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Community News

Potts Camp News
Dale Hollingsworth

Brownie and Irene Tohill celebrate 50th anniversary

Mr. and Mrs. Jack Provost of Salt Springs, Fla., are visiting her sister, Mary Lois Gurley and family. Sue and Bill Rowland are serving as their hosts this week.

Also, visiting Mrs. Gurley and family on Sunday afternoon were her nephew and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Larry Butterworth of Jonesboro, Ark.

Mike, Holley (Stone), Jordan and Colton Muraco are visiting her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Stone, her grandmothers Annie Ruth Stone and Mary L. Gurley, as well as other family members this week. Jordan and Colton joined cousins Christopher, Jayne and Brendan Rowland in trick or treating on Saturday evening.

Many people enjoyed the wonderful Fall Harvest Festival held at First Baptist Church of Potts Camp on Saturday, Oct. 24. The singing was special and the food was delicious.

Happy 50th wedding anniversary to the pastor of Hickory Flat United Methodist Church, Rev. Brownie Tohill and wife, Irene. Many of our friends attended the celebration there on Sunday. My late brother, Rev. Lindy Potts, was called to that church for his first charge many years ago. He met his wife, Joann Bready, there. She was his pianist.

We send our love and sympathy to the family of Marjorie Minor of Waterford in her recent death.

Get well wishes to Betty Wayne Wilson Ash, who suffered a recent stroke. We are thankful she is improving and has left the hospital to stay at her sister’s and recuperating.

Get well wishes to Lela Hale, my friend, who spent several days at the New Albany Hospital.

Jack and Linda Clayton’s son, Tommy of Paducah, Ky., had recent surgery. He had three stents in his heart and has been in ICU. Get well wishes are sent to him. Jack is formerly of Potts Camp and was my neighbor.

A baby shower was held on Sunday at the fellowship house of the Church of Christ for Julie Elliott, daughter of Joann and Carey Mayer.

The family of 1-year-old Hannah Grace Greer celebrated her birthday recently at their home in Cornersville. Her parents are Mr. and Mrs. David Greer Jr. Her sister and brother are Mary Elizabeth and Dave Greer. Grandparents are David and Betty Greer Sr., and Mr. and Mrs. Junior Williams of Etta. She is my great-grandchild.

Visitors in my home Sunday were my sister-in-law, Joann Potts, and a friend, Ann Busby of Olive Branch, also a special friend and Joann’s aunt from Hickory Flat, Doris Goode.

Frances Fitts of Dallas, Tx., called recently. She is the daughter of special friends, the late Rose and Harry Jones. She is interested in the history of old homes in Potts Camp, where she grew up. I love that family. Some of the homes, like the Greer Place, have been demolished.

Thoughts

1. By grace you have been saved, through faith and not of yourselves. It is a gift of God. Ephesians 2:8

Jesus has to depend on us to tell the world how He lived, and died on the cross to save us from our sins. Can he depend on us to strengthen the Kingdom of God, just as He depended on those first disciples? Today’s Christians are all He has! Can He depend on us?

2. Sometimes we forget God is only a prayer away!

3. Everybody is somebody in God’s eyes as long as we have the “Spirit of Love.”

Prayer

Dear Lord, fill our lives with love for others; help us to tell the world about God’s gift to us, Jesus Christ, and how he died for us. For Christ’s sake, amen.

Thoughts

1. Lean not on your own understanding. Proverbs 3:5. Without God as our guide throughout the fog of life, we will wander aimlessly.

Our motto should be “In all our ways acknowledge Him and He will direct our path.”

2. Poem

I have no hands but your hands to do my work today. I have no feet but your feet to lead men to thy side. I have no tongue but your tongue to bring men to thy side.

Prayer

Dear Lord, I pray at the end of the day I’ve helped someone, somehow, some way. That I’ve not failed by word or deed to lighten the heart of someone in need. Though my talents be few I pray that you will find me a credit to you. For Christ’s sake, amen.

Happy birthday to Jake Hollingsworth of Morristown, Tenn., son of my son, Danny and Elizabeth Hollingsworth; also to Rodney Whaley on Nov. 5, Amanda Whaley Smith on Nov. 6 and Tracy Sanders on Nov. 6. Happy birthday to Martha Hollingsworth, Jimmy’s wife, on Nov. 8; Liesa Greer Blond, my granddaughter, on Nov. 8, Amanda Leigh Qualls (my niece) on Nov. 10. To a special friend, Virgie Kelly on Nov. 13.

Prayer list: Charles Henderson, Connie Work, G.R. Thompson, Diane Clayton, Mary Jarrett, Mary Lois Gurley, Betty Fincher, Henry Tutor, Mary Jo McCallum, Robert Hugh King, Betty Wayne Wilson Ash. Pray for those who suffer and to those who have lost loved ones.

Memories and History

As a child on cold winter nights, we would sit around the fireplace and listen to our dad play his French harp. He played by ear. We used coal oil lamps.

We had a tall Victrola in the hall. When Daddy went to St. Louis every year for a checkup at the Railroad Hospital, he would being us several gold records of Jimmie Rodgers, the singing brakesman. We really enjoyed them.

Rodgers was a Huckleberry Finn-type boy; his mother died when he was young, and his dad was a railroad man, so he hung around juke joints, pool halls and traveled with a medicine man at age 13. He took along his guitar and played for all who would listen. They called him “America’s Blue Yodeler.”

In 1927, he received a big break when he was recorded by RCA Victor Co. at Bristol, Tenn. He drove to New York and called RCA.

He told them that he just happened to be in the city and might come by to record another record. It was “T. For Texas,” a big hit; it sold 20 million copies. He had the gift of telling a story with his songs. People didn’t know at that time Jimmie Rodgers had the dreaded disease TB and needed bed rest to recover. But he never stopped singing. My favorite was “Waiting for a Train.” I played it so often, I felt like I was there beside him, waiting for that train.

“All around the water tank, just waiting for a train
A thousand miles away from home, just sleeping in the rain
I walked up to the brakeman to give him a line of talk
He said, “If you got money I’ll see that you don’t walk”
I haven’t got a nickel, not a penny can I show.
Get off, get off, you railroad bum, and he slammed the box car door.”

He died because he wouldn’t stop singing.

In Meridian, a crowd was waiting at the railroad station. A train with Jimmie Rodgers’ flower-draped body was bringing him home.

As the train had almost reached there, the crew gave a long whoooo in remembrance of their singing hero.

Every year, they have a “Jimmie Rodgers Day” at Meridian. For many years, the late Harry Jones and the late Hayes Henderson from Potts Camp attended the celebration.

North Marshall News
Richard Simmons

God and Country...

Since Veterans Day is next week I could not keep my mind from wandering….and as it did I thought about great Americans who gave so much for this country and for each individual who is privileged to live in America. As I thought back over our great history, I thought about a family, any family that gathered all they had and left their homes and sailed for unknown territory. Why did they do that? Felicia Dorothea Hemans was an English poet (she sounds American) who wrote these words about why they came.

Amidst the storm they sang,
And the stars heard, and the sea.
And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang
To the anthem of the free.
There were men with hoary hair
Amidst that pilgrim band.
Why had they come to wither there,
Away from their childhood’s land?
Aye, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod.
They have left unstained what there they found,
Freedom to worship God.

They came to have freedom of worship. It is my opinion that they founded a nation that was designed to be under the divine guidance of a Holy God. I give you some quotes of the founders. According to Ben Franklin, he prayed this prayer everyday. “O powerful Goodness! Bountiful Father! Merciful Guide! Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to thy other children as the only return in my power for thy continual favors to me.” Although not a founder President Ulysses S. Grant wrote to the Sunday School Times in Philadelphia, “My advice to Sunday Schools no matter what their denomination, is: Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts, and practice them in your lives. To the influence of this Book are we indebted for all the progress made in true civilization, and to this must we look as our guide in the future. Thomas Jefferson wrote at the occasion of the Kentucky Revolution: “No power over the freedom of religion[is] delegated to the United States by the Constitution.” One only needs to read the Declaration of Indepen-dence to understand what our founders had in mind for this great nation. It is God and country.

Did You Know On

Nov. 4, 1939 – Packard Motor Co. produced the first air-conditioned car.
Nov. 5, 1889– Wyoming approved the first full voting rights to women.
Nov. 6, 1869 – Rutgers defeated Princeton 6-4 in the first intercollegiate football game.
Nov. 7, 1916 – Jeanette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress.
Nov. 8, 1942 – U.S. and British forces landed in French North Africa during WWII.
Nov. 9, 1872 – A three- day fire in Boston destroyed 775 buildings.
Nov. 10, 1928 – Notre Dame’s football coach Knute Rockne told his team to “Win one for the Gipper.”

This Week’s Quiz

Who introduced Irvin Berlin’s song “God Bless America?”
Who was the first African-American governor?
From what disease did Ronald Reagan die?
Who wrote the novel Moby Dick?
Who discovered Puerto Rico?

Answers to Last Week’s Quiz

Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Nellie T. Ross was the first woman to be elected a governor. She was elected in Wyoming.
Notre Dame was the first football team to use the forward pass.
John Q. Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush were elected president even thought their opponents received more popular votes.
Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were the two presidents who were impeached.

Send questions or comments to – richardps@centurytel.net

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