“IT’S LIKE PAINTING A PICASSO’

There’s something reassuring in watching Roscoe Ross work.

The knowing eye. The strong, steady hands. The rhythm of his movement.

His way is an old way. It pays no mind to the TikTok world we live in, with its five-second attention span and fixation on fame.

You could say his trade — laying bricks — is biblical: “And you, oh son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and portray upon it a city,” the Good Book says. 

At sunrise one recent morning at Rose Hill Cemetery, Ross was getting the texture of concrete just right before he began troweling. He was adding a second thin layer to protect a row of old, decaying bricks at a private burial plot. 

You’ll find him at Rose Hill on many days, even on weekends. (“You have to take advantage of your sunny days. I’d prefer to be somewhere catching fish.”)

Last summer, after someone’s car or truck battered the arch at the cemetery’s College Street entrance, it was Ross who took on the restoration. He cleared away the damage, then set about to repair the arch, brick by brick, layer by layer.

If you’ve ever visited the burial site of Allman Brothers Band members near the main entrance to Rose Hill, you’ve seen more of his work. He laid all the bricks there, bringing the shrine to life.

The 68-year-old learned from the best. His dad, Oscar Ross Sr., was a master brick mason for more than 65 years. (So was one of his uncles.) Between the elder Ross and his son, they have 138 years of “union work” between them.

It’s a tie that binds. Sometimes on a job he pulls out one of his daddy’s tools, maybe his trowel. It keeps him connected.

Roscoe Ross was recently honored as one of Historic Macon’s 2024 Preservation Award winners. He won the Jenny Thurston Award, which salutes a lifetime of historic preservation work.

His father saw to it that young Roscoe got a head start on learning the trade. Many a day when the younger Ross got home from the old Duresville Elementary School on Millerfield Road, he would start stacking bricks in the barn, learning different patterns — running bond, jack-on-jack, herringbone — that he’d use on the job one day.

His father would come home from a long day of work, greet his wife, Amanda, then inspect what he had assigned his son to do, correcting him where he needed to.

“When other kids were playing with Play-Doh, I was playing with bricks,” he said with a laugh.

During the summer, he also helped his grandfather, Benjamin Collins, on his Donnan Road farm. Much of Collins’ 145 acres was devoted to fruit orchards — peaches, apples, grapes — but there were peas, beans, corn and plenty more in the garden to harvest in the summer heat.

“I was his right-hand man till I was 10,” Ross said. “Once I got to 10, they put a trowel in my hand.” 

During his days at Northeast High School, he got a part-time job at a Piggly-Wiggly store, stocking shelves and carrying out customers’ groceries. Working at the store also meant he got a Social Security card, which he needed to get into the union.

There were two brick-mason unions back in those days: the Local No. 4, for Black masons, located above the H&H restaurant, and the Local No. 17, for white brick masons. Once you were accepted into a union, you had five years to get certified as a journeyman brick mason.

In 1973, the year he graduated from Northeast, he began twice-a-week classes in the evening, learning everything the program offered, including how to read blueprints.

“You set your own pace,” Ross said. He was able to finish that training in three years because of all that practice in his youth. (He’ll get his 50-year union card soon.)

 “All of that training I did back then for my dad put me years ahead of everybody else,” he said. “Dad was getting me ready for an apprenticeship.” 

In short order,  “I was a full-fledged bricklayer,” he said. Others would have to get on-the-job training.

‘YOU ONLY GET ONE SHOT’

Bartholomew Duhart

He worked for his father about 25 years, but he also worked for other contractors in town, including Bartholomew Duhart, whose creations across the Unionville neighborhood in particular are legendary.

Ross would travel out of town on occasion — even to work on the Buckhead home of Capricorn Records co-founder Phil Walden — but he preferred being home with his wife, Debra, and seeing his son, Jonathan, who now lives near Atlanta. (Ask him about the two-year British Petroleum project east of Chicago, where more than 200 brick masons lined the inside of 8-foot-tall pipes with fire bricks for more than a quarter mile.)

Ross quickly made a name for himself. People would call his father and ask if Ross could help with their brick or stone projects. 

He’s worked on four different homes for Macon attorney Frank Horne, everything from walkways to fireplaces. (Horne also knew Ross’ father.)

The walkway in front of Frank Horne’s home.

“When people are out walking the dog or pushing a baby stroller, they stop in front of my house (on Albermarle Place) all the time and ask, “Who did this brickwork,” Horne said. “It is absolutely amazing.

“Everybody knows he’s the best. There’s nobody at his level.”

Maryel Battin, left.

In time Ross met Maryel Battin, who led the Historic Macon Foundation for 17 years. After he did some work for her, she saw his talent and asked him to help with restoration and historic preservation projects whenever he could.

Now, decades later, you’ll find that work all over town. A walkway (and reset stone) at Washington Park. Brick walls outside Mercer Law School. At the Robert E. Lee Building, formerly the Professional Building and home to WIBB studio. Inside and outside Mount de Sales High School. The Cannonball House. The old warehouse where 41 NBC is located.

And soon at the Hay House, where it looks like a delivery vehicle hit one of the stately columns near the driveway.

Ross’ work on the Rose Hill arch.

On a job, he knows the most important thing he can do. It’s pretty simple. “As you go, just stand back and look at your work,” he said. “Pick out your flaws and straighten ’em out while you can.”

In his line of work, mistakes are easy to spot.

