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Retired minister gained his earliest confidence at CCHS Dear Editor, Congratulations to Grove Hill and Clarke County for the high school building replacing the 1936 building! After completing nine grades at the Whatley Junior High School, I rode the bus to Grove Hill for three years, being in the last tenth grade (1935-36) class in the old two-story 1908-09 building and the first to graduate (1938) from the then new building. While the old building was demolished and the new one constructed, we had classes in the old Sage Auditorium, temporarily divided into four classrooms, and in a new frame building which I think later became the cafeteria. When I entered CCHS I was a country boy from Whatley, too shy to get up before the student body. Thirteen years later I was pastor of the Methodist Church where two of my high school classmates and their husbands were members. Just three years after graduation (1941) I became a pastor. My Grove Hill pastor was quoted as saying one could get me out of the country but couldn't get the country out of me (actually he was right), but 12 years later I became pastor of a church in Montgomery where that former Grove Hill pastor's wife was employed as secretary, he having died in Montgomery, where she continued to live. This timid country boy has been the preacher at district conferences of both the Montgomery and Pensacola Districts, and twice at the nationally known First Methodist Church of Evanston, Illinois near Northwestern University and a Methodist denominational headquarters. Several persons who were children and youth in churches where I was pastor were later ordained ministers or wives of ministers. These include longtime pastors of First Methodist in Pensacola and Montgomery and one of the largest in Atlanta, Ga., other pastors, a military chaplain and a district superintendent. I was pastor to the mother, two grandparents, and a greatgrandmother of the present Grove Hill Methodist pastor and pastor to the Methodists at Evergreen during the pastorate of the Rev. Sam Granade to Baptists there. He was a brother of the late Rev. Charles Granade, long-time beloved Grove Hill Baptist pastor. At Linden I was pastor to Grants who descended from Isaac Grant, first editor and publisher of The Democrat. It is indeed a small world. My residences have been outside of Clarke County almost seven decades, but I have visited the Grove Hill- Whatley area frequently, still home to me, and when my earthly life is over I expect that what remains will come back home to rest near the graves of my twin brother and Calhoun relatives just accoss the street north of the high school at Grove Hill. But I am not in a hurry to make that last journey.
Ray E. Whatley Asheville, N.C.
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