Greene Publishing, Inc.

By Lynette Norris

Greene Publishing, Inc.

The Junior Auxiliary held the first weekend of their Indoor Garage Sale Oct. 7 and 8, bringing in just over $1000, said Kara Washington, JA member and one of the volunteers conducting the “pre-sale” Friday evening from 6 to 8 p.m.  Washington estimated that between 20 and 25 people showed up at the pre-sale and about 65 to 70 attended the big main sale the next morning from 8 a.m. until noon.   The following Saturday was not as busy, said Washington, but the Junior Auxiliary managed to finish up with a little over $1200 for both weekends.  All remaining items were loaded up and donated to area thrift shops, and all the proceeds from the two weekends of sales go to Kids in Crisis, an emergency fund that focuses on kids, but helps entire families in emergency situations.

The Junior Auxiliary is also still conducting their annual Coats and Warm Blankets drive; several locations around town, including We Insure Florida, Madison County Community Bank, Wells Fargo (formerly Wacovia) the Busy Bee, Fellowship Baptist Church, Odiorne Insurance and Ameriprise Financial are still receiving donations of coats, warm clothing and blankets for those in need, and will continue to take in donations through the end of October.  With the temperatures already dropping, these items will become more and more important in the days ahead, and the JA will be working with the schools to spread the word and locate children and families in need of warm clothing.  They will also be working with the Madison Senior Center to locate seniors in need.

In the coming months, they will be busy preparing Thanksgiving baskets, working with Consolidated Christian Ministries to locate families who wouldn’t otherwise have a good Thanksgiving meal.

For Christmas, they plan to go caroling at the nursing homes, and this will also be the final Christmas they will be able to help decorate the Mansion.  In hard economic times, without funding from the state, North Florida Community College will be unable to keep the Mansion open to the public after this Christmas.  With that in mind, the JA and other organizations will be doing their best to make this final year a memorable one for Mansion visitors, encouraging everyone to make plans to come out this Christmas and enjoy the beautiful Mansion with its halls decked out in Victorian Yuletide glory, before its doors have to be closed.

Members of the community who would like to contribute to Kids in Crisis or any of the JA’s other projects, please contact Cathy Rogers at 464-4000.

By Kristin Finney

Greene Publishing, Inc.

On Tuesday, Oct. 11th, anyone who ate at Shelby’s got a huge surprise. Those who went would have been astounded to see all of the new waiters and waitresses serving. They also might have been puzzled as to why these new waiters looked strikingly similar to many of Madison’s most famous residents.

The reason is because they WERE many of Madison’s most famous residents and they were there to support a great cause. The occasion was the United Way of the Big Bend’s annual Celebrity Waiter Event, which raises money for national charities. This year’s event was their biggest success yet, thanks entirely to the kindness of the Madison community.

In previous years the event has been held at Kens, but this year Shelby’s was home to the outstanding event. There were so many people in attendance that those trying to find a parking spot at Shelby’s might have had to park under the large oak tree several yards behind the building. This year’s event not only met the United Way’s goal, it surpassed it.

The goal for this year’s event was $1,500, which was nearly $500 more than last years event. The nights ending total was $1,563, a whopping 50% increase from last year’s amount. The United Way raised this money through tips and selling homemade desserts.

The whopping increase in the amount they raised also had to do with the cake auction the group held throughout the night. Local residents and politicians made bids on different cakes during the night. The lucky guests who bid the highest got to take home the cake.

This year’s celebrities included Howard Phillips, David Abercrombie, Jada Williams, Mark Buescher, Dr. Stuart Steiger, Mickie Salter, Sheriff Ben Stewart, Ethyl Barefoot, Janet Meir, Ed Meggs, Megan Earnhardt, Cathy Bass, Dianne Sullivan, Alfred Martin, Lou Miller, Willy Gamelero, Jackie Johnson, Cheryl Abercrombie, Crystal Lee, Cindy Vees, Vickie Howerton, Chief of Police Gary Calhoun and Jim Catron.

Another plus to the night were the many desserts that were available. The amazing cakes were provided by Rosa Richardson, Mark Buescher, Jackie Johnson, Cheryl Abercrombie, Jim Catron and Vicki Howerton. Cathy Bass brought banana pudding. Kim Halfhill brought peach cobbler. Heather Wilson, Carol Russo and Stephanie Carrol brought cupcakes. Matt Webb brought chocolate chip cookies.

United Way would like to thank Madison County for all of its support and a special thanks to everyone who attended the event.

By Lynette Norris

Greene Publishing, Inc.