“Brick work has always been under everybody’s eye to where it has to be perfect — straight joints, straight head joints, the whole nine yards,” he said. “You may not know anything about brick work, but you can look to see if it’s straight or if it’s pure ugly. You know what I mean?”

In its own way, it is a work of art. And you don’t get second chances. 

“It’s like painting a Picasso,” he said. “You only get one shot to do this. You can’t come back tomorrow.” 

When the Rose Hill archway was damaged last summer, there were sentiments to just tear it down and rebuild. But Ross knew he could save it, and the results have drawn praise far and wide. He used 8-inch bricks — almost 90 years old — for the project that had been set aside for such restorations. (Using incompatible materials can cause damage to historic masonry.)

He credits the foresight of consultant Bill Causey in collecting — and saving — old bricks, cobblestone, marble and more that are invaluable in such preservation projects. It was crucial in saving the old archway. Ross used hundreds of them.

Rose Hill, which opened in 1840, holds a special place for Ross. He has a real sense of history — and pride — about Macon too, even talking at one point about how important it was to Macon’s growth that the city had two big brick companies: Cherokee Brick, founded in 1877, and Burns Brick, founded in 1936.

“Here, Rose Hill, you can’t find a better place to do masonry surgery,” he said. “It’s needed in here. You can see where the families preserved nice, beautiful plots, but over the years of neglect the walls are collapsing. You can go in and surgically restore them. … Whatever the material is, though, we have to match it. That’s what makes it so exciting.”

Historic preservation, he says, “is the heart of the city, … but it takes a lot of effort.”

Causey, who worked for decades with Macon’s Engineering and Public Works departments, now oversees work at Rose Hill. He has turned to Ross time and time again for repairs that require an expert’s touch.

Simply put, Ross’ restoration work on walls, steps and more “is a beauty to behold,” he said.

“He is truly a master craftsman, and upon his departure from this honorable trade, there will be a huge void, unlikely to be filled in today’s construction industry,” Causey said.

“There will always be bricklayers,” he said, “but there will never be another master craftsman like Roscoe Ross.”

‘WE’RE ALL CAPABLE OF MUCH MORE’

Home improvement work comes in all shapes and sizes, especially when you’re in the historic preservation business.

It’s not always the byproduct of a miter saw or a nail gun, though. And it’s not always what you see — or think you see.

Susann Lavold (L) gives instruction in our class.

Susann Lavold taught us that.

The “visual artist” flew to Savannah from Big Timber, Montana, recently to teach members of our construction crew and our apprentices “faux-painting” techniques that create the look of various types of stone, including granite, marble and sandstone. It was fascinating.

Lavold, 70, earned her chops the old-fashioned way. She grew up on a ranch near the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains in Montana and attended a one-room schoolhouse when she was young. There was no indoor plumbing.

Her mother — a transplant from Connecticut — was a  “naturally talented” artist, but she never developed that talent.

Lavold did. Her mom — recognizing Lavold’s artistic bent as a preschooler — taught her how to “shade” and draw in perspective. By the time Lavold got to grade school, her art teachers confessed that they could not teach her anything. She was left to cut out paper snowflakes and weave place mats out of strips of construction paper.

Later, at the University of Montana, “conceptual art” was in vogue. (The idea that an artist presents is more important than its appearance.) Lavold wanted no part of that. She took off to Europe so she could “learn the techniques of the old masters,” spending almost a year there studying the best collections of their work in 18 different countries.

Standing inches away from their paintings, she could see the attention to detail. The way they used color to create light, depth — and sometimes illusion.

It was a time when museum visitors “could get up close and examine brush strokes” or see the precise chisel marks in statues. “You could really examine what was done.”

Her studies took her to “ancient places — Greek, Roman and Viking archaeological digs. I was in old palaces and castles. I was seeing firsthand what had been done down through the ages — some of the techniques that were used in building. My interest developed there.”

It had a profound impact on her career.

In Savannah, we attended classes at the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum, thanks to the generosity of the Watson-Brown Foundation.  Lavold had two goals for her students. 

Brothers Brandon (L) and Christopher Haun refine their “faux painting” technique.

“It’s about learning the methods, the techniques, the tools and the materials” involved in the work. Secondly, “It’s to show people that they’re much more capable of doing things than they think they can do. We’re all capable of much more than we give ourselves credit for.”

The work doesn’t have to be perfect, she told us. “That’s the biggest hump. You’re creating an illusion. It’s the illusion of stone or wood. It doesn’t have to be exactly like it.”

Reed Purvis, our carpenter in residence, uses a kitchen and sea sponge to get just the right texture.

For our purposes, it wasn’t just about the colors we used, although those were important (And we made some of our own paint too.) Texture is  key, so we practiced painting with everything from kitchen and sea sponges to leaves, feathers and pine straw to create the desired effect.

After we practiced one day, we took a break upstairs at the museum to see practical applications of faux painting. There we found an entire wall of Sheetrock that looked like shiny, yellow stone. We saw wooden creations — a mantel and columns, for example — that you’d swear were marble. We looked at painted wooden flooring that looked like inlaid tile.

It was hard to believe that this wall isn’t stone.

We knew we wouldn’t use the techniques we learned in Savannah in the day-to-day work at our rehab projects. But we saw the value in knowing how to do it.

Chamille Blount shows us some of her work.

“HMF could use these techniques on request-for-proposal preservation projects that come on our radar,” said Christopher Haun, our director of construction. “These techniques are in a very specific niche of historic preservation and are an important aspect (of it) that would be implemented in local historic properties such as the Hay House.”

