. What's the first thing they do with you, the U. S. 

Navy? 

Well, I already had my commission, and my orders were to report to a destroyer that was based in Mayport, Florida that was in the blockade, the USS Zellers. 

So they're sending you right down there where all the action is. Yeah, that's a photograph of that picture, a ship right back there. We'll have to take a, we'll put it on camera after. 

So it's the USS Zellers? 

Zellers, C-E-L-L-A-R -S, yeah. I still go to their reunions. What was your task on the ship? 

What were you assigned to? 

I was a communications officer. Okay. Actually, assistant communications officer. 

I was supposed to have six months to learn his job, and then he got transferred off just three weeks later. And there you were. 

And so the captain put me into a communications school at the Charleston Naval Base while we were in port. And so in three weeks I was. That's called learning and learning on your fire. That's called learning on the job, yeah. Yeah. Quick, quick, quick, learn what you have to do. Was it pretty high tension, pretty stressful to be there? 

Well, it was exciting. 

I mean, you know, the main part of it, by the time I actually got aboard the ship in December, according to the newspapers, it was all over. 

It wasn't really all over, but, you know, the Russian fleet had turned around and gone the other way, and, you know, President Kennedy... She was still on very high alert. Yeah, yeah. And it still looked, you know, we had signs on our ship what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. 

Put sheets over the portholes, go close to the center of the ship, put your head down as far between the legs as you go and kiss your *** goodbye. That was the printed instructions we had. Isn't that something? 

Oh, for goodness sakes. 

But you were young, and it was exciting, you said. It was exciting. Yeah, it really was. 

I felt like if there's going to be a, if the war is going to start and we're going to have the end of civilization as we know it, I'd rather be a participant than a spectator and just watch it happen. And so I thought I was in the best possible place. 

In fact, you're probably physically safer on a Navy ship than you would have been if you were a citizen of Moscow or Washington. If it had broken out. And we were that close. Oh, yeah. We were closer even then than we know now that we were closer than what anybody realized. Yeah, because all the statute of limitations on the restrictions are off. Yeah, there's information coming out. 

I subscribe to this Military History magazine, and there was an article that came out only a couple of years ago that they based it on material that had just been declassified. 

One of the ships in our unit, the USS Beale, and none of us knew this at the time, And they had sworn all the crew members of the Beale to secrecy at the time. 

They actually dropped warning to a depth charge that would say depth charge, practice depth charges that would hit the submarine and wouldn't explode. 

But that was like a warning firing across the bow for the sub to come up to the surface. And they did that to one of the Russian subs. And the Russian sub commander ordered torpedoes to be fired and nuclear torpedoes. It would have sunk every ship, Russian and American, in the area. And his subordinates refused to do it. And they first surfaced the sub. 

And the crews of both ships, the Russian sub and the destroyer, were told never to say anything about it. And they didn't until this order finally came out in the magazine after it was declassified. And we were talking about that when I went to our most recent reunion that I went to. They held it in Atlanta. The USS Elders had their reunion in Atlanta in 2009, and Janet and I went to that. 

And I loved talking to those because there were people who were actually in the ship as far back as 1944 and 1945 when it was built. Oh, yeah, the old. And those guys are now in their 80s and 90s, and I loved talking to them. They were going through the kamikaze attacks in World War II and everything. 

Now tell me, how long were you on the USS Elders? 

Not very long, because after the blockade was over, we went up to Charleston. We sailed up to Charleston because we needed just general repairs and maintenance. And we were in dry dock up there, and I was in a real serious automobile accident. Off base? 

On base? 

No, it was off base, but I was taking the mail to the Charleston Post Office. 

So you were in line of duty? 

Yeah, so it was considered duty-connected, service-connected. And by the time I got out of the hospital, this is the strange part of it. 

This is why I think there's been some divine intervention in my life, because I'm not smart enough to have made this happen. Oh, I'm not so sure. I don't think that was. 

I mean, my working with Charlie Pryde and getting into the music business, and I couldn't have made that happen. 

But by the time I got out of the hospital, the ship had moved, And so they had to wait orders to go back to get assigned to another ship. 

And I did go to have a physical exam afterward, and they said that the doctor recommended me return to full active duty. 

So I just figured it was going to be a matter of time before I got my orders. 

And that was when I came down to Miami and started playing in a nightclub and just wait for my orders. 

And that gave me a good excuse not to start an engineering job because I could say, Okay, so how did you get the job in Miami? 

I came home, just went out and sitting in a couple of bars, and they hired me. You didn't have to be that good. 

I mean, I didn't have the professional experience I got later, but you didn't have to be to play in a ******* hockey ball. 

But you could play, and that's where you went. 

I could play, and, you know, I actually wrote a letter to Lockheed up in Atlanta and said I have a degree in aerospace engineering. I'm on temporary leave in the Navy, and I wonder if you're hiring any engineers. 

And they sent me a letter back saying they were hiring engineers because of the space raids that was going on then. And they would pay my way to Atlanta if that would come from an interview. And I had this job. I had just started working in the club. And my father again said, you've always loved to play music. We'd like for you to stay here anyway. You don't know when you're going to get called back in the Navy. Why do you want to leave home? and we'd like to have you here, and you can play music now. 

So it was just serendipitous that you stayed. Yeah, and so I did. 

So there you are, and then what happens next? 

Well, then. How long did you have to wait? 

I played music for about a year. Oh, that long? 

All this time waiting for orders. In Miami. 

Well, then I had just, some friends of mine had moved, had been playing at the club, had moved to Nashville, and they got a good gig up there. and they wrote me, actually wrote me a letter. 

They didn't have, like I said, they didn't have email and said, we've got a chance for a record deal and everything. We need a steel guitar player to play in our band. Do you want to come and join us? 

And so I wrote them back and said, yeah, I'll do that. 

So I went to Nashville. 

About that time I got my orders to report just to another hospital to a routine examination that the orders were for, You know, my address was Miami, so I wrote that I don't live in Miami anymore, so they recut my orders to go to the hospital, Army Hospital in Fort Campbell. 

So I went up there, and again, this time the doctor said, well, you've been playing music all this time, you're easily, you know, there's nothing, there's no residue from the accidents, so I'm going to recommend you return to active duty. 

So I kept playing music. I was in Nashville now and playing with some of the Grand Ole Opry people. Waiting for orders. They still didn't. The only orders I got was to go to that hospital. No, but I mean, it's okay. They recommended return to active duty but didn't call me. How weird is that? 

So then I was in Nashville. I'd only been here a short time, but playing on the Grand Ole Opry. and, let's see, the details started to get hazy. When did the military contact you? 

Well, they did again when I was over in Germany. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 

Okay, now wait a minute. You're playing here in Nashville. They never did call me back to active duty. They never did. I don't know whether my records got lost or what. They never called me back to active duty. And so you were free to just pursue anything you wanted to do. Yeah, but now that temporary disability list is only good for five years. 

And at the end of the five years, they have to either call you back to active duty or they have to discharge you. And by the end of five years, I was playing on the road with Charlie Pride. 

But there's something that happened before that. 

Well, I went and spent two years over in Germany with a band that I believe they really hired me because I had a military ID card and they were playing Department of Defense tours over there. That wasn't just a band. Tell me what the name of it was. The Hometowners USA. Hometowners USA. And they were a group that performed on military bases. That's right. 

And they were hired here in Nashville because it was expensive for an artist to fly over there and bring his whole band and everything and pay hotels and everything. 

So this company called the Hometowners Incorporated wanted to have a band, Nashville band that could play professional country music, but living there on the German economy. And then they could hire people like Jimmy Dickens and Charlie Lubin and all this. and say we've got a Nashville band that can back you up. To back you up, yeah. 

And I really think the reason they wanted me in the band was because it wasn't going to be the red tape of getting on and off the bases. That's a good reason, but did everybody else have a military ID? 

No, I was the only one. 

Well, then that can't be the only one. The others had been in the military before. At least two or three of them had been, but they didn't have a retired ID. 

