Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 46. WHEN HENRY RAN AWAY FROM HOME (Pp 94-95) When my brothers and I ware
children we did some foolish things. Our parents usually found out about them but sometimes they didn't. Jesse Mattox and I were good friends and we spent a lot of time together. His grandparents were Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Grooms who lived near us, and Jesse and I played together whenever he visited them. I also visited at his home. We were about the same age and enjoyed one another's company. Jesse's daddy, Jim Mattox, always ran a sawmill and was hardly
ever at home except on weekends. He kept a box of cigars on his dresser and that was quite a temptation to us. When I was at Jesse's house we would steal one of the cigars and run to the big barn on the Mattox farm. Jesse, his sister Myrtle and I would climb up in the loft and, we would smoke that cigar. We never did get caught! My youngest brother, Henry, ran away from home once and he did get caught. Henry was a teenager when he decided to leave home and he took one of
Tom Wrench's boys with him. They said the reason they left was because Mrs. Belle Roddenberry, their school teacher, was too strict. (She was one of Papa's good friends and he said she was a number one good school teacher.) Night caught them after they had passed Patterson and they decided to sleep in a little wooden school house out in the country. It got cold and they built a fire in the school's heater, a pot bellied stove. They had gone out to look for fuel and had
found five or six turpentine cups on nearby pine trees. They put all of the gum cups in the stove and lit a match to that and before long they were getting warm. Soon they were getting too warm as the heater turned red and then the stove pipe got red hot right up to the ceiling. They were frightened half to death as they thought they ware about to burn the school down. Henry said he had never bean so scared in his life. But the heater finally cooled and they slept there without putting any
more fuel in the stove. Henry and the Wrench boy got a job with a farmer near Patterson. Someone told my brother Charlie where they were and he went to get them. The farmer thought he was about to get in trouble and said "I want you to understand now, we didn't kidnap those boys! They came up here looking for work and we gave them a job." Charlie took Henry to the warehouse behind our gas plant in Waycross. Then he called me and another brother,
John, and together we gave him such a chastising talk that Henry finished high school, with Mrs. Roddenberry as his teacher, and even went to college. | 
