Our Boys: a team , a town , a history, a way of life

By David Pierce

The legacy began 100 years ago, when Ocilla beat Fitzgerald ... in football! It was a point in time when progressives in the region had drubbed Ocilla industrially. For many reasons, Ocilla, a little-known farming town, could not compete with anyone for growth and manufacturing jobs. Then Ocilla Hi started up football, and ... wham! Nobody saw O

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ewings Publishing LLC
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798890313324

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Copyright © 2023 David Pierce.

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ISBN: 979-8-89031-330-0 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-89031-331-7 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-89031-332-4 (e)

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Contents

Dedication 

Acknowledgements 

Preface 

Part I

1 Hustle 

2 Rivals 

3 A Husky Bunch 

4 ‘A Credible Team’ 

5 ‘The Strongest Eleven’ 

6 Marion The Great 

7 ‘Outstandingly Clean’ 

8 Whelchel Field 

9 Creep on, Terrapins! 

10 ‘Wonder Man’ 

11 Crazy With Joy 

Part II

12 Terrapins Wilt 

13 Mister Waldo 

14 Hard Times 

15 The Last Stand 

16 Up From The Ashes 

17 First Lights 

18 Country Boys 

19 Indians! 

20 The Promoter 

21 Desire to Win 

22 Quagmire 

23 Held in Check 

Part III

24 A Nice Little Town 

25 Down the Drain 

26 The McNease Years 

27 Fans Jeer 

28 Cook Turns It Around 

29 ‘Couldn’t Tackle Walt’ 

30 Big Red! 

31 Cornbread 

32 ‘Pressure’ 

33 On To Blakely 

34 ‘Shocker’ 

35 ‘Almost a Riot’ 

Part IV

36 A Fighting Spirit 

37 An Ideal Squad 

38 Out-toughed at Fitzgerald 

39 Slippin’ and Slidin’ 

40 Lanny Roberts Memorial Stadium 

Part V

41 Red Man! 

42 Integration 

43 Playing to Win 

44 ‘Wasn’t All My Idea’ 

45 A Hard Transition 

46 Rude Awakening 

47 Impossible Dream 

48 Frustration 

49 ‘Movie Stars’ 

50 Our Time 

Part VI

51 Playoff Ban 

52 No Ordinary Joe 

53 New’s Era 

54 The Bean Man 

55 Dome Bound 

56 Unfinished Business 

Epilogue 

Update 

DEDICATION

To ever man alive or departed who was ever an Ace, Orphan, Terrapin or an Indian, who spilt his blood, sweat and tears on the field of the gridiron for the greater good of the Ocilla community; to the coaches who molded our boys into men; to the cheerleaders for their undying spirit; to the bands for their wonderful pageantry and to everyone else from hamburger flippers to the chain gang who’ve helped to make football in Ocilla special these many years

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To The Ocilla Star especially for its fascinating articles discovered on microfilm at the Irwin County Library; to the ladies of the library for kindly allowing me repeated access to the genealogy room; to my wife, Lucy, for her valuable work photo-scanning and proofreading, and to the countless faithful from near and far for sharing their golden memories of football in Ocilla.

The 1924 Ocilla Hi football team first string.

Courtesy The Irwin County Library

PREFACE

There are many aspects to football in Podunk that you don’t find in Metropolis, the colleges or in the pros where it is a business. Out here, where the tractors are, the cows, trees, fields and the plains, where everybody knows one another, the boys of the ball team are your sons, brothers, uncles, cousins, in-laws, your steps, and seeing them on Friday night get after boys from other towns, seeing, too, your cheer girls and your band, and eating hotdogs and catching up with old friends is like a family reunion in many ways.

Here, in Ocilla, Ga., where you can throw a rock from one end of town to the other, where there is not much electricity that is moral, clean or very legal, football has been a part of the culture for a lot of years, and it still matters if the boys win.

They’d rather had that than church, cracks an old football player from the 1960s, Pat Hodnett, the former chief of Ocilla’s public works.

While we’ve had our ups and downs in the record, football, much like farming, is a pillar of what’s left of our local heritage, an irreplaceable source of pride, entertainment and social enrichment, and some of us like to observe it by whooping and hollering on game night, decorating our store fronts when the team’s doing good and sticking Indian signs in our yards to show that we back the team. Somehow, although sometimes the backing is weak, it seems the bigger the game the bigger the turnout and hoopla and you can expect to see Billy Spicer, an Ocilla man with Downs, helping lead the band. Billy rarely misses a home game and feels awful if the boys lose.