Well, then that can't be the reason. You were good enough to play with them, and they wanted you. 

So this was a pretty good gig. Plus, you were performing for military personnel. And I really loved it at the end. Oh, and then I got orders for another physical exam, this time sent to Nashville. While you were in Germany. And I had to write the Navy again. I'm not in Nashville anymore. I'm in Germany. 

So they gave me new orders from the Frankfurt Hospital in Germany. And I went and had a physical there. And they said the same thing, you know, return active duty. 

Well, they didn't lose you then. For some reason, they were just giving you plenty of... 

Just for that five years they lost me, because at the end of five years, Then they called me in for some kind of hearing to see whether to discharge me or call me back in. By that time, I guess they didn't need anybody back in the Navy. 

Well, the war was over. Whatever the reason was, yeah, they didn't call me back in. Meanwhile, you're performing for the military with this wonderful music group. And the last one, we worked with a different artist every month. Every time. And initially I took the job because networking is so important in the music. business. 

I thought, gosh, you know, after one year, I will work with 12 different recording artists and I'll know them and then it's going to open a lot of doors for me. 

But at the end of the first year, I was enjoying myself in Germany so much. I'd learned to speak the language pretty well by then and had a German girlfriend. 

Anyway, so I signed a second year contract and stayed over there for one more year well there's 12 more people that you know yeah different artists every month and the last artist that i've worked with before uh uh was charlie pride and he had said he was just getting started in his career he just had his first album released and he told me that his manager wanted him to have just one musician to travel with him in the states and use house bands to back him up or he would do opening acts for major artists and their bands would back him up but they wanted one musician that would know the keys to the song kickoffs and stuff and i said well charlie i'm getting out of this i'm getting my discharge next month they're they're you know i won't be in the i can do that he said well good i'll i'll call you and i you know people always send who call you and i didn't really didn't think i was going to hear from him but i did i got my discharge and i went home i was down in florida not knowing exactly what i wanted to do whether i wanted to go back to nashville or what and i was working with ***** Tonk in Miami and living at home. 

And one day I woke up about noon or two o'clock in the afternoon maybe because I wouldn't get home until four o'clock in the morning. And my dad said, this guy called you, wants you to call him back. He said he was Charlie Pride. 

And I said, what do you mean he said he was Charlie Pride? 

And Pop said, well, Charlie Pride's black, isn't he? 

And I said, yes, he is. 

He said, this guy I sounded white, and I said, well, that's Charlie Brown, he does sound white, and I called him back, and sure enough, he said, you know, I told you my manager wanted me to have one musician, would you be interested in doing that, and I said, yeah, I really would, and so, so what happened, and you left Miami and moved back up here to Nashville? 

I didn't leave at first, what I did, he would, he would go on a tour, and he would pay my away for a plane ticket to whatever the first job was on the tour. And then they would travel in his car or sometimes fly in airplanes or airliners. 

But whatever it was, I was just traveling with him. 

So it was static. It wasn't like a nine to five job, seven days a week or five days a week, just on occasion job. 

Well, it was pretty steady when we worked. We'd start a tour and maybe be gone for a month or more on doing one-nighters. 

And then And then at the end of the tour, he would pay my way back for a plane ticket back to Miami or to Nashville, whichever I wanted to go to. And I usually chose to go to Nashville. And then when the next tour started, he'd do the same thing. 

So that helped. 

Can you make a living doing that? 

Does it pay well enough for you to say, I've got a really extended job? 

Well, I was a member of the union, the union scale, you know. It was pretty good then. It was pretty good. It was livable, especially because I didn't have a family to support. you know and uh and i didn't even have a have rent to pay i was you know i was living my official those were the glory days so i'd go up there and i'd rent a room a furnished room there there's over on boscobel street here in east nashville it's east nashville is still pretty artistic type of community but back then boscobel street especially had a group of older ladies who was who were widows, and they would rent rooms out to musicians. And it was always word of mouth. They wouldn't advertise it. It was a great way for them. 

They had big old houses that they couldn't keep up by themselves, but by having four or five people living in them and by the fact that they were musicians, they all knew each other. 

So it wasn't like picking up hitchhikers or something. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't dangerous. There was family, community. And so I'd moved in. This lady, everybody called her Ma Up Church. Church. She's sort of an institution now in Nashville. People know her. I mean, she passed away years ago. 

So you lived there with her? 

She and about two or three other ladies. 

I would go out on the road and I'd say, you know, can I just put all my stuff in the trunk of my car and park it in front of your house? 

And they'll say, yeah, but we'll have to rent your room out to somebody else. 

But when you come back, if we don't have a vacancy, there'll be one of the other ladies up and down the street will have one. 

So you always knew you had a place to go. 

So when I was gone, my car was parked here in Nashville with all my stuff in it and in front of, you know, on that block. That's living like a gypsy really. 

It really is, except it's a little more stability because you know the people and when I'd come back, either there'd be a room opening up in that house or in one of the other houses and I'd stay there until we went on the road again. 

Well, what was it like to be on the road with Charlie Pryde. He was building his reputation. He was just building his reputation. And again, it was 1967, only three years after the Civil Rights Act had passed. 

So it was a real, you know, we were being interviewed by Ebony Magazine, by Life Magazine and all this, you know, here's a black man singing country music. 

And the way people reacted to him, it was like giving him an opportunity to show they were not prejudiced because he was genuine. 

A lot of people, especially black people, thought that he was a gimmick, that some fancy corporation had hired him. 

But he was real. He was born and raised in Sledge, Mississippi, only 60 miles south of Memphis. He grew up on a cotton farm. His father was one of the few black people in the area that owned his own land. 

And he grew up picking cotton on his dad's land and here in the country radio stations out of Memphis. And he didn't realize that was country music. That was supposed to be white people's music. He thought that was just music. And he learned all these songs. And he learned them the way he heard them. The way he heard them, yeah. And then he got married with a lady named Rosine. 

And I think that he didn't tell me a lot about this, But I believe the reason they decided to move to Montana was because raising a family here in the South, I think he was concerned about his kids growing up under segregation. 

So he moved to Montana. They moved to Helena, Montana. He took a job. 

Oh, he had spent some time as a professional baseball player with the Memphis team called the ***** American League. He played with them, but I think he was injured. And for any reason, he was up in Montana. 

He and his wife had moved up there, and he was playing music on weekends and working at a smelter during the week. Wow. Tough job. And this fellow named Jack Johnson, who just wanted to get into the business end of music. 

I don't think Jack ever played an instrument, and I think he had a degree in journalism, maybe in law, whatever it was. He heard Charlie up there, and he knew what the situation was in the world today. He said, the time has come. this guy is great people love him you know these white people coming in that worked in the smelter all week with him they go hear him play on weekends and they just loved him to death and uh so jack said you know you know let me and i don't know the details of this because this is after you know when when i started working with charlie he and jack both told me some about what was going what had been going on in the past but this this is secondhand information that i that i get from them is that Jack said, look, if you'll sign a contract with me, I'll put some of the money to make in, take you to Nashville and get a record made. 

And I think Charlie already had a record that was being played locally in the Montana area, but I'm not sure exactly which came first. 

But Jack brought him to Nashville and did get him a contract with RCA, and he recorded a song called Just Between You and Me, and it made a big hit. It went up to number nine on the country charts. 

Now, I had met Charlie. 

I was still over in Germany playing when all this was going on, and so our band leader, when Charlie was going to come over, said, this is the next guy that's coming over. I want you to listen to him. Here's his record, and they put on Just Between You and Me. And he said, tell me what you think of him. And I remember all of our comments. Some guy said, he sounds kind of like Hank Williams. And then he said, no, I think he sounds a little more like Ray Price. And I said, well, the only thing I can say, there's nothing different about him. He sounds like all the country singers. 

And the book and he said, do you think there's anything different about him? 

