by Al Stump
No evidence indicates that anyone in the Narrows was especially shocked when the twenty-year-old resident schoolteacher, William Herschel Cobb, wedded a girl of twelve. That had happened before, and not infrequently. It remained ordinary practice in the 1880s for a bachelor farmer with five or ten stake-claimed acres and a few share-croppers under him to pick, through expediency and loneliness, a hard worker from among the females nearing puberty and make himself a household. Gossip had it that Amanda still played with toys when she married, and read grammar books upon becoming a mother. “She was a damned good cook,” reported Ty Cobb.
In 1960, as a curious researcher, I queried Banks County pioneers about the three-year lapse between Amanda’s marriage and her production of Ty. “Who knows?” replied one Royston old-timer. “Her father, Caleb Chitwood, was the biggest landowner around here, and word got out that he didn’t at all like his kid’s getting spliced so young. He was supposed to have raised the roof. Don’t forget that Chitwood also was the main support of the Narrows’ only school back then. And Ty’s father was the teacher at that school.” Maybe, it was intimated, W. H. Cobb agreed to refrain from sex until Caleb’s daughter was a little older. Since in the end she proved fertile, what else could explain it?
Another curiosity: why was W. H. Cobb, a mustached six-footer with a no-nonsense air, a graduate of North Carolina Agricultural College, such a roamer? Apparently he had better academic credentials than the average backcountry educator of his day. Yet, steadily on the horse-and-buggy trot, “Professor” Cobb moved around through two local counties, teaching classes in the towns of Commerce, Lavonia, Harmony Grove, Homer, Carnesville, and eventually in Royston. He was a pedagogical version of a traveling salesman. One of Ty’s first memories was of sitting barefoot at age four—“maybe five”—on the tailgate of a horse-hack bucketing along a rough clay trail to one more village, where W. H. Cobb had landed an instructor’s job. By then Tyrus had a younger brother, Paul. “We used to wrestle in the wagon all the way to whatever burg came next,” he chuckled. “When little old Paul got sore, he’d bite me.”
In naming the first son, the senior Cobb dipped into his interest in war and warriors. Tyrus was not named for Tyr, a Norse god of arms-bearing, as would later be claimed by members of the sports press. In 332 B.C., sweeping across Asia Minor, Alexander the Great was halted by defenders of the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre. Through seven months of carnage, the Tyrians kept Alexander’s army at bay. Thence came the newborn’s name. The child’s middle name of Raymond, which he much disliked, came from a distant relative, a gambler by profession, but friendly with the Professor.
So much traveling, living in rented, poorly heated roadside boardinghouses and drafty tent camps, seemed to harm Tyrus’s health. From birth to almost age six, he suffered from “the pip” and undiagnosed fevers. Yet he never doubted his roving father. From the beginning he loved, revered, and was dominated by the austere Professor Cobb. His sire was one of those authoritative men who also are sympathetic to a boy’s needs—tough but fair.
The second-strongest character in the boy-child’s life was tough, gingery, tobacco-spitting John “Squire” Cobb, his woods-wise grandfather. After the Professor and family finally became permanently settled in Royston in 1895, Tyrus often visited the home of his grandpa in the summertime. With close to one square mile in holdings across the state line near Murphy, North Carolina, the Squire was a fairly prosperous farmer, set apart by owning trotting horses and eating steak for breakfast. Although a limping and semicrippled veteran of the Civil War, Squire Cobb led nine-year-old Ty into the hills to hunt rabbits, squirrels, and wildfowl, meanwhile spinning skin-prickling tales. Some, Cobb recalled, went like this:
Squire Cobb: Do you own a knife, boy?”
Tyrus: “No, but I got a slingshot.”
Squire: “Well, I’ve been thinking that before this day is out, I’d meet a boy who needed a knife. And here’s one for you I can spare.”
Tyrus (accepting a brand-new pearl-handled pig-sticker with a shiny silver shield embedded in it, a knife he would keep for all of his life): “Golly, can I take it with me on a hunt?”
Squire: “By all means. But be careful with it. It’s sharper than a bobcat’s paws.”