I started (playing football) in the seventh grade, says Cartavion Benyard, a member of the 2015 squad. It’s just a tradition down here in Irwin County. When you’re young, you look up to the football players, and you just want to become one.

Myself, when I was ten years old, I saw the great Indian, Walter Sumner, elude tacklers with his shifty hips, and to watch my older brother Wayne and his buddy, the Indian monster, Big Daddy, come out on game night and terrorize opposing lines was better than television.

When I was either thirteen or fourteen years old and living in Fitzgerald, I quit football, but I picked it back up when we returned to live in Ocilla. When the Indians take the field, you be with them, my brother Wayne, an old football player, said to me sternly. And so, from 1969 through 1971, I was an Indian, first under Buzzy McMillan and then Conrad Nix. Later, my little brother, Danny Ray, was an Indian, and then his son Cam became an Indian.

If you didn’t already know, Ocilla is pronounced O-Silla. People here like pickup trucks, cornbread and their tea sweet. You find a good deal of those preferences in southern Georgia, which is also known as God’s country or Peanut Country, and in the autumn time when the lights come on, it is Football Country. Specifically, Ocilla is the seat of Irwin County in the south central part of the state. At last count, the population of the town, which probably took its name from an Indian, was roughly 3,400 with a few thousand more spread out in the reaches of the county. To drive the distance at normal speed and unimpeded, Ocilla is about a three-hour ride, and worlds apart, from Atlanta, but it is only nine miles from Fitzgerald. When I was growing up, the good little town of Fitzgerald, with its economic energy and grand dwellings, its stores and those famous brick streets, was like a big city to Ocilla folks. They had the jobs in Fitzgerald, the prestige, too, and their school, Fitz Hi, had more athletes than we did, which made for some meaningful football over the years between the two teams, although Fitzgerald has us by the throat in the record.

This work explores the history of football in Ocilla in chronological order, year by year, from its roots prior to the Great Depression to 1975 and takes a broad view of later seasons To put it together, in addition to, a team, a town my own recollection, I combed through an eight-inch-high stack of old newspaper clippings that I copied from slow-chugging microfilm at the Irwin County Library and elsewhere, mined the Georgia High School Football Historians Association on the Web for data and relied on the knowledge of many, primarily old players and coaches, as to throw sufficient light on the subject of football as it has been played in Ocilla over the decades beginning in the 1922. A number of pertinent sources I called on have died since I interviewed them. Regretfully, some I hoped to interview could not be reached or they were already dead. At any rate, although it’s taken me ten years to do finish this labor of love, here is the book that I always knew I had to write. I tried to make it as clean and polite as possible, and I hope anyone who celebrates high school football finds something in it they can relate to.

—David Pierce

Ocilla, Ga.

PART I

1

HUSTLE

Fitzgerald High School fast foot ball team went the way of all the other school teams (except Ashburn) Friday afternoon when they took a drubbing at the hands of our boys to the tune of 15 to 6.

At the first of the season, Fitzgerald were a bit chesty, and for a while it appeared that the Ocilla team could not attract their attention sufficiently to get a game with them. Now they probably consider Ocilla High School worthy of the best of school teams.

It was a thrilling game from start to finish and both teams played good ball.

—Ocilla Star, October 25, 1923

What a town. You really needed to be here. It came up like a summer storm, one of those swift-moving tree-benders that go bam , bam , bam, and blew the natives away.

How the locals marveled at all the strangers and the speed of their axes, hammers and saws. It was all really mind-boggling, a sight to behold if you had a date, say, or were just curious to see what a boom town looked like.

By the droves, from every direction, by every mode you could think of, people with dreams rode in on the storm to build a hearty town, clean and civilized.

You did not have to be an old Yankee. Everybody was welcome to join in one of the greatest post-Civil War town-makings of all time, a town where the Yanks and the Rebs could put down their differences and live in harmony.

It was not gold but milk and honey that inspired legions of settlers to hew a colony in the piney woods of old Dixie in the year of 1895.

Of course, many of the newcomers to Irwin County were Yankees. That was not a coincidence. They had a good team, those yanks, and a solid plan for growing a colony in this territory rich with farmable land, good fields for cattle grazing, tall timber, wild game and water fresh and clean as in the Holy Bible.

Just say their name, Fitzgerald, and everybody’d heard about the town.

But you did not mention Fitzgerald.

You got away from home, maybe to find a brother or see a man about a mule and told somebody that you were from Ocilla and got the strangest look. It was like, Ocilla? What, where, is Ocilla? Nobody knew.

And let’s be frank; nobody cared about Ocilla except the ones who lived here or used to live here but who had moved away for some reason or died.