And he said, he's a ******. You know, you might not want to, but that's the way people talk back then. And we all thought it was some joke, you know. That couldn't be it. 

But it was enough of a gimmick to get them attention. 

But it wasn't a gimmick. And they didn't, they did not, people did not know his race. 

They deliberately did not put his picture on the, because they knew it was going to cause trouble if they did. They knew that once people came out and heard him. Yeah, that would be a different story. He would go over. 

But if they had a country music show, especially in the military, there was a lot of race problems in the Army back then in the 1960s. 

And they didn't want, if they were advertising ahead of time with a picture that there was a black man playing at a country music show, they would have brought out probably the worst of both races coming out there. There would have been a lot of race riots. 

But as it turned out, the only people that gave him any trouble were sometimes other black soldiers who would think that he was like, you know, he was an Uncle Tom or something. Yeah, yeah. And I remember one time. 

Well, he sure did well. What now? 

He sure did well. Yeah, he did. He proved himself over and over again. Everybody knows his name. I mean, you know, that's a well-known name in country music. 

There was an instance where this one black soldier, he was with a table of others, and they were laughing and not paying any attention. Finally, Charlie got kind of, they were right in front of the bandstand. 

And he said, look, whatever is so funny that you guys are laughing at, why don't you just share it with everybody? 

And that kind of, they stopped for a second, and one of them got up and sort of got his nerve up. 

And he said, well, we were just talking, and we wondered if you can scratch your head and shuffle for these white folks. And Charlie said, well, I'm glad you said that. 

You just showed us all that prejudice works both ways, doesn't it? 

And everybody, black and white, in the club started cheering him. Sure. He said that. Sure. 

And even afterward, those guys at that table came up and shook his hand and said, you okay, you know, you made me think. Yeah. And so he was an ambassador for, you know, for racial peace. Yeah, he sure was. And I was real glad that I could be part of it. From 1967? 

That was 67. Until when? 

I got my discharge. 

You played with him until when? 

I got my discharge in 67, and then I just played for him for about another year. And one of the jobs we played was with Billy Walker. 

And Billy's a member of the Grand Ole Opry, and I'd met him before when I'd been in town, and he offered me a job. 

And I wanted to live in Nashville, and I wanted to play on the Opry, so I went ahead and went to work with Billy Walker then. And I stayed with Billy off and on for about five years. 

But when you're playing for people on the Opry, you can play for all of them. If Billy wasn't going out, somebody else, Jeannie Shepard or somebody, would be going. 

So you really got to play. That then became the focus of your life was the performances at Grand Ole Opry. Yeah, it really did. 

Until I got to be about 35, and then I thought, well, you know, I don't want to be a road musician all my life. And I wasn't getting my foot in the door for doing a recording session. That's hard to get into, especially back then. Nowadays, there's a lot of home studios, so there's a lot more work. 

But back in that day, so then you made a decision. 

The decision I made was I'm going to move back to Florida, find me a nice girl and get married and never see Nashville again. 

That was your thought, huh? 

That's what I did, except the nice girl that I married, she already had a 7-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. And that's what brought me back to Nashville. 

Okay, wait a minute. Where did you meet her? 

Where did you meet Jan? 

At First Baptist Church of Sunrise, Florida. 

So you did meet her in Florida? 

Yeah, I went back to Florida. That was my purpose, going back to Florida. And you met her, and she had two children, and so you fell madly in love. That's right. And you were well old enough. It was time to get yourself established, right? 

Well, by that time, I was 40 years old. Oh, my word. Yeah. Yeah, so. 

In fact, when I saw Jan in church, first time I saw her there, she was playing piano there, And I thought, that's a cute little girl playing piano, but she's way too young for me. I thought she was in her early 20s, and I hear I was 40 years old. And then the next time, I didn't see her again, so I thought, well, you know, that's no big deal. I don't know who that was. 

And, you know, I had a lot of girlfriends back then just trying to juggle them and keep them separate and not get too involved with anybody. And then one of the men at the church, I'd never been a member of a Baptist church before. I'd usually gone to non -denominational churches. 

And one of the men in the church came to me, one of the deacons, and said, I understand you play music for a living. And I thought, oh, here it comes. That's what I've always heard about Baptists. They don't drink. They don't smoke. They don't, you know, they're going to pray for me to get another occupation. And I said, well, yeah, I play six nights a week over on Pompano Beach, but I'm off on Sunday night. And he said, well, I know you were off on Sunday night, and here's what I was hoping. Maybe we need somebody to work with our children's choir. We have one lady that plays piano, but we have discipline problems. There's too many kids. We need somebody else. 

And so I thought, oh, that one lady that plays piano is probably some old woman married to one of the deacons. 

But I said, yeah, I'll do it. And so I stayed after church that night to meet the children's choir. 

That lady he was talking about was that cute little girl I had seen that I thought was about 20 years old. 

Well, we got to talking. I took her out to Denny's afterward. We wound up sitting there for three hours. The kids both fell asleep in the booth while we stayed there at Denny's drinking coffee. And that's when I found out she was not in her early 20s. She was in her early 30s. 

So I didn't feel quite so out of place to ask her out. And the rest is history. The rest is history. How long did you court her? 

Six months. I didn't want to. Yeah. You work fast now, huh? 

So. Yeah. 

I knew her after I married, after I knew her for three months, I asked her to marry me and it took another three months. Talk her into it. No. It didn't take any time to talk her into it. 

She told me that she had already made up her mind that first night we met her at Denny said that she was going to marry me if I asked her. I'll be darned. And so it took me three months to be smart enough to ask her. 

So there you go. It was meant to be. I think it really was. And that settled you down. You didn't want to be traveling when you had a family. No, and the oldest one, I adopted both of her kids, so that's why they've got my name. And Michelle, the oldest one, turned into a great musician. That's why I had these signs with the Poe family, because we would go out and play as a family. We're going to talk about that when we get a little farther along. We've got a little more stuff to do here now. Okay. All right, so why did you move back to Nashville? 

Was Jan from Nashville? 

No, no. You know, as I said, Michelle got to be such a great musician. 

She played bass, and we started playing at a place called the Thunderbird Swap Shop in Fort Lauderdale. Oh, so she got to be a, she was a younger musician. She was 11 years old when we got that first job, yeah. She was seven when I married her mom. 

So between, were you two performing together then, you and Michelle? 

All three of us were. 

Jan would play piano and sing harmony, and Michelle would sing melody, and then Michelle started, I told Michelle that I could pay her more if she'd learn to play bass, and she said, yeah, so I paid a bass player to teach her, and by the time she was 11, she was playing bass with us, and she played every Saturday and Sunday, sometimes only one or the other, but at least once a week, we played there at the Thunderbird Swap Shop, by that time, I had taken a school teaching job, I was teaching at Dillard High School. 

Okay, now how did that happen? 

Let's not go squirreling by here. Let's stop now. 

All right, how did you happen to think that you were going to be a teacher? 

You were going to settle down? 

Was that the idea? 

I wanted to stay in one place. How were you qualified to be a teacher? 

I wasn't very qualified to be a teacher. 

How did you get hired by a high school? 

I really, you know, I wanted, I kind of thought here I was 40 years old, and I'm playing with bands that are younger and younger all the time, The music is changing, and I don't necessarily like the new kind of music or like to play it. And I thought I needed to do something else. I didn't exactly like the idea of teaching school. That seemed, and having to get up at 5 or 5.30 every morning, you know, that's, but we needed more money, you know. It's not that you get rich to teach school, but at least it's stable. It will keep you in one place. And so I thought, well, I don't really want to do this, but I ought to. 

So I put in an application, and a lady in our church was a math teacher at Dillard High School. 

And I called her, and I said, what's it like at Dillard High School? 

And she said, that's the best -kept secret in Broward County. It was a high-crime area, and a lot of kids were from a lot of dysfunctional families. 

But she said, it's the best-kept secret. We've got a great principal, those kids. It's the best part of their day. They have disciplined structure, and they really like it. 