Apprentice Chamille Blount also saw its value in “retaining a historical reference or context to root history.” Reed Purvis, our carpenter in residence, figured we could use the technique here and there “to make our homes more attractive for a low cost.”

And apprentice Liam Purvis could see occasional spot applications on our projects.

Apprentice Liam Purvis checks the colors of his “faux painting.”

“Say, if the house has tile or stonework that has deteriorated, we can bring the look back with faux painting without shooting up the price.”

For Lavold, historic preservation is “everything you do to a building.” That means trying your best to retain “all of the historic material that is practical.”

“We’re such a wasteful society,” she said. “We take pieces of furniture that look beat up, for example, and it gets tossed out. We tear down old buildings that could be revamped. We’ve been groomed to be consumers, where we go and buy more constantly instead of doing what humans have done traditionally, and that’s to look at what you’ve got and transform it into something that’s appealing and at the same time useful. 

“That’s what the basis of any art originally was. It had a function. It wasn’t simply to decorate a wall.”

‘SOMETHING ABOUT THIS FIRED ME UP’

Greg Albert couldn’t believe his ears.

The man on the local TV news said something about the free use of tools. All you had to do was sign up, reserve what you needed, then come pick it up.

“He said the address and he said ‘free.’ I said, ‘I can afford that!’ I went down there to see what they had, thinking ‘What’s the catch?’

“Well, there ain’t been no catch.” 

Albert soon tapped into Historic Macon Rehabs’ new tool library, and he has become one of its most prolific customers. The new program offers all kinds of yard and construction tools that folks can borrow — for free — for their projects.

In the last month, Albert’s initiative has shown that preservation and restoration involve far more than just lumber, hammers and nails. Now that he’s a regular customer, he’s spreading the word too. Not only is he using the tools to make his own yard look better, he’s going up and down Lilly Avenue, in the Unionville neighborhood, helping his neighbors, many of whom are older.

“Something about this fired me up,” he said. “It gave me inspiration.”

Greg Albert makes the neighborhood field look better.

Early one recent morning, he was across the street from his home starting to mow an open field — well over an acre — that kids in the neighborhood use to play ball. But he also had a blower that he walks up and down the street with, clearing off leaves, dirt, cigarette butts and whatever’s in his path.

Ivory Manning was grabbing a breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast on his front porch before heading off to a painting job. He said Albert mowed his yard recently.

“We watch out for one another over here,” the 65-year-old said. “I’m proud to be his neighbor.”

Arthur Hall, another friend, stopped to chat while driving by.

He said he was looking out a window at home one day and saw Albert blowing away debris near his home.

“He went to the end of the street. The next thing I know, he’s coming back around on the other side of the street. He gets out there like he’s a teenager.” (Albert will turn 70 on July 3.)

“If you find a better neighbor than him, it’s God sent,” Hall said. “That’s a good man.”

Tracey Jackson and her dog, Candy.

Added Tracey Jackson, another neighbor: “He does something just about every day. … I tell him to get out of the heat.” 

‘PEOPLE LOVE IT’

Reed Purvis explains the new tool library to Channel 13’s Suzanne Lawler.

Reed Purvis, who oversees the program for Historic Macon Rehabs, said the word is slowly getting out about the new program, which is run through the MyTurn platform (https://bit.ly/35DFvSb). It began May 18.

For many, the concept is strange at first. As Historic Macon worked on the program, it connected with The Well CDC in Akron, Ohio, (https://thewellakron.com/) and picked up good tips for a successful program. Purvis also talked to representatives of the Asheville (N.C.) Tool Library to glean their best practices. 

So far, Macon homeowners have signed up for 55 tool loans. Leaf blowers have been the most popular. (There are no gas-powered tools. They’re either corded or have batteries.)

“It’s going really well,” Purvis said. “I definitely expected more wood-working tools to be checked out. We could have spent more money on yard equipment.”

The program was able to stretch its buying dollars thanks to a generous discount on tools from Riverside Ace Hardware.

Judging by responses from those returning tools and comments he’s seen on social media, “People love it,” Purvis said. “I’ve only gotten positive feedback.”

A couple of people have said they wish the program offered a chain saw they could borrow. So that option may be coming in the near future.

It’s all part of an ambitious initiative to boost the trades presence in Macon. Historic Macon Rehabs hired three preservation carpentry apprentices for a 10-week program, training them for entry-level construction jobs. The nonprofit also has begun a series of Saturday workshops to equip homeowners with the knowledge to tackle basic projects on their own. A grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation funded the pilot programs.

The quality of tools in the tool library has impressed Albert.

Before he started taking advantage of the new program, he had to use “whatever I could find, whenever I could find it.” He had no equipment, and even if he did, he has no place to store tools. (“My house is too small.”)

And if you borrow from a friend, “if it breaks down on my shift, it’s my fault.”

Albert and his wife, Sheridan, moved from Oakland to Macon — where she grew up — in 2003, when she took a teaching job with the Seventh-day Adventist school system. He was born and raised in Oakland, and he’s a big Raiders fan.

He has a ready smile and friendly nature, and it was clear during a recent visit how much his neighbors like him and appreciate all the work he’s doing.

But Albert isn’t one to toot his own horn (“It’s just being neighborly.”) 

He’s trying to make a small difference in his neighborhood in a way that he can.

And in doing so, he hopes he can inspire others to follow suit.

“People notice me with good-quality tools,” he said. “I try to introduce them to the tool library. I tell ’em, “You don’t have to wait for one. You can do it yourself. People see that it’s working.