Although only nine miles from the famous haven, Ocilla remained in obscurity.

We had our pride, though, and nobody could intimidate us.

Ocilla does not take a backseat to any town in this part of the state. Remember that, crowed Ocilla’s first newspaper, the Dispatch, in the year 1900.

Then in 1909, when the Yankee haven was on the way to being called one of the greatest colonies in America since Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims, the owner of the Ocilla Star sounded the alarm.

A village always or a hustling little city? J. J. Flanders cried.

It was a great question.

In one of his pep-talk writings, publisher Flanders told us about a new game going around called the hustle and he said we’d better get on the ball if we ever wanted to have anything or be anybody to matter.

A former Ocilla school superintendent, Mr. Flanders and his cohorts of the business district warned of danger ahead, saying this, now, was the age of everlasting hustle for industry, and if we didn’t score some jobs, others in the race would leave Ocilla in the dust.

"Let’s go," Flanders cried many times in the Star.

The spectacled, humble but enthusiastic James Julian Flanders had no means to make Ocilla into a modern little city. Compared to the local powers who controlled the money and the politics, and the elite landholders, who frowned on industry, fearing that factory jobs would leave no one to pick cotton, Flanders was near about a pauper. But in civic spirit and the floating of progressive ideas on how to grow Ocilla, he was among the richest citizens, and he dreamed big.

In his dreams he saw Ocilla wake and begin to dance for the capitalists that she favored, and it was a beautiful union. The right industries came, the jobs came, the right kind of people moved in, the school grew, and Ocilla began to hum with new life and vigor while staying true to her farming roots.

But in the real world, Mr. Flanders’ editorials, although they were always very interesting, did not seem to have much of an effect. Ocilla slept through the industrial revolution.

Maybe we were blackballed.

Whatever the case was, Ocilla would never rise to the level of Albany, Valdosta, Moultrie, Tifton – even Fitzgerald.

But all hope was not lost.

At the pace of all-sufficient God, Ocilla kept her slow feet moving and made her own fires.

The average Ocilla resident had a blissful spirit. They were hearty, agrarian people, a little wary, somewhat lazy, predominantly of Southern cloth. There were some drunks among us, yes, and naysayers and the kickers fought progress at every turn. But if you could put up with the politics and liked a small place away from the traps of big city life, Ocilla in the old days was a nice spot to put down roots, do business and bring up children to teach them how to live.

Besides loving Jesus, and it was Jesus who said, Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, Ocilla folks came on strong for properly educating the local youth.

You had to commend schools in Fitzgerald, which boasted of kids from 38 states and two territories and being the first in Georgia to offer free textbooks to its pupils.

But Ocilla was just as proud of her own institution. Two stories of red brick at Fourth and Alder streets, the Ocilla School was charming and the kids were civilized.

Basically, everyone was as happy in Ocilla as they wanted to be.

The bulldog, Flanders, kept beating and beating the drum of progress. When anything occurred in Ocilla that resembled prosperity, initiative or forward thought, the town crier dashed from his office, pen in hand, eager to salute it.

A few years washed under the bridge and not much happened.

By now it was getting late in the first quarter of the twentieth century, during the autumn time, in fact, when Mr. Flanders must’ve jumped out of his chair, rushing to investigate a grouping of Ocilla boys in the school yard.

He discovered they were playing foot ball.

Foot ball?

Well, it wasn’t exactly the industry Flanders and his pals had long hoped would come in and push Ocilla ahead. But it looked like fun, and we could all use the distraction.

Finally, Ocilla had an equalizer.

We would never beat out anybody for industry and jobs, so the next best thing now was for us to get some of our husky boys together and try to whip the other boys on the gridiron.

"Fascinating, Flanders said of what was called the great game."

Certainly, he recognized the boys were our Sons, each a Son of Ocilla, Irwin County, at a time when this community south of Fitzgerald needed some heroes to take on boys from the bigger towns who’d drubbed us industrially.

You might as well know, our very first boys were killed, and even in the finest years, which began in 1923, they did not always win, losing to the big frogs on foreign soil.

But every time they took the field our scrap-happy boys expected to be victorious, and they were very often the underdog, which made them fight with a chip, and they put on a very good show.

Flanders wished they would win every game, especially if we were playing Fitzgerald and the bigger frogs.

But even in defeat the boys of Ocilla Hi were never beaten for character and fair play and those traits counted for a lot in the eyes of the clergy as well as football-savvy fans in towns our boys brought the show to.

