From Watermelon Inspector to the White House: A Memoir

By H. Spencer Faircloth

For an old country boy from South Georgia, I never dreamed of all the adventures my journey through life would produce during my eighty-plus years on this earth. I began life with two loving Christian parents who taught me I could achieve any goal if I worked hard and followed my Christian upbringing.

I graduated from Leesburg High School in 1947, one of ten in my class, and set out to put those lessons into practice. After my first year at Emory at Oxford College, it was clear I had not been exposed to as comprehensive an education as many of my fellow students. I was a young man from a small Southern town, and I still had a lot more to learn. But I was also the son of parents who taught me the value of working and learning and challenging myself, so I never shied away from hard or demanding work. Decades of service in the United States Air Force, including two tours in Cold War Europe and leading a committee for the President of the United States, would continue my education.

I approached each new challenge with the same understanding and determination as that first semester of college. Maybe I was not as equipped as I could have been, but I could learn and I would not quit. With each success, my bosses continued to recommend me for more important and more challenging work, and each recommendation gave me the confidence I needed to rise to the next challenge. Over the years I have laughed with famous actors and fighter aces, dined with mob bosses, and partied with presidents. I have worked to dig civilization out from the ruins of war, helped feed a continent, flown around the world in service to my country and her veterans, and built a life with the most amazing woman I have ever known. This incredible journey has taught me many important lessons and left me with countless stories of historic events and incomparable people. I feel blessed to have lived this life, and I hope my stories are an equal blessing to you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503555327

H. Spencer Faircloth

“From Watermelon Inspector to the White House is a ticket on a time machine with stops at many of the most important moments of the twentieth century. Your tour guide, Lt. Col. H. Spencer Faircloth, USAF (ret.), is a born storyteller with a lifetime of tales to tell, secrets to share, and a fresh, first-hand perspective on the people and events that shaped the American Century.” —Beacon Reviews Born in rural Georgia in 1929, Henry Spencer Faircloth’s distinguished twenty-four-year career in the United States Air Force would take him a long way from his roots working as a soda jerk in his dad’s drugstore, but he would never forget the vital life lessons he learned growing up during lean Depression and tense war years. Working several jobs, including watermelon inspector, to put himself through college, Spencer enlisted in the USAF as a basic airman in 1950. After completing OCS, he was commissioned as an officer and began a career that would include postwar rebuilding efforts in Europe, training airmen on two continents to help win the Space Race, serving on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, and writing letters for Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Faircloth’s distinguished military career would culminate in a presidential appointment as executive director of the jobs for veterans’ committee, another globe-spanning vocation that introduced Spencer to a plethora of powerbrokers and history makers in politics, the military, business, and entertainment. Along the way, Spencer married the woman of his dreams, Mary, who would be his best buddy and boon companion for fifty-two years. After retiring from the USAF in 1974, Lt. Col. Faircloth served as assistant vice president at the Equitable Life Assurance Society, spent more than a decade as a licensed real estate broker in New York City, and worked in real estate development in California, Kentucky, Virginia, and Florida. His work in the Sunshine State included serving as VP and GM of the development of Freedom Plaza, a continuing care facility in Sun City Center, Florida. After eighteen years as first vice president and trust officer for SunTrust Bank, Spencer retired for the third time. He continues to serve his community on various nonprofit boards, teaches seminars, and gives talks related to his military and business careers. “For an old country boy from South Georgia, I never dreamed of all the adventures my journey through life would produce—from Leesburg High School to postwar Europe to the Oval Office of the White House. Along the way, I discovered the secret to success is to learn whatever you can and look for ways to help. That approach to life has carried me across the world and back more times than I can count and allowed me to work with people who have, literally, changed the world. I feel blessed to have lived this life, and I hope my stories are an equal blessing to you.”

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Chapter 1

I Come From Stubborn Stock

I WAS BORN AT PHOEBE Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Georgia on July 21, 1929. Four months later the economic world came crashing down. Not that life in Albany would be much different. We were accustomed to working hard just to get by and doing without when we had to.

My dad, William Young Faircloth, was a pharmacist at the Albany Drug Store on Pine Street. Mother’s name was Una Lee Hall Faircloth. She hailed from Onancock, Virginia. Before she met Dad, Mother moved to Baltimore and worked as a milliner at Hutsler Brothers and later at the White Sulphur Springs Hotel in West Virginia where she made ladies hats.

Dad, you might say, was unique in his trade. Born in Swainsburo, Georgia to a farmer turned circuit-riding Methodist preacher, he grew up with six siblings, two brothers and four sisters. Grandfather died when dad was just sixteen years old, leaving him to care for his younger siblings. His was not an easy life, but even with all the demands on his time, dad was able to graduate with a Pharmacy Degree from Mercer University while still in his teens.

Dad had the education and the smarts; but, because of his age, he could not get a license as a pharmacist. He had a family to support, so this was not about to stop him. Dad teamed up with a blind pharmacist in order to get work in his field. The blind man had the license but lacked the sight. That made he and dad a perfect pair.

When World War I was declared, Dad was drafted into the Army and served as a pharmacist in France until the War ended. Dad told me they didn’t even have aspirin. When a soldier was hit in an arm or leg, they just had to amputate it. They used dope such as cocaine for pain. He said most of his time was spent mixing chlorine with water to wash out wounds.

After coming back from Europe, Dad acquired several small drugstores in South Georgia, but he lost them all during the Depression. Eventually, he took a pharmacist job at the Albany Drug Store.

My mother had moved to Albany, Georgia from White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia. She and Dad met on a double date. Mom took a shine to Dad, but he was very shy. Eventually, she was able to get him to take a hint, and he asked her out. They started dating, but he was so shy he never even tried to touch her, much less get fresh. After several dates ending without so much as a goodnight kiss, Una Lee decided she’d had enough of William’s extreme timidity. He dropped her off at her front door, bid her goodnight and turned to leave. As Mother told the story, she called his name and he turned with just his head inside the screen doorway. She shut the screen quickly, catching his head in the screen door and kissed him good night.

They were married soon after, in 1922.

Mother was a very Christian woman who had a very close relationship with God. She would preach to anyone willing to listen, and some not so willing. Both Mother and Dad were devoted members of the local Methodist Church, but mother tended to be more vocal about her faith. As a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she let it be known in no uncertain terms how she felt about drinking and gambling. She held signs and picketed and somehow gained a reputation for being a keg smasher, a regular Carrie Nation, though I don’t know that she ever actually took an axe to a barrel. This did not stop her enemies from implying otherwise. Some folks in the community, annoyed with Mother’s efforts, complained to Dad’s employer. The drugstore owner approached my father, who worried that he could lose his job over the issue. However, both the owner and my Dad understood just how valuable being the best pharmacist in the county was for business. Besides, Dad was not about to try to change Mother’s mind once she had it made up. He told the drugstore owner, and anyone else who needed to hear it, that mother was her own person, and she would follow her Christian beliefs.

The storeowner was not happy with that response, but he sure did not want to fire my father, so he laid off the layoff talk. That night at supper, Dad mentioned the conversation to Mother, delicately, of course. We were deeply in the Recession, and Dad’s job was very important. I think maybe she slowed down a bit after he talked to her, but she never changed her mind.

I guess you could say I come from stubborn stock, but I prefer to call it innovative approaches to problem solving. To understand fully, you need to meet the rest of the family.

My older brother’s name was William Young, after our father. My older sister was named Mary Elizabeth Faircloth, after our two grandmothers. I was named after my two grandfathers, Henry and Spencer.

My brother, who was six years older than me, graduated from Young Harris College before enlisting in the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. After the War, he joined the Florida National Guard as a staff sergeant and was promoted through each grade to Colonel. William served as Director of Personnel for the Florida National Guard until he retired. A smoker all his life, cancer took William shortly after he retired in the 1980’s.

Mary Elizabeth graduated from Young Harris College, then earned her nursing degree (RN) from Union Memorial in Baltimore and was awarded a Bachelors Degree from the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Mary Elizabeth joined the Army as a nurse during the Korean War and served in a forward MASH unit in Korea. After the War, Mary attended the University of Florida, earning a Master of Science Degree. Now at the age of 89, she is still teaching in her own business in Savannah, Georgia. Like Mother, Mary is very devout in her faith.

I spent my earliest years living in our family’s home on Slappy Drive in Albany, Georgia. We never had much money, but I never noticed. Nobody else had money either. Most folks considered things to be tight, and talked of better times. But as a kid, I had nothing to compare those times to. For my siblings and me, tight times were just normal. Looking back over the decades I can also see the effects of not having TV or daily newspapers had on our perspective. We were not being constantly reminded how bad things were, and we had nothing to measure our current circumstances against. All we knew of what life should be is what life was.

