FNP 51
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 their stuff out, their belongings out of the house. Well, I got under the wheel and drove
 off, and drove up and made a big circle and came back and hollered to him out the
 window that I was headed back to Madison with the truck. And so nothing doing, but he
 just said, no, come on, we are going to do it. And I said, no, no, no. So, I drove off down
 the road, I guess about 100 yards, and stopped. And I [said], you come on, go with me or
 else. So, he finally got in the truck, mad, and we started back. So, he said, stop, stop,
 stop. And I stopped the truck, thinking that maybe he needed to relieve himself, and he
 said, back up. So, I said, well, what's wrong right here? It was a long dark stretch of road.
 He said, back it on up, back up there a couple hundred yards. So, I started backing down
 the road, and that's probably two o'clock in the morning by now. He says, now, cut it
 hard to the left, back it in there, there's where you can back it in. Well, I looked back.
 Then, there [were] some beehives, but I backed in across this little culvert pipe. I thought
 maybe that's where he was just going to stand there a minute. He got out and proceeded
 to start to load some beehives, and I pulled off again. He was just absolutely determined
 to steal something that night. So I told him, I'm getting ready to leave you here halfway
 between Fargo, Georgia, and Jasper, Florida, and there won't be [anything] coming
 through here till daybreak. So he got back in the truck, and we came on in. The next
 morning, I told my daddy what happened, and daddy went down to his house and gave
 him his walking papers. This was the type stuff; there's so many interesting stories that
 went with the turpentine business, and the crossties. I remember the crosstie business.
 We'd be down there belly[-button]-deep in the swamp water and all these hewers. The
 first remembrance of the crosstie business, they were hand-hewing crossties, and they'd
 cut off what they called sticks [which were big cypress logs], and these sticks would be
 the length of the tie. When somebody got ready to hew out a cypress tie, they'd stand
 there and get in rhythm with a chant because you could hear this song, this chant, all over
 that swamp where all those hewers was chanting the same chant, and they were all
 chopping together. You know, I grew up eating out of their lunch buckets. As hard and
 conservative as I am today, which came, I am sure, out from my daddy's shadow, I got
 what some would consider an extremely liberal education extremely young in life. That
 made me a better man to get into the newspaper business, of which I knew absolutely
 nothing about, because I knew that failure was not an option in anything I went after.

P: Talk about your early education and where you went to school and how far you got with
 your education.

G: I started off at Madison Elementary, first grade and went all the way through. I failed [a]
 grade. I never was much [of] a student. Reading and spelling, to this day, I don't do well.
 Nothing leaves my desk that my wife [does not proofread], [she] majored in English; they
 say that's the reason I married her. I mean, I do not spell. I write. I have written stories. I
 wrote a short story that took second place in the nation on the freelance writers' deal. I've
 got some movies that I'm working on now and some short stories and a novel. But
 spelling is out of the question. Between my wife, we were in the same grade together and
 went all through school together, as best friends and running- around buddies. We had