Jack Etheridge interviewed by Bob Short
2010 June 3
Atlanta, GA
Reflections on Georgia Politics
ROGP-114
Original: video

sponsored by:
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
University of Georgia Libraries
and
Young Harris College


Date of Transcription: July 12, 2012

BOB SHORT: Im Bob Short and this is Reflections on Georgia Politics, sponsored by the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia and Young Harris College. We're honored today to have as our guest Jack Etheridge, a former Georgia legislator and a retired superior court judge in Fulton County. Welcome, Jack.

JACK ETHERIDGE: Thank you, Bob.

SHORT: You are what is becoming a rarity in these parts and that's a native Atlantan.

ETHERIDGE: Right and proud of it.

SHORT: You grew up here.

ETHERIDGE: Yes, sir.

SHORT: Well tell us about your youth.

ETHERIDGE: I had the good fortune of being born here. As a matter of fact, on Peachtree Road, right within two blocks of Lenox Square was my home; it still stands. Went to school at R.L. Hope Grammar School on Piedmont Road, and then North Fulton for a short time, and to Darlington School in Rome, Georgia. From there, I went to Davidson College, and had some military service in between that, and then to Emory Law School. I've always been very proud of the fact that my father, who was born and raised around Auburn, Georgia., in that part of the state, came to Atlanta as a young man to practice law and then became what I consider to be a wonderful trial judge himself. He died when I was 18 or 19 and I've missed him sorely ever since then -- of cancer. But he left a wonderful gift to me, a heritage about which I've been very proud all my life.

SHORT: How did you get interested in politics?

ETHERIDGE: Well, I suspect it's because of him. He loved people, and he liked things that happened, and he liked to tell stories and so forth. He was also very smart in an academic sense as well. So once or twice -- he must have had a political race -- I don't remember precisely. But I remember going with him wherever he would go and he would make speeches and I would hear those. In those days, politics was more congenial, let me say. There was no television and there not much radio. When you spoke, you spoke to a group standing on a podium, speaking to them. I remember Herman Talmadge, of course, in the early days, listening to him. I even heard Gene Talmadge before his death. So I was fascinated with that and the dynamics of politics because it is an inexact science. It's not something that can be described literally in a textbook way. And therefore, it calls on the skills of persuasion, thought, and I think empathy toward those with whom you're speaking. You've got to understand they've got a point of view too. And that always intrigued me.

SHORT: So you ran for the State House of Representatives.

ETHERIDGE: Yes.

SHORT: Tell us about your first race.

ETHERIDGE: Well, the first race that I had was -- I would think -- because the time was right for me, I thought. I had been practicing law for a few years and continued to practice law while I was in politics, of course. But I wanted to get more into the arena and I was loving the practice of law, but about this time, we had an interesting change in our town. The mayor was Bill Hartsfield, who I look back now was a dear friend of mine. Sort of a mentor in a sense. And I would occasionally go around town and make speeches for him and others who were running for political office, like Hoke Smith Jr. And I loved that; that was fun. Mr. Hartsfield came to the time of retirement and he said to me, "You need to get in political life."
I was young and about that time, the new mayor was Ivan Allen and I had the great good fortune of knowing Ivan Allen. He referred some business to our firm, and I had worked with some of his people that he'd referred to us so I had a good relationship with him. He had been having some difficulty with "Muggsy" Smith, who was then in the legislature; I don't remember, nor do I remember nor is it important, what those were. Ivan wanted someone in the legislature who he had a connection with, so he came to me and said, "How about you running? And, you know that's very flattering to a young man. Didn't have any money, but I had a lot of interest. And so, I said, "But how can I afford it? In those days, politics was not very expensive when you look back. There was no expense of television and those things. But still, it took money to put out your written material in the mailings and all. He said, "Well, I'll help you because I'll tell you, everybody that's given money to "Muggsy" Smith that I know about in the last few years. Well that struck me as being an interesting proposition. And I said, "Well, that's fine." I liked Mr. Smith and admired him, though I did think at the time he was getting off my track, politically. He was more conservative, though he was a courageous man and did the right thing as he saw it, and was a good man. So I said, "OK, that's a deal. And then I put together some friends of mine and we went to every single person who had given "Muggsy" money that we could identify, and said to them, "It's time for a change." And so most of them came to our side -- they felt it was time for Muggsy to step aside. It didn't amount to a lot of money, but it was enough to finance my campaign, as they say, for which I was very grateful. In those days, the legislature did not pay much on a per diem basis. It was not something you would do to make a living at, but it was very challenging. And that's the reason I entered the race and happily won a right substantial victory.

SHORT: So you go to the state house. What were your goals?

ETHERIDGE: Well, my goal, I think if I could articulate a single goal, I'm not sure I can, but my goal was to see that Atlanta got at least a reasonable recognition in state affairs. In those days, Atlanta was virtually a non-entity in the state legislature. And it always struck me as being terribly unfair that we had no county unit votes that were relative to other counties. We had three; Echols County had 1,600 people and they had one. So it was just a terrible disparity. I wanted to see that Atlanta got its fair share. I wanted to meet a lot of fascinating people throughout the state that I knew I could meet as a member of the legislature. And I wanted to see if I could do it. It was a two-year term and I knew that practicing law was my first desire and objective -- to be a good lawyer. And I wasn't sure you could do that in the legislature and in an urban law practice. I think you can, or you could then, and so I knew I could get out in two years if I didn't want to continue or to run for reelection, hopefully get reelected.

SHORT: Reapportionment changed that.

ETHERIDGE: Yes.

SHORT: You went from three members of the House of Representatives to, what -- 24, was it?