It was all the greater gift because, as Squire Cobb explained, from a knife Tyrus would graduate to a long rifle, like the gun that had saved Grandpa’s life when he tangled with a huge bear. “A slavering monster twelve feet tall, teeth as long as a corncob … and me with just a rifle,” he told him. Ty couldn’t wait to hear the outcome.
After a chilling delay, the lighting of his pipe, the Squire would drawl, “If I’d missed with that rifle, Tyrus—you wouldn’t be here today.” A bearskin rug carpeted the plank floor. “That’s not him,” the Squire would continue. “The one I fought was even bigger.”
ONE SCORCHING-HOT summer day, in or around 1897, word reached Squire Cobb that he was needed in Asheville, North Carolina, seventy-five miles away. His wisdom and stature in the area had led to his election as foreman of the county grand jury. The jury adjudicated everything from boundary disputes to pig thefts before they became a shooting matter. Tyrus was allowed to ride along to Asheville. At a meeting hall there, the Squire handed down the verdict. In rage, the loser grabbed the Squire’s shirt and yelled threats. “Get behind my desk,” said the Squire to Tyrus.
At eleven Tyrus had never seen grown men in a serious fight. Instead of hiding, as he remembered it, he jumped in to kick the attacker’s knee. A slap from the man knocked him dizzy. Someone then punched the disturber of the peace. Tyrus got off the deck to see his grandfather whip out a pocket pistol. “Get on your way,” he coldly ordered. Backing down, the man left. The Squire, on his way home by buggy, told Tyrus that he’d done something foolish, but the kicks had been appreciated.
Things could get thrilling in North Carolina—at least the way a latter-day Cobb liked to tell it.
In the next few years he hit the schoolbooks harder in Royston, so as to qualify for visits to the Squire’s homestead. He owned a bench-legged squirrel dog, Old Bob. The well-trained hound accompanied his master on train trips to Murphy. In his ballplaying heyday, one of the swift-striking Georgian’s greatest talents was tricking opponents. Doubtless some of this cunning had its roots planted when he rode the rails from Royston to Murphy, reading his hometown Record, the Police Gazette, and other newspapers. Dogs were not allowed in the coaches of the Southern Railway. Concealed on the floor of Tyrus’s seat under a jumble of newsprint rode the smuggled Old Bob. The camouflaging worked almost all of the time.
TYRUS RAYMOND Cobb was part of the South’s postwar crop of youngsters who were replacing the approximately 258,000 Confederate soldiers killed in the war. By the last part of the century, Georgia’s population had slowly made a comeback to 1.7 million. A newly designed state flag had been adopted. Blacks were unable to vote or be elected to office, and without many exceptions were unable to hold better than straw-boss positions in agriculture.
Automatically, Tyrus didn’t play with black children, although by order of his father he worked alongside them in seeding and crop harvesting. Professor Cobb, the respected school supervisor of Franklin County and part-time land investor, had acquired leases on one-hundred-odd acres of tillable soil. He needed all the help his family could provide. Connected with farming was the need felt by W. H. Cobb to knock a rising arrogance out of his son. It did not become a Cobb to strut, break rules, and boast. One way to bring Tyrus into line was to sweat him behind a plow or hay reaper. There was plenty of that work doled out.
The first signs of Ty’s uncontrollable temper appeared during his school days; it was a condition that would dangerously worsen. In North Carolina, Squire Cobb handed out none of the rebukes and penalties regularly issued by Ty’s father. The old gent was forgiving of all sins except “hard cussing.” He only shook his head when he heard that ten-year-old Tyrus was suspended from Royston District School for a few days after hitting and
kicking a classmate friend for missing a word in a spelling contest between boy and girl teams. When the girls’ team won, Tyrus was so burned that he beat up the teammate. His punishment for that was mucking out cowsheds. Many years later he said of the school incident, “I never could stand losing. Second place didn’t interest me. I had a fire in my belly.”
When he paid boyhood visits to the North Carolina farm of the Squire, a series of letters reached Tyrus. In many of them a worried Professor Cobb sharply warned his offspring to “stop your unsuitable acts,” to overcome his fierce temper, and “defeat the demon who lurks in all human nature.” Tyrus took it hard. “Father doesn’t like me,” he grieved.
