Living History

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to talk to someone who survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912? Maybe you would like to hear from an eyewitness to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, or how about the tornado that destroyed downtown Gainesville in 1936?

Well, I found one the other day.

Ed Parks, now retired at age 74, was only 5 when that tornado came close to ending his young life.

Parks was with his parents when the twister roared into town, turning the area around the square into a pile of wood splinters and brick that April morning. The twister then went down East Broad Street, smashing into his home.

"That morning around 7:30 it turned completely black," Parks recalled. "My father told my mother to get up and go to the back and pull the windows down."

"After she got up he said, 'come on boy, we better get up and go back there with her' (and) he picked me up and we started back there and we got to the hallway. We had a treadmill sewing machine. He threw me under the sewing machine and fell on me, and about that time the house exploded."

Parks' foot was seriously cut, his parents were injured by flying debris,
but everybody survived.

Two hundred other people did not - and more than 1,000 were injured.

I caught up with Parks while I was on a recent assignment at the Northeast Georgia History Center at Brenau University, which has an exhibit featuring a giant photograph mural showing the devastation.

Parks saw that scene in real life and remembered that two family businesses were destroyed: his grandfather's dry goods store and a restaurant operated by his his father and uncle. He walked over to the mural and pointed to a wrecked car. He said it was his grandfather's.

Just out of view in the mural, Parks said, were the ruins of what Gainesville folks knew
as the "pants factory." It was on Maple Street.

Parks peered back across nearly seven decades. "There were more people killed there than anyplace else," he recalled.

A group of visitors entered the exhibit, one of them a lady from Atlanta,
and they began listening to him recall that fateful, terrible day in his
city's history.

"Thank you," the woman said later, as she turned to leave. "I enjoyed the history lesson."

Unlike most of us who just gaze in wonder and amazement at the exhibit,
for Ed Parks, it is a vivid memory: he saw it, he heard it - and he felt it.

Parks grew to adulthood, founded Parks Insurance Company, and retired in
1992, but he remains a part of April 6, 1936.

The history center exhibit details that day and what happened as
completely as anything I know, and then there is Ed Parks.

He was there.

He is living history.

(Jerry Gunn is a reporter for AccessNorthGa.com, WDUN NEWS TALK 550 and SPORTS RADIO 1240 THE TICKET.)