So she encouraged you? 

Yes. She said, I love teaching there. 

But don't you have to have a teaching certificate to teach in Florida? 

No? 

Well, I had gotten a teaching certificate. We left that one part. 

I went to David Lipson College right after I got out of the Navy to get a teaching certificate because I thought I might want it someday. Where was that? 

Where was David? 

In Nashville. Oh, here in Nashville. 

The liberal arts college? 

I was playing with Billy Walker, and I was thinking then maybe I ought to have something else to do. Oh, okay. 

Because I kind of thought, how could you just go pick up and do that? 

Well, I didn't want to be an engineer, but I thought I might need something. 

And I had my Navy benefits, so I used my VA benefits to go to Lipscomb College to get a teaching certificate. I didn't have to get a degree. They told me that with my transcripts, I already had enough math and science to teach those subjects. 

Okay, so you did have that. Had to take the education courses and stuff. That's a Tennessee certificate, but they honored it in Florida? 

That was in Tennessee, yeah. I got an out-of -state certificate. And you applied to teach math and? 

Well, at first it was just math. Not music, but math. No, I never had taught music. I don't have a degree in music. I don't even read music. You're just a player, right? 

I can read writing, but I don't read music. 

So you started teaching there before you got married, or was this after you got married? 

That was long before I ever met Jan. 

In fact, after I did my student teaching, that was the hardest thing I'd ever, I'd already quit Billy Walker. I'd given him my notice. I gave him plenty of notice so that he could get somebody else. 

And then, well, it took me about a year to get my, to finish, and I'd just finished the student teaching, and I hated that. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Yeah, in somebody else's class, you know, you're having to use their methods to teach. That's not what you wanted to do. And I thought, this is a drag. 

But I went ahead. I didn't want to quit. 

So I went ahead and finished my student teaching and got certified. And then I called Billy Walker up and I said, look, I don't want to teach school. I got to finish you. 

Can I go back to work with you? 

And he said, well, the steel player that I hired has just given his notice, so I do need a steel player. 

So I went back to work with Billy Walker. And so when I went down there, I had that Tennessee teaching certificate. I mean, Florida, Tennessee teaching certificate. 

So I went back down to Florida. And when I had the interview, oh, I really didn't exactly want to teach. I just felt like I should at least try. It seemed like the responsible thing to do. And when I heard about this opening at Dillard High School, it was the middle of the school year. It was like in December. And my resume had no teaching experience on it. You know, what I want to tell this guy about, all the nightclubs have worked. You know, I'm pretty safe. He's not going to hire me. 

But anyway, when I went and had the interview with him, he was an older black man, probably seemed like he's as old as I am now, but this is 35, 40 years ago. And it turned out he had a reputation like this. 

If you've seen that, what his name is, Joe Clark or something, he was in a movie called Lean on Me or something. That's the way he was. I mean, he didn't put up with any nonsense from the students or the parents or anything. The teacher was always right in his eyes. It was, you know, he wanted, discipline was his main instance. 

So intuitively he thought you could handle that. 

Well, he asked me, this funny thing in our interview, first thing he asked me was, what do you know about teaching black kids? 

Because the school is 95% black. And I said, well, my wife and I taught a Sunday school class. We got about half and half black and white there. And he liked that idea. And then he said, look at my resume that I put in. You know, I had no teaching experience. He said, well, I see you do have certification and a degree. What's this, you work with Charlie Pride? 

And I said, yeah. 

And I said, do you know any Fats Domino songs? 

And I said, well, I know a lot of that kind of 50s rock and roll. He said, well, I can sing just like Fats Domino. He said, we have this faculty of follies every May. 

You think you could back me up on faculty and faculty of follies? 

We wound up talking for about an hour on music, and you easily see how I can do that. 

But we talked just about music business for about an hour. And that's what got you in. It got me in. About five minutes we talked about teaching, and for an hour we talked about music. And he did. He sounded just like Fats Domino. He looked a lot like Fats Domino. Did you end up playing at the follies? 

I played at the Faculty of Follies, yeah. With him? 

Did you back him up? 

Backed him up, yeah. Oh, my gosh. And Michelle even came with me and sang at the Faculty of Follies. My daughter, she sang a Dolly Parton song or something. And she said, Dad, I don't know whether I've never sung for black people before. I don't know. They're not going to like me. You know, she was about 12 years old, younger than the kids in the high school. 

Well, when she got to singing that, they got out dancing in the aisles and clapping. They had a good time. She got a better reaction from them than she did from when we played at the swap shop. 

Isn't that fun? 

That was the beginning of my teaching career, but I still was playing music a lot, too. 

Well, how did you like teaching when you got in the classroom on your own without being a student teacher? 

Well, again, having him as principal, I didn't really have to do the kind of things that most teachers do as far as discipline. 

If a kid talked back to me or didn't have his homework or you knew he was disrespectful in any way, I could just send him out in the hallway, and it was like the kids, in the kids' eye, that was like throwing him into shark -infested waters. 

So they tried to behave, really. They tried to behave. 

They knew that if I sent him out in the hallway, they'd get caught by this roving team of administrators that would put him in internal suspension. And that was a bad thing. They didn't want that. Did you teach them? 

I think a lot of them learned, yeah. And it was Matthew, primarily teaching them Matthew? 

No, actually, that class was Earth Science. 

Well, you said all you ever taught was math. You did teach some science. No, I was certified to teach math and science. Yeah, I would think. 

Yeah, at that time, when I got that job, I had taught at a private school occasionally, a part-time job at a church school teaching math. 

Well, I'm still trying to find out. Did you like being a teacher? 

You were making a difference. I liked making a difference. It's very satisfying in ways. I never got bored, but it's a very stressful job, too. Is it? 

And it's disappointing when you can't get through to some kids, you know. Yeah, there's always that. And I got to be a lot better teacher as time went by. That first year, again, I was sheltered because I had a principal that would always take my side. It would always take every teacher's side. He wouldn't. 

But my second year teaching, the assistant principal there at Dillard High School got a new job as principal at a middle school, Deerfield Beach Middle School. And he asked me if I'd go with him. And I said, yeah. I said, you know, this would be fun working with younger kids. And it's a principal who I already know that's been assistant principal and he's asking me to do it. 

So I did at Deerfield Beach. 

But the trouble was that the new principal didn't really have that much authority. He was new, and there were three assistant principals. 

So then you had discipline problems. Yeah, one for sixth, one for seventh, and one for eighth grade. 

And I got off on the wrong foot right away with one of the assistant principals, the one that was the eighth grade assistant principal that I had to immediately answer to. For one thing, they didn't have textbooks for the kids to take home. They just had a classroom set. And I knew that Florida State Law said they have to assign kids to take home. 

And I said something about that to the assistant principal, and she said, well, they're just going to lose them if they take them home. And they probably would have, but still the law says they had to have them. And I said, I can't assign homework to these kids if I can't give them books to take home. And she said, well, I don't want you giving them books. 

Well, I went over her head. I went to the book depository. I told the principal I was doing that, told him what she had said. 

And he said, well, just go on to the book depository, get the books you need, and say otherwise, you know, we're breaking the law. 

So I did. 

Well, that meant from then on she was not going to give me any support whatsoever with discipline problems. Wow. 

So I had to learn to do it on my own, you know, get parents' names and phone numbers any time a kid talks back or does something, call the parents. that had to learn to not depend on the administrators to back me up because she wasn't going to. 

And did that make teaching more satisfying when you got to be more independent? 

Well, the next year after that, my daughter graduated high school, and we moved up here to Nashville. 

So I didn't have to stay at that school anymore. 

Okay, so she was in the seventh grade when, or she was seven years old when you got her, when you adopted her. Oh, I had gone to Nashville briefly. Actually, between the two, I came up to Nashville to establish residency so she could go to MTSU. 

But you had a pretty long career of teaching then. 

