Viewpoint

LET’S HOPE HISTORY DOESN’T REPEAT ITSELF

By Charles D. Williams, M.D., FACR, FAAP 1918: The year of the Spanish flu. The year that changed the destiny of the Williams family.

Grandpa Williams died at the age of 27 with that bad flu leaving grandma with 7 children and they were all farmers. The children did not go to school in order to save the farm. They were unable to read or write. Boll weevils got the cotton and banks got the land. Dad with grandma and his 6 siblings moved onto someone else's run down place and became sharecroppers. Someone from the Baptist church dropped by and told grandma that she, her youngun's, and the good Lord shore got this place looking good. Dad replied, “you should have seen it when the good Lord had it by himself.”

Grandma wanted her grandchildren to do better and get out of those cotton fields and get their education. She kept repeating, “git yore educashun. It's something they can't take away from you.” She wanted us to go off to college and get a “dilemma” to hang on our wall. We studied hard, did well in school and given scholarships. Mine was a fertilizer scholarship and a hog killing scholarship from Swift and Co. Education of me and my first cousins has taken us further than we ever dreamed. Even though my dad couldn't read or write I’m proud of my dad. He saw it in my tears the night he got sick. He once said, “Since I ain't educated I'll have to use my head.” Even though he never got formally educated, he did learn to say “thank you” and “please” and he learned to give a dollar’s worth of work for a dollar’s worth of pay. He was the tallest when he was on his knees. He was the happiest when his hands were in the soil. Sometimes I wished I had stayed and taken my place with the home folks but now I have different shingles on my roof. If I had to do it over, I would once again become a radiologist. Grandma was right. Get your education and it will take you places you never dreamed of. However, with all that medical knowledge we could not cure dad and grandma when they got sick. If love for them could have cured them they would still be with us today.

2020: The year of the coronavirus. Will the destiny of some future generations be changed? Will people lose their businesses? Hope not. Maybe medical knowledge will save them. Hope so. Just like the 1918 pandemic, Americans once again will tough’en up, hunker down, and come back. That’s who we are.

Even though grandma's 7 children could not read or write, the 7 grandchildren carrying her coffin at the time of her death were medical doctors. When I was a freshman in medical school I had a first cousin who was a sophomore and another one a senior at the Medical College of Georgia. Another one had already graduated. We all used the same microscope which we kept passing down. Grandma now has 26 descendants who are medical doctors.

My dad was proud of me. I know he was. I saw it in his tears the night I graduated from high school. He wanted me to find a better way of life.