ETHERIDGE: Yeah, we had 24. During this time when Ivan Allen became the mayor, we were in great tumult in this state in many ways. Not the least was the reapportionment question. Because it was perfectly obvious that it was unconstitutional. It was not right, but the powers that be didn't want it changed. The powers that be never want the status quo changed. And so looming above us was the certainty of constitutional review. And it was coming and everybody knew it was coming. And so people were having to reexamine their whole attitude about it. One of the things I also thought I might like to have a part of was a review of a very unpopular subject, which was the diminution of the number of counties in Georgia. We had -- and still have -- 159 counties in this state. I don't recall the data, but probably 100 of them were insolvent, wholly dependent on urban Georgia. I mean, we are still today finding that the urban Georgia is paying for the maintenance of most of the counties of Georgia. That's not right. And so I had the -- I think audacity, if not the foolishness -- of introducing a resolution to study the question of the consolidation of counties in Georgia. And that doesn't reflect any intelligence on my part because the minute I did that I was in trouble.
I remember I went to Mr. Steve Mitchell, who was Margaret Mitchell's brother and a lawyer, a wonderful fellow, wise old man, and I said, "Steve, I've stepped into a hornet's nest." I didn't realize how controversial it would be just to have a study made of what appears to be a clearly economic benefit for the state of Georgia at large. Of course, we all remember that we have 159 counties in large part because we wanted a county seat within reach of horse and buggy. That was the theme. So the county courthouse, somebody could get to it, could almost walk to it, or come by mule or wagon. No longer, of course, applies. And that's why we had this proliferation of counties. We're a big state. And I said, "Steve, tell me something that would help me get this thing on some rational basis, some practical basis." And he said this, I'll never forget it, bless his heart, he said, "Well, what I want you to do is introduce a bill that will provide for the lifetime pension of every existing county commissioner, city clerk, county clerk, in that county. And then see if we can get a referendum and get it passed." He said, "I bet you can do it." Well, of course, that was in a way ridiculous, but sadly ridiculous. Because the fact is, the only reason for the maintenance of most counties was to support the infrastructure of government in those counties.

SHORT: Getting back to 1962, the year you first ran there was a historic governor's race between the old and the new. And of course, Senator Carl Sanders won that race. That's looked upon as being a real turning point in Georgia. Would you agree?

ETHERIDGE: Oh yes, I don't think there's any doubt about it. Governor Sanders was not the model, as I think back, that we were accustomed to in Georgia. Of course, we were accustomed to Marvin Griffin and accustomed to Herman Talmadge and those are the good old-fashioned, down and dirty political days. And you went to eat the next guys barbecue, don't you know, and you voted for the other fella. And it was not a serious exercise of economics in government; it was not. It was largely driven by dreams of the past, hopes for the future, to maintain the status quo, unawareness of the impact of urban living on people and of transportation.
So big issues existed, for example like paved roads, farm to markets, and so forth. So it involved all kinds of considerations, as for example, the highway department. Who's going to run it? Who's going to get the money derived to taxes? Should it go straight to the highway department or should it go into the general fund, and things of that nature. It just had tremendous implications, none of which had really been faced in prior governorships, except perhaps Ellis Arnall, who did think outside the box and was concerned with the transportation into this state from across the country. Until Ellis Arnall came along, we were terribly punished in the South by tax revenue rules and he fought that and did a lot of good. But except Ellis Arnall, I don't think we had much of a -- it was mostly parochial. Carl Sanders brought to the state, as I remember it, a different perspective in that regard. And that was a very defining moment in our government, I think.

SHORT: Let's talk about that reapportionment. As I said, or we said, we went from three to 24. That was the first time that the Georgia House of Representatives was integrated.

ETHERIDGE: That's right, and that was a time of tremendous anticipation. Nobody quite knew what to expect. Would there be a standoff vis-a-vis black and white? Would there be -- we didn't speak of it then so much, but conservatives vis-a-vis liberal? We didn't use those words much then. Rural, urban. So there was a quiet, but very strong concern about how we, the legislature, and maybe in a larger sense, the state, would deal with this. Because this was very new. If you talked about integration of the house you were talking about -- the last memory of that would have been post-Civil War, occupation by the feds. You know, we were occupied over 10 years by the federal government. And all of those recollections were in a way, vaguely sometimes, emanating in the minds and hearts of members of the legislature. They didn't know what their people would think about it. I mean, should they go to lunch with a black legislator? Should they have a drink? Should they consort with them in any public way?
I'll have to tell you that, for example, because I was chairman of the delegation when it became integrated, I felt strongly that I had the job of introducing members of our legislature to urban life to the extent I could. And I took, at that time, the Speaker of the house with me to meet a captain on the Atlanta police force. And we went down into a black neighborhood; I had an appointment with the captain. And he was a black man; he was the first black captain in the police department we had. And that was the first time the Speaker of the house had ever shaken hands with a black man. I was just flabbergasted. He'd come from long into southwest Georgia, wasn't accustomed to that, and here we were the three of us standing on the corner with him dealing with the captain of a police department in Atlanta who had authority, who had dignity and had power. And that's where we were when we integrated the house at that time. Now, fortunately, this Speaker, like so many others, was a fair-minded man. This was just a new experience -- he learned from it and he found out that he could communicate where he never had the experience before at a level that he had never really anticipated.

SHORT: Who were some of the first black members of the Georgia House of Representatives?