Between the part-time teaching that I did at math and then the teaching at Dillard High School and then Deerfield Beach Middle School, it was spread out over about four or five years. It sounds like it's more than that if she was seven years old and then she's coming off to college. years old when i first when i first met her mom yeah but you were teaching you said before you met her you've been at this longer than you think i've done student teaching but i hadn't actually worked as a teacher and i and i had worked briefly as i think i mentioned that i taught at a private school so the whole plan always was to come back up here then uh well that's when it not at first but when i saw how what a good musician she was and how how well she handled you know working in crowds and Jan and I both felt you know and when she graduates high school we really need to go to Nashville and so when you moved up here you moved back to Nashville what year was that 1990 that was 19 91 and then I didn't get a job right away this guy took a job with the Social Security Administration for about six months but and I got with I got with the school system the following year and then jan got a job teaching up here too yeah and michelle had a serious accident she fell and off of the tennessee performing arts center she fell off one of the she'd gone to a concert there and fell about 20 24 feet broke her leg in several places so anyway she she came back home so after that for after her freshman year in college she came back to florida and jan came back with her to kind of get her back to health and so the next year they both came back so we had a couple of years of the family kind of having to commute back and forth to see each other but primarily once you moved back to nashville in the 90s it wasn't for music it was for teaching um you always do music it was for Music, because it was, to start with anyway, I wanted music for Michelle. No, I'm talking about you and your career. 

How were you supporting the family? 

Were you a musician when you came here or were you a teacher when you came here? 

I started out as a musician because I knew people up here. 

I knew I needed more money, and so I wanted a guy that I knew got me a job playing at the Opryland Hotel. 

But I knew I would need it. Have some water. I knew I would need more money than I could make playing. Here in Nashville, there's so many musicians, it drives the wage right now. Yeah, right, right, right. That's right, because this is the Mecca. Everybody comes here. 

So I took a job working for the Census Department. That was the 1990 census. That's how I know it was 1990. Yeah. And then did you get back into teaching here? 

Not until about the fall of 92. That's when I started back teaching here. 

Okay, so you did eventually come back here to teach. You did teach once you got back here. You went back to school, too, at some point in time. Yeah, that was after I had started teaching. 

I had already been teaching here, and Michelle had signed up for the aerospace course at MTSU, Middle Tennessee State. 

And I think I mentioned that to you, didn't I? 

Her professor found out that her father was a metro school teacher, and he told me about all these programs they had for metro school teachers, free college and everything, because they wanted to get us into it. 

So I took that course, and then I decided I liked it, so I majored in it. 

So I think it kind of embarrassed Michelle that I was going to college at the same time she was on the same campus. 

But you got a master's degree. I got my master's the same time she got her bachelor's. Okay. And your master's was in aeronautic... Aerospace education. Education, okay. Aerospace education. 

And what was really cool about you getting involved with that whole program was you got involved with Civil Air Patrol. Yeah, yeah. 

Not just Civil Air Patrol, but other organizations like the Young Eagles program, people that could connect me with the kids using aviation as a way to do it. It's a great way to motivate children to learn math and science. is, you know, how dull most kids think math and science is. 

Well, if they've been up in an airplane and you can give them problems relating to math and science. 

Well, tell me how that worked. I mean, you didn't have an airplane. You didn't have a pilot's license. 

Well, I had gotten a pilot's license, but I let it expire. You never even mentioned that you got a pilot's license. 

Where did you learn to fly? 

When I was working for Charlie Pride, Charlie had decided that he was going to get a plane to fly around in, and I thought, well, you know, this would be ideal. I could fly his plane with just a private license. You only need 40 hours to get a private license. 

I could fly his plane, and I wouldn't have to have a commercial license, just like I didn't have to have a commercial license to drive his car. You know, I didn't have to have a CDL. 

And then when I get enough hours flying his plane like that, then I can always get a commercial license with it. 

But what happened was after we came back for one of our tours, There had been a few high -profile artists killed in plane crashes, Jim Croce and people like that. Yeah. And he said he wasn't going to get a plane. Maybe he's not going to get a plane after all. 

But did you go take lessons? 

I had been taking lessons when I was home. I told you he'd pay for me to fly to Miami between his tours. And when I was home in Miami, I would take flying lessons. 

So did you ever get a pilot's license? 

I got a student license where I could solo the plane, but I hadn't, when finally the last tour went on when I came back, the school had gone out of business. 

So you never completed that? 

I had not done my solo cross country, and I lacked about two or three more hours. And when the dream of the airplane evaporated. And when Charlie had decided he wasn't going to buy a plane, I didn't see any reason to follow that. To pursue that airplane. 

Well, I didn't know I was going to come to Nashville and get involved in aerospace education. Your life has all been about serendipitous happenings, hasn't it? 

Yeah, it really has. And that's why I said I'm not smart enough to have made it turn out the way it did. 

Bill, one of the interesting things about you getting your degree and your master's, actually, in aviation education is the unique ways you found to apply that. Tell me about the Civil Air Patrol Squadron. 

What is that all about? 

Well, the Civil Air Patrol itself is a group that I became familiar with while I was working on the aviation, the aerospace education degree. And another group that I got to work with was called the EAA, Experimental Aircraft Association. It sounds like it's really just mostly private planes. And they have a subgroup called Young Eagles. 

Those are mostly retired Air Force, Army, or Navy pilots or airline pilots that own their own airplanes and they want to give back in some way. And so especially out at the Lebanon Airport, they have a chapter of that organization. 

And so I really got involved with them more than I did at first, more than the Civil Air Patrol, because they were a standing way for me to get flights for the kids. so they would volunteer their time. 

Okay, what kids? 

Where were you getting the kids from? 

My school, my eighth graders. 

Okay, your eighth graders, and you were teaching math and science in the eighth grade? 

Mostly science. Mostly science, okay. And then you wanted to give them an opportunity to fall in love with the idea of flying. 

Yeah, I love flying, and I knew that if they liked it, just when they can see their teacher in some other capacity than just being their teacher, then they have a lot easier time working with the kids. 

So what you did in building, you were a liaison then, getting them opportunities to go out to the airport. These were like field trips then, and to actually fly. 

Yeah, and then the Civil Air Patrol was also a group that I'd become familiar with through the aerospace education degree. And I made some calls. First, I talked to our principal about it, and he said that would be good. And I found out how to go about getting a squadron set up in the school. and we had somebody come out and talk to the faculty. 

One of the officers in the Civil Air Patrol came out and talked to the faculty and talked to the principal and to the kids, and there seemed to be a lot of interest in it. 

We finally realized that rather than having the squadron meet at our school or fly out of the Nashville airport, there's too much traffic. 

They said it would be better to fly out of the same airport as that Young Eagles group did because it's a Lebanon airport, 35 to 40 miles away from Nashville. You don't have to watch out for airliners. And so we set up. They already had a Civil Air Patrol squadron in Lebanon, but it was pretty much inactive. 

So that when they found out we were interested in doing it, they had all the paperwork in place. they activated the squadron and we would go out there every Monday for civil air patrol meetings. 

Okay tell me what a squadron means. It's a group of maybe 8 or 10, sometimes as many as 20. Do they have? 

It can be a cadet squadron would be kids under age 18. 

What would be the point of it? 

Would they be learning something, teaching them things about flying, or about... 

Well, the purpose of the Civil Air Patrol itself is for search and rescue. Right. It started in the beginning of World War II, they were hunting for German submarines. Right, right. 

And the people that belonged to it had to learn to identify all different kinds of aircraft and things of that sort. That's right. 

So this follows that same principle. They're learning things about aircraft. That's right. 

At the beginning of World War II, most of the nations were really not in favor of civil, civil aviation was like a nuisance for the government of Germany and France and England and Russia and the, you know, the warring nations. 

And a lot of people who were advocates of private aviation in the late 1930s here in the United States thought the best way to stop that from happening in our country, where the government would just take over all private aviation, would be to convince the president that private aviation could be a definite asset if we were to go to war. And that's what they did. 

