The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book

by Inc. The Foxfire Fund

  I think the secret to a long and happy marriage is primarily give-and-take. It’s very hard. It’s hard to give, and it’s hard to take sometimes—get togetherness, doing things together. Betty and I, we discuss a lot of things. It don’t matter whether it’s a small thing or a big thing; before it happens, we generally discuss it. If we agree on it, then we can go with it, but the number one thing for a long, happy marriage is togetherness. Me and Betty have to be “one”; we can’t be separate. She can’t go her way, and I go mine. We gotta go together. [Editor’s note: Betty, who has been sitting with us throughout the interview, smiles and nods in agreement.]

  I’ve really, really had a good life, and I’ve really enjoyed it. Of course, people like Betty have helped me; she’s my right-hand person. And, of course, the kids were good. Really, I don’t think that they would be a whole lot that I would change about my life because I’ve really enjoyed being, you know, the type person I am and my friends and everything like that. I don’t think that there would be a lot that I would change.

  “Castro, he invited me to come see him.”

  ~Tommy Irvin on forty years as ag commissioner~

  Tommy Irvin is the longest-serving agriculture commissioner in the United States, retiring in 2010 after over forty years of service in that role. The son of sharecroppers, he had to quit school at the age of sixteen to support his family after the sudden death of his father in a sawmill accident. From those humble beginnings of paying crops in exchange for rent and decorating Christmas trees with eggshells, Commissioner Irvin has traveled the globe, meeting world leaders and promoting Georgia’s agricultural commodities.

  My sister, Sheri Thurmond, and I first visited with Commissioner Tommy Irvin at his home in Habersham County—an unassuming brick ranch house with a giant magnolia tree out front. He was an imposing presence—filling the doorway with his six feet, five inches of height as he greeted us. As we talked to him about his life, it quickly became apparent that although he had no “basic formal education,” he is well spoken and, more importantly, remains deeply concerned with doing a good job for the people of Georgia during his tenure of political service, which first began in 1956.

  Later, I met with Commissioner Irvin at his office in the Department of Agriculture in downtown Atlanta. The walls surrounding his office were covered with dark wood paneling and bookshelves—all filled with mementos and pictures from his years in office—everything from pictures of family members, world leaders, and Irvin’s trips around Georgia, to framed newspaper and magazine articles, a little red wagon, and awards and plaques.

  I truly believe that many people are born with gifts. Commissioner Irvin’s gifts are public service and public speaking. He read from a prepared speech only once. As he said, “I couldn’t read a speech. I tried, and I was a failure, so I don’t like to feel failure a second time.” Instead, he prepared a few talking points for each of his two hundred–plus speaking engagements per year and gave impromptu speeches based on these notes. He went on to say, “I’ve had people, even today, that would compliment me for never turning down an invitation. I was hands-on about what we got going on in this department.”

  During both interviews, Commissioner Irvin emphasized the importance of education. Although he did not have the opportunity to complete his education, he ultimately came to where he is because he cared about education and wanted his children to have the best. He obviously made an impression upon the people of Georgia, as they elected him to serve as commissioner of agriculture ten times.

  Arty Schronce, director of public affairs for the Department of Agriculture, was instrumental in completing the second interview with Commissioner Irvin, and I thank him for his assistance.

  —Teresa Thurmond Gentry

  I was born in Lula, Georgia, in ’29. I’ll be eighty-one years old next week, the fourteenth day of July [2010]. I had two brothers and two sisters. I was the oldest in the family. You probably may be aware of the fact that I’m really a product of a father and mother that were sharecroppers. Being a sharecropper, a portion of what you paid on the farm for the rent was paid in crops, since you didn’t have any cash.

  My grandfather on Daddy’s side died of rheumatic fever when he was just a kid. Grandmother was a Dixon—Florine Dixon. My grandmother on the Irvin side was a beautiful lady. You can tell that from her picture. The Dixons—most of them were identified by some of the historical people [members of the historical society] in Habersham County.