ETHERIDGE: Well, I've mentioned Grace Hamilton, who I always remember so fondly as being the ideal, the quintessential legislator. The principal one, though not the most important in some ways, was Julian Bond. Julian Bond had run in a very good election in the city of Atlanta in his district and he'd won; he was a winner. He was a very articulate young man, handsome, and he came along at the time when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr., and others were becoming increasingly outspoken. And if I could just tell this story about Julian Bond's situation as he became a legislator.
He was asked by WGST, the radio station here, one day what he thought about some black men who had burned their draft card. As you remember, Vietnam was going on and the draft card was something everyone had to carry. And Julian, who I suspect was pretty naive, but he was trying to be as honest as he could be, said, "Well, I have not --" this is almost an exact quote, "I have not burned mine, but I would not object to those on moral grounds who would burn their own. That's kind of his statement. You might have a better memory of that than I do, but that's pretty close to what he said. He didn't burn his own, but he wouldn't have an objection. Well, within an hour that was across the state. That was like a flamethrower that had been sent out across the state. Bond is unpatriotic; Bond is opposed to the war. He was following, of course, what Martin Luther King was saying and what many people were saying; that it was an act of moral courage to burn the card and so forth. And so he immediately became the target all over Georgia of hatred. I mean, it was terrible. Really, one of the first times I'd encountered that in my life. I was fairly young and I had been protected and so forth, but I saw it. I mean, irredeemably lost was Julian Bond in the minds of people who had never seen him, didn't know him, but they'd heard this. And so the legislators picked up on that. This was a week or two before we were sworn in. This was probably in early January of '63 or '64.
And, the first day of any legislative session, all of the members have to stand and take the oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and of this state, and so forth. One member of the house, whom I don't remember, offered a resolution requiring that Julian Bond not be sworn that day, not be allowed to take the oath. Well that presented an enormous challenge for all of us. I'm the chairman of the delegation; I felt strongly that that was wrong. The man had been elected; the resolution would prohibit him from taking the office to which he was elected. We didn't know what kind of violence might arise from that. Because now there were groups that were beginning to get together and decide this was just not going to happen. Fortunately, it didn't happen. I met Julian downstairs at the capitol steps and we went up together in the elevator as a little corduroy to surround him. We didn't know what might happen. He walks in and I had arranged that -- as chairman of the delegation -- that we were going to sit together so that I sat on Julian's right in the house and he sat next to me and on my left was Charlie Brown, who was our oldest member of the legislature then, distinguished old-timer. So there were the two of us on either side. And everyone was asked to stand and take the oath, but "Mr. Julian Bond, you are to remain seated. Tremendous moment, I mean it was a tremendous moment. I didn't know personally what to do. I felt I had to take the oath, I was elected by my people to do it, but somehow there was an onus to that I didn't like. But I did. And Julian remained seated, so everyone but him took the oath of office.
I'll never forget that moment. I saw good people on the house floor take that oath. And it was not an oath against Julian; it was an oath to take office to which they were elected. But still, it was some kind of a supportive resolution, which was like throwing a skunk on the table, and you could never get rid of it. And the day went on, but of course, the theme of that day was patriotism. Julian was un-American, unpatriotic, and everybody in the house-- this is a footnote that's very personal to me and it might be boring, and forgive me for that-- everybody in the house was given a flag, a lapel to put on their suit, as is common today. This is a personal experience I had. Traditionally, after the swearing in, the committee chairmen all went to the Capitol City Club for luncheon. Every committee chairman. And I was fortunate to be Chairman of the Special Judiciary Committee that year. And I was damned if I was going to put that flag on my coat lapel. I just felt like I couldn't do it.
And I tell this story because it was one of the first times in my life that I'd ever felt completely isolated. I was the only person in that room, long table, that didn't have a flag on his lapel. And some of those there, who were my friends-- we had been in the legislature together -- did not speak to me, would not look at me, because of the failure to wear that pin. Now that's very personal and I hold no grievance to anybody for it, but it taught me something about being ignored, or being a nobody, that I don't think I'd ever had in my life before. And it taught me something about the black person who achieves something and then is not acknowledged in any respect, which was a great event that day. So that was a big moment and Julian later on within a matter of weeks, the federal district court heard the case, reversed the legislature, said it was unconstitutional, as it should have. It was reaffirmed in the appellate courts, and took his seat, and became a productive member of the house.

SHORT: What is some of the legislation you worked on while in the house?

ETHERIDGE: Well, I started, I think with the local ones. As I mentioned, maybe earlier, one was fluoridation. The medical profession, the dental profession in particular, had come to me to ask me to introduce a bill to provide fluoridation in the water. I thought that was a good idea. I didn't know anything about fluoridation, but I studied it and I introduced the bill, and all hell broke loose. I'll never forget it; it was considered a communist plot. In those days, that was a big deal. John Birch Society was strong in those days; they sort of, in my view, took positions on things that had nothing to do with the merits. Many very conservative people thought that it was a communist plot. They even said there was an office in Chicago, which was sending down instructions to me and others because of course this would be a way to fluoridate the water and thus kill everybody in the community. That was the ultimate result. And of course, again that was introduced as a local bill, a general application. So we could deal with it in local committees, it was a different way of handling litigation. And it passed ultimately. And I never will forget the Cobb County Jr. Chamber of Commerce, I believe it was, issued a resolution condemning me and others who would support such a bill. That was one, it passed, and of course, fluoridation has been a boon to kids all over this country. It taught me a lot about how strong people can be when they oppose you. They're not very kind, you know.
I think another one that has to do with the change of the world when I was there was something that one easily could forget, but it had to do with the elimination of the Office of Coroner in Fulton County. And that was significant because one of the great common law positions that grew out of old England -- which is highly regarded, which I love common law -- was the Office of Coroner. And the coroner had a good many different official positions and powers, but ultimately it came down in modern days, the days of the legislature that I was in, it came down to being an elected position in the county where there were no qualifications required. We had for many years in Georgia a blind man who was coroner, and he was a good man. And you ran as coroner really old-fashioned politics and so forth. And we had an elected official here. The bill I introduced, which was then passed was highly controversial, again, because it changed the status quo and it required, in the terms of the legislation--I don't know that I have it here -- it required that there be no longer a coroner, but there be a medical examiner and he had to have medical -- had to be an M.D. That was an interesting learning experience for me because every time you introduce a bill that's new, you create a lot of controversy.
I had a bill that probably my most important learning experience that first session was one where I felt that school bus drivers in Georgia ought to have training; ought to have something more than just the ordinary drivers' license. So I introduced a bill, which I thought would fly through the legislature. I found out that it never got out of committee because school bus drivers were sons, and daughters, and nephews, and retarded cousins of people in politics, and that was a good job, and they couldn't have qualified. I just never had thought about that. That's changed, I hope now, and school bus drivers have to have certain qualifications. But in those days, they had to have none, except an ordinary drivers' license. Those were the kind of bills I was doing the first session.
I'll never forget one, I'll finish with this one, where the bill was to prohibit the theft of copper wires along telephone lines. I didn't know anything about that but the telephone company, I think, came to me and said, "We've got to make this a felony because people were stealing copper wires all over Georgia, selling them, and getting a misdemeanor." A perfectly good bill, nothing wrong with that bill, I introduced it. As the vote was coming up for the vote, I noticed throughout the floor of the house was a whispering campaign, something's going on. I didn't know whether it was about my bill or what else. And when it came up for a vote, it was disastrously defeated. I mean, I was almost the only one who voted for it. Well, I was distraught. I was almost crying, I was so embarrassed, and I walked up to the bathroom in the back of the hallway, went in there, just sort of to get myself together. And one of the old deans of the legislature, I don't know whether it was Fred Hand or who it was, but one of the wonderful old-timers who'd been there 30 years and who was a friend, I thought, came in to see me and he put his arm around my shoulders. And he said, "Son, you didn't do very well out there, did you? I said, "No, sir, I'm embarrassed. I don't know whether I should even be in politics." And he said, "Well, let me tell you what you can do. You can go in the house and you can ask on a point of personal privilege, for the Speaker of the house -- and that was George T. Smith at that time -- to allow you to recall that bill tomorrow. You get a chance to do it one time for reconsideration. I didn't know I could do that. I did that and as I was speaking to that bill a minute, I noticed Mr. Hand, or whoever it was, kind of do this. Bill came up; it was passed without objection. And I asked Mr. Hand afterwards, I said, "Look, Mr. Hand, what in the world happened? It wasn't my persuasive talk." "No," he said. "Son just wanted you to learn where the power is. And I did, brother, I did. And it passed, and of course, that was good. So those are some things I did the first year.