“And it’s great for me,” he said. “It has me planning more projects.”

‘That’s where you get your joy from’

As home-improvement projects go, it was nothing like the 1986 Tom Hanks movie “The Money Pit.”

Still, Janet Williams needed extensive work done on her nearly 100-year-old home in the Vineville Historic District when she and her husband, Pete, moved to Macon from Decatur.

They were getting two full bathrooms redone, replacing fascia, wiring, copper gutters — and much more.

Finding a carpenter — especially one who could work on an older home — was among the biggest hurdles they faced.

“If I had a carpenter in my bag, I would be doing all sorts of things I’m not doing now,” she said. “We need it now more than ever, and it’s hard to find people who are good at it. 

“I would love to see people take it up as a calling.”

You’d get no argument from Shawn Stafford.

Stafford opened Stafford Builders and Consultants on Napier Avenue in 1999, although he’d worked in construction in Macon for 12 years before that. His niches over the years have been church construction and work on federal properties.

He needs a variety of folks across the trades spectrum to carry out his projects, from masons to carpenters. Especially carpenters.

“When I was a kid, being a carpenter was a big deal. We saw the value in it,” the 70-year-old said. “We’ve downplayed it so much (over the years) that we stopped teaching it. But it’s a skill that’s needed in this town.”

That perspective is one reason Historic Macon is trying to help.

During a recent news conference, Executive Director Ethiel Garlington announced a series of trades-related initiatives that will begin this month. He said Historic Macon’s has a standing challenge of finding skilled tradespeople — especially carpenters — who are willing to take on work at historic properties.

He cited surveys by the Associated General Contractors of America and  the National Association of Home Builders that lamented the lack of skilled workers and the difficulty in hiring them. And for historic preservation projects, that shortfall is even more pronounced.

Now, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation, Historic Macon will soon test three initiatives that aim to make a difference.

“Our hope,” Garlington said, “is that learning from these pilot programs, we’ll be able to raise additional capital and grow and expand the successful programs.”

First, Historic Macon soon will be hiring three trades apprentices for a 10-week course that starts June 1. The program will blend on-the-job training with classroom instruction and travel to prominent sites in the region. The goal is for the three apprentices to find full-time construction jobs after the program. 

Historic Macon also will hold a series of workshops that help teach homeowners and professionals alike, often with hands-on instruction. First up is a tool safety session called “Fingers and Toes” May 15. On May 22, “Stile-ish Doors” will show how to renovate both wooden and glass doors.

But that’s not all. Coming soon, HMF will open a new tool library, where Macon residents can swing by and borrow a variety of tools for their home projects. Stay tuned for details.

We know these initiatives aren’t a cure-all. They’re a small step in trying to improve the situation. But it’s a start.

For Stafford, another part of the solution would entail bringing training programs for the building trades back to schools.

“Why not teach it just like you do engineering?” he asked. “It’s a workforce crisis. You can talk to a thousand contractors and hear the same thing.” (Stafford said he’d pay a crackerjack carpenter $60,000 right out of the gate.)

He used an analogy to drive home the opportunity that many young adults are missing out on.

“If you saw a gold bar on the floor, you’d reach down and pick it up,” he said. But too many people are walking on by and “don’t see the value” in learning a trade.

“These kids need to learn to love this industry,” he said. “I can never remember a day I didn’t want to get to work.”

Johnny McClendon, who owns IconiCraft Custom Cabinets, has watched the decline for the last generation. He remembers the boom times of the early ’90s, then a slow slide since then.

 “I’m deeply embedded in this business, and it’s just gone away,” the 59-year-old said of the talent pool. “It’s gotten scarcer and scarcer and scarcer.”

He’s doing his part too. He has a 19-year-old working for him, helping him learn the ropes of the craft. But McClendon knows he could leave at any time.

“It’s just hard to find people with a love for it,” he said.

And there’s another aspect. Carpenters are tailor-made to become construction superintendents, Stafford said. They’re on a job from start to finish. They read blueprints, devise layouts, help frame up a project, do trim work — and plenty more.

“They see everything in between. They see the process more than any other trade.”

Helping Stafford on a job site next-door to the H&H Soul Food restaurant recently was 69-year-old Eric Turner. He said his grandfather taught him a lot about carpentry and woodworking when he was young. As a teenager he began making house repairs, “and I just kept going with it.”

He acknowledged that carpentry is not for everybody. You’ve got to pay attention and be willing to listen and learn. And it’s rugged. You work in the winter cold and the summer heat, often outdoors.

“You’ve got to withstand the elements,” he said, and not everyone wants to do that these days.

But there’s a certain satisfaction in working with your hands, seeing something you build take shape, “and you’ll always have a job — anytime or anywhere.” 

“That’s where you get your joy from,” he said. “You can always look back and say I had a part in that.”

'SOMETHING WE COULD CALL OUR OWN’

Betty Freeman can close her eyes and see the line of people  stretching all the way down to Broadway.

Betty Freeman (Photo by Dsto Moore)

“They came from everywhere,” she said. East Macon. Tindall Heights. Fort Hill. The Pleasant Hill neighborhood.

She remembers the laughter, the anticipation, the excitement of going to the Roxy Theatre with her friends on Saturdays.

“It brought people together,” she said. “It was something we could call our own.”

She was about 9 years old. She and her twin brother, Jim, would go at least twice a month. 

She loved the Bugs Bunny cartoons right before the main feature. Often, that would be a Western starring Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Rex Allen or maybe the Lone Ranger.

The Roxy, built by Phil Kaplan, opened on Hazel Street in late 1949 as a venue for Black patrons during the Jim Crow era. Now, the Quonset hut-style building is on Historic Macon’s Fading Five list of endangered places across the county. HMF will also nominate it for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

Freeman said her grandmother talked about the Roxy “all the time.”

Of course, it was hard not to notice. It’s right across the street from the home Freeman grew up in — and has lived in all her life.

“It was segregated,” the 71-year-old said. “We couldn’t go into the white theaters. That was the main entertainment we had. We had a TV, but it was black and white, a small screen.

“When you’d go to the theater, it was exciting to see people on that big, wide screen.”

She remembers the marquee outside the theater, advertising the current shows, and wonders what happened to it. 

The old Roxy, with marquee intact.

You can’t talk about going to see movies at the Roxy back then  without mentioning Capitola Flour. Inside those sacks of flour were metal tokens you could use for free admission.

A Capitola movie token

“We mostly got in on those Capitolas,” Freeman said, laughing.

She had a Plan B, though. When there were no tokens or they didn’t have the money, she and her friends would sit on the bank of her front yard and at least get periodic peeks through the theater’s front door when it opened.

“We were lucky to be directly across the street.”

A young James Brown, the Godfather of Soul

There were also talent shows at the theater. Otis Redding sang there. Freeman says James Brown and “Little Richard” Penniman performed there too.

“We had a lot of important people who started out at that theater.”

(Brown and one of his first bands, the Famous Flames, recorded a lean version of what became his first hit, "Please, Please, Please," in the basement of radio station WIBB in 1955.)

Freeman remembers Little Richard pulling up outside the Roxy once and stepping out of a limo. Even when he made it big, she said, “Whenever he came to town, he’d always stop in front of the Roxy for a few minutes.”

Redding once worked at the Quick Car Wash right down the street across Broadway, she said. Her mom worked there too for a time.

Guys at the car wash would tell Redding: “You ain’t never gonna make it singing,” Freeman said.

“The theater was a good thing. It was good for our area” — the Greenwood Bottom neighborhood. “It brought people together. That’s what I liked about it.”

It was also a balm for the area, including the nearby Tybee neighborhood, which faced its share of challenges. Toward the end of the Roxy’s run and soon afterward, homes in the Tybee neighborhood began coming down, making way for “urban renewal,” said James Timley, a former Macon City Council president who led a tour of the area recently. City officials blamed substandard housing and the area’s  “crime-ridden” environment for much of the demolition. 

This plaque on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard gives a concise history of the Tybee community.

Equncer High (Photo by Oby Brown)

Equncer High was born on Ash Street, one street over from Hazel. So it was easy to get to a movie at the Roxy, which she and her friends called “the show.”

The children would ask each other: “Y’all going to the show today? … Yeah, ’cause we got us a Capitola!” 

They even had curbside service.

“Daddy would put all three of us in a wheelbarrow and take us  over.” 

She thinks it cost 9 cents for children to get in. Maybe a dime.

The theater sold popcorn, candy, cookies and drinks. “But we didn’t have that kind of money to buy that,” High said.

Her brother, Martin Kendrick, worked there.

She remembers how soft the red, leather seats were.

She loved Esther Williams movies.

“We would always sit down near the front — all us kids,” the 81-year-old said. “We used to have that theater full on Saturdays.”

A man named Leroy Scott would walk around checking on people with flashlights.

“Y’all down here cuttin’ up?” he’d ask sternly. “I’ll put y’all out for two weeks!”

If that happened, High and her friends would just walk down to the Douglass Theatre, about a mile away.

She saw more than movies at the Roxy. There was a dancer named Shirley Hill and a singer named Bill Jones. She heard a band there once called Patty Cake.

“We were around there all the time.”

The whole area bustled with business. There was the B&B Service Station at Hazel and Third, where you could also catch a cab and get something to eat in the back. (She says the H&H Restaurant actually started there before moving to Broadway, then Forsyth Street.) The car wash. The Floyds’ store. 

Whatever they did, though, they made sure to get home on time.

Her dad told her: “When that street light comes on, you better be home.” He’d take a switch to the children if they were late.

“Our parents didn’t play,” she said. “Kids didn’t run the street and cut up like they do now.”

Ronnie Gary (Photo by Oby Brown)

The Roxy — one of three Macon theaters for Black residents — was “part of our Black history,” said Ronnie Gary, 72, a retired letter carrier.

He grew up in the old Enterprise Homes off Broadway, up near what is now Eisenhower Parkway.

There wasn’t a lot for a 10-year-old to do at the time, so the Roxy was a big deal to the kids.

There was the Douglass, Grace Hill swimming pool on Dempsey Avenue and a nearby baseball field where future major leaguer John “Blue Moon” Odom once played.

“That was the entertainment for Black folks,” he said. “You came here. We enjoyed ourselves. You’d go in and have fun and watch the movies.”

He remembers Mr. Lester’s filling station down the street, a pool hall and McLendon’s Cafe around the corner.

“There was no fussin’ and fighting — none of that stuff,” he said. “We had fun. It was safe.”

Ruby Moore liked the cowboy pictures too.

“I could sing all the songs with ’em,” she said.

Those Capitola tokens were important to her too. Thank goodness her grandmother, Sallie Fullmore, made biscuits for her grandfather, Arthur, to take to work at Robins Air Force Base every day for lunch.

