By Wilson Hall
Wilson met Ernest Brocket while researching a fishing story on Lake Seminole in the southwest corner of Georgia.

When I first met Ernest Brockett he was sitting in the reclining chair of the bait shop at Jack Wingate’s Lunker Lodge on Lake Seminole. He was over 75 years old, but his step was lively and his eyes were clear, giving a good indication of the quickness of mind within the man. When he was not fishing or hunting or working his garden or training his dog, he was at Wingate’s talking to people in the shop or out on the front porch. And at the first sign of interest, he would tell you about deer hunting, turkey calling, dog training or bass fishing. Then to all of this, he would add his philosophy of life.

There was a group of people standing around Ernest talking. Jack stopped me at the counter and asked me if I knew Ernest.
“No,” I said, “Who is he?”
“Go over and meet him,” Jack said. “We call him the ‘Sage of Seminole.’ ”
So I went over and introduced myself.
“I guess you have lived around here for a long time,” I said by way of breaking the ice.
“Might say I have,” Ernest said, showing me a circle of his thumb and index finger. “When I first came here the moon wasn’t but this big and there wasn’t no stars.
“Times have sure changed, ” he said. “When I was younger there wasn’t a body of water in this area that I couldn’t jump over in one jump. Now I catch bass where I used to hunt deer and turkey.”
“That was over twenty years ago, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“More or less,” Ernest said. “Are you a writer?”
“Yes,” I said. “I write for Brown’s Guide.”
“Do you write about hunting?”
“No,” I said, “I write about fishing.”
“Never mind that,” Ernest said. “I have got some information I want to pass on to the world. I want you to put it in your magazine.”
“Well, I can’t promise you that,” I said.
“I want to tell all the world how to call a deer,” he said. “This information is worth a million dollars to people who want to know it.”
“Call a deer!” I said. Then I thought: Here you are, about to have your leg pulled. Your have been around fishing and hunting camps long enough to see it coming. I did not know whether to laugh him off or carry the thing along to learn what the end would be.
“Okay,” I said, “How do you call a deer?”
“With these,” Ernest said and held out his brown bony fingers.
“How does it work?” I asked, bracing myself to become the butt of the joke.
“You have to be wearing khaki or denim pants,” he said. “And what you do is take your four fingers and thumb and get a good grasp on the muscle on the back of your leg. Then you drag your fingernails over the cloth in a quick crisp ‘crunch’ of a sound. This sounds like a deer chewing acorns. A deer’s hearing is 40 times better than a man’s. If a deer hears that sound on a still morning, he will come to where he thinks other deer are eating acorns.”
There is the end of the ride, I thought. Is my leg pulled or not?
I looked at Ernest in the eyes for a few moments, not saying anything. Ernest looked back at me, eye-to-eye. “Put that in your magazine and people will thank you for it,” he said.
Later that day, I asked one of the guides what he thought about Ernest’s “deer call.”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know, because I never tried it. But last year Earnest killed a deer so close with his shotgun that they dug the wading out with the shot. He’s getting too old and doesn’t see as well as he used to, so he has to get them in close to get a good shot, and he shoots his deer every year.
Later Ernest told me: “I’ve tried to live my life by one principle: I always try to help the other fellow when he is in need. When I learn that someone needs help, I pray to God that I will be able to help them. I have plowed fields, dug ditches, helped build houses, given money. And I have had it returned to me. People don’t seem to feel that way about each other any more, not as much as they used to. But it is a good way to live. Can you imagine what kind of world it would be if everyone tried to help his neighbor? It would be hard for people to dispute.”

Well, world, here is the million dollars worth of information that Ernest wanted you to have. Use it in good health.

Dr. John Burrison, professor of English at Georgia State University, estimates there are dozens of stories involving preachers and chicken, but he selected the best of the bunch for his book Storytellers: Folktales & Legends from the South. This story was told by Don Buchanan of Decatur, who heard it from his father, a Baptist minister:

Once there was this preacher who loved fried chicken, as all preachers are supposed to love fried chicken. And he was invited to eat at the house of one of his parishioners one Sunday. After church he made his way through the country to this house, and it so happened, as he was crossing this particular creek, right in the middle of the bridge he stumbled and he lost his false teeth, and they fell in the creek.

Well, ‘course he couldn’t eat, but he couldn’t turn down this invitation either, so he went on to the house. And, as they ate dinner, he ate what he could eat—mash potatoes an’ things that weren’t so hard to chew—but he didn’t touch the fried chicken. Well, he had a great reputation for eating fried chicken, and so, of course, everybody at the table was amazed and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t eating any fried chicken. So finally they asked him. And he said, “Well, I just have to tell you the truth. I lost my teeth goin’ across the creek down here, an’ I just can’t eat any.”

Well, he no sooner got the words out of his mouth than a little boy ‘bout twelve years old jumped up from the table, grabbed a chicken leg from off the platter, got him a piece of string, and went out the door.

‘Bout half an hour later he came back in, and he had the teeth in his hand. An’ the preacher said, “How in the world did you get those teeth out of the creek?”

He said, “Well, I just took this chicken leg and tied the string on it and dipped it down in the water, and those teeth bit right on it!”

John Burrison’s academic interest in folklore evolved during his undergraduate years at Pennsylvania State University, where he published and edited Folkways magazine. He came to Georgia State University in 1966 to develop the folklore curriculum in the Department of English, where he teaches such courses as American Folklore, Georgia Folklife, British Folk Culture, and Irish Folk Culture. He serves as curator of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee Center near Helen.

