When we was kids and would get to go huntin’, that was a treat. I remember the first time that I ever went squirrel huntin’. I found some shells in the backseat of the car that we had borrowed to go coon huntin’. I found me some shotgun shells, and I asked Daddy, I said, “Can I take your gun over there and go squirrel huntin’?” He sat me down and talked to me a little and taught me what to do and how to act. He told me that if I seen a squirrel not to shoot until I saw it move and knew for sure that it was a squirrel. “Don’t waste a shell,” he said. So I went up across the edge of the field and into the woods. I had to walk about a mile or two up there before I could go huntin’. I walked up quite a bit, and there was a squirrel sittin’ on a limb, just sittin’ up there, lookin’ at me with his tail bowed up over his back. It was a perfect picture. Well, I remember standin’ there, waitin’ for it to move. I waited and waited, and it never did move. It just sat there and looked at me. I said to myself, “Well, I know that’s a squirrel, so I just better shoot it.” So I did, and out it fell, so then I went on around until I finally killed one more. Then I went home ’cause I was pretty happy over killin’ those two squirrels. That was my first time.
It was pretty nice to get candy bars and things like that back then. My aunt and uncle owned a store. Burt, our uncle, give us a candy bar. I think it was a PayDay or somethin’, somethin’ with nuts. We had never had nothin’ like that, and we couldn’t believe that he had give it to us. We thought there was somethin’ wrong with it. We went on and looked and unwrapped ’em, and we got halfway away from the store to a little place, and we finished unwrappin’ them, and, boy, we thought they were molded or old or somethin’. Really, he just wanted us to have them, I think, because we had never had none or nothin’. I finally tasted around enough a little bit to see if they was soured or anything, and then we went for it. It was the best thing I’d ever had.
I joined the Army when I was eighteen. You had to be eighteen to join the Army, I guess. I went through basic training and all, and I graduated the Army in ’55, ’56, or ’57. I can’t remember the exact year. I had to come back, but I met a girl when I was in the Army up in Illinois, and I went back up there to see her. We never got married or anything, but I liked her. I worked in Illinois for a while—ten years, in fact—and me and my wife got married up there. Them Yankees didn’t get me; one of them liked to got me, and I really liked her, too. She was from Wisconsin, and her name was Rita. She was Catholic, and I was a Baptist, and that’s kinda the way that went. They said, “You gotta become a Catholic or either raise the kids Catholic, and that’s the only thing that will prevent you from marryin’ her.” I said, “Well, you know, I don’t know; I don’t believe I could ever baptize my kids Catholic.” And she said, “Well, they’ll come and baptize ’em while you’re not there.” I said, “They would do that, me not bein’ there, my own kids’ baptism?” That’s kinda where it come apart.
I left there and came back down to Washington, D.C. The people I was workin’ with came down from Washington to start a new business, a new job—a big job—a water plant. I helped move all that down there; then I came home for a while. I decided to call and maybe go back. I called the boss, asked him, “Would you have a job?” He said, “I’ve always got a job for you.” I said, “Well, what about the scale? The Washington scale ain’t near as much as Illinois.” “Oh,” he said, “We’re gonna do better than that. I’ll give you your own job.”