Green Publishing, Inc. Photo by Lynette Norris, October 15, 2011 Rachel Reichmann, who turned 100 years old Saturday, holds the proclamation in her honor, signed by Gov. Rick Scott, while daughters Raye Wooley and Nell Ring (standing) look on and smile.

On an October day in 1911, a baby girl, Rachel Townsend Smith, was born in one of the bedrooms of the family home on Livingston Street.  One hundred years later, in that same house, Rachel, now Rachel Reichmann, with a long lifetime of memories, turned 100.

On that Saturday afternoon of October 15, a large bright orange jack-o-lantern faced the street with a big grin for passers-by, standing out against the bright white house.  Halloween was only a couple of weeks away, in spite of the fact that the warm, pleasant afternoon was more like early summer than mid-October already.

Inside the cool living room with pale mint green walls and flowers everywhere, “Miss Rachel” sat in a chair and greeted guests as they arrived to say hello and wish her a happy birthday.  It was a drop-in reception from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. and a steady stream of visitors arrived with cards, hugs and kisses.

“I told Miss Rachel I didn’t think I’d ever been to a 100th birthday party before,” said Vicki Howerton, one of the many guests.  “And she said ‘that’s okay, I haven’t either.’

”After about two hours, Miss Rachel’s daughter, Raye Wooley, estimated that at least 200 people had been by to see Miss Rachel already.  A long lifetime of friends from church, from the town of Madison and from out-of-town.  Old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years, met again at Miss Rachel’s house.  Daughter Raye was pleasantly delighted to run into several people she had gone to school with, and everywhere there was laughter, smiles, embraces and excited voices catching up on the news.

Here also, was a century’s worth of family members that now included great-grandchildren, at least two of them now young adults in their 20s.

The highlight of the celebration, other than singing “Happy Birthday” to Miss Rachel, was when Joe Peavy, former sheriff of Madison County and a longtime family friend, read aloud a proclamation from the Governor of the State of Florida, Rick Scott.

Recognizing the contribution elders have made to the State of Florida, the history they have witnessed and help shape, as well as the rare achievement of reaching the century mark, Gov. Scott’s proclamation praised and congratulated Miss Rachel on her 100th birthday.

Miss Rachel, a Florida native, has indeed witnessed a lot of history; her family had owned and operated the landmark Smith Drug Store for several generations by the time she was born, the oldest drug store continuously owned by the same family in the entire state.  When she arrived in 1911, Albert Gilchrist was the Governor of Florida.  Since then, there have been 24 more state governors between Gov. Gilchrist and the current Gov. Rick Scott.

A framed copy of Gov. Scott’s proclamation later sat on a nearby table among several vases of flowers.

Twice widowed, Miss Rachel lost her first husband, Nat Norfleet, to a farming accident, and two years later, her son, Nat Norfleet, Jr., died of leukemia.  While working in the drug store and running the family business to support her three teenaged children, she fell in love again and married Kirby Reichmann, who passed away several years later.

Miss Rachel grew up in the Presbyterian church, and was very active in civic organizations, serving as president of the Woman’s Club at three different points in time.  Family, friends, church and community have always been very important in her long life.

Eventually, her two adult daughters, Raye Wooley and Nell Ring, came back to the family home a few years ago to look after their mother.

About halfway through the afternoon’s birthday celebration, Miss Rachel was too tired to sit up any longer, but she continued greeting a steady stream of company from a comfortable recliner in a cozy den in the back, smiling as one of her four adult grandsons performed the “Gator chop” for her –Miss Rachel is a huge Gator fan – and smiling again as all four of them gathered around and playfully vied for her attention while other family members laughed and took photos.

Near the end of the celebration, there was still a table full of food left, and one of the two huge pink-and-white-frosted sheet cakes still had not been cut.  Despite the large numbers of people who dropped by all afternoon, there had been plenty for everyone; nobody went home hungry.

Late in the afternoon, as people were going home, Raye was urging them to take a piece of cake with them.

But whether they went home stuffed with cake or whether they just nibbled a little, they went home with memories of a pleasant October afternoon spent in the company of friends.  They came to help a dear friend celebrate a milestone birthday and left with admiration for a grand lady.

As they left, one of the small great grandchildren picked up the grinning jack-o-lantern in front of the house.  A lot of Halloweens have come and gone for generations of children in this family home; a lot of Christmases, a lot of birthdays a lot of Easters.  Memories have been made there, lives lived, families formed, new generations begun…and Rachel Reichmann has seen it all.

Happy 100th birthday, Miss Rachel!

By Lynette Norris

Greene Publishing, Inc.