  My grandmother Hogan was of the old-fashioned way to do things. She would never cook anything on Sundays. She would cook it on Saturdays, put it aside, and serve it on Sunday. That’s coming back in style, I noticed in some media recently. History, idn’t [isn’t] it? Well, I can remember it. I ’us [was] little when I was at Grandma and Grandpa Hogan’s home; they had a big, long table, and you’d have a bench seat and move up to the table. We were called in to dinner by the big bell in the kitchen. We would line up, sit on that bench at the big long table; it was probably as long as from here to that wall (about eleven feet). The Hogans were White County folks.

  We always had biscuits and cornbread for a meal. We fared better than you think we would. We would trade eggs or chickens off the farm, or an extra ham, for coffee and sugar and things that you couldn’t produce on your farm. The economy in those days was entirely different than what it is today. We were poor, but we didn’t know it. Everybody else was as poor as we were. You didn’t have any money back in those days. It was the bartering system—we didn’t have any money back in those days, so we traded for what we needed.

  Tell you what we used for Christmas trees, since we were so poor: we used to stretch cotton out and put that on that tree. You might take shelled eggs and anything else you could do to dress up a tree.

  We made a lot of our toys. When I was a young lad, we made our own wagons. We’d get a hickory tree and cut it, block it off, punch a hole through it, put you a little rod through it, and build on it and have something that you could play with, but not much steering. You’d also use it to go to the corn mill. Back when I was a young lad, we had a corn mill that was run by waterpower and a little dam over it. We used to catch the water running down the race to turn the wheel on the gin in the mill. It’s also where we’d go swimming at. I have a little red wagon now that my staff gave me years ago. I remember I told ’em I always wanted a red wagon.

  I remember my daddy would take his cotton to an Irvin distantly related to us who run a store in Cornelia, later where Belk’s had their store. And we would take what we received for the cotton and get our overalls, shoes, wearing apparel, and coats—things Mama couldn’t make or didn’t have the material to make. And you may be aware that my daddy got killed in a sawmill accident, and I didn’t get to finish school. I was sixteen. My daddy and I were big buddies. He taught me a lot, even though he was uneducated to the point he could hardly sign his own name. He took me under his wing, as you called it in the old days. Taught me everything about how to survive in the world at that time.

  My brother is still living. When he was a little lad, he crawled up on a chair and fell backwards in a bed of hot coals in the fireplace. The only heat we had was the fireplace. I remember I pulled him out of that fire. I went screaming to Mama. I remember she come runnin’. She laid her hand—put it in some rendered lard we kept after we had killed our hogs—she put that on the burn, wrapped it up in a towel, and asked our neighbor to take him to the doctor. The closest we had was in Cleveland. I remember the doctor told my mother, says, “If y’all hadn’t a’ handled it the way you handled it, he wouldn’t a’ survived.” He’s gotta big patch there now where he didn’t have any hair on the back of his head.

  I tell folks I guess I learned how to drive on an old Model T. I knocked the steps down. Back in those days, the [porch was] sort of high off the ground, and you had to have three or four steps going up. I knocked the steps down, and my daddy gave me a good thrashin’ for it.

  Well, most of the things we had
back then … you grew everything you ate, so you’d have all kinds of potatoes—what we know as sweet potatoes and what we call Irish potatoes now, and corn to make cornbread. You usually had a little patch of wheat to make flour out of if you had a place close enough around to thrash it for you. You raised your own hogs; you had your own cows. We even had cows after I moved here and built this house after I was married. This house, I built it in ’53.

  We had mules. My daddy would plow in those red hills up there in White County. When he’d get hot and thirsty, he’d tie up the mules to something stationary. Daddy always liked mules, not horses. Everybody wanted to know why. Daddy would say, “They’re more reliable.” He would go down to a branch head and lay down and siphon water up. Sometimes he’d take a wheat straw and use that for a straw. Wheat has a straw … had a hollow. You can see what they have when they have a straw now. It’s fabricated, but it didn’t have the uniqueness of the original wheat straw.