“No,” counseled the Squire, “Your pa wants you to go on to a university, to be liked, and be a success.” In this matter the eldest Cobb could point to his own six children, most of whom he had sent to a church college. He suggested that Ty might return to his parent’s good graces by writing something original on man’s relation to the natural world, and sending it to the weekly Royston newspaper, owned and edited by Professor Cobb. It might be printed.
Tyrus titled his article “Possums and Myself.” After praising possums for their finer points, he continued to tell how past midnight Old Bob had been “bellering in the woods,” how he’d dragged himself from sleep, how they’d treed “Brother Possum,” and how he’d shot, killed, gutted, and skinned him “who felt no pain and made a fine cap for wearing.”
Ladies of the Royston sewing circles may have found the story too stark, but editor Cobb was pleased and showed it in a following letter: “You are making good progress in aligning yourself with the grand outdoors, yet always remember to remain in control of yourself, to be dutiful, to be proud but courteously proud.” He enclosed a clipping of Tyrus’s article, with the author’s byline above it.
In the 1910s and 1920s, when Cobb was cutting down infielders with sharpened steel spikes and throwing punches and vitriol at those who crossed him, the Georgia Peach would show business associates some of the “be good, be decent” letters of W. H. Cobb that he had retained. The associates would either wince or go somewhere to laugh.
Long on animal spirits, the young Cobb generally was humorless, with growing antisocial tendencies. “Get off your high horse,” he was often told. Bud Bryant, a boyhood chum, once was asked by a press correspondent to sum up Cobb at ages ten to fifteen. Bryant said, “Oh, we had some fights, toe-to-toe stuff. He’d win one, next time I’d get the best of it. You couldn’t make the little bastard stay down. Born to win. Touchy and stubborn about the smallest things. There were times he’d disappear or climb a tree and stay there for hours because his mother made him wash some kitchen pots or sing in church. Could never laugh it off when the joke was on him. Ty was damned serious. Concentrated on whatever he did. He had a stammer he couldn’t overcome.”
I also consulted Bryant. “My God, how he loved himself—and his father,” added Bryant. “But there was a way about him that made us think he’d go far. Would become a big man at something. He had these piercing pale eyes, for one thing.”
Bryant and others were asked about Cobb’s mother. By their recollection, Ty seldom mentioned Amanda, the ex–“baby” bride. She was overshadowed by her erudite, ambitious, classics-quoting husband. Amanda was small and pretty, with Ty’s pinkish skin and fair hair, said witnesses. She was a homebody who didn’t go to dances and such things very often.
Schoolmates dared to call Tyrus “Squeaky,” for his high-pitched voice. Not for long, however. “Squeaky” almost assured another fist-fight. Ty drew pleasure from putting down any challenge. A Royston sporting figure of the day, Bob McCreary, remembered him: “He could throw a rock out of sight at twelve or so and outwrestle any of us at catch-as-catch-can not long later. He was always thinking of new things to try. Once, down at the pond, Ty said he could hold his breath underwater longer than any of us. We lasted maybe a minute, while he was still down there. Someone, probably Ty, invented the crazy trick of laying on a railroad track and being last to roll off before the locomotive got there. He didn’t lose that one often.”
Would-be athlete Tyrus, at a skinny thirteen, sent away to Atlanta for a book, How to Sprint, by champion American dashman Dan Kelly. On a regular basis, for he was disciplined even if lacking in obedience, he practiced snap starts and running with his knees pumping high. He won at least one recorded event—a fifty-yard race at a Franklin County fair—and wore the blue ribbon on his shirt for months.
Next to contesting, he was most interested in his lengthy roster of prominent ancestors. Previous Cobbs had been fighters of the Cherokee, pro- and antislavery exponents, academicians, statesmen, and generals. The tribe dated back to Joseph Cobb, an emigré from England in 1611 who eventually becaoe a tobacco tycoon, owning Cobbham, a Virginia estate. There also had been Thomas Willis Cobb, a Revolutionary War colonel who was said to have counseled George Washington and reportedly reached 111 years of age. Another, Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb—Ty’s favorite on the family tree—had been facile princeps at the University of Georgia, codifier of Georgia law, organizer of the state’s first law school, and a brigadier general killed by a shell-burst at Fredericksburg. Long afterward, Ty informed interviewers that this same Thomas R. R. Cobb wrote a large part of the Confederate Constitution. “Which would have worked,” he insisted, “if we’d had more troops and cannon. At this Cobb’s burial, General Robert E. Lee said, ‘Know ye not that a prince and great man is fallen this day?’”