Well, you know, I reckon I kinda had everybody fooled. See, I couldn’t hardly read; I just had bad eyesight. I saw double all my younger life, and I couldn’t ever learn to read nothin’ at school. It never worked, couldn’t. Saw, you know, everything was up and down instead of lines. After I got my glasses and everything, I kinda learned how to read on my own. I read slow. I mean, you know where the thing that comes across the TV? If you’re watchin’ some of those Mexican movies, then they write out what they said? I can’t get all of that—’bout half of it, maybe two-thirds of it. Sometimes I can get all of it, but not usually. Anyway, that’s what happened with my education. I wanted a high school education, and I remember wanting that, you know, and I said, “Well, I’d like to have that, a high school education.” No Billingsley had ever finished high school up to that point, but I had to quit. I went four days in the eighth grade; it was just too humiliating. I just couldn’t stand the pressure, you know. They’d ask you to stand up and read, and the teacher wouldn’t wait for you to figure out which letter was which, you know. I just couldn’t take it. I told my dad, I said, “I ain’t goin’ back,” and he never said nothin’. I didn’t. Then I hurt my eye coon huntin’ one night, and I went out there and told the doctor, I said, “I hurt my eye—jabbed a stick in it. I think I about knocked it out. I can’t hardly see nothin’, and it hurts pretty bad.” He done an eye exam on me, and he said, “It’s gettin’ no better; it’s getting a little worse?” He said, “No, you didn’t do this a’ coon huntin’.” I said, “Yeah, I jabbed a stick in it—limb hit me in the eye. Somebody turned one loose on me.” He said, “Well, they’s a little bit of a scar there, but,” he said, “that ain’t what’s botherin’ you. You’ve had this since you was born.” He went into the detail of how to show me, you know. I said, “Well, I don’t reckon there’s nothin’ wrong.” I always just argued, even when I was a Christian. You know, the Lord tells you. I would argue with that pretty good, you know. Anyway, he showed me. He said, “Now I’ll show you.” Then he flipped his thing and said, “How many lines do ya see?” And I said, “Well, I see two.” He said, “How d’ they look?” And I said, “They look like a V, a big, long, slim V, touchin’ at the bottom.” “Now,” he said, “how many you see?” And I said, “One.” He flipped it back, and every time he flipped it, he said, “That’s what’s the matter.” Said, “You’re seein’ double.” So he give me the glasses to correct that, and I began to kinda learn how to read.
PLATE 24 “I saw double all my younger life, and I couldn’t ever learn to read nothin’ at school.” Vaughn Billingsley as he tells the story of his double vision
I come back from up north and growed cabbage at the farm. We had a bunch of work—just a mule and a hoe or whatever y’ had. By the end, I had two hundred and two dollars. Anyway, before I left, I still had some money. I took off and started to caddie, and I had to get up at four o’clock in the mornin’. I’d be the first one there, and I’d get out early. We made three dollars a day, all day, to be a caddie. I couldn’t save enough money doin’ that—didn’t make enough on that job—so I packed my clothes and took off. I caught the bus and got off at Cornelia, Georgia, and caught the train. I went back to Chicago. I had very little money. I had to ration out everything, so I couldn’t spend it or nothin’. I just had to stay wherever I could. I got a little ol’ job for a dollar and ten cents an hour. I had to ride a bicycle six miles a day, and in the wintertimes, it was awful cold. It got all the way to thirty-two below one mornin’. I just couldn’t ride that bicycle to go to work, so I called in. They said, “What’s the matter?” They called me “Bill” up there. They said, “What’s the matter, Bill? Is your bicycle froze up?” I said, “Yeah, just a little bit. I don’t know what’s the matter with this bicycle.” You had to pedal it hard downhill to make it go. Anyway, I worked there a while, and then I got another job.
I was workin’ in a bowlin’ alley. After about a year, I guess, or close to it, I met this girl named Sara Lee. She came out there one time. Her daddy was on a bowlin’ league, so she just come down there with her daddy. So me and her got to talkin’ for a little while, and all of her girlfriends came up to me when she went to the bathroom or somethin’, and they asked if I knew who she was. They would say, “She is Sara Lee.” I didn’t care. I had seen and eaten them cakes before. I seen them in the store. I didn’t pay no attention to it. I just figured it was the only bakery around there. Anyhow, at the bowlin’ alley, I made one hundred and twenty-five dollars in two weeks to take home. That was pretty good pay at that time. I go
t enough to buy me an old car. I was doin’ all right. I knowed some old buddies around there and this girl, and they would give me a ride every once in a while to work and back. All I had to do was call ’em and ask for one. I met them at the bowlin’ alley. They’d play at the bowlin’ alley down there, and then they’d take me home some.
I never owned my own place. I had one feller let me sleep in his garage. He had a car lot. He had a car and owned this buildin’, and he would let me sleep in there. Man, it was warm in there; run out of fuel one time because all the radiators froze and busted, and I didn’t have no place to go.
After I got saved and born again, filled with the Holy Ghost—now, I didn’t speak in tongues, but I was filled with the Holy Ghost, and it happened to me just exactly—see, big ol’ dummy me didn’t know nothin’—but it happened just exactly like the Bible said. Teachin’ and meetin’ and teachin’—I was able to read. I read the Bible, and that thing came alive. I read it day and night and studied it. I’d sit and tears’d just pour, reading the Bible. It’s so real. And a lot of people, if you don’t have that spirit, it’s a barbaric-type thing, a comic-book-type thing, you know, ’cause it’s all impossible except you’ve got to leap through faith. From then on, you know, things got off of that, and I quit goin’ to church. You quit goin’ just a few times, and Satan will getcha. He can offer everything, like he’s the god of this world, and it’s all in his hands. He can getcha ticked off at all the church members or your neighbors, and take a polished shoe and unshine them. He’s super sharp. I just quit, and I ain’t been back yet, but I know, and that did happen to me—that ain’t no fluke. That did happen to me; it changed all my insides, my heart and everything.
Satan is something, boy. He’ll getcha. I used to pray that the Lord would take me away if anything I started to do was gonna belittle Him in any way, in His ways. I prayed that He’d take me on out. I said, “I’m ready to go; just take me.” It ain’t thataway; it didn’t happen thataway. You have to be tested as though by far [fire], to see what works out, to have a good testimony. I was so happy; somebody come under conviction with, you know, the spirit just come. I would just melt down and go to telling ’em what the Lord done for me, how happy He made me, and they just couldn’t take it. Some would just get right, right there; some are preachers and stuff now. That’s the awfulest thing to have to think back how you got out of church and quit after so much happiness and everything.
Well, anyway, back to the workin’ deal. I came back from Illinois, and he [his supervisor] said he was gonna give me that job, you know, to do my own thing, that was like building a factory where they built factories and power plants and stuff like that. Well, I knew—that scared me, obviously. I said, “Well, they probably have rolled blueprints as big as a thirty-gallon barrel. I won’t be able to; I can’t even read very good, just enough to kindly know.” I couldn’t hardly read a Christmas card or nothin’ after I got to where I could see, and it just scared me off. I didn’t go.
I had an old Mercury car; it was rusted to pieces. I bought a new ’60 Chevrolet car, a two-door coop. I thought it was gettin’ kinda wore [worn out]. See, Bucket Head [referring to himself] traded it for another ’60 Mercury that rode real easy. I thought, “Well, mine [the new car] worked, but that’s the way it was built.” See [it was] a big, old heavy thing, and they’d fixed it and painted it and everything, and I traded mine—even paid a little boot, five or six hundred dollars. I told some of them that I made such a car trade that I could be out in the woods and think about that car trade an’ my face would turn red! I used to have a red face, you know; my face’d be red, and they’d ask me, “What’s your face so red for?” I’d probably thought about that car deal! I made such a bad trade that every time I think about it, I can be out huntin’ by myself and think about it, and my face’ll turn red, you know, just fumin’. It was a bad trade; I got beat so bad. I never ever traded another one after that; I just put ’em somewhere, give ’em to somebody, or sell ’em for whatever you can get for ’em. I didn’t go back, so that old rusty Mercury, I fixed it up and sold it to a feller down there in Otto, North Carolina, for five hundred dollars. There went my whole new car for five hundred bucks—that’s all I got out of it—that I bought; I paid thirty-two hundred for it at that time. I paid steady payments, and I got it paid off. It was a fast car; Lord have mercy, it was so fast, had that big motor in it. When I came back down here, and I took that old car and sold it, I went down sixty-four [Highway 64] out of Franklin and bought a ’53 Chevrolet pickup. It had a new rebuilt motor in it. It’s hard to imagine; it was in good shape, didn’t have a dent or nothin’ in it. Of course, this was in 1960; it was [nearing] ten years old. I gave three hundred fifty dollars for it, for a pickup that looked like new, wasn’t bent or nothin’—had a new rebuilt motor.
