After a long dusty 3 hour drive Joseph and Dottie arrive in Savannah, they were hot tried and a little bit afraid. Dottie had never seen a city any larger than Soperton before, other than pictures in magazines. But unlike the skyscrapers of New York City, Savannah was a busy port city with its oak lined streets thick with hanging Spanish moss. When they planned their escape they heard of a boarding house on Jones Street that welcomed farmers coming into the city to find work. Once they settled in Joe quickly discovered his 1931 Model A truck was a handy tool for finding quick work around town. While Dottie found work sewing and doing odd jobs at the boarding house.
It wasn’t long before Joe found work at the ports loading cotton, timber, and turpentine onto ships. It was there that word started getting out about the government getting ready to build “Liberty Ships” in Savannah and Brunswick and many other ports for the fledgling war effort. Joe quickly got a job at the shipyard down from the ports on President Street. Working alongside hundreds of others in the same situation as millions of other Americans trying to feed their families. Joe found himself working alongside other farmers, out of work construction workers, and even minorities. Starting out as a Rivet Cooker, Joe worked in the ground heating the rivets to wield the steel to the ships frame. Once heated up Joe would throw the hot rivets up to the Catchers, who in turn handed them off to the Riveters. It was dangerous work all around with many bearing the burn marks to prove it.
There he worked with one Black man in particular named Peterson Louis. Pete as he was known was of Haitian decent with a French/English accent much thicker than even Joe’s own hillbilly draw. Blacks and unskilled poor whites were relegated to the lowest and most dangerous jobs. So after a few weeks on the job, Joe and Pete formed a bond working in a synchronized rhythm or cadence. This made them a particularly effective cookers for the Riveters putting the ships together. As they continued to work together the two man discovered they had a lot in common. Including having wives that were raising their young children. They both had mothers that practiced folk medicine and magic, and they both wanted a better life then their sharecropping roots.
It was at this time when Dottie started coming out of her shell. With no outside schooling, Dottie could barely read. But with Joe now bring in a steady income, it gave Dottie the chance to teach herself to read. With a daily newspaper and various magazines laying around the boarding house; Dottie wasn’t shy about asking anyone what a word she didn’t understand. And soon she was able to read and write, to the point she was able to send letters back home to her beloved cousin and Pastor Stephens. Creating for herself a lifelong love of reading, learning, and storytelling. It was also during these years their little family began to grow with one boy, then another, and another. But it wasn’t until the end of the war that they finally had a little girl. A tall lanky little dark haired girl who would grow up to be my mother.
During the war the family moved from the boarding house to an upstairs apartment on Broughton Street. Then into a WPA housing project built during the Great Depression on the east side of Savannah. It was there that the kids grew up through the late 1940’s and into the 1950’s. Their house soon became the Grand Central Station of the neighborhood. With Joe, Jr’s gang of friends leaning under the hood of his old Hudson, while his brother Harold was hanging out somewhere with his latest girlfriend. And young Gabe, ever the outdoors man, spent hours exploring the nearby marshes and old civil war ruins. While Michelle “Missy” and her gang of Puddle Skirt wearing friends were either pretending to her mother or in her bedroom listening to that nerve wracking rock-n-roll. Of course this left Dottie to referee all the fights or manage all the gossip going on throughout the house. While Joe worked every waking hour at the local paper mill on the Westside of town after the war.
In the late fifties Joesph, Dottie, and the crew moved again only this time buying their first home on the rural west end of Chatham County. The community was nothing more than a whistle stop for the Georgia Central Railroad called Bloomingdale. On the end of Oak Street lay a tract of five wood framed houses built on concrete pillows during the 1940’s. Each house looked the same on the inside with small deviations on the outside. They each had three bedrooms, a kitchen dinette, a small living room, and one bathroom. With now two teenage boys sharing a bedroom while “Missy” had a bedroom of her own. The oldest brother Joseph, Jr. had recently joined the Air Force before the family moved.
Moving from the crowded low income community on the Eastside of Savannah, to woods on the other side of the county was a bit of a culture shock for the young teens. But for Joe and Dottie it was almost like going back home with room for a garden and the peacefulness of a quiet suburban community. As the early sixties came to light Bloomingdale had grown from a whistlestop for the railroad; into a modern community with a department store, with a couple full-service gas stations and even its own to Post Office. Still for decades to come Bloomingdale was nothing more than an afterthought for most Savannahians and the rest of Chatham County. But it turned into a thriving simple suburban paradise for thousands of locals the paper mills and other manufacturers employed. With it’s dirt streets and plenty of woods to explore these factory workers children played endless hours on those dirt streets…till the porch lights came on.
The Joe and Dottie Higgins family lived next door to a young couple the Barnes, who had recently moved there from rural Wayne County. Wendell and Lucy Barnes had only moved to Bloomingdale several months before Joe and Dottie. Much like the Higgins, the Barnes’ were looking for a better life for themselves and their two small children, Carol and James. Lucy’s brother () had moved to Savannah several years before and it was his stories of the opportunities there that inspired his younger sister and brother-in-law to move. And it wasn’t long before Wendell was working at a local manufacturing plant, making enough money to buy their home on Oak Street. So with an extra bedroom available the young couple invited her quiet bachelor brother Grayson to move from the boarding house into their home.