  Well, back in those days, we had one cotton gin right across from where Chattahoochee Baptist Church is in White County. My father and mother are both buried there. Mr. E. T. Irvin had the cotton gin. I remember that when you got ready to harvest your cotton, people would bring it in on their wagons. And you’d have those wagons lined up one right behind the other. Most people had people in the family that picked cotton. My mother and I—she could always do more than I could—we’d pick a bale every two days. It takes about eleven hundred pounds of cotton with seed to make one ginned bale, which will weigh around four hundred fifty to five hundred pounds. At cotton gin time, Daddy would close the sawmill down and be a worker in running the gin, and he was good at it. My daddy was a hard worker. A real talent that person was—he was my buddy. My mother used to work at the sawmill, too.

  I can remember in World War II … I was just a kid and was too young to serve—all of the other young men were going off and were old enough to go into the service. That ’uz the big war.

  After we moved from White County to Habersham, we eventually moved into a farmhouse that my father had purchased. He was smart enough to know he didn’t want to always be a sharecropper. He wanted to own his land, grow his own crops, and create his own revenue. This place where we gave a fourth of your cotton and a third of your corn as rent—that’s what you called a sharecropper. Daddy was a tenant farmer in the Rogers’s house. It had no inside facilities. The house was already occupied by the Rogers family, and what our family did when we moved in, they give up one room, and we all had to sleep in that room. We’d eat out on the porch. It was so hot for us. Best I remember we moved in about this time of year, around September. And that’s when I moved down to the corncrib. We cleaned it out—no corn in it. I took me—you didn’t have mattresses—you kind of had a heavy-duty quilt, padded cotton in it. That’s what I slept on. Oh, by the way, there was a side part of that crib where you could drive a wagon into it. The people who owned it were up on all the things you do to do things right. I think they had a mesh war’ [wire] inside, so the rats couldn’t get in there.

  We moved into this house with an old fireplace called the Shelton Place. That was the first place my daddy was able to borrow the money to buy, and he didn’t borrow the money from a bank. He borrowed the money from individuals. Well, the only heat we had was a big fireplace, and this particular house was a dual fireplace—had a fireplace on each side. One room was where you slept. The other room is where you cooked and eat, and you had those fireplaces farred [fired] up. That house had four rooms and a hallway, which was unusual back in those days. You’d have a hallway from one side to the other without having to go outside. At that Shelton Place is where Daddy let me have my own cotton patch. Even though he got killed in that work accident before harvesttime, the cotton money that I made out of my cotton patch allowed me to not be a tenant farmer—to buy a patch of land and own a patch of land. Best I remember, I think that money I got out of that cotton, I was able to get in the sawmill business. I got up early and stayed up late. I did everything myself. I was fairly well successful.

  As I said earlier, my daddy got killed in a sawmill accident, and I really grieved deeply when I lost him. I know that I was in the truck with Fred Bowen. He worked with Daddy at the sawmill. We got him in the truck. We went down to Stephens County Hospital in Toccoa, Georgia, and they pronounced him dead when we got there.

  The Rogers family was associated with us before we even moved into the house up at Dick’s Hill where I slept in the corncrib. If you did something for one, you did it for the whole family, and we had to keep an eye out for each other. After my father’s death, one of the members of the Rogers family, Delmus, married my mother. She was widowed, he had never been married, and she had a second family with him.

  I guess back in those days, if you turned five, you could go to school. We would have what you would call a summer recess. You had a time to plant the crops and a time to harvest the crops. You didn’t have lunchrooms back in the school in those days. You had to paper bag it. Your mother would make you—in the summer months—make you sandwiches that were picked out of your garden. You may have heard this before, but I tell folks that it’s amazing that my political career later on caught on and that I was a sponsor of the constitutional amendment that allowed the use of public funds to pay for the school lunch program.

  I know that I have told a lot of people how I got started in the business world, but I started out in the lumber business. As I said earlier, I got in the lumber business from what I made out of my cotton patch. Daddy allowed me to have three acres from the first farm he owned. I was able to cash that in. I run the sawmill, and my business had done right well. I guess at one time back there, we had the largest-volume lumberyard in the county. Remnants of it is still standing. [I had] what we called a lumber sorter. It was the first one, I think, in the state. I believe that you had to have good equipment; even though technology was headed our way, it hadn’t fully arrived at that time.