After being told by the Tarleton twins that Ashley Wilkes was to marry his cousin Melanie Hamilton, Scarlett O’Hara stood on the road to Tara awaiting her father, Gerald O’Hara’s, return from Twelve Oaks, the plantation across the Flint River where Ashley lived.“Her eyes followed the winding road, blood-red now after the morning rain. In her thought she traced its course as it ran down the hill to the sluggish Flint River, through the tangled swampy bottoms and up the next hill to Twelve Oaks where Ashley lived. That was all the road meant now—a road to Ashley and the beautiful white-columned house that crowned the hill like a Greek temple.” The Flint is only a 20-foot wide, winding stream between Fayette and Clayton counties, but this portion of it has played an integral part in literary history. Here, is where it flows along the western edge of Tara, the fictional home of Scarlett O’Hara—and perhaps the most famous home in all of American literature.In reality, these Flint River bottomlands were part of a 2,527-acre cotton plantation owned by author Margaret Mitchell’s Irish great-grandfather, Phillip Fitzgerald. Margaret roamed the land as a child, and when she sat down to write Gone With the Wind, the Flint and her grandfather’s plantation, named Rural Home, evolved into Tara.

By Sherri Smith Brown

When I was twelve, my Aunt Madeleine gave me a copy of Gone With the Wind for Christmas. I had seen the movie the previous summer, and when she told me that there was a book—that I could actually curl up in my own room and read to my heart’s content about Scarlett, Rhett, the Civil War and Tara—I was beside myself with amazement and anticipation. And then I got it and saw that there were hundreds of pages that I could pour over—passages describing the red clay countryside, the march from Resaca to Atlanta, Rhett and Scarlett fleeing Atlanta’s flames and the billowy, green-flowered muslin dress Scarlett wore to the barbeque.

During all my teenage summers, my family headed out of Indiana for Daytona Beach, Florida, each time passing through Atlanta, where I would peer from the car window at the skyline, dominated by the blue Hyatt dome, as we maneuvered our way through the construction and detours of the new interstate highway. Was there a trace of the railroad depot or Aunt Pittypat’s house? Would I catch a glimpse of a sign with an arrow pointing to Tara?

By the time I was twenty-one, I had read the book ten times. Then I put it down—life got in the way. But my perception of the South, and particularly Georgia, was fixed: it was a long-gone place of cotton fields, huge houses with white columns and pretty, flirtatious Southern belles with eighteen-inch waists and swaying hooped skirts.

Over the years I learned that I was not alone in my fascination with Tara and Gone With the Wind. In the preface of the book’s sixtieth anniversary edition, author Pat Conroy writes about his mother’s passion for the novel and how she raised him up to be a “Southern” novelist because Gone With the Wind “set her imagination ablaze.” Albert Castel, Civil War historian and author of the widely acclaimed Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864, tells of being mesmerized by the movie and the book at the age of thirteen. From that time on, the Civil War became a passion of his “inseparable from what had inspired it—Gone With the Wind.” Back in the ‘70s I taught a high school student in North Carolina who told me how she and her father, with a copy of the book and county road maps, had driven the back roads of Clayton County one vacation looking for signs of Tara. And, of course, there’s the Georgia Department of Tourism claiming that thousands of tourists, both foreign and out-of-state, visiting each year will invariably ask for directions to Tara. Somehow this all comforted me.

In my late twenties I moved to Atlanta—to Fayette County, that is. This Hoosier girl had gone from Indiana to California to Texas to North Carolina only to end up within twenty miles of where Gerald O’Hara’s plantation sat along the swamp bottoms of the Flint River. In fact, Scarlett had received her meager education from the Fayetteville Female Academy—just nine miles down the road in Fayetteville.

I could NOT believe this twist of fate. But—WHERE WAS TARA—exactly?

The receptionist at the Clayton County Visitor’s Center looked at me strangely.

“Well, yes, I know that Gone With the Wind is a novel—but it’s so real.” After all, I expected to find something. “What? There isn’t any Tara?”

The Tarleton twins never sat on Tara’s porch with Scarlett? Scarlett and Cathleen Calvert never spied Rhett looking up at them from the bottom of the Twelve Oaks winding staircase? Rhett never gave Scarlett a farewell kiss on the road near Rough and Ready? Scarlett never led her half-dead horse up the driveway to find Tara, desolate but standing, spared by the Yankee invaders? And movie producer David O. Selznick put white columns on Tara—Margaret Mitchell never mentioned white columns in her book? Not only is there no Tara—but my vision of it is just a celluloid Hollywood version of the South?

Margaret Mitchell couldn’t have made all of this up. I decided to combat my disillusionment with action. Forget Scarlett—what was Margaret thinking of?

Born in 1903, Margaret Mitchell was spoon-fed stories about the War of Northern Aggression. Her grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, had been an Atlanta wartime bride. Stories were told and battles were fought over and over again in living rooms and on porches as Margaret sat on her relatives’ knees. According to Mitchell biographer Darden Asbury Pyron in his book Southern Daughter, Mitchell wrote the first draft of her book from memory. So, if Mitchell had written from memory—what memory had sparked Tara? How did she envision Gerald O’Hara’s plantation? What had been her inspiration?

My search for Tara began again.

With county maps in hand, I have wandered Fayette and Clayton county roads along the Flint River, searching for the hills of Tara—or more accurately, the plantation land where Margaret Mitchell had spent her childhood summers, the land belonging to Mitchell’s Irish great-grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald.

Like Tara, Fitzgerald’s plantation lay along the Flint River swamp bottoms. Flint River land in the Georgia Piedmont was some of the finest cotton land in the state. It had been Creek Indