Pete White's Store Is Gone( and so is a piece of my heart)

Going back to my old hometown is always a little weird. Blakely hasn't changed that much, cannot change that much, but each year brings a little change, and after a while, like a puppy that's put a decade on him, everything is so different that it's hard to believe it was ever the way remembered.

I got my first speeding ticket on US27 between Blakely and Colquitt Georgia. If they had bothered to look they would have discovered that I had enough pot on me to make life very interesting. I was going seventy-two miles an hour and the place they pulled me over fell victim to the four lane. The massive oak tree and barn that was once there is now gone. I sold the pot to pay for the ticket.

It's odd that they will take out houses, trees, and memories before they take out a graveyard. The dead have no need of space, have no need for anything, and they are the only ones not displaced by this road.

It's ironic that back in 1995, I was part of the survey crew doing the first survey on US27 to turn it into a four lane. If you have no idea where you were on April 19, 1995, I can tell you exactly where I was. I remember where we set up that day, and I remember getting into an argument with my crew chief and walking off the job. He begged me to come back, apologized for being a jerk, and never changed anything that he did, but I do remember that day. Everyone was so convinced that the bomber was an Arab but I knew it was an American who did it. The crime just seemed too... American. No foreign group would have taken the risks to get that far into the heartland to attack a target no one had ever heard anything about.

Pete white's store in Hentown is gone. Hentown is about the size of a Volkswagen and there are as many people living there as you might be able to get into a VW. For years and years, Pete White sold beer on Sunday, and sold beer to minors. I bought more illegal beer from Pete White's store than I did from anywhere else. He also sold fireworks, which were also illegal. If you lived in Early County, and you drank a lot of beer, at one point in time or another, directly or indirectly, you put money in Pete's pocket. Now the store is gone, paved over, and nothing remains but what you see here.

A classmate of mine lived right off of US27 and they've paved over the place where his mother's trailer once sat. He was a very odd guy.  He liked Bruce Lee films and he was always saying things that made no sense just to say things that made no sense. They kicked him out of the Army after less than a year, and he kinda drifted around Blakely until he and four of his friends were killed in a wreck in 1980. The little patch of land they once lived on is now gone.

The first restaurant I remember eating in as a little kid has been gone for decades now. It was a very small hamburger joint in the middle of nowhere. My parents would take us there sometimes and I remember they cooked their pickles on the grill before putting them on the hamburgers. 27 was just a small dark road with nothing going on with a tiny little hamburger joint on it back then, and when the place burned down, insurance wire, I heard later, it never occurred to me that one day it would be a four-lane highway.

These are just the things I remember, the things I'll miss, and you can bet that every person who travels that road, who has been there before, will miss some small part of their life that is no gone forever. Except, of course, what you see here.

Take Care,

Mike