SHORT: Let's talk about some legislation that really affected the city of Atlanta and some of the urban areas of the state in that transitional period. For example, you were very active in the passage of the alcohol bill for Atlanta.

ETHERIDGE: Yes, very important bill for Atlanta's future. In Fulton County, as I think would be true all over Georgia at the time, you could not serve a mixed drink. You could only serve wine because the degree and the amount of alcohol was limited. And you could get by with six glasses of wine, but you couldn't have one martini, if you see what I mean. And all the hotels were struggling back then. But to compound that problem, we had a very active solicitor general of the state criminal court who every now and then would want to get a little publicity and he would raid a hotel because they'd served a martini, and he'd get his name in the paper. And it would go away, but no hotel was willing to invest a huge amount of money taking the risk. So they went to Mr. Ivan Allen and he knew this, everybody knew that. He said, "Charlotte and Jacksonville and Birmingham are talking about convention hotels, and you don't have one." That was a new idea. The idea that a hotel could also be a convention center was not known, really, across the country. Now we take it for granted. And they said, "We ain't building a hotel in this city where we're going to take that risk. So, unless you get something passed, we're going to Birmingham." And we didn't take that for granted. These cities were threats to Atlanta's leadership in the Southeast. So I introduced the bill at Ivan Allen's behest I think, I can't remember now the basis for it, but certainly, it was a bill of general bill of local application, which meant that it would apply only to cities of 300,000, I believe, or more. Only Atlanta. And all hell broke loose. Dr. Turner, the preacher of the -- what's the name of his church? Do you remember the name of his church?

SHORT: Druid Hills Baptist.

ETHERIDGE: Druid Hills Baptist Church. He took the lead to destroy that bill, even though it only applied to Fulton County, it was a threat, of course, throughout the state. He assigned a preacher, I think, to virtually every single member of the legislature. He took me on himself as the leader. He'd have prayer meetings for me; I was the author of the bill and I was trying to get it passed. Just a local bill and it was huge; it became -- John Barleycorn bill of the state at that time. We got it into the local committees and got it out. And it read twice in the house, went to the senate; it was read through the senate and came back to the house. It was kicked around, delayed by everybody until the last day of the session that year, either '63 or 64. And you have to read a bill three times to get it enacted into law. It has to be read in each house. And when it's read the third time without objection, then the Speaker will sign the bill and then it has to go to the clerk of the house and she has to -- that was Ms. Hirsch. What was her first name?

SHORT: Janette.

ETHERIDGE: Janette. Wonderful person. Ms. Janette Hirsch would have to authenticate it and then the governor had to sign it. So we're down to the last day of the legislature, which is the most important day of any legislature because that's when extra things happen to bills. And I got the Speaker to promise-- I don't want to overstate that, Im sure others did too, but I was interested in that bill, that was my bill -- to promise to call the bill up at three oclock that afternoon. Usually we go 'til midnight and that day, and he did at some risk to himself because he could have left it off the calendar.
Then we had to deal with a single legislator who said and told me that he was devoting his career to killing this bill. And of course, he knew if he did kill it, he could take credit for it in every Baptist church in Georgia, I suppose. And that was his thing. Every morning he would check to see where the bill was. Bob Cohn was a reporter for the Augusta paper and he was a good one. And I didn't want to make him complicit in this conspiracy, but I asked him if he would interview this man before Tom Watson's statue downtown. Tom Watson was from around Madison, Georgia, and I knew he couldn't resist it, that is this legislator. And so he did that. Bob took him down, interviewed him before the statue. At that very moment, this is now three oclock, the bill was called on the house floor. It was read routinely, there were no objections and the Speaker -- oh yes, that man's name was Howard Tamplin-- exactly right-- I remember the name. Anyway, Mr. Tamplin and Bob Cohn were down there--Bob can tell this story too, I hope he will sometime-- and when he came back up prepared to object to the bill whenever it came up, and he was going to sit there all day long, they told him, "Well, Mr. Tamplin, that bill's already been passed." And the moment it was signed by the Speaker, I took it by hand to Ms. Hirsch in the Clerk's Office. She signed the authentication; she was prepared to do that. I took it down to the office of Carl Sanders, might have handed it to you first, I'm not sure. But he was prepared for it. He signed the bill and we had in the night's Journal, the Atlanta Journal, we had the story that the bill had been passed.
I suspect within no more than three to six months we had a contract for the first convention hotel in Atlanta, and it was down around where the Marriott hotel is now. A great triumph for Ivan Allen because then and at that moment we could say to anybody who wanted to build a hotel in town that we've got a convention facility that can serve mixed drinks. And in sort of a way, that's the beginning of our convention city, combined with the leadership we had from Ivan Allen and others and the airport and so forth. But that was an ironic twist to what could have been a catastrophe for us.

SHORT: The idea of MARTA was alive when you were in the legislature.

ETHERIDGE: Oh, boy was it. MARTA was an idea that had to come, but it was revolutionary. And the reason it was revolutionary is that to get MARTA done you had to create an authority and an authority had to encompass more than one county. And as far as I know, we had no authorities in Georgia. I might be wrong, but I think that was the first one. The authority had to include anywhere MARTA was going to be and we had -- Jamie Mackey was strong in that. There were a group of people, good people, who worked hard on putting it together and getting the concept right. There was really no model across the country. I remember I was asked to kind of look into the model that we could find and the New York Port Authority was about the best thing we could find at that time. San Francisco had not yet developed; Toronto was beginning to start metropolitan rapid transit authorities. But Atlanta had to include five counties to work, we thought, Cobb, Gwinnett, Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton. And nobody ever thought about that before.
Well, we got through all those hurdles. We'd meet at night, night after night after night, trying to work out something. And it was opposed by the right wing, big deal. They thought again, that was a consolidation of government. And then when it really hit the fan was one night when somebody said, "What are you going to do about policing MARTA? How are you going to do that? You're going to have City of Atlanta policemen get on the car and get off when it gets to DeKalb County and DeKalb county policemen. What are you going to do about that? And I'll never forget that night because it really wasn't something we had on the table to consider at the beginning. That's just not something that was fundamental to the thought processes we were trying to use to get there. Somebody said, "Well, we've got to create a police force." Wow. We heard from John Birch, we heard from everybody in the country that had to do with conservative issues. This was -- now you're talking about real communism now. Oh, my, I almost didn't want to go to work the next day because we had to create a MARTA police department, and of course, that was necessary. But in those days, it wasn't just a little thing; this was important stuff in those days and thank goodness MARTA was created. We lost three referendums after the bill was passed and thanks to my former law partner, Stell Huie, who took over that responsibility when -- I was out of the legislature then -- but Stell was the principal spokesman in this community for the passage of the referendum.