If you wanted fresh vegetables, you grew your own. So we did. We had a quarter acre lot, and we raised vegetables on it to feed our family. Corn, potatoes, tomatoes—you name it, we grew it. We always ended up with too much of a given item, but so did everyone else. It was my job to make the rounds of the neighbors and barter our surplus to our neighbors for their surpluses that we could use.

The iceman delivered a 100-pound block of ice for the icebox every day, the milkman delivered the milk to the front door and the mailman delivered our mail to our front door for a three-cent first class stamp. These were not just workmen out on a route, they took the time to stop and chat when they came by. But, even though we always seemed to have time for a neighborly chat, everyone worked and had little time to waste. Our playtime was at school during recess.

We raised ducks and chickens. The rooster was mine, and my responsibility. My brother helped get meat by trapping rabbits. He did that well, until the day he trapped a skunk. William tried to turn the skunk loose, but it sprayed him before he could manage to escape. I’ll never forget mother hollering at him as he tried to come in the house, telling him he best stay outdoors. She got our big washtub and heated water on the stove since there were no hot water heaters and no central plumbing. As he undressed in the yard, mother brought him a pitcher of hot water and a bar of Lifebuoy soap. While he bathed, mother buried his clothes. She knew he would never get the stench out. After a considerable scrubbing, William presented himself for inspection, but still reeked of the skunk. Mother just shook her head and pointed at the tub. Back out the door he went. After that, Mother made sure his trapping days came to a screeching halt.

We still had the ducks and chickens for meat and eggs. The family had a dog, which Dad named, Sport, after a dog he had as a child. Each year on Easter, my parents would give me New Zealand white rabbits. Our back yard was not very big, and those rabbits bread like…rabbits. In a short time we were overrun. My father came to me and said, Spence, what do you think we should do? We cannot keep all these rabbits. We could give them away, or try to sell them, or take them down to the butcher. The family could use the meat.

I could not bring myself to agree to take my pet rabbits to the butcher, so I said nothing. In the end, Dad made trip to the butcher on his own. I did not want to think I was eating my pets, so I just pretended it was all chicken.

That left only the staples to buy. Again, this never seemed uncommon. This was just how things were in South Georgia during the Depression.

In those days there were no refrigerators. We kept food cool in an icebox, and we also used the ice to make snowcones. People without iceboxes, usually put food that needed to stay cool in a bucket and lowered the bucket into the well. The iceman would come each day and put a 100-pound block of ice in the icebox.

We had no central heating. For heat, we had a fireplace in each room. We burned coal in these fireplaces.

In the winter, we would let the fire in the bedrooms burn down in the afternoon, but kept one fire burning in the livingroom fireplace. Each night before getting in bed, we would all gather in the only warm room in the house to jump into our pajamas before going to bed. Late in the afternoon we would put kindling wood and paper and coal in each bedroom fireplace for the next morning. Then each morning we would jump out of our warm beds, light those fires we had prepared the afternoon before and leap back in bed until the room warmed up.

We conserved. We pinched pennies, and we provided for our own sustenance. But, again, we never considered this unusual. Aside from the hardship of having to raise, snare or shoot the food for our table, we considered ourselves very fortunate. Our father was employed. During the Depression, if you had steady work, you had everything.

I started First Grade at Broad Street School in 1935. There were no school buses. Like my family, most people did not even have cars. Some families got around in Model T’s; but, if you wanted to go someplace, in most cases, you had to hoof it. For William, Mary and me, that meant a four-mile walk into town. That sounds like a ways, but when you’re a kid, it’s fun. You make the trip with your friends, and each walk is an adventure.

I enjoyed school, but I missed quite a bit in that first year due to repeated ear infections. Eventually I had an operation that fixed the problem, but by then I had missed so much class work that mother had me repeat first grade. I stayed at Broad Street School through fourth grade until the spring of 1939.

Those were good years. Our innocence extended far beyond economics. We had very little to play with and nothing in the way of what children today would consider toys. Of course, this did not bother us. There was no constant stream of commercials telling us how bereft we were. Instead, we used our imaginations to make up our own games. Because our father and uncles and most of the older men fought in the Great War with the Germans, those were the stories that fascinated us. As soon as we were old enough to make up our own war stories, we did so. With enthusiasm. We’d write stories about all kinds of stuff.

