Grandparents

My paternal grandparents were Johnny George Poole ,Sr. and Katie Mae Thomas (Cadle). Grandpa was a very fat, round guy who died in the early fifties. I remember him only once. Something happened to scratch him and I recall that was the first time I can remember blood. I was sitting on his lap on the front porch of 1956 Battle Row. He was in a blindingly white spread-collar short-sleeve shirt and when he started bleeding he took it off and sat in his old-fashioned "guinea" T-shirt and pleated-front, cuffed pants with his shoes off. We were in the "glider", a metal porch swing with square perforations and stampings to make it look woven. The "glider" didn't swing from the ceiling, which was close-spaced beaded planking about two-inches wide, but sat on a tube frame suspended by four tubes on bearing pins. Didn't rock, just moved back and forth about eight inches. Grandpa and my father ran the service station at 13th and Broad Street after the war. Little leather bow ties, billed caps and all.
Granny Poole was a sweet southern woman. My grandmother's mother was quite the successful businesswoman. She built a building in the 13-1400 block of Broad Street and ran a candy store at street level. The second floor was where the money was made, though. Apparently Ma Cadle ran a string of the nicest girls in Augusta up there. But she kept Katie well away from all that.
I remember her most for her fried egg sandwiches and the quarter for sweets she'd give me every Saturday. It was the most closely held secret in the world. I was to never let her second husband , George Pilcher, know about the fortune she was giving away. Uncle George worked for the city at the pumping station and was apparently on 24-hour call as he would receive telephone calls about every four hours informing him of the levels of the Savannah River and the Augusta Canal along with the Highland Avenue filter plant status. Occasionally, he'd have to leave immediately and go tearing off down Goodrich Street Extension along the canal to get to the pumping station. When that happened he was always in a foul mood.
My mother's parents were more distant. Hester Edenfield is only a memory from pictures of a bubble-coiffed woman with teardrop eyeglasses. My grandfather was never spoken of.

Why Battle Row

I grew up in an Augusta, Georgia neighborhood called 'Harrisburg' primarily on a street named 'Battle Row'. The story is that the local patriots fought a running retreat up the hill out of town along the path that became my street. Or maybe it was the local Tories.
What I want to do here is to record my memoirs and stories of growing up in Augusta. Not necessarily thrilling stuff, but more of an exercise in writing and journalism than anything else.