They organized to hunt for submarines, and I think they actually were credited with sinking one or two submarines by dropping grenades on it. 

But mostly what they would do was locate the subs, and then American military planes would fly it and get them. 

But what you're saying is that's still a viable thing today for these kids to go and learn about it, to be at the airport, and learn about the airplanes. 

That way they can learn about history, they can learn about the principle of aviation, how an airplane stays up in the air. Are you still involved with that? 

No, not really. Not so much. 

But you did that for a long period? 

Because I don't have the access, you know, to a close relationship with students that I could take them out there. That's when you were actually teaching that you could do that. 

So that was a good part. That was a nice thing you were doing. It really was, yeah. You really enjoyed that. I sure did. You kept on teaching until, I think you said you retired in 2004. 2004 that's right 2004 and that's seven years eight years ago now yeah okay so what has been going on with you in the last eight years i've been playing a lot more music than i did before because i don't have i don't have a day job to interfere with my music like i did like i did well and not only that but you also have this facility where you can make have people come in and actually get built put this building up well i didn't do it two carpenters put it up in two days and most of what I used, I was still teaching school then, and I used it as a lab. You know, I would do experiments in the school before I would do them. I mean, experiments out here in the studio before I would do them in school. 

You know, when you're having the kids go through a science experiment in school, you've got to know exactly what's going to happen to people. Oh, yeah, no surprises. 

So I would want to go through it out here. if I didn't remember whether it was hydrogen or oxygen that exploded, I wanted to make sure what happened here, not with 30 kids. 

So it wasn't built originally as a studio. I knew I was going to use it as a studio, but I wasn't having that many opportunities to play. That's why I've still got a lot. 

I mean, I had science experience done there, and I still kept a lot of my teaching equipment in case I get an opportunity to use it. 

I've got all the books and the magazines, but I'm stored them where they're kind of out of the way now, and I just use it for music. 

Once you retired from that teaching, then you had the time to outfit this and turn it into a recording studio. It is a professional recording studio. 

Well, when I first built it, whatever it was going to be used for, I called the music minister and the pastor of the church that we were going to at the time. It was Riverside Baptist Church. 

And they came over here and we had a little kind of ceremony ceremony to dedicate this building to God's purposes, whatever he chose to use it for. 

And I knew that he would choose probably more to use it for music because I'm more of a tool for music than I am for science or anything else. 

But at the time, science was where I had the most opportunity and it was definitely a good place for me to do the experiments before I would do them at school. 

So I had plenty of space out here to do it. 

Once you had the time and you started using it as a music studio, did you advertise for people to come make demos here, or did that just happen? 

No, I did advertise, but word of mouth actually is more effective. I've still got a website, applecreekstudios.biz, B-I-C, not.com. 

So it tells everything that I can do with the studio, the capabilities of it. And so you've had people come, and you've... 

I had a girl out here just last Sunday, and then I'm going to do some more stuff with her this coming Sunday. She's recording, so she has demos? 

Yeah, making songs she's written that she wants to record. This is the mecca for kids that are young people that want to break into the music industry. It sure is, yeah. It's a mecca for old people like me who want to help young people break in. It works out kind of really neat, doesn't it? 

It does, yeah. Yeah, it does work out really neat. As long as you don't have to depend on it for a living. 

But it's been, yeah, like you say, you don't depend on it. You're retired. Yeah, I've got my metro school retirement pay and my Navy retirement pay. And your wife still works. Jan is still teaching. 

Well, she's retired, too, from regular classroom teaching. 

But she's doing sort of what I'm doing, but she's doing it during school hours. She's at the same school every day, four days a week, Monday through Thursday. and I think her official educational specialist or educational consultant, but it's a fancy word for tutor. She's working with kids that are behind in their math or reading. 

Well, she's still working. Yeah, but she's at the same school all the time, but she's drawing retirement pay. And then working back as a consultant. 

So now you have the time and the wherewithal to pursue your own music and to entertain yourself by seeing young people come in, and make demos, and, you know, you'll be ready when somebody hits it big, right? 

You'll be more than happy for them. I've been waiting for 50 years now for somebody to hit it big. 

Well, you know, it hasn't been, I mean, it's been a lot of fun. You've had good times all along the way. That's true. 

A few years, just this past year, you had a very dramatic thing happen to you that you certainly didn't plan on, and that was getting sick. Tell me what happened. This past year? 

Just recently. just recently you told me you had you just got the cardiologist oh I had a heart attack did you forget I was trying to think of something cool I didn't consider that cool but you and I talked about what did it do how did it change your life or was it a life affirming they say stress will bring out heart attacks if stress was the cause I would have had a heart attack when I was teaching school. A long time ago, yeah. 

But the only teaching job I had was one that I enjoyed very much. It was very easy. Like two or three days a week I would go in after school. It wasn't like Jan's job is every day except, I mean, four days a week. 

She goes in, she gets up at 5 in the morning and goes to regular school hours, and she doesn't have a full class load, just four or five. 

But mine was after school, and I would only, again, only three or four students. It would be just two hours a day. And I was enjoying doing that, and I had actually gone out to the school that day. 

It was Apollo Middle School here in town, and about 3 o'clock in the afternoon because it was an after-school program, and I was walking across the parking lot to go into the school, and all of a sudden I just couldn't breathe. 

And I kind of stumbled across the parking lot, pushed the door to the school open, and somebody said, Are you all right? 

And I said, no, I can't breathe. Please call an ambulance. And they did. You were lucky. I was lucky that there was other people around to do something. 

Because they found that there was blockages, complete blockages, two arteries in the heart and like a 90% blockage of a third one. And so they bypassed all three of those. They took a vein out of the leg. And I was in the hospital for about four or five days. 

And then I think I'd mentioned that it was several weeks before I could leave the house, before I couldn't drive or play my sealed guitar. They didn't want any kind of motion in my left arm that could possibly mess up the surgery. Cause anything, yeah, yeah. 

So you're finally at the point now where you've been sprung. You can drive now, you can play. I can drive now, but they don't want me lifting more than 10 pounds. 

So when I work jobs like I'm going to work at the Square Dance day after tomorrow night, But I have a good excuse now to get other people to carry my equipment for me. Hey, man, I can't live for it. Ten thousand, you help me carry my steel guitar. And I think that's a good idea, too. 

But you can play now. They don't mind you playing. Yeah, the danger now is to the actual incision that they make. The heart seems to be healing all right, but they have to cut you open, you know. You saw that breastbone in half. It's pretty dramatic. It is. And it's just like a broken arm. It takes a while to heal. 

And they don't want to take a chance that just because I'm feeling good, I'll try to lift something that would pull that apart. You know, it's a good time to really listen to what everyone tells you. Follow the rules, pal. You don't want to be the first guy to blow your heart surgery. 

But it's an awakening to realize. 

Well, you know, I didn't realize how many people that happens to until after it happens to me, then people just come out of the woodwork and say, you know, that happened to my father, that happened to me. They're, it's really, it's a routine type of operation. It's almost like getting a haircut. No, no, no, no, no. Probably not. No, you're not going to convince me of that. Probably not that routine. Not that routine. 

I wouldn't want to, I don't mind getting a haircut every couple of weeks, but I wouldn't want to have to do this. No, no, you don't want to do this one ever again. That's right. This is a once in a lifetime thing. That's right. 

But it is a wakening up when we find out we're vulnerable to things, so. Yeah. 

How long did your parents live? 

How long did your father move? 

My father was just a few months short of his 90th birthday. Oh, he had a wonderful long life. He was born in 1907, died in 1997. He saw practically the whole 20th century. He did. 

And the history of aviation, he was born three years after the Wright brothers flew their first plane. And the last plane he flew was a four-engine jet airliner. And, you know, he had seen men, and by the time he died, men had landed on the moon. That's wonderful that he had that home. And then my mother was about seven or eight years younger than my father. 

But she lived to be a little over 88, about a year or less than he did. 

So that meant that she was around for six or seven more years after he died. And it was very hard on her. 

