Mrs. Martha Poole passes at 85

Mrs. Martha Poole, who baked my parents' wedding cake and stored a piece of it for a year in her freezer -- it was one of those good-luck wedding traditions -- passed last week. She was 85. "Miss Martha," as I always knew her, served for many years as clerk of Superior Court in Warren County, succeeding her late husband, J. Allen Poole, in that post. Outside of work, Miss Martha had a great passion for genealogy and was often a great resource to out-of-town visitors who arrived at the courthouse to search for public records pertaining to their ancestors. You can read her complete obituary at this link.

New York Times comes to Gibson for bank closure

Well, it finally happened. No, hell didn't freeze over, but this is almost as strange: Gibson, Ga., was on the front page of the New York Times. No, I'm not kidding. It was right there on the front page on Saturday. The Times recounted the story of the shuttering of what used to be the Bank of Gibson, more recently called FirstCity. You can read it at this link, though you might have to sign up for the free Times registration to get to the story.

GBI to probe Norwood shooting involving Warren County commissioner

It's not clear from the McDuffie Mirror story who fired at who, but it does say someone shot a car door. (Honest disclosure: The Peebles guy in the story is my father. The three people who read this blog know that already, but I include that fact here to make myself feel better.)

A thank-you to our readers: No, we're not going away ...

Warrenton Watch has been around for a few years now, through good times and bad, through periods where I blogged every day and periods where I didn't get a chance to post for months.

We're not going away. In fact, I'm hoping I'll be able to post more frequently in 2009. But I wanted to stop and take a moment to thank all of you out there who read Warrenton Watch, and to step back and reflect a little bit on it.

Through the magic of the InterWebs, I have no way of knowing who reads this blog or where they are -- whether they're in Thomson or Timbuktu. But over the years I've been tickled to get e-mails from Warrentonians and former Warrentonians around the country who say they drop by my site every now and then. I appreciate each and every one of you who read, whether you and I have communicated or not.

Some of you who read Warrenton Watch are people who have known me all my life, and known my parents most of their lives, and knew my grandparents. Some of you who read, we don't know each other at all. Whoever you are, I'm thankful you read.

I started this blog on a lark, just to see if it could be done. Blogs were just a new thing then, and, at the time, not everyone had one. Now, it seems, everyone has one. (I actually have two, and I'm thinking of starting one or two others. That's in addition to my blogging at my job at www.TexasWatchdog.org.) I wish I could blog here at a more consistent frequency, but, well, life is what happens when you're making other plans, right?

I hope to blog again very soon. So I will sign off for now and wish all our readers a happy Super Bowl Sunday.

Happy new year: Our top 10 posts from 2008

In case you missed any of them. Here's the list, from No. 1 to No. 10.

• First Baptist pastor indicted 
• Warrenton's Jamie Ellis appears on Good Morning America 
• Controversial First Baptist pastor resigns
• Back from quick trip to Warrenton (July post) 
• New Aflac duck commercial coming out on New Year's Day (Note: this post went up in 2006. I'm not sure why it was so popular this year, but it was.) 
• Teachers fired for falsifying grades (this was another 2006 post) 
• Where'd I-20 go? 
• Car hits mom, son while pushing motorized car uphill 
• Need grits? Ogeechee River Mill for sale (this was a 2005 post) 
• Warren County high school principal charged in sex case
  

The gloating begins now

I couldn't help but notice that every single one of the "Pigskin Prognosticators" in last week's edition of The Clipper predicted that Boston College would beat my alma mater Vanderbilt in the Music City Bowl today.

Final score: 16-14, Vanderbilt.

Read more about it here.

Remembering Mrs. Martha Jane Wilhoit, typing teacher extraordinaire

I had a lot of teachers when I was in school -- heck, I went to three different schools (long story), and when you go to three different schools, you have a lot of teachers.

I had some really great ones. And I had some others who made me think, "Uh, do you know that what you just told us is actually wrong?"

But I only had one teacher back in The Day whom I can honestly say put the fear of God into me when I walked into her classroom. And she's the one I'm recalling fondly in this note tonight.

Mrs. Martha Jane Wilhoit taught me -- and probably about two or three generations of other kids -- how to type. I'm so saddened to report that she passed on on Monday at the age of 78. (The Augusta Chronicle has her obituary online here.)

Mrs. Wilhoit was the toughest teacher I ever had. When you walked in her classroom, she meant business, from the first bell to the last. No low-down hangin' around allowed.

You didn't talk to your friends in her class. You didn't pass notes in her class. You didn't goof off or stare out the window in her class. You didn't doodle on your notepad. You typed.

You typed as soon as you sat down -- well, right after you removed the plastic dust cover from your aging IBM Selectric. And you typed until the bell rang. And you typed. That was all you did. You typed.

This wasn't class. It was typing boot camp.

And when she got finished with you, you knew how to type. Period.

I can still hear her now, instructing my class in the late 1980s to remove our paper from beneath our paper bail rollers (now that everyone uses computers instead of typewriters, do kids today ever have to mess with a paper bail roller? Do they even know what one is?).

I vaguely recall that she posted the best students' work on a bulletin board near her classroom door -- I wasn't the greatest typist in the world, and I don't think I ever made it to the bulletin board. But I passed, and now I make a living sitting in front of a computer 8/10/12 hours a day, doing what Mrs. Wilhoit taught me to do.

I'll always be grateful to her for that. I bet a lot of other folks out there will be, too.