From studying the Cobb genealogy, Ty was equally familiar with Thomas Cobb, an 1824 U.S. senator from Georgia, after whom Cobb County was named. And he was much aware of Howell Cobb, Georgia’s governor in 1851 as well as a general who gamely held out with three thousand ragged militiamen until overwhelmed by the Federals at Macon in 1865. One historical note on General Cobb quoted President Andrew Johnson as saying at war’s end that he most wanted to capture and hang by the neck until dead three particular Secessionist leaders, one of them Howell Cobb.
The Professor’s well-stocked library was open to Ty; he boned up on so many battles and their strategy as to cause concern by W. H. and Amanda Cobb that his eyesight might be harmed. In his early teens he came to interpret the war and his forebears’ roles in it in terms of defiance by an oppressed, underdog society. He knew that northern historians gave a false picture. “We won at Norfolk, Chicamauga, Antietam, Yorktown, both times at Bull Run, and a hell of a lot of other places, didn’t we?” he reminded schoolboy friends.
A concerned, impatient W. H. Cobb felt that his offspring was smart enough to qualify one day for a career in the law, as a physician, or perhaps in engineering. Yet Tyrus showed no sign of real interest in any of these professions. To encourage the fourteen-year-old, W. H. asked an attorney friend, Colonel W. R. Little, to advise the youngster. Little, who resembled Buffalo Bill with his bulky body and long, shaggy hair, invited Tyrus to visit his office. To be sure that Ty didn’t duck out, his father went along. Little mentioned Blackstone. “Sir William Blackstone,” he said, “was an English judge who did much to create our common law. You can start with his dictionary, learn some terms lawyers use.”
“How long will that take?” asked Tyrus.
“All the spare time you can find,” said the Colonel.
For days a conscripted Tyrus struggled with Blackstone, finding him as boring as watching a hen peck corn. To W. H.’s considerable disappointment he gave it up and never returned.
Medicine was a possibility—either that or an appointment to West Point. Professor Cobb, thirty-seven years old, had been elected Royston’s mayor and by 1900 was the proprietor of the Royston Record. His eye was trained on election to the Georgia senate, a goal he would soon reach. He was seen by politicians beyond his town and county as smart and well known—maybe even a future governor. Through his contribution to establishing a public, tax-financed educational system in northern Georgia, W. H. was acquainted with influential people in Virginia, the Carolinas, and beyond. He m
ight well be able to secure an appointment to West Point for his footloose offspring.
Tyrus foresaw that regimentation would be his fate at a military academy, and he was too free-swinging for that. Doctoring, he guessed, might work for him. An area physician, Dr. Sam Moss, encouraged the idea. Moss had first noticed Tyrus when the Doc’s services had been needed at Grandfather Squire Cobb’s farm. While out ridge-running for wild pigs, Ty drove a tree prong through his big toe. Grannie Cobb, with a reputation for her use of roots, barks, and herbs as healing potions, fed him a foul-tasting brew. He came through without infection. But then his bowels went on a spree. “It’d hit me so fast that I’d barely have time to run for the Chic Sale in the back orchard,” he wrote in a 1961 memoir. “And I’d spend the rest of the day there.” In came Doc Moss to apply a cure.
Not long after, a white boy of Royston shot a black boy in the belly. Moss and another doctor invited Tyrus to observe the surgery. By flickering oil lamp on a kitchen table, they went to work. Moss told Ty, “You’re the anesthetist,” and handed him a dousing mask and a bottle of chloroform. Cobb’s account of the surgery went like this: “I put the boy under without much trouble and the docs opened him up. After failing to locate the bullet, they began searching for a perforation of the intestine. Both being elderly men, their eyes grew tired under the oil lamp. ‘You look, Tyrus,’ said Moss. ‘Blasted if I can find any puncture.’
“I went over the intestine until I found a bruise, but no hole. ‘Aha,’ said Moss, ‘the bullet slanted off somewhere into his side. He’s lucky.’”