SHORT: Don't you think that the failure of those three counties actually has hurt the system?

ETHERIDGE: There's no question about it. Cobb County had no business voting it down. John Birch society and others were opposed to it. They didn't come in, as you know. They profited mightily by the, I think, by the Atlanta community building the main station. You don't talk much about fairness but it's certainly not fair. And they have their own MARTA transit system, which is a good one I think, but it ought to have been integrated. But sometimes you do the best you can.

SHORT: And then you left the legislature.

ETHERIDGE: Yes, I was president of the Atlanta Bar Association in 1965 or '66, and we were a smaller town then, not big. The Bar Association wasn't huge in those days. We sort of had a custom that the Bar Association, where there was a vacancy, would try to seek out someone who would run. It was not really a highly political operation. Certainly not Republican or Democrat, it was a non-political office, really. I was very moved when I was asked if I would consider taking the post being vacated by Judge Virlyn Moore. Judge Virlyn S. Moore (Virlyn B. Moore) is now 90 years old, wonderful man, but he was not going to reoffer for election. And so I was flattered. I'd had now several years in the legislature and that was a tough grind to do that plus practicing law. And I suppose I'll have to say I had dreamed someday of being in my father's position. And just fairly young, I think I was 47 at that time -- I consider that young now. So I ran, I had opposition, but won in a substantial vote. And then Judge Moore retired early and I took his place, appointed by Carl Sanders to take my first term on the court.

SHORT: Well, tell us about your career as a judge. What makes a good judge?

ETHERIDGE: Well, I'm not sure. That's always a very important question and it's one that anybody who wants to go on the bench must consider carefully, else his life will not be a happy life. Many judges are not happy in their careers. I think what makes a good judge, in a sense, in his judicial work, is to be able to take two dissonant positions and in some way or another, deal with those without emotionally destroying oneself. And without trying to split the difference. That's not justice in some cases, that's unjust I think. So to be able to hold two discordant views, consider them, do the best you can considering the statutes and so forth. Now, the trial judge has a challenge that appellate judges don't have much. Appellate judges pretty much look at the statutes, and look at the rule, and contrast it to the ruling of the lower court, and decide that. A trial judge spends more time than not determining questions of character, questions of judgment -- do I probate this person, do I revoke his probation? Do I believe this witness; do I accept the other witness's position, however weak it might be because that's the just result? There are so many differences between the life and work of a trial judge and an appellate judge that you could write books about it. Because in the long reach of things, the daily work of a trial judge is to do right. He's got to use discretion, which means there's got to be some basis for it; it just can't be flipping a coin. There's got to be a basis for it, and that basis can reach into, if you could, the very heart of a person. And that's what great judges do, I think. Judge Virlyn Moore, who I succeeded, was that kind of man. Rarely reversed by the appellate court, but a lot of good humor, a lot of sense of humanity about what he did. I think that's what makes a good judge.

SHORT: Do you think that judges should be subjected to the political process? You mentioned you were elected. Is that good?

ETHERIDGE: In a perfect world, I don't think it is. In a perfect world, judges ought to be selected by those who know them best, who know of their use of discretion, to know of their academic success and their integrity and their intellect. That's the perfect world. I have to say I don't believe in the notion of just picking somebody out of the crowd and telling to be a judge. And that's what happens more and more today because people don't know judges anymore. Back when my father was on the bench and when I came on the bench, I think most people would know at least the names of the judges; they would know who they are. Now you don't have that privilege anymore. So you can't make a judgment based on more than maybe celebrity or maybe just the name. We see an example every now and then of people elected just because their name's the first on the ballot. That's not the kind of judge I would like to have. So I do think in the perfect world -- but on the other hand, it's not a perfect world, so we've got to do the best we can to try to identify the best person and then support them. I mean support them, give them money, help them run a campaign. Get out there and hustle, be a party to it. Right now, most people are disengaged from politics. They don't take responsibility for that. They can raise hell, but they don't do much about going out helping candidates.

SHORT: Right.

ETHERIDGE: And that's a loss for us in this society, I think.

SHORT: Let's talk for a minute about the Georgia judicial system. Are we keeping up with the times?

ETHERIDGE: No, I don't think we are. This is a harsh judgment on my part, forgive me for that. I'm not keeping up as well as I should with the judicial system. But I love the judiciary and I love the judicial system. I think it's slow, it's tough, it's not easy to keep up with the times, for example. Just to give you an example, in criminal affairs, this is an immediate working day of a court. In criminal affairs, in urban areas, for example, people are bused into the courthouse by school bus loads, lined up, come up, wait all day, enter a plea, pile back in the buses and back to the jails. That should be done somewhere in the jailhouse. And we can do it with television and we don't have to bring people back and forth and the indignity of all that, first of all. The danger of all that, secondly of all. The inefficiency of that could be resolved largely by the use of telecommunications.
Now, in sentencing, that's a little different, I think, because we don't do a good job in this state and in most states in determining who's going to be sentenced and what their story is. In the federal courts, you have a pretty rigid requirement that you have a pre-sentence report for everybody. Probation department looks at it and you get a pre-sentence report. In most state courts around the country, the judge doesn't get the benefit of that at all. The judge just gets the benefit of the solicitor's recommendation and maybe the public defender's plea, but very little information about the psychological component of the defendant or the economic situation of the defendant. And so the judge is given very few options about what to do, and that's not right.
In my view, there's more injustice in the name of due process than there is justice. We keep people sitting in jails for weeks and months, never having a chance to see a lawyer. That shouldn't happen. It's not a perfect world and we'd have to do the best we can, but at least we ought to recognize that people who are arrested are, we believe, presumed at least to be innocent. So yes, I think in the criminal justice system there's a lot that can be done. Unfortunately, it's expensive, but there's a lot that can be done. In the civil cases, we have come a long way since I was first on the bench in the area of resolving civil disputes. We might want to talk about that later, but I've spent some years now in the field of arbitration and mediation.

SHORT: I do want to talk about that. But before we do, do you recall any major trials over which you presided? Would you share some of those with us?