Well, it [Billingsley’s Nursery] just come gradual on. It started off we didn’t have nothin’. Me and my brother started to haulin’ a few bushes, some of the Chastains was a-talkin’, and they had dug some around, and they’d dug one of those wild azaleas. I had done that all my life, dug for this fellow out of Atlanta to come up here, buy ’em for ten cents apiece off of the farmers and government or whoever had ’em and sell ’em like that. I knowed how to dig ’em. I could really pop ’em out; it wasn’t nothin’ for me. They said they’d sold one of them for fifteen dollars. I said, “Lord, help! I can dig one of them and sell ’em for a dollar apiece and make plenty of money!” So me and him [Vaughn’s brother] got to talkin’, and I said, “Let’s take that pickup and dig us a load of mountain laurel and honeysuckle and just wild stuff and maybe get us a few boxwoods off of somebody for a dollar apiece.” He said, “All right,” so we did. We made eighty dollars apiece. We got us up a little load and went, and in one day, we made eighty dollars apiece. So we come back and got another load. Some woman said she’d like to have boxwoods, so we went back and bought a bunch of boxwoods. We got back down there, and she said, “Well, I’ll have to go see the property owner, see if it’s all right to put ’em in, see if he wants to buy ’em.” Boy, there we sat, mouth open then! We just left. We finally sold ’em, but we didn’t make but forty dollars apiece with all the gas and everything comin’ out of that. I told ’im, I said, “This ain’t gonna work. I thought we’d be into something, but it don’t look like it’s gonna work,” so we just pulled off. Finally, one day I told my brother, I said, “Well, I think I’ll get up a load and take in by myself; might make enough for one guy.” It was my truck and everything. I did; I made pretty good money for a day’s work—made a week’s pay in a day. It took one day to load it and one day to sell it, and I just kept going back. It wasn’t no time till nearly everything I took was promised. I’d just go around and deliver it, make three or four hundred dollars a day. It just went on like that. Then I got to doin’ landscape and studying that. When I started, I found that I was kind of an artist like drawing pictures or anything like that. My daughter teaches art down there at the school. She’s talented; that’s a genetic thing like music.
Well, I just kept fooling with that, and I got to doing landscape, and a feller up there in North Carolina, they put in that golf course up there, Wildcat Cliffs Country Club. That was the second golf course in Highlands. It was big; it was nice. They wanted to try to get somebody to do the landscapin’, so they went down to Franklin and asked a local landscaper about takin’ the job and doin’ all the landscapin’. “Lord,” he said, “I’m nearly eighty years old; I can’t do nothin’ like that.” They said, “Well, would you recommend someone?” His son did it, too, sold bushes, and his son-in-law did. God, I guess he sold more bushes than anyone, the son-in-law, but, you know, they’d just dig it anyway—bare root it. I’d go down there and buy some bushes from the landscaper—turned out me and him dug ’em the same way, real nice balls. Of course, I was sellin’ to a landscape architect; I had to do it that way. They asked him, “Well, could you recommend somebody?” And he said, “If I gotta recommend somebody that I know wi
ll do the right thing, it’d be Vaughn Billingsley.” He said, “He’d dig it and put it in; it’d be done right. He does it; that’d be the only one I know.” Well, they just called me straight; that’s what really got me kicked off—had that whole golf course. I’d just work on both sides of the streets at the same time, pockets so full of money—couldn’t hardly have time to go to the bank or nothin’, just bulging with money ’cause you didn’t have to argue price or nothin’. I tried to do unto them as I’d want them to do to me; then the reputation came. A lot would come, say, “You fix it. You’ve been recommended, and give me the bill when you get done.” Money was not an object nor price, so that got me off to the races. I used to have to dig out of the woods, and everybody had bushes, had ’em planted in rocky ground that they couldn’t use, awful hard to dig. Sometimes you’d find a patch that you could really dig more and get about all of them. It was always when I’d come home from Highlands that I’d see that big bottom down there that they used to grow beans and cabbage. [Editor’s note: The site to which he refers is the current location of Billingsley’s Nursery in Rabun Gap, Georgia.]
PLATE 25 Vaughn’s nursery business in Rabun Gap, Georgia
One day I came home, came in, and my daughter said that land [I wanted] was for sale. The landowner was a schoolteacher, and I went to school with her. My daughter was substituting for the landowner, and during their working together, she told her, she said, “I want to sell that.” She had gotten into it with a farmer who leased it that had it in cabbage all the time. The farmer had farmed it so long he felt like it was his, and she wanted to go up on the price of the lease, and he said he wouldn’t pay it or something. He just wasn’t gonna do it, so she said, “Just stay off of it then,” but he didn’t stay off—just kept goin’ on it—and she sued him then. He didn’t go to court; she won the case. My daughter said, “She’s gonna sell that.” She had about thirty acres there. I called her, and she said, “Yeah, I wanna sell it.” I said, “How much you gonna ask for it?”
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