Around 1933, we moved from Slappy Drive to downtown Albany. While we lived in Albany my next-door neighbor was a kid named Tommy Williams. We would play war against the Germans. He had his own country, and I had mine, but we always beat those Germans. Tommy’s family owned a plumbing company. They had a great big lot out behind their house filled with empty plumbing pipes. We loved to put firecrackers in those pipes and listen to them explode.

Eventually, the neighbors would get enough of our war games and firecrackers and started making noise of their own to our parents complaining of the din, and our parents, Tommy’s or mine, would make us quit. We also collected toy lead soldiers to play with. We would line them up and have battles.

There was an old man who used to hang around Albany, an ex-slave all the kids just called Uncle Enoch. Most of the houses in town had no central heating, so someone had to cut the wood and fill up the coal buckets. When the residents couldn’t do this job, they would hire Uncle Enoch to cut the wood to fill up our boxes. Afterward, Mother would fix him a big meal. He would sit on the step, eat his meal and drink coffee. He would pour his coffee into the saucer to cool it. We wondered about that, but never asked. We had seen other people do this, and we figured it was just his way to cool the coffee.

Uncle Enoch had a lot of stories to tell. When he was done chopping wood, all the children would gather round and listen to his tales. Sometimes, he would show us the welts on his back where he had been whipped as a slave. He seemed to enjoy telling his stories to us children. When we got tired of listening to his stories or he got tired of telling them, he would go on to the next house to do odd jobs.

I got to know everyone in the neighborhood and when peddlers came by to sell fruit and vegetables, I would tell them that I would go door to door and sell whatever they had and would add a nickel to the price, I always sold out, so they were happy for me to sell their products.

Some time during my elementary years I caught my mother’s fervor for the faith. I determined then that I would grow up to become a pastor. That being the case, I would need to practice. We used to hold church services in the house after dad got home from work, and I would speak the Word, pray and always pass the plate to collect the money.

This pleased Mother and Dad, because they were very active in the First Methodist Church, which was about half a block from our house. When the doors were open at the church, the Faircloth family was in the third pew on the right side of the church. I joined the church when I was ten and served as a junior usher.

The Pastor’s name was Ed Fain. His son, Donny, was one of my best friends and playmates. We played hide and seek all over the First Methodist Church grounds, doing all the things kids that age do. Donny and I also liked to help out with the collection and communion. After communion we would hang around and drink the grape juice and eat the bread that was left over.

But the ministry was not my only childhood commercial pursuit. My buddy and I decided we needed a neighborhood newspaper. We would go around and interview neighbors in town, and tell their stories. We called the paper The War Drum. Of course, being kids, we did not realize there was some things folks in the neighborhood did not want us talking about, much less printing. Ignorant of this, we just printed what we heard, even the juiciest gossip, until our parents stopped us.

I might have been a fire and brimstone preacher and a budding journalist, but around the fairer sex I was the typical tonged-tied kid. Not so my buddy Waite Clark. Waite was a ladies man from way back. He lived up the street from me, and boy did he love to kiss all the girls. I was too shy! One day Waite picked the wrong girl to kiss. She hauled off and smacked him in the forehead with her tin lunch box. It split his head open and blood went everywhere. I took off my undershirt and gave it to Waite so he could hold it over the cut until we got to school to see the nurse. After school, we stopped at Dr. Hillsman’s office next door to Waite’s home to get stitched up. Waite carried that mark for some time, but he never did stop kissing the girls.

There were other times we got into mischief. And, like most parents at the time, dad was a firm believer in spare the rod, spoil the child. Except his rod was a razor strap. I distinctly remember him telling me, whenever I got a whipping, I’m gonna keep whippin’ you until you stop crying, followed by This hurts me more than it hurts you, which I always thought was impossible.

All in all, those early years in Albany were pretty good. Not the least of which because of the candy store across the street from Broad Street School. This was the sort of shop with rows of candy jars offering five or ten pieces of candy for a penny. One shiny nickel could fill a kid’s pockets. Now that was really living!

Chapter 2

Cigarettes at the Drug Store

(My downtown years)

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Spencer’s parents, William and Una Lee Faircloth, outside the Faircloth Rexall Drugstore in 1948.

I TRANSFERRED TO FLINT STREET School for the fifth and sixth grade. Flint Street School was about a mile further from my home than Broad Street School. Five miles every day. But I did not complain. My friends and I loved it. Sure, there were some unfriendly kids, but