You can go home again

By Ken Stanford Contributing Editor

Posted 12:55PM on Monday, October 21, 2013

Thomas Wolfe penned a novel that was published in 1940 called "You Can't Go Home Again." The title worked its way into our language to mean one cannot recapture youthful memories. But I spent a recent weekend doing just that. It was my high school reunion - the 50th for the Moultrie (Ga.) High School (MHS) class of 1963. It was the first time in 10 years I had been back "home" - home being Moultrie where I lived the for eight years before graduating and leaving home and Tifton where I spent the first 10 years of my life. They are about 30 miles apart. I tried to visit every street or road we lived on in those two places - and was successful in finding the house or plot of land (now vacant) where the house stood on all but one: the Thompson homesite in Tifton just down the road from the Thompson homeplace where our landlord lived. The house on 9th Street in Tifton, just a few doors from the home of my maternal grandparents. The one homeplace or homesite I could not pinpoint was the one on Waterloo Road. In Moultrie, I found the street on the northside of town where we lived briefly. I think the house is gone but the corner store is still there. Our second homeplace in Moultrie, on Woodmen Road, still stands but the one on the Sylvester Highway, where we lived until I graduated from MHS, is gone - the land consumed by the pecan orchard that once bordered it on three sides. The schools I attended were on my list. Annie Bell Clark Elementary in Tifton: a SunTrust Bank building now sitS on the hill where the school was located. Okapilco Elementary in Moultrie: the old school has been torn down, replaced by a new building, but the archway that was in front of the old school was preserved and is still in place. The junior high school I attended is now used, what's still standing, as a performing arts complex. Moultrie High School: the buildings where I attended classes are gone and the complex that replaced it is, itself, due to be replaced soon. Then there were the towns themselves. Neither, on the surface, appears to have changed much. In Tifton, the landmark Tift Theater still dominates the main street through town, Love Avenue, its signature sign still visible for several blocks in either direction. It's now used primarily for concerts, plays, etc. In Moultrie, the town square is still dominated by the Colquitt County Courthouse, with its capitol-like dome reaching skyward. Around it, the old Friedlander's Department Store building still sits on one corner, as of caught in a time warp. Empty now and the store long-closed, the old familiar sign still clinging to the front of the building - as if waiting for a return to the hustle-and-bustle days of yore. Other must-see places included Funston, just west of Moultrie, where my paternal grandfather had a small country store/service station. That building is long gone but not the house he and my step-grandmother lived. Then there are the churches we attended, New River Baptist in Tifton and Eastside Baptist in Moultrie, and the place where my 50+ year career in radio started - WMTM in Moultrie. And, last but not least - the graves of my mother and father. So, you see. You can go home again. And, if you haven't made the trip to your hometown lately, plan to do so before its too late --- for you or some of the places that made home "home" all those years ago. I don't think you'll regret it. (Ken Stanford is a Contributing Editor and retired longtime News Director for radio stations WDUN, WDUN-FM, and 1240 ESPN Radio and AccessNorthGa.com.)

Ken Stanford Contributing Editor