They had been married for 62 years, and she lived for him, especially the last two years, because he was in bad health this last two years. and she did all the driving, all the cooking and cleaning and taking care of him. 

And when people would say, oh, you're such a saint to take care of him the way she'd say, I don't have to take care of him, I get to take care of him. She'd say, he took care of me for 60 years, this is all I can, this is the least I can do now. 

And then when he died, she didn't really, it seemed like she didn't feel like she had any reason to be here. Oh, and that can happen, yeah. Yeah. 

But they both had pretty long lives and they had a chance to see your successes and see your family. 

Since she lived for six more years after he died, she got to know especially the younger children in a way that she never would have if she had gone when she wanted to. 

So there you go. There was that blessing. Let's talk about the children. Let's talk about your whole family. We've talked about Jan now and then throughout our thing. And Michelle, we've talked about a good bit. that we know she's an aspiring, the next American Idol. Can I say it that way maybe? 

She's aspiring to that. What about Scott? 

Well, Scott was four years old when I married them. And when I married Jan, actually I married the whole family. You said it right. Because we included them in the ceremony. When the preacher asked me if I would take this woman. You said it right. She would take this man. 

He would ask, now will you take these children? and asked the children if they would take me to raise them, and they did. And then later their father had a very profound born -again religious experience. 

It wasn't too much longer after that, and he asked me to adopt the children, and I thought that was the best thing for all of us. 

So tell me about Scott. About Scott. About Scott. Oh, all right. 

He, when we'd work on these jobs, Scott would, I think he felt like it was his job to keep Michelle from getting a big head. And so he'd walk across the front of the stage with his fingers stuck in his ears like this. Give her the business. Yeah, he had quite a sense of humor. And he loved going down to my parents' house and catching turtles. 

They had a canal behind their house in Miami with turtles in there, and he could have spent all day, I think, just standing there and catching tea. 

So he liked the water a lot. He loved the water, yeah. And we liked building radio -controlled cars and airplanes. 

Finally, years later, we kept one of the radio-controlled planes here, and he asked me one time if I'd send that out to him when he had gotten married and moved to California. and I said yeah I will I didn't tell him that it was going to be a lot of work because I didn't want him to say no I thought that was real cool that he wanted that plane and so I paid somebody to pack it up and ship it out you know these packing companies it's fragile so they had to put it in some pretty it was a big plane about like that What was his career? 

What is his career? 

What does he do for a living? 

Well now he's driving a truck locally in the San Diego area That's where he met his wife. 

He loves the water, and he was working on a corporately owned, I don't know whether they called it a big boat or a little ship, but 150 feet long that traveled. 

So he was out on the water then? 

Yeah, traveled all over the East Coast. I think he had some buddies that worked with another one. Did you mean East Coast or did you mean West Coast? 

Originally it was the East Coast. Oh, he was on the East Coast. Yeah, the Gulf and the Bahamas. 

And I guess the people who served as crews on these corporately-owned ships or yachts, they're a community that sort of all knows each other. 

And he heard about an opening for one that was going between Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, sailing up and down the Rural Humber. Oh, so then he went to the West Coast. 

That's when he went out there, and they were making a stop in San Diego, and that's where he met this girl that he wound up marrying. And her name is? 

Liz. Liz, okay. 

And they have children? 

Liz already had two children from a former marriage, and now they've had a third one, and she's pregnant with a fourth one. And Scott asked me one time, he said, Dad, I don't know whether I can do this. 

What do you think? said this is why we had met Liz she had she had come here with it but they were not married yet they were just just engaged and he said what's it like you married a woman with two kids and it worked out just fine yeah and it worked out fine and then Michelle was in the next room she said yeah but we were perfect kids and Jen said no you weren't and so he married her and And that's worked out. The rest is history. It looks like the rest is history. And so you have two adopted grandchildren, and then they had one of their own. Yes, they had a stepchildren. They had one of their own. And, you know, Scott might be not my biological child, but he's my legal child. He's got my birth certificate and my name on it. 

So I consider the grandchild as my grandchild. He's got my name. What is his name? 

What is the little boy's name? 

Dalton. Dalton. Yeah. Okay. Dalton is a little town in Ohio that Jad is from. Oh, really? 

So he was named after that? 

That's cute. That's cute. And his middle name is Nash. 

So Scott wanted to recognize both places. 

So Nashville is my hometown, and Dalton is Jad. 

So Dalton Nash is his name. Dalton Nash. Poe. And they're expecting him. Dalton Nash Poe. And you said they're expecting another one. They're expecting another one, yeah. Okay. 

But I don't get to see Dalton very often. 

Well, he lives a lot away from there. 

Well, when my ship had its reunion out in San Diego, I thought this. And Liz was about eight months pregnant, and I thought, well, this is going to be great. You know, she'll probably give birth while I'm there, and I'll get to see my grandson. 

But she didn't. 

But I went out there. I spent a lot of time with them while I was out there. 

I was sort of divided by time between the ship's reunion and going out to see them at the San Diego Naval Base. 

Okay, now tell me about Jessica. 

Well, Jessie was born at a time where Jan had had a miscarriage. And, you know, it would have been the first of our own children when she had the miscarriage. And she went into a terrible depression, Jan did. And I didn't know whether she was going to be all right. It scared me to death. And, you know, we had been married for over a year before she got pregnant. We thought maybe we were doing something wrong. 

But in any case, we wanted to have a child. 

But then after the miscarriage, she got pregnant again right away. And getting pregnant with Jessie, it was like the sun coming out. Changed everybody's life again. It ended her depression. 

And so God had a definite reason for Jessie partly to recover Jan from what she had to go through with that miscarriage. 

And what does Jessica do in life? 

What is her mission? 

Well, Jessie, I think I mentioned she had three different colleges. And then finally, I think the first college she went to is Tulane in New Orleans. And I think she just sort of liked the idea of Tulane. And her major was journalism. 

And then when she realized that with the student loans she was getting, she was going to have like the equivalent of a house payment to make without a house to show for it if she stayed there. 

So she came back to MTSU for her second year and again majored in journalism. 

But she found out that she was really good at photography. She took a photography course at MTSU. 

But they don't have a photojournalism major there. 

So the third year, she transferred up to Western Kentucky University, which is about 60 miles north of here, and majored in photojournalism. Oh, that's wonderful. 

And then I think she had waited so long that she thought it was going to take her four more years to get a degree. And photojournalism is kind of like music. People are more concerned about what you know and how well you do it. Yeah, not the degree. It's not like teaching where you've got to have a piece of paper that says you can do it. You don't have to have a piece of paper. It'll be a lifetime thing for her. She'll always be into that. 

But her most recent thing that she seems to be really getting into is health. This company called Symmetry that sells, actually the products did lower my cholesterol level. And she, I guess Genesis is the name of their flagship product. 

But so she's been working with them and doing very well. Then now that she's gone up to Minneapolis where they have an office there and living in the... Oh, she's living in a cold country. She's renting a room there from somebody that is connected to the company out there. And I think he's got several other people that work there that are renting rooms from him. So... We'll see how that goes. Yeah. And... 

But now she's taking a job. she's thinking about selling her car because every place she goes up there is within walking distance or a bus thing and I love public transportation if you can be in an area and so she seems to be she's thinking about doing that she took a job now she's still working for that company but she's now working for a gym where she's like a sales consultant where she gets minimum wage with commissions, yeah, commission with a guarantee of minimum wage. 

But I'm pretty sure she can do a lot better than the minimum wage because she loves exercise, for one thing, and she's very knowledgeable about health. 

And the two jobs will go together because people who are motivated to exercise in a gym will also want to be putting the right stuff in their body with the nutritional supplement company that she's working for. 

So it seems like the two jobs would really kind of benefit each other. 

Now tell me about Brett. Brett is like a little surprised, and he won't mind if I say this because he knows it. I've still got some, I've saved them on some flyers. You know, Jan would put out flyers about our family band. And then when she said, and you've got to come meet her. 