ETHERIDGE: Yes. It's hard to bring back particular ones, but we always try cases that -- I remember two, just quickly. One was in the development of the MARTA system in Georgia, where the MARTA trains were going up and down -- the tunnels were being built up and down Peachtree. I remember there was a family who owned a little store just across the street from the Carnegie Library downtown. And they'd been, I think, a second-generation store. I don't remember whether they were selling hats or books or what, but it was their business. MARTA wanted to condemn the property along that way, and they did which would in effect destroy their property and take it. And I remember the case went to trial and I tried it. It was to be a six-week trial and you always hope to avoid those kind of long cases, but this was a complicated case of value of land and so forth. And that was a trial that illustrated what I thought in a very acute way the immensity of the power of government over the individual. And they were happy, they had their land, they had their store, they had their livelihood, they had their second, third generation. And yet, all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes the government with this huge train coming down the tract that they call their land. Well, it was a good trial and everybody did a good job and tried it the best they could. And it did come out, I thought, as best it could. The jury gave a decent value to the land. And these people were paid for that. I thought that was a good way to get rid of a case where the public had to be served. We had to have a rapid transit line.
Another case I remember quite well was one where I was serving as senior judge and it was called the Anneewakee Case. In that case, there was a camp for children, wayward children, many of them of families of middle class, upper class people, wealthy people. And these kids were on drugs, largely, bad conduct, and they were subjected to all sorts of misconduct, mostly sexual misconduct. And one lawyer, essentially took over the claims of all of these people, and there was more than 100, I guess. And it was just too complex a case to ask any sitting judge to handle because it would take forever and it would have been maybe 20 or 30 different cases. And so I was asked to take on those cases and did. And we took maybe a year or two to deal with all the preliminary motions. Many of the defendants were doctors or psychiatrists and others and lots of insurance companies involved; lots of plaintiffs, a lot at stake. At the end, I was able to segregate about ten young men as the plaintiffs against a few of the defendants and then we were going to try the other cases incrementally as we went along. My hope had been and was that we could get jury verdict on the first group of ten and that would probably establish damages and so forth.
But in those days, it got a lot of press attention, a lot of television coverage. It had appeal for some time to the wrong interest of the public. And we set up a separate courtroom -- we built a courtroom for that trial. And it was tried over a period of, I think, ten weeks. In that case, we for the first time I believe in Fulton County at least, television was permitted to be in the courtroom. And we had the television camera in the very back. And no one knew quite what to expect of that. Great opposition to that. Still great concern about television in courtrooms. But we did some pretty good groundwork. We had some really good cooperation from the television stations around. We had, I think, two cameras, which were, what do you call them? They were corporate cameras shared by all the stations. And outside the courtroom was a room in which there were monitors, and so forth. So it was pretty unintrusive. And yet there was coverage each night from the trial. I don't think anybody even thought about it after we got started the first day or two. The fear you have is that people will showboat in trials, but I don't think that happens in most cases because you concentrate on the trial, not on that camera.
And so that was an important, and a very sad case for me because I saw an awful lot of youngsters who had been hurt and some good people as defendants who'd gotten into a situation that's inevitable in the end. The Dr. Poetter was the main defendant; he ran it. He was a former probation officer and so forth and he was convicted both -- in a criminal sense, he'd been in jail -- and also in a civil sense. So those were two cases that I thought very interesting and required a lot of legal attention.

SHORT: After what, 11 years, you left the bench.

ETHERIDGE: I did.

SHORT: Why?

ETHERIDGE: Well, I'd just gotten reelected and I'd been there for 11 years. I realized that I really wasn't thrilled by the work I was doing. I love the law and I love lawyers and I love civil cases, but I found out that I didn't like domestic relations work. It just bothers me. And I wasn't as good at it as I ought to be. I found myself getting too uptight to hear people destroying each other. And we have jury cases for divorce work in this state, not much anymore, but that was big in those days. And I just was broken-hearted with all the criminal work I was doing. In those days, still to some extent now, people thought "real justice" took place when you were harsh. I'll never forget one day a wonderful deputy sheriff was in my courtroom and that particular day I had a series of sentences I had to impose, all of which compelled me to sentence these folks to the penitentiary, to prison, because they had prior offenses, and so forth. And I knew exactly that that would not help this community. They would come out just as bad as they were when they went in; they would cost the community a fortune; their families would be without support. There was no gain in most of those cases. And I suppose in total I just found out that that was not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life. So I resigned, I was gratified by people's appreciation of the work that had been done, but I was more excited about what I thought I could be doing in the world of teaching and so forth. So I did.

SHORT: You went to Emory.

ETHERIDGE: No, I first left and went up to the University of South Carolina, where Ellis MacDougall, who you remember quite well -- Ellis McDougall was helping put together a criminal justice school in the University of South Carolina. This was a school to grant degrees to those people who want to be in the criminal justice field without being lawyers. And I admired Ellis very greatly; I thought he was a fine head of Board of Corrections in Georgia when he was here. He talked me into coming up there and I did. And I spent four years there sort of commuting back and forth to Atlanta. And at that time, I was chairman for one and a half of those years of what we called the National Conference of State Trial Judges, which I had to go all over the country to kind of do the work. So it fit in at a good time and I loved it. I taught people who were in the criminal justice field. Some who wanted to become lawyers, others who wanted to become sheriffs, deputies -- good people -- police officers. And it was a great experience. And then I went to Harvard for a year because I was interested in trying to find out how we could encourage judges to assist in settling cases. That was a fine year; I was a visiting scholar there for a year, then came back to Emory to teach.

SHORT: How long did you teach at Emory?

ETHERIDGE: I taught there about nine years, 10 years I think. That was a good experience; I enjoyed it. I was associate dean for five of those years, which gave me a great opportunity to look at academe in its special kind of way. That was a good experience too. And then I left because I wanted to go into mediation full-time, which I'd been doing part-time. And so I did that and I set up an office in the Southeast called JAMS, Judicial Administration and Mediation Services. And that was a company in California that I had been asked to join, which I did for the sake of opening an office here in Atlanta and did that for about six years. And was gratified by that, lot of success, I thought. We had a good panel of former judges who were mediators. And I hope we did some good by training people and lawyers to accept mediation as a viable and useful alternative to litigation.

SHORT: It seems that's been a great asset to the judicial system.

ETHERIDGE: Well it has. And you can't think of a good judicial system today -- or I would put it further -- a good lawyer today who doesn't understand the prospects and possibility of mediation. In the early days that was considered sort of a Mickey Mouse operation; judges didn't mediate things like that. Now we know that the judicial system simply cannot handle the litigation that's coming before it.