Underprivileged, not the most talented and playing with a short hand, these colorful pioneers of football in Ocilla attained a degree of celebrity for their clean, plucky play.

No team was bragged on in the daily press more than Ocilla’s little brigade.

Between 1923 and 1928, our finest years of that era, wise fans in towns that Ocilla could not compete with in the industrial arena grew fond of the gallant teams she threw at them on the football field.

Spectators accustomed to the scheme of four yards and a cloud of dust were awed and richly entertained as if by a circus when the out-manned Ocilla squad, under the leadership of the professor, hit town with its aerial show and clever play-calling.

Perhaps nobody in south Georgia did any more than little Ocilla Hi to develop the forward pass as a basic offensive scheme.

The write-ups of that time in the daily press gave Ocilla a degree of notoriety that you could not buy with money.

Maybe it would’ve been cool to have lived in those days when, for lack of a bus, Ocilla boys traveled by car and went by many names. Up for a scrap with anyone who dared to play them, our gritty bunch of cotton pickers crisscrossed this old Indian country, tooling merrily on the roadways and on some dusty roads with their meager gear stuffed in amongst them like gypsies.

At first, Flanders referred them as our boys or the boys while the daily press called them the Ocilla Eleven or Whelchel’s boys.

Our ambassadors to the outside world that did not know about Ocilla dubbed themselves the Aces or the Orphans, which was odd; most teams went by mean creatures and a great storm was just up the road at the colony.

But generally, our early lads, those kids who threw the ball all over the place and ran it trickily, many times catching the opposition flat-footed, the first of our boys to bear the Ocilla banner of Pride and Prosperity, would be uniquely remembered in the record as the Terrapins.

Their pants hung on them dumpily. There were no names on the jerseys and no numbers on the front or back of the jerseys, at least not for Ocilla. Some boys wore long johns under their gear on the colder days. The shoulder pads were not much more than a stack of flapjacks. The leather helmets, buckled under the chin with a single strap, had holes in the side and holes in the top for hearing and sweating through with no mask to protect the boys’ snarling faces from flying feet, elbows and knees. A few poor boys for Ocilla did not have decent shoes for cleats; some played in tennis shoes or without helmets, but nothing could deter our fighting few from trying to whip other boys from towns that had trampled Ocilla over economically.

The value of football to little Ocilla could not be estimated in dollars. Economically the game of games never did a lick for us. But it was good for fan morale when the boys were winning, and the games were a fine venue for fun and fellowship and a wholesome source of relief from the mundane realities of that period.

Football was something for locals to look forward to, to cheer over, to talk about besides cotton and peanuts in the drab days of autumn, even in church.

For the players, football was a good outlet for their energies to keep them out of mischief. It taught them about teamwork and life.

For some of the better ones, it was a ticket out of Ocilla.

So, everyone associated with the little program at the high school made a profit.

It irked Flanders when games on the school lot were poorly attended. He felt the boys, popular on the road, deserved better from the home folks, and while they did have some crazy local fans who hollered during the games, our needy bunch of ballers scratched for every dime to pay for such as gear and road trips, and they spent a lot of time on the road where they were very unlucky.

The home record of the 1920s tells a different story.

The school lot was a hard place, unfit for goats, full of little red rocks and stones that left scars on a boy forever. It was probably the worst field in the league, which might help to explain the soft turnouts and why our boys were the Orphans, a team without a field.

There was no running water or place to pee. The goal posts were two-by-four boards nailed together to form the letter H and a few banks of pine lumber was the best you ever got in Ocilla for seating.

But those were the times. It was what it was. The game was football, not girls’ tennis, and there, on that old, rocky lot at Fourth and Alder streets, the boys of the mid-1920s put up many victories in the good name of their school and the town of Ocilla.

2

RIVALS

Valdosta High School took a hard fought game from Ocilla last Friday by the score of 20-3. The Valdosta team had no trouble gaining thru the Ocilla line and Ocilla could not gain consistently thru the Valdosta line. Ocilla had several chances to score a touchdown but each time the Valdosta team tightened up and held them back…For Ocilla the entire system of forward passing seemed to give Valdosta trouble. This was the best gaining play Ocilla had. Vardeman and Whelchel at ends played nicely and both received several passes for nice gains. Fletcher played a good game at full back for the time he was in. McCall scored for Ocilla with a pretty field goal from the 25yard line.

—Ocilla Star, October 9, 1924

The South lost when Lee surrendered. We knew that. You were supposed to get over the war, move on. Billy Yank and Johnny Reb could live in peace and harmony if we put down our differences, so forget the past, fellow, and let’s work together as children