Now, Brett is a little surprised that now he gives Jan something to do in her spare time. 

But in just no time, we're sure he's going to be old enough to carry our amplifiers and PA systems around for us. 

And Brett was really something that we needed, somebody that we needed, because otherwise Jesse would have been, like I said, our only child with four parents, with the other two kids being so much older than her. 

But then Brett was born, Jesse was three, not quite four when he was born. And Jesse was like we had bought her a new toy or something. Yeah, something. It was her baby. That was her baby, yeah. Isn't that neat? 

And one time Jan's sister came over to take Brett home to stay overnight with her. And Jesse just screamed and squall like she can't take my baby. 

But when she brought him back the next day, Jesse got over it. Yeah. 

So what does Brett do? 

Well, Brett just graduated from MTSU. 

He was also working in a restaurant as host at the Canyon Fork Restaurant, which is a seafood restaurant out near Opryland. 

What's his degree in? 

And his degree is also in, well, it's mass communications, but journalism is the main focus. 

And he just took a job with Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt Hospital on their Meharry, he works on their Meharry campus, Meharry Medical School. It's a branch of Vanderbilt. And I don't know exactly what he does. He's trying to explain it to me. It's got something to do with computers. 

So maybe that's not going to be your area. 

Well, he says he... The good news is he's got a job. He says he gathers and inputs data. 

Well, basically, he's getting the information from people that are related to diabetes and then putting it into the computers. Yeah, for studies and such. 

I think he probably thinks about that like I did at the, working for the Social Security Administration. It's an interim job until he finds what he really wants to do, huh? 

But he likes the money. I mean, it's, you know, it's paying him $32,000, $33,000 a year, something like that. It's good that he found a job right away as soon as you get out of school. It is. And that's very good. And he found networking is so important. And he has so many friends in college. That's how he got this. The girl who was doing it, he graduated about a year before him and recommended him. Yeah, you found that out yourself. It's all about who he knows. He knows that. 

He's probably, as far as being a people person, he's probably got more of a talent in that way than any of us, the rest of it. 

But it was, you know, it really helped Jesse to have a little brother, somebody to boss around, somebody who has a companionship. And Michelle was 14 years old when Jan found out she was pregnant with Brett. And Michelle was just embarrassed. 

So, you know, when you're 14, you don't think your parents do stuff like that. And she said, Mom, you're pregnant. 

What am I going to tell my friends? 

And Jan said, well, if you find that embarrassing, we'll just tell everybody it's yours. As it ended up, she's happy as can be to have her brothers and sisters. Sister and brother, I'm sure. 

Well, when they're in the music business, it's hard to be happy sometimes. It's quite a legacy that you're passed on, your music. 

Nobody else is going to fly, it doesn't look like, huh, at this point? 

Well, you know, I think Michelle does have her degree in aerospace. You know, she was majoring. That's what got me into aerospace education was her majoring in it. And I remember asking her one time when she was maybe a freshman or sophomore in college. Michelle doesn't remember this. She told me, she went up and told her, and she said she doesn't remember the incident. 

We were sitting in the parking lot in front of Kroger's, and I said to her, Michelle, if you could look into the future, 15 years into the future, and had your choice of whether you were going to be a country star or be a professional pilot, which would you rather do? 

She was still taking the professional pilot's course there at MTSU. 

And she said something that was, to me, was just showed a level of maturity that I didn't have as an adult. She said, well, Dad, I don't think I have to make a choice like that. 

God knows what's best for me, and I'm going to just follow what I just have to live each day and make decisions to let him handle it. And she said something to that effect, which she doesn't even remember today. 

It was just a passing conversation, but to me it struck a nerve because that was so much the way I have lived my life that I didn't try to plan what was going to happen. Whatever happened, happened. 

But, you know, at the same time, music and aviation is two things that could be kind of hard to combine. 

But there's nothing that says you can't have both of them in your life. 

I was hoping that maybe she would get a job with some artists like Charlie Pryde was going to do with me that would have their own plane and Michelle could fly their plane and play bass for them in their band. 

But now she's reached the age now that being a pilot for an airline is out of the question. They won't hire anybody over 34 years old because you have to retire when you're 60 anyway. so that is something she it doesn't seem to have any uh any hope that she's ever going to do anything with aviation i hope i'm wrong because i think there are a lot of other things in aviation besides being an airline pilot oh sure absolutely but she hasn't done it she hasn't flown an airplane since she graduated college well there's but she's been so busy with her yeah you never know what's going to come back around so she uh she was working with a band her senior year in college and they had to do a job in Alabama and she still hadn't done her solo across country and so she decided she'd kill two birds with one stone and fly down there to work the job. 

I don't remember the exact details but she was scared to death when it happened because she almost ran out of gas. I guess she hadn't planned it right and they had the FAA meeting her at the airport when she landed. 

They were doing searches to find her and I think ever since then she's felt like she's she even said it as a joke one time you know somebody asked her in an interview what made you decide to go into music and she said because I decided I wasn't a very good pilot that was like a joke yeah but I don't I would hate for her to think that I mean if you almost run out of gas one time she's not gonna do it again you know probably a better pilot because you almost ran I guess that we learn from our mistakes is what you're saying yeah yeah we do enough but she has not flown a plane since she graduated well when I When I called you and said, we're going to take a little trip down memory lane, and you said, oh, I don't know that I can remember anything. I think you remembered quite a bit. What do you think? 

Well, yeah, and we've still only gotten up to what that does. 

Well, we've gotten up to right today. We got you recovered from your heart attack. 

Well, yeah, we skipped some areas in there. Probably some areas might need to be skipped. Maybe just as so. I hope you've enjoyed going down memory lane. It's been a treat for us to hear your story. Yeah, I really have. It made me think about things that I haven't thought about in years. That's usually what happens when you sit down to talk about it all. I'm going to ask you if you're going to play something for us in a minute. Yeah, I'll be glad to do that. No, you stay right where you are right now because you're mic'd up. 

And what I'm going to ask you to do is just, first I just want to say thank you so much for letting us come. We've taken your whole afternoon and evening. And it's been a pleasure and we've enjoyed every bit of your story. 

So first I say thank you for that. Okay. and we've gotten this many chapters done and now we'll see what you're going to do with your next chapter if you want. 

Okay, all right. Leave it at that, all right? 

All right. Thank you for your time, sir. 

Well, thank you for the interview. Just, I happened to see Petit Page. They had a re-run at E-Haw and Petit Page was on the singing her big hit which was Tennessee Waltz. That's why I had that song in my mind. Yeah, yeah. I remember when she was on the hit parade a couple of those years ago. 

Yeah, of course, that was a rerun, probably filmed about 1970, but, you know, her biggest times were back in the late 40s, early 50s, like the old Cape Cod and Tennessee Watts. It was good to see her yesterday. That's what she played, wasn't it? 

And square dancing. And square dancing, yeah. And in your ***** -tonks, what do you play in your *****-tonks? 

Well, that's an example of it. The square dancing and the ***** -tonks are a lot of the same kind of music. The people are a lot wilder in the *****-tonks. 

The square dance, they don't allow any drinking or any smoking, so it's a much more civilized type of behavior than what they have in the ***** tops. I've heard of them where they have chicken wiring around the bandstand. I've never played in one like that, but I've played it somewhere. I wish there had been chicken wiring around the bandstand. To protect you? 

Yeah, that's what they say. Solo instruments, don't they? 

No, but it sounds wonderful. I've always loved the sound of it. It wasn't that first time I saw that guy playing a guitar. He just tuned it, he recorded a slid a bar on, slid a cigarette lighter on the, doing that. That was such a beautiful sound. That's why I had to have one. It is indeed. 

Okay, pick out, I'm a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech CORVUS. That's easy. Of course, it's Air Force. I still think Army Air CORVUS sounds more musical. It does indeed. Thank you so much, Bill. We appreciate it. Thank you.