She knew the more biscuits her grandmother made, the more flour she’d use — and the more Capitola tokens there’d be in that bowl on top of the refrigerator. 

“When there were enough tokens in the bowl for us all to go, we all went to the movie together,” the 71-year-old said. “Our minds were on the Roxy Theatre.”

She still has that bowl.

Sometimes she’d get a dime for allowance. If she had a Capitola token and a dime, she had it made. Maybe she could get a Sno-Cone too.

The movie offerings were all over the road. She saw “The 10 Commandments” there. Then one week there was something called “Peyton Place.” (Trailer promotion: “Where scandal, homicide … and moral hypocrisy belie its tranquil facade.”)

Moore remembers the beautiful women and colorful clothes — and a lot of kissing (and more) going on.

When she got home, somebody asked her: What movie did you see?

“I didn’t want to tell that,” she said. “They didn’t know what ‘Peyton Place’ was. But her parents found out, and when they  did, “There was no more of that” for a while.

The times were much simpler then. The pace was slower. There was joy in the little things we often take for granted  these days.

While Moore was sharing her memories of the Roxy, she paused for a moment, perhaps lost in reverie of those happy days.

“I loved my childhood,” she said.

For all the nostalgia about the Roxy’s golden days, a new chapter in the theater’s life is on the way if a Macon man’s plans take hold.

Wes Stroud won a $5,000 grant earlier this year to draw vendors to a blacktop area behind the Roxy. In time, he has plans for a food park, a pedestrian plaza, public art and a concert area, among other initiatives, to help revitalize the area.

He wants to have a soft opening by early 2021, complete with fireworks, performers and, of course, food trucks.

‘It has consumed my life’

Somebody is buried here. But you wouldn’t know it from what you see.

There’s no headstone. The ground around the makeshift plot is hard and broken. Peeking through a patch of grass is a sliver of brickwork that covers the vault. If a gullywasher hit, the whole thing could vanish under rock and mud.

That’s the way it is in much of the Oak Ridge section of Rose Hill Cemetery, where Black men, women and children — many of whom were slaves — are buried. There are marble headstones there, but lots of them are in pieces. 

One Macon man, though, is trying to set things right, one plot at a time.

At daybreak one recent morning, Joey Fernandez pulled into Oak Ridge, his tow-behind trailer filled with the tools of his trade: shovels, hammers, clamps, epoxy, lime mortar, tarps, and a leaf blower among them. 

“Eighty percent of the monuments in here I can repair,” the 49-year-old said. “I don’t think anybody took me seriously until I started doing the work.”

It’s a labor of love that started innocently enough — as these things often do. Fernandez was driving near the Interstate 75/475 interchange one day when he saw a marker off the side of the highway. It piqued his interest. 

“All I saw was a sign that said Stokes Cemetery. … I went to the real estate company and asked if I could go look at it. They said they had moved it. I said ‘Let me check.’ ”

So he did. The site was overgrown and hadn’t been touched in years. It took him two days to get to it, hacking away at the dense brush.

There he found Civil War graves — and plenty more. Many of the markers were in pitiful shape.

“It upset me,” Fernandez said. “You realized that people were buried there. People prayed there, cried there. Loved ones … (I wondered), “Who’s gonna come out here and take care” of them? 

“I knew somebody had to be doing it. I started looking and I couldn’t find anyone. So I took it in my own hands, started spending my own money. I learned how to do it.

“From that moment on, it has consumed my life.”

He began driving to Savannah and taking classes on everything he could related to  grave-site repair, some of them with Jonathan Appell, a leading gravestone and monument preservationist.

Soon he began volunteering at Rose Hill, a cemetery park that opened in 1840 and was named for Simri Rose, who designed it.

Over time he showed what he could do and earned his stripes before he drew paying jobs, some of them from Historic Macon. He’s cleaned monuments. He’s repaired headstones. He’s re-pointed brickwork. He’s rebuilt entire burial plots that had collapsed.

Sometimes he’s “just had to puzzle the pieces together.”

It also took him awhile to gather the proper materials to work with that wouldn’t hurt the stones.

He uses lime mortar, for example, and not Portland cement for his repairs. That’s better for the stones and truer to the original work.

He even tries to match the size of the sand in particular mixes. One morning he was pulverizing marble chips into dust with a hammer so he could mix it with lime mortar to get the authentic look he wanted.

“No stone is the same,” he said. “I’m doing it the same way they would have back in the 1800s. The less you do to it, the better. 

“There’s a thousand of ’em in here that need work. It’s not just fixing it. It’s preserving it. You want to pass it along for future generations.”

One repair alone took him about 200 hours.

His passion and craftsmanship are evident to those who know and work with him.

"Joey is exactly the combination of expertise and enthusiasm that Rose Hill needs,” said Matt Chalfa, Historic Macon’s director of preservation field services. “I've had the opportunity to see him work both in the field making repairs and at various events as an advocate for the cemetery, and in both settings he is an invaluable partner for HMF as we work toward restoring this Macon landmark. 

“The local history and culture that reside in Rose Hill are in excellent hands. Joey is a true asset in preserving that heritage."

Now, the word is getting out about his skills and his company, Preserving our Georgia Cemeteries. He’s done work for Macon-Bibb County and other cities and counties across the state, as well as churches, veterans groups and preservation clubs. Earlier this year, Historic Macon honored him with a Preservation Award for his revitalization work.