SHORT: How does mediation work?

ETHERIDGE: Mediation is essentially consensual, that is both sides agree to mediate. You don't compel somebody to mediate. And the function of a good mediator is to get parties to the table. And when they get to the table, to help them see several things: one, the risk of litigation, which is sort of the down and dirty dead end of failed mediation. "Okay, you don't want to mediate; we'll go to the courthouse. We'll see you down there about five years from now when you get your case tried." And $100,000. And destroyed relationships with everybody, because most litigation, as you know, is between people who know each other, business people suing other business.
So the function of a mediator is to get parties to sit at the table, usually to tell their story. Why are you mad at me? Why are we litigating? Why did this contract not work? Why, Mr. Surgeon, did you not sew me up properly? And let each side tell that story. And its absolutely amazing, I mean absolutely amazing, how many cases you can resolve when you allow that to happen. Everybody's got a story. Sometimes they've imagined things, and sometimes they've dreamed it up maliciously, but more often than not, they tell it the way they see it -- they do. I might disagree with you, you might be a damn fool, but at least that's what you think. You know what I mean? And if you'll tell me what you think, then I can tell you, "Well, wait a minute, this is not the way I saw it. I saw you doing something else." So the mediation process, and it is a process, requires the meditator to be, of course, both neutral and strong enough to have the parties understand that they're going off on the wrong track. That's not persuasive. We all have lots of stories about mediations, which succeed.
You also bring into a mediation other parties -- I mean not other parties, but other people, expert witnesses. And if you have a mediation, which requires an expert witness who ultimately is going to be in the trial, then for the first time, the other side will hear that expert and will say, "Wait a minute, there's something to that," you know what I mean? I've had that happen many times. The expert who might have studied the subject for a long time will sit across and look at the other one and, "This is what I've found, this is what happened." If there's a malfunction of a piece of machinery, they can talk about that; therefore, you have a basis on which now to settle the case. So the mediator will go between the parties and say, "Bob, what it'll take to settle this case? And of course, there's always going to be the kabuki dance. People will always negotiate and you are helping them negotiate. Then they have made a resolution; and it is their settlement, and that's what's very important. It's not a jury's decision, it's not a judge's decision, it's not an arbiter, it's their decision. And all the data suggests that mediated settlements will endure.

SHORT: They're binding.

ETHERIDGE: They're binding. They're a contract and they're binding. And a mediated settlement will almost always endure because both parties have made a decision that that's in their best interest.

SHORT: You remember some of your most interesting cases?

ETHERIDGE: Oh sure.

SHORT: Would you share some of them with us?

ETHERIDGE: Well, they range from real big ones to the little bitty dog barking cases. And I'll maybe start with that. Let me tell you one of the first we had in the Neighborhood Justice Center in Atlanta, which still exists. It's good; it does wonderful work. I had the privilege in 1977 of founding it. About that I mean Jimmy Carter had just been elected president and the Attorney General's Office of the United States put aside some money to try to develop what we call Neighborhood Justice Centers, and Atlanta was granted some funds to do that and we put together the center. One of the first cases we had was mediated by a young and very capable woman, who graduated I think from Smith College, or from Wellesley, or some school like that. And she's the mediator and in comes these two couples or these two families, I think, families, who lived in the same house. It was a shotgun house. You know what a shotgun house is? You've got a hall in the middle. And in the old days that was good for circulation and separation and there were kids living on both sides. And the two families were fighting all the time. They were kicking each other's dogs, throwing rocks, doing all kind of bad things.
And here comes this very highly educated young woman, sophisticated, white woman. And she sees a world she had never seen before. And she's got this dispute. Now, they had been taking out peace warrants against each other, you know what a peace warrant is? And they'd go get the sheriff to arrest them and hold them in jail for a few days and the judge would hear the case and throw it out. It was chaos. They worked on that thing a couple of days and finally they agreed that if either side would stay off the property of the side of the other, they could live in peace. And if they didn't, they could knock the hell out of the other one. This was language they used, except they didn't use the word hell. And everybody knew that that was the rule if you violated the line. So the young mediator said to this family, "Now you go out, I'm going to tell you what you've got to do. You've go out and buy a gallon of white paint. And you've got to go out and get some paintbrushes. And the two of you are going to decide on a straight-line right through that house, across the front yard, up to the sidewalk. And that's what they did. Very solemn agreement, they were very solemn like they were in a courtroom, virtually. That was the law; they made the law in that case. As far as we know, we checked out 90 days after that, it was working. And that's a great one.
It's hard to think of the larger ones because they do get very complex, but you know, I remember one that was very, very large where people who had been running steel mills had been burning the raw stuff in chimneys and the chimneys would be filled up with this black soot. The federal pollution rules had just been passed. What year was this? This was in the early 70s maybe. And they were selling this soot to a guy down here in central Georgia, a truckload of it. And he would pour a lot of fertilizer in the soot. What is it that makes grass grow green? Do you remember? Some kind of fertilizer, cheap, and he'd pour it in this soot and sell it to farmers. And he had enough of that stuff in it to make the weeds come out good, and then then they'd die off, but it was a fraud.
The steel mills, five of them, were selling this stuff to him and he was dumping it down here. They were getting rid of that, he was selling to these poor farmers and I was asked to mediate a dispute between a little black community that was all around the dumpsite, down somewhere west or east of Macon, Georgia, somewhere, I've forgotten now where it was. And they were represented by good lawyers, this black community, good people. But children were getting sick and there was a real question about why they were getting sick. And I think pretty clearly came because of all the chemicals growing out of that stuff. It would leach out into the creeks around there. Well, they tried and tried and tried to litigate it. It would have taken years and years to litigate. The five steel mills were all joined together as co-plaintiffs, I mean co-defendants and the community of black folks were represented by a very good -- could have been a class action, but it wasn't a class action, it was a lawsuit. It would have been tried in a rural county; it would have bankrupted the county to try that case because it would have taken months and months to try. So we mediated that and I was asked to mediate it.
We went into a courthouse that was not being used in that area, an old courthouse. The five presidents of the steel mills were required to be there because we wanted people who could make a decision right then, no surrogates. And their space was the grand jury room in that courthouse and the people in the community were in the courthouse on the courthouse floor. And so we met together and both sides talked about their views and their positions and the lawyers were of course taking notes. Community representatives spoke, and the presidents of the mills spoke, and their surrogates spoke. It was a good two, three, four days of communication back and forth at which the presidents of the steel mills began to recognize these were not just grieved people, some of these were smart people, fair-minded people who had a problem, they had health problems. The long and short is after a good while we finally reached an agreement and it included a number of things, I've forgotten all of which.
One was financial, a good many thousands of dollars or more than that to the community. The other was an establishment of an infirmary, a clinic, in that neighborhood with a full-time nurse who for six months, I believe, was going to be available and did examine all the children in that community, give them tests, lung tests, breathing tests, everything they could think of -- free, paid for by the steel mills. And a few other things, I've forgotten the details, but there were a few other things about which this community could agree. There were one or two houses, I recall which were so affected by it that they were condemned by the county and the steel mills paid for those houses, they were small little houses, but they were paid for. So we reached a glorious agreement and the parties were happy. The defendants, the steel mills, came out they thought ahead; they would have paid for years and years of litigation plus no matter what the jury would have done. The community felt they were respected, and by the way, the medical clinic had a board of which the chairman was one of the members of the community. So they had some governance over the thing. Well that was one and that grew out of an ability to -- a willingness of these people to form some consensus around which they could reach an agreement.