Harvey Pickles was born and raised in Lee, and has spent most of his life within a 35 mile radius of his birthplace.

Born in 1933, the only child of Madison natives George and Mamie Pickles, his earliest memories are from when he was about three or four years old, trying to help pick cotton and crop tobacco; the sharp edges of the cotton bolls would cut his fingers, but “we didn’t know what gloves were,” says Pickles.  They were poor, but then, so was everyone else they knew; maybe the people they sharecropped for were a little better off, but in general, no one knew of any other way of life at the time.  As he puts it, “You don’t miss what you’ve never had.”

His family lived in a log cabin about three miles south of Lee, where his father worked as a sharecropper for Till Webb; the cabin had a wooden-shingled roof with gaps through which he could see moonlight at night.  “When it rained, you had to slide your bed over and set out the pots.”

There were also no pencils or paper to spare for schooling, so Pickles’ mother taught him his letters and numbers writing with a stick on a patch of smooth, bare ground.  Thanks to his mother’s efforts, by the time he started first grade at Enterprise Public School on 255, he already knew enough of reading and writing to finish first grade in half the term.  His teacher, Jeanie Wadsworth, promoted him to second grade for the second half of the school year.

After he finished third grade, his mother became too sick to handle the heavy work, so Pickles dropped out of school to help.  Since everything from cooking to heating to washing required a fire, he was wielding an axe at eight years old, chopping the necessary firewood.  Again, he though nothing about it; that was just the way things were at the time.

Soon afterward, he was working for J.C. Black as a farm hand, earning $5 a week.  At age 12, he was doing farm work fulltime, making $2 a day, hoeing peanuts and cropping tobacco.  At 13, he was plowing with the tractor.

His biggest thrill from that time was the once-a-year trip into Madison to see all the beautiful toys in the Van H. Priest Dime Store.  Cap pistols were a dime, and a roll of caps was a nickel.  If you found that in your stocking Christmas morning, along with an apple, an orange, some brazil nuts and maybe some candy, “you just had yourself a really big Christmas!”

Back in Lee, there was the McCall’s Grocery (later became the Ace Hardware store) where families would drive up and park their wagons for a Saturday afternoon of shopping for that week’s essentials; one of Pickles’ favorite places to visit was S.E. Whitty’s for ice cream and five-cent comic books.  Superman, from the first issue, all the way up through volume100, Batman and Robin – he collected all the old favorites.  He had a huge box of them that he threw out in June of 1956 when he fell in love and married Maude Graham.  The house was small, they needed the space, and he never dreamed that people would one day pay hundreds of dollars for old Superman comic books.

The first movie he ever saw was when Swan’s Theater had a free day close to election time.  He remembers seeing Tom Mix in black and white, and being totally fascinated by the moving images on the screen.  Regular prices for movies were 25 cents; popcorn was five cents, drinks were five cents, and gas was ten cents a gallon.  Later, when the competing Woodward Theater started charging 50 cents for movies, people were aghast and said they’d never make it charging that much; however, the Woodard stayed in business “an awful long time.”

He also remembers getting 25-cent haircuts at Simon Kinsey’s barbershop.

Eventually, he went to work for Madison Metal Products on the Valdosta Highway, back when wheel covers and car body parts were made out of stainless steel instead of plastic, and worked there for 18 years.

He and Maude had four children, Tina, Glen, Teri and Curtis, and one of the biggest treats for the whole family was to pack a picnic basket full of food, fill up a gallon jug with ice tea, pack all the children in the station wagon and head for the Madison drive-in theater.

“That was the big thing to do on Saturday night,” he says.  Prices then were $2 a carload and it was usually a western that was playing.  They would take along mosquito coils that “smelled like oily rags burning” to keep the bloodsucking insects at bay while they watched the show.

Then, the children, content and full of food, would usually fall asleep in the back of the station wagon, leaving their parents to enjoy the movie’s ending in peace and quiet.

Now, with seven grandchildren and five great-children, Pickles sometimes worries a little about the bits of knowledge that get lost from one generation to the next; he knows things about survival that his children were never interested in, and now realizes that “my daddy knew things that I wasn’t interested in until it was too late.”

People just didn’t keep records back then; whatever wasn’t handed down orally was lost.“

Remembrance of Things Past” he says, is one way to record at least some of what is still around, before it disappears forever.

Anyone interested in being interviewed for this article can call 973-4141 and make an appointment with Kristin Finney, or may drop by Greene Publishing, Inc., any day before noon.  Those interested must have lived in Madison for a large portion of their life, and be able to recall a few things that have changed since then.