  During this time was when I got acquainted with Clyde Turner. I used to call him Hooten Dasher. That was his nickname over in White County. Clyde was a big buddy of mine. He had Mount Yonah Lumber Company, and we used to trade lumber. When you try to fill a bill order to build a house, there might be a part of that order I didn’t have in stock, so I’d go to Clyde Turner. And if he was short of something, he’d come t’ us. We ended up partners. I had half interest in it. I used to tell folks that I had half interest in the product, and I was always the one who was successful in borrowing capital to expand the business. I sold out my interest to Donald Thurmond.

  PLATE 28 “Even though I didn’t have a basic formal education, I had become quite educated through on-the-job training.” Tommy Irvin as a young man

  I changed from cotton to the lumber business due to the boll weevil. The mechanized machines that you used to spray for the boll weevil didn’t function very well in small crops like ours. I tell folks … I was real, I guess, self-gratified to know that when I got in the lumber business and got to be kind of a leader in the lumber business … I was in a meeting at one of our national meetings, and some of the technology people out of Washington, U.S. Department of Agriculture, said that they thought they knew how to get rid of the boll weevil. It thrilled me that I was one of the leaders in getting the boll weevil program implemented here in the South. That was quite an accomplishment, considering that the boll weevil had been so destructive to people who were producing that commodity.

  Well, I tell people that the unusual thing is how one thing leads you into something else. We used to have our own milk cows. My barn’s down there below the house—still there. One morning, I heard somebody coming down towards the barn. I recognized the voice. It was a person wanting to ask me to run for the state legislature. I told the individual that nobody would vote for me ’cause I didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t know anything about politics. He came back another day or two later with a couple of other people with him, still wanting me to run for the state legislature. On his third
visit, he got me to tell him that I’d look into it.

  I got out, and even though our incumbent member of the state legislature had already qualified, I went from door to door and knocked on everybody’s door. When election time come, I won by a big margin. That’s how my political career began, and that was in 1956. [Years later when] Nixon offered Campbell a position as deputy secretary of agriculture, USDA, somebody mentioned to Governor Lester Maddox that if Campbell went to Washington, under our constitution the governor has to fill the vacancy till the next general election. Everybody said that if Campbell goes to Washington, Irvin’s gonna be agriculture chief. Maddox did that without ever—it never was mentioned to me—just one of those quirks that he had.

  Well, here come the media—wanted to know what I’d do about it. I says, “Well, he never mentioned it to me.” They said, “Well, whatcha gonna do?” I said, “Well, seems to me like I don’t have a real big choice. If Governor Maddox wants to fire me as his chief of staff and name me to a constitutional-elected position, I can either [be commissioner of agriculture] or I can pack my bag and go home.” People tried to get him not to appoint me. I think the unusual thing about this is that this thing got so hot. When I took that job, we just had got a telephone—rural Georgia, you know—and he called me at home, and I always said when I spoke to him, “Remember, this is not a private line.” “Well, I don’t mind if it isn’t,” he said. “You’ve done a great job for me. If Campbell goes to Washington, Georgia needs a new commissioner of agriculture.”

  Well, becoming commissioner of agriculture was a big challenge to me, but I was young. I was very active. Even though I didn’t have a basic formal education, I had become quite educated through on-the-job training. If you’re an active member of the legislature, you know a lot about how government works. If you don’t after a small period of time, you oughta leave. The challenge was a great one. Even though I was appointed January of ’69—the balance of that term was by appointment—[I had to run] for a full four-year term in 1970. I served two years; I ran in 1970. I had formal opposition from Mr. Bill Lanier, who was highly qualified. He had been Farm Bureau president for several years and had most all of the political insiders already committed to be for him. You didn’t have a two-party system back then—everybody gettin’ elected as a Democrat. I tell folks the way I won that race was that I just outworked him. He had the infrastructure they had. I think before the votes were finally counted, I made some inroads on that.