Erie and Ron

My father has made a mark on his home at the foot of the Blue Ridge in Ararat. Every time I am out at a festival selling books, I have someone who had him in school come up and wish him well or ask about him or tell me some story related to him.

            Christa McAuliffe the teacher who died in the space shuttle accident in 1986 once said “I touch the future. I teach.” I know that my father has done that too. So, the man who tells the pretty girls his name is Erie-sistible deserves a few comments from his only son.

            My father Erie Meredith Perry turned 87 on December 19 and celebrated his 61st wedding anniversary to my mother Betty Jane Hobbs Perry of Augusta, Georgia, on December 21.

            Erie was born in 1931 in Chattanooga, Tennessee the son of Erie Perry from Sherwood, Franklin County, Tennessee, and Idell Bates Perry of Birmingham, Jefferson County, Alabama. His paternal grandfather, Meredith Perry, lived and worked in Sherwood, Tennessee, along with his “part Cherokee” wife, Alice Catchings, who I knew as “Old Mama.”

            Last year, my father and I both did DNA tests, and after being told his and my entire life that we were part Cherokee, we came back with zero Native-American in our makeup. When I told my father this, he pondered it a minute, looked at me, and said, “Grandma lied!”

Meredith Perry’s ancestors lived in the Franklin County area since the early 1800s. The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, is on what was once Perry land. During the War Between the States, the Perry family had fought in the Seventeenth Tennessee Infantry fighting in the Army of Tennessee until the fall of 1863 and then with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in last two years of the war joining with the Twenty-Third Tennessee and surrendering at Appomattox.

Idell Bates Perry. Grandma or “Ima” as I called her was from Alabama, and she was the second wife of my grandfather. When my father was in high school the family including sister, Shirley Caudle, and younger brother, Joseph Antonio “Buddy” Perry moved with their parents to High Point for textile jobs when my father was in the third grade My grandfather Erie, was a fixer and Idell a knitter. During young Erie’s seventh grade year, the family returned to Tennessee for one year and then back to High Point for the next three. Midway through young Erie’s junior year of high school, the family moved to Mount Airy in 1949.

My father, Erie, excelled in sports during his high school years in the “Granite City” After graduating, he spent one year working at what is now Spencer’s, then accepted a scholarship at Lees McRae College. He played on one championship football team and two championship basketball teams for Western North Carolina Junior College for a $555 scholarship, which required him to work in the lunchroom and sweep the gym floor. He was a student-athlete. He would not have been able to pay for college without a scholarship to play sports.

He graduated from Appalachian State Teacher’s College playing sports on scholarship. The first member of his family to do so. He later received a master’s degree in Administration from Radford University in 1967. He rode to Radford with George Rigney, who taught English at Patrick County High School for many years and recently passed away. Whenever I encountered Mr. Rigney at PCHS, he always told me about going to school with my daddy.

Erie volunteered for the United States Army in September 1956. After basic training, he was transferred to Fort Gordon, just outside Augusta, Georgia. While there, he met Betty Jane Hobbs born on May 4, 1932, in Jefferson County, Georgia. Her parents were Floyd Thomas Hobbs and Elizabeth Prescott. My father said he met my mother at a BBQ stand in Augusta.

The army stationed Erie at Stuttgart, Germany, in February 1957. He won $100 in a football contest in the Stars and Stripes, the U. S. Army newspaper and a round trip ticket home, which he used to marry Betty on December 21, 1957. After my father says he replaced Elvis in Germany in the army, he came to Patrick County in 1959 to teach at Blue Ridge.
            Two other Ararat men, Bill Smith, and George Beasley brought “Georgia Peaches” back to Ararat. Bill and Claudette Smith share the same wedding anniversary with my parents.

Erie and Betty came to Ararat, Patrick County, Virginia, in 1959 when he took a position at Blue Ridge High School as teacher/assistant principal. He coached baseball and basketball. I, their only child, was born nine months after the massive snowstorm in February 1960, on November 4. In 1963, my father accepted the position of Principal at Red Bank Elementary School in Claudville, Virginia. He returned to Blue Ridge Elementary School in 1973 from which he retired in 1988. I had my father as principal for my seventh-grade year only, at which time, I heard the “You must set an example speech.”

My mother, Betty Perry, worked for Doctor Tuledge in Claudville and then worked at Cross Creek Apparel in Mount Airy for over thirty years. Today, she like her mother and sister is going through dementia and my father, who is not built for it, has had to become a caregiver.

My father retired in 1988 after 28 years as a teacher at Blue Ridge High School and then principal at Red Bank and Blue Ridge Elementary Schools. Today, you can see his name on the Mount Airy Sports Hall of Fame marker, the Blue Ridge Elementary School marker honoring retired teachers and at the J. E. B. Stuart Birthplace, where he and my mother were the first to be honored for their service in preserving the site.

            Earlier this year I was in Chicago, Illinois, after another successful year at Mayberry in the Midwest in Danville, Indiana. Each year, I take a week to do some sightseeing before I return for the Hillsville Memorial Day Flea Market.

            This year I spent a day in Dixon, Illinois, the home of President Ronald Wilson Reagan, who was born on the same day as Patrick Countian, J. E. B. Stuart. This was my second trip to Reagan home.

            When I visit the home, I always take a moment to stop on the front porch and remember a story that hit close to home for my father. My grandfather, Erie Perry, was an alcoholic and not particularly pleasant when he was imbibing. My father as the oldest child took the full brunt of his father’s behavior.

My father is the classic child of an alcoholic. I have never seen my father take a drink and the joke about him when he played golf at White Pines Country Club in Mount Airy that I called a beer joint with greens was “How can you tell which one Erie is?” He was the sober one.

Like Reagan, Erie is a very private person. Most people like him, but few really know him or see the emotional side of him except for Nancy Reagan and my mother. I have only twice seen my father break down emotionally. Once was when his nephew, Uncle Buddy and Aunt Gwen’s son, Andrew, died as a newborn. The only other time I saw my father cry was when his own father passed away in 1979 about a week after I graduated high school.

When I was growing up, I knew a mellower grandfather. He never owned a vehicle and walked or rode the bus everywhere he went except for the occasional cab ride. Grandpa Erie like to go up to Main Street to the pool hall or the cab station and have a few Pabst Blue Ribbons or Schlitz while smoking his Lucky Strike cigarettes. When he would start home a little wobbly from the alcohol, someone would call my grandmother to let her know. If I was present, I was dispatched up Pine Street to intercept my grandfather and get him back to what is today the Graves House, where he would fall into the bed and pass out. Before he fell asleep, he would reach in his pocket and hand me a Kennedy half dollar. When he passed away, I had a box of these.

            Back to Reagan and Erie’s connection. Reagan’s father, Jack, had a drinking problem. One snowy night, young Ron came home to find his father passed out in the snow along the walkway to his porch. The future President picked up his father and helped him into the house and saved his life from hypothermia.

            Several years ago, I found myself at my father’s house one evening watching the American Experience show about President Reagan. They told this story, and I could see my father was moved by what he was watching. I mentioned this to him, and he responded that sure is familiar. I replied that it sure was.

            It was at that moment when I came to realize what every child hopefully discovers about their parents, the moment of epiphany when you understand that your parents went through things that you never imagined and you gain a bit of empathy for them that you might not have had before and especially before you became an adult.

            As I drove out of Dixon this past May on U. S. Highway 52, the same road that takes you north out of Mount Airy, I remembered that my father and Ronald Reagan had a connection that only I ever knew.