Alpha Delta Pi officials have also reached out to him about restoring the brick wall at the site of the sorority’s founder, Eugenia Tucker Fitzgerald, who is buried in Rose Hill. (ADPi, as it’s commonly known, was founded at Wesleyan College in 1851.)

He’d also like to tackle the grave site of Joseph Bond, who is buried in the Holly Ridge section of Rose Hill. The large angel monument at the site, carved from Carrara marble, is one of the most well-known in the cemetery. Vandals and a tornado have taken their toll over the years, though, including a missing portion of the angel’s right arm. (Fernandez himself has found more than 50 scattered pieces of Connecticut brownstone that are missing from the site.)

He guesses that about half the damage at Rose Hill over the years has come from Mother Nature. The rest is from vandalism, theft or human error.  Cars have backed into statues along some of the narrow paths, he said, and contractors have also done their share of damage over time.

“A lot of people come here and never see the broken monuments,” he said. “And it’s been robbed of a lot of things.” Cast-iron fencing. Urns. Finials. Arms on statues. 

Rose Hill needs help, he said, but it has great potential as a tourist draw. It could use directional and exit signs at strategic points, and some of the small roads should be blocked off.

He calls Rose Hill “an untapped gem — one of the best things Macon has to offer” —  that too many folks take for granted.

Many people know about the Allman Brothers shrine, but the cemetery is full of Macon history that’s being lost to time.

With some work and better marketing, “more people will come here,” he said. Guided tours on weekends and more special events would help.

So would more folks joining the Friends of Rose Hill, which supports the cemetery’s work. (To do so, contact Historic Macon’s Matt Chalfa at mchalfa@historicmacon.org or (478) 742-5084, ext. 103.)

For now, Fernandez is doing what he can to make a difference, one grave site at a time. He knows, though, that he’ll never get to them all.

“I wish I had started this when I was young,” he said. “I had no idea. But I want to do as many of ’em as I can. I want to save the ones that are here before they’re gone.”

THEY BUILT IT, AND ONE DAY WE’LL RETURN

It was big news across Macon when it opened 91 years ago this week. So big, in fact, that the city’s mayor, Luther Williams, even asked bosses to let their workers leave early that day: April 18, 1929.

Mayor Luther Williams’ proclamation

“I, therefore, proclaim Thursday afternoon … to be a holiday as far as possible,” the mayor said, “and respectfully urge upon all our people to come out in force, and furthermore would request that the merchants allow as many of their employees as can be spared to attend the opening. … Let us consider it a part of our duty to be present.”

There was a baseball game that day at the city’s brand-new (and unnamed) stadium in Central City Park. Kennesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner, even threw out the first pitch.

Times were good. The start of the Great Depression was six months off.

Within two weeks City Council members named it Luther Williams Field, in the mayor’s honor. It cost about $60,000 to build. 

This iconic sign greets visitors to Luther Williams Field.

Macon native John “Blue Moon” Odom was a star for the Oakland Athletics.

If there ever were a priority list of historic places to preserve (and history to share) in Macon, you’d have to include Luther Williams Field. (And there is: It’s Historic Macon’s Saving Places Index.)  The ballpark is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its old-time look is much the same as it was back then. The brick entryway. The words MACON BASE BALL PARK in block letters right outside steps to the grandstand. (There’s even a Walk of Fame that honors players who’re either from Macon or who played in Macon.) 

The park has witnessed both glory and despair over the years. Jackie Robinson played at Luther Williams on April 7, 1949, during an exhibition game between his Brooklyn Dodgers and the Macon Peaches. In the process, he broke the color barrier in Georgia.

Pete Rose and other members of the Macon Peaches were a championship team in 1962.

Hank Aaron, Ted Williams and Joe Dimaggio also played there. Old-timers remember seeing future Cincinnati Reds stars Pete Rose, Tony Perez, Lee May and Tommy Helms, among others, play for the Peaches in the early ‘60s. 

Vince Coleman set a base-stealing record for the Macon Redbirds in 1983 (despite missing a month of the season with a broken hand.) Chipper Jones, Jermaine Dye, Andruw Jones, John Rocker and Rafael Furcal played for the Macon Braves when it was an Atlanta Class A affiliate.

It also sat empty for years, waiting on much-needed repairs.

High school teams — public and private — once played in the Lem Clark Tournament there each spring. In the mid-’70s, college-age players home for the summer formed a league and took the field there too. (I remember a few at-bats in each.)

Since the 1950s, seven different major league teams operated farm teams there: the Dodgers, Reds, Phillies, Tigers, Cardinals, Pirates — and the Braves, who last played there in 2002 before moving to Rome.

Now it is home to the Macon Bacon, a wood-bat collegiate team in the Coastal Plain League about to begin its third year of play — we hope — as we also wait for the major leagues to return.

Despite shelter-in-place orders and other social distancing measures, the Bacon are preparing to play a full season. The roster is set. They’re selling tickets and lining up sponsors. County workers are cutting the grass. 

“We’re going full bore planning for the home opener May 29,” team President Brandon Raphael said. “April and May are our go time. Everyone is prepared to get this thing moving.” (UPDATE: The league season will begin July 1, with a 28-game schedule for the team. Social distancing will restrict attendance at home games to about 1,300 fans.)

Giant fans will help tamp down the heat.

If you haven’t been inside the stadium lately, there are plenty of improvements: A beer garden and group areas on the first- and third-base sides. Picnic and children’s play areas. Seating and painting upgrades. And new for this season: four huge ceiling fans with 16-foot blades to help beat the heat.

Raphael actually remembers the first time he set foot inside the ballpark: July 27, 2018. He’d flown in from San Antonio, Texas, for a visit while he was considering taking the president’s job. He had done a little research on Macon and the ball field, but “I did not realize how much history I was going to be exposed to” at Luther Williams Field.

“I will never forget it,” he said.

In October, his family — wife, Kimberly, and their two children, Caden and Brooklyn, came to Macon for the first time. Raphael brought them to the ballpark. His son had just finished a book report on Jackie Robinson. As the two of them strolled around the field, they sat in the home dugout at one point.

“Do you know who you’re sharing a bench with?” Raphael asked his son. “Jackie Robinson played baseball here at Luther Williams Field.”

Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Georgia when he played at Luther Williams Field in 1949.

The park’s throwback features have made it a Hollywood favorite for 45 years. You know the titles. “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings.” … “42.” … “Trouble With the Curve.” … “Brockmire.”

Luther Williams Field on April 18, 1929.

Yes, they all make us miss baseball. And at a time when we’re turning to such diversions, we can take some solace in a line from another baseball movie, “Field of Dreams,” that has an uncanny relevance these days as we hope for the best in the midst of our collective turmoil:

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again.

“But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.” 

The Macon Bacon are proud to honor baseball’s past at Luther Williams Field.

A Macon street bears his name, but you don’t know his story

You’d have to forgive Louis Persley if he had occasional bouts of identity crisis.

He was born in Macon in 1890 and died in 1932. You’ll find his first name spelled both “Lewis” and “Louis” in different registries. Census records from 1900, 1910 and 1920 spell his family’s last name “Pearsley,” “Parfley” and then “Persley.” There are even variations in his middle name (Hudson/Hudison).

A Macon street named for him (or his family) is spelled “Pursley,” and that’s how his name reads on his gravestone in Linwood Cemetery, where he is buried.

Louis Persley

But make no mistake. There was never any confusion about his talent in his chosen field, architecture. And that was at a time when such an achievement was virtually unheard of for a person of color. In fact, the Macon native was the first registered black architect in Georgia. It happened 100 years ago, on April 5,  1920.

Still, few people have ever heard of Persley. One reason is that there’s not a lot of information out there about him.

“He’s still obscure in history,” said Muriel McDowel Jackson, the head genealogy librarian and archivist at Washington Memorial Library. “We have black history, but we don’t have all of black history. We’re still learning information about people.”

(Jackson also told us about Wallace A. Rayfield, who was born in Macon in 1874 and also went on to become an architect. He designed the famous 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that was bombed in 1963 during the civil rights movement.)

Persley grew up in the Pleasant Hill neighborhood, now a historic district. His mother and father, Maxie and Thomas, lived with their four sons at 215 Madison St., although it’s now 122 Madison St. thanks to a recalibration of street addresses decades ago. 

Persley attended public schools in Macon and then headed to Lincoln University, a historically black university near Oxford, Penn. He graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology with an architecture degree in 1914.

Robert Robinson Taylor

Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama — now Tuskegee University — offered him a teaching job. (“He still had to come back south to practice,” Jackson said.)  He taught mechanical drawing until 1917, when he volunteered to fight in World War I. (A man named Robert Robinson Taylor was director of the college’s Mechanical Industries Department at the time. Remember that name.)

When Persley returned from the war, he was promoted to head of the Architectural Drawing Division.

He hadn’t been at Tuskegee long when he designed a new building for the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Athens, one of just a few projects he ever had in Georgia. (The church began as Pierce’s Chapel in 1866, during Reconstruction, and is thought to be the first congregation in Athens that black families forged after the Civil War.) A marker erected there in 2006 tells the story.

Marker outside the First A.M.E. Church in Athens

He designed the Chambliss Hotel in 1922 and helped with the seven-story Colored Masonic Temple in Birmingham, a Renaissance Revival building that was dedicated in 1924. There are also references to Atlanta jobs and design work on a two-story brick-and-stone funeral  home in Macon.

But he really made his mark at Tuskegee, designing many of the campus’s iconic buildings, several of them while working in partnership with his colleague, Robert Taylor, during the last decade of Persley’s life. Taylor & Persley Architects may have been the country’s first-ever formal partnership of two black architects.

In 1921, the two men completed their first building for the campus, James Hall, a dorm for nursing students. Among the others were Sage Hall, a dorm for young men where the Tuskegee Airmen would later live; Logan Hall, which merged athletic and entertainment facilities; the Armstrong Science Building; and the Hollis Burke Frissell Library.

An early rendering of Logan Hall

In a short YouTube video “The Persley House: An Architectural Gem in Tuskegee,” Persley’s granddaughter, Linda Kenney Miller, tells viewers about the house that Persley designed for his second wife, Phala Harper. He completed his final design for the home, located near the university, just months before he died, and he didn’t get to see the finished product. 

Louis Persley’s granddaughter, Linda Miller.

“Mr. Persley is another of these unsung heroes,” Miller says in the 3-minute video. “History has remembered Robert Taylor and not Louis Persley. … They were great compatriots and they worked together on so many projects. It’s a mystery to me.”

Persley died July 13, 1932, while hospitalized for kidney disease, and they held his funeral at Logan Hall. But he accomplished much before his death at a young age, like so many other renowned Macon residents over the years.

 “We should remember that Macon produced two African-American architects” during those turbulent years, Jackson said, “proving that anyone can become anything.”