It was there that my mother and father became neighbors on Oak Street...
It wasn’t long before Joe found work at the ports loading cotton, timber, and turpentine onto ships. It was there that word started getting out about the government getting ready to build “Liberty Ships” in Savannah and Brunswick and many other ports for the fledgling war effort. Joe quickly got a job at the shipyard down from the ports on President Street. Working alongside hundreds of others in the same situation as millions of other Americans trying to feed their families. Joe found himself working alongside other farmers, out of work construction workers, and even minorities. Starting out as a Rivet Cooker, Joe worked in the ground heating the rivets to wield the steel to the ships frame. Once heated up Joe would throw the hot rivets up to the Catchers, who in turn handed them off to the Riveters. It was dangerous work all around with many bearing the burn marks to prove it.
There he worked with one Black man in particular named Peterson Louis. Pete as he was known was of Haitian decent with a French/English accent much thicker than even Joe’s own hillbilly draw. Blacks and unskilled poor whites were relegated to the lowest and most dangerous jobs. So after a few weeks on the job, Joe and Pete formed a bond working in a synchronized rhythm or cadence. This made them a particularly effective cookers for the Riveters putting the ships together. As they continued to work together the two man discovered they had a lot in common. Including having wives that were raising their young children. They both had mothers that practiced folk medicine and magic, and they both wanted a better life then their sharecropping roots.
It was at this time when Dottie started coming out of her shell. With no outside schooling, Dottie could barely read. But with Joe now bring in a steady income, it gave Dottie the chance to teach herself to read. With a daily newspaper and various magazines laying around the boarding house; Dottie wasn’t shy about asking anyone what a word she didn’t understand. And soon she was able to read and write, to the point she was able to send letters back home to her beloved cousin and Pastor Stephens. Creating for herself a lifelong love of reading, learning, and storytelling. It was also during these years their little family began to grow with one boy, then another, and another. But it wasn’t until the end of the war that they finally had a little girl. A tall lanky little dark haired girl who would grow up to be my mother.
During the war the family moved from the boarding house to an upstairs apartment on Broughton Street. Then into a WPA housing project built during the Great Depression on the east side of Savannah. It was there that the kids grew up through the late 1940’s and into the 1950’s. Their house soon became the Grand Central Station of the neighborhood. With Joe, Jr’s gang of friends leaning under the hood of his old Hudson, while his brother Harold was hanging out somewhere with his latest girlfriend. And young Gabe, ever the outdoors man, spent hours exploring the nearby marshes and old civil war ruins. While Michelle “Missy” and her gang of Puddle Skirt wearing friends were either pretending to her mother or in her bedroom listening to that nerve wracking rock-n-roll. Of course this left Dottie to referee all the fights or manage all the gossip going on throughout the house. While Joe worked every waking hour at the local paper mill on the Westside of town after the war.
In the late fifties Joesph, Dottie, and the crew moved again only this time buying their first home on the rural west end of Chatham County. The community was nothing more than a whistle stop for the Georgia Central Railroad called Bloomingdale. On the end of Oak Street lay a tract of five wood framed houses built on concrete pillows during the 1940’s. Each house looked the same on the inside with small deviations on the outside. They each had three bedrooms, a kitchen dinette, a small living room, and one bathroom. With now two teenage boys sharing a bedroom while “Missy” had a bedroom of her own. The oldest brother Joseph, Jr. had recently joined the Air Force before the family moved.
Moving from the crowded low income community on the Eastside of Savannah, to woods on the other side of the county was a bit of a culture shock for the young teens. But for Joe and Dottie it was almost like going back home with room for a garden and the peacefulness of a quiet suburban community. As the early sixties came to light Bloomingdale had grown from a whistlestop for the railroad; into a modern community with a department store, with a couple full-service gas stations and even its own to Post Office. Still for decades to come Bloomingdale was nothing more than an afterthought for most Savannahians and the rest of Chatham County. But it turned into a thriving simple suburban paradise for thousands of locals the paper mills and other manufacturers employed. With it’s dirt streets and plenty of woods to explore these factory workers children played endless hours on those dirt streets…till the porch lights came on.
The Joe and Dottie Higgins family lived next door to a young couple the Barnes, who had recently moved there from rural Wayne County. Wendell and Lucy Barnes had only moved to Bloomingdale several months before Joe and Dottie. Much like the Higgins, the Barnes’ were looking for a better life for themselves and their two small children, Carol and James. Lucy’s brother () had moved to Savannah several years before and it was his stories of the opportunities there that inspired his younger sister and brother-in-law to move. And it wasn’t long before Wendell was working at a local manufacturing plant, making enough money to buy their home on Oak Street. So with an extra bedroom available the young couple invited her quiet bachelor brother Grayson to move from the boarding house into their home.
It was there that my mother and father became neighbors on Oak Street...
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