SHORT: That would not have happened at a trail.

ETHERIDGE: No, no. No, a trial would have imposed something on it. And it could have been zero for the community, it could have been mega millions of dollars, you see, for the other side. This was a good result, I thought.

SHORT: You mediated a very famous case that involved the beginning of the Georgia lottery.

ETHERIDGE: Yes, sir.

SHORT: Tell us about that.

ETHERIDGE: Well, that was an interesting case. Zell Miller was the governor, I believe. I was a senior judge at that time; this was after I'd retired. It was promising to be a very difficult situation, which it might have called into play the calling of a special session of the legislature. As I remember, the money had already been appropriated. It was complicated in many ways and it certainly didn't lend itself to traditional litigation because there were too many legal issues, too many political issues. It was going to be a mess. It would have taken way too long. These things can last for years. So I was asked to do it as a private mediator; I was not acting as a state person, I was private, and I charged on a per diem basis for it. And everyone agreed at the outset that I had judicial authority to do what I needed to do, like calling a witness in and that sort of thing, but that everybody would engage in a mediated settlement. And that the settlement, if we reached it, would become the law. So we did that, we had a court reporter there. We had a very -- I tried to conduct it as informally as I could under the circumstances, but we still had each side. I tried to run a pretty tight ship there because politics always endangered us. And we did, we reached a settlement, it became the law.

SHORT: And the lottery opened.

ETHERIDGE: And the lottery opened and we did it, I think, in maybe a week or two weeks, we finished it up.

SHORT: Well, you've certainly had a wonderful career. If you had all of it to do over again, would you do anything differently?

ETHERIDGE: I suppose we all look back because none of us is as smart as we think we are. We all look back and say, "Well, gosh, I should have done this or this," but in the long reach, I'm now 83 years old. I've had the great, great, great good fortune of having a wonderful wife who's 82. We have three children and seven grandchildren; all of them are doing well, I'm talking real well. Several of the grandchildren are graduated from college now; they're on their way. I still have my youngest is 12 years old and she's a wonderful child. We've travelled; I've travelled a great deal. In teaching, I taught in South Africa for a year. I've been there several times. I've lived in Europe for a year in Hamburg, Germany. I've been in the military twice. I was in the Korean War when I was a little lieutenant there and I was in the last two months of World War II, I was in the Pacific. So I've had so many good things happen to me that I can't think of anything I would not do that I've done. I'm sure there are a lot of things I should have done that I didn't do, but with good health, good friends, good luck, and a good heritage from my father and mother, anything I said I'd want to do differently, Id sound like I'm complaining and I don't want to complain.

SHORT: What was your proudest moment?

ETHERIDGE: Well, no moment was more important to me in my life than when my wife said she would marry me.

SHORT: We all say that.

ETHERIDGE: We all say that. Gosh, I don't know, I dont know. So many things have happened to me that are good and I'm really proud of. And probably no right to be, but I am.

SHORT: Your biggest disappointment.

ETHERIDGE: My biggest disappointment. Well, in a funny sense -- not a funny sense -- in a strange sense, I remember when I was 17 years old, like so many people at that age, I would have almost given my life to go into combat. I enlisted at 17, hoping and thinking I could get in before the war was over, and I was in the Pacific for two months, but I never saw anything like combat. And that sounds crazy today, it sounds crazy. But I remember almost getting to be frantic not to get in the military and not to be a combat soldier. That's not really sensible, but as I look back in my life, I wish I could have said to myself that I had been a good soldier somewhere, or sailor, whatever it was.

SHORT: Finally, how would you like to be remembered?

ETHERIDGE: I'd like to be remembered as a good father. A fellow that was good, not only just to his children, but for his children. And left them the kind of heritage I think my father left me, which was the memory of someone with integrity and a certain kindness who had failings and faults like any other human being, but who was still nonetheless was a good example for the future for their children. I guess that's how I'd like to be remembered. And one who loved the law and loved being in the law business.

SHORT: I'm sure, Jack, that you have many more memories. Can you think of any you'd like to share with us before we end our conversation?

ETHERIDGE: Yeah, we all do, and forgive me for going on. But I mentioned that I'd lived in Europe, Hamburg for a year. When I finished college, I was at Davidson College, this is after WWII, there were masses of people in displaced persons camps who were trying to leave that situation and go to the United States or Canada or Australia or somewhere. They were displaced persons for Eastern Europe mostly, Lithuania, Latvia, etc. I was asked to go over there as what they call a displaced persons resettlement officer -- I'd just finished college. And the function was to identify people in displaced persons camps who'd be eligible to come to this country because they couldn't return wherever they came from. I had been in the military a brief time, this is before I was called back for the Korean War, and I thought I knew something. But I didn't know anything when I got over there until I met the kind of heroic people that you see who're living in adversity. I saw people in displaced persons camps who had been heroic; they had fought the communists, Russians came in after the war, or they'd fought the Nazis during the war. They had endured life that I could never have imagined and yet were generous and kind and good people. And I suspect a lot of people reached that kind of understanding long before I had. But I had not realized how courageous and brave you could be and how remarkable you could be, having endured what many of those people had endured. So that's a memory that I have that I almost think of everyday and I'm grateful for that memory.

SHORT: Jack, on behalf of the Richard Russell Library at the University of Georgia and Young Harris College, I would like to thank you for being our guest.

ETHERIDGE: Well, youre very kind and patient. I appreciate the chance, Bob, to see you again. Its been wonderful. Thank you.