The Fourth has been with me all along

May the Fourth be with you.  With apologies to Obi-Wan Kenobi, I have never been much of a Star Wars fan. 

I am more of a Stars and Stripes guy.

On this day, give me fireworks at the lake and hot dogs on the Big Green Egg in the back yard. Give me neighborhood parades and flags on porches and street corners. Give me people who hold their hands over their hearts when the national anthem is played.

July 4 is a celebration of our nation’s freedoms and independence. Technically, it is not the midpoint of summer, the apex between the joy of spring fever and the dog days of September. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, summer’s midstride is considered August 7, which is halfway between the summer solstice and autumn equinox.

But find an eighth-grader and they are probably already holding up one of those doom-and-gloom signs that reads “The End (Of Summer Vacation) is Near.’’ The first day of school for the Bibb County School District is approaching fast (August 5), and the local private schools and state colleges will be in lockstep soon after that.

 In that sense, it really is halftime. “Back To School” displays are making their way to the endcaps in store aisles. (If you listen carefully, you can hear the soft sobs of teachers).

Over the years, my Fourth of July travelogue has taken me across Macon’s patriotic landscape. 

For many years, my family and I had a standing invitation to “Jack’s Bash” every Independence Day. It was hosted by the late Jack Caldwell, who owned a beautiful stretch of property he called “Jack’s Beach,” where the river tumbled over the shoals on the Ocmulgee below the bridge at Dame’s Ferry. 

For more than 40 years, he invited a wide circle of friends for an afternoon at his “beach” house. He bought the river property in 1976. Appropriately enough, that was the same year America was celebrating its bicentennial. 

At the gathering on the Fourth, he would dress up as Uncle Sam, and everybody got a “Jack’s Bash” T-shirt. I miss those days.

As much as I enjoyed Jack’s friendship, Sam Lamback Jr. wins the prize as my favorite Uncle Sam. And he didn’t even have to change his name.

A retired Army chaplain and Methodist minister, he would crawl inside an 8-foot costume, with 18-inch stilts. His red striped pants made him look like a giant peppermint stick. He had to stoop through doorways and be aware of low-hanging chandeliers.

He played songs on his banjo with All-America themes. He tossed in a few patriotic stories and struck a modern-day analogy about the Promised Land in a sermon from the book Hebrews.  

I once found a star-spangled stump of an old china-berry tree in the front yard of a house on Houston Road. It was almost 6 feet tall with an 82-inch waist. It was blue at the trunk, white across its midsection and red at the top with the letters “USA” etched in the bark.

It belonged to Jack and Sue Mosley, a patriotic couple who had it cut down after growing weary of raking all those leaves and berries. They never needed a calendar to know when it was the Fourth of July. People would pull over and wander down into the yard to look at it.

Oh, say can you tree?

While writing a story in this week’s The Melody about the replica of the Statue of Liberty in the small town of McRae, I was reminded of the late Bill Tomey, of Macon. 

As a child in the 1930s, he had a unique address. He lived on Bedloe’s Island, a 12-acre island that had been used in 1811 as a fortress to protect New York Harbor and was later renamed Liberty Island. 

The Statue of Liberty was in his backyard, a few yards from his front door.  He could look out his bedroom window and see Lady Liberty.  

Because Tomey’s father was the commanding officer of the First Division of Military Police at Fort Wood, a park superintendent once allowed the young Tomey and his aunt to climb a ladder inside the arm and up into the torch. That part of the statue had been closed since July 1916 after the famous “Black Tom Explosion” during World War I. The explosion at a nearby wharf in New Jersey did structural damage to the statue, tearing bolts from the arm. 

A few of my Fourth of Julys have been at the center of some not-so-great memories. In 1994, I was assigned to cover the National Sports Festival, a prelude to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. On July 4, the day before I was supposed to fly back to Atlanta, I looked out my hotel window and saw the famous Gateway Arch on the banks of the Mississippi, the most storied river in America. The Beach Boys were playing in concert. It truly was an American moment.

But my plane ride home the next day was one of the most terrifying flights of my life. We slammed headlong into a tropical storm named Alberto. I thought we were going to crash on our approach to the airport in Atlanta.

It was raining so hard on my drive back to Macon I could not see the road. The storm dumped 13 inches of rain, and what became known as the “Great Flood of ‘94” would become the worst national disaster in state history. 

The flooding in Middle and South Georgia killed 34 people, forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes and caused an estimated $1 billion in property damage. 

 The Ocmulgee River surged to an estimated 35 feet, nearly twice its normal flood stage, and the Macon Water Authority’s treatment plant – less than a mile and a half from our home at the time in Riverside Park – was severely crippled, forcing the operations to shut down and leaving parts of the city without water for 19 days.

My other somewhat “forgettable’’ Fourth came in 1978 and also involved an airline flight home. My father, brother and I returned from a trip to Europe on July 4, 1978. I graduated from the University of Georgia in May, and the three-week trip was a graduation present from my parents.

The following day, I traveled from Atlanta to start my new life in Macon. I had been hired to work at the newspaper, and I had five days to find an apartment. I don’t know whether it was the excitement or fatigue and jet lag, but I pulled into town on the Wednesday morning of July 5 and promptly had a wreck. I made a left turn in front of a car on Vineville Avenue and got smacked above the front tire on the passenger side. It spent the entire day at a garage and body shop on the south side of town.

But there’s something you never really think about in those moments. That it’s all part of a divine plan.

The wreck happened right in front of Vineville United Methodist, which became an important part of my life. My middle son was married there. Two of my grandchildren were baptized there. My mother’s funeral was held there last November. And, later this month, I will join a group of 20 church members on a mission trip to Costa Rica.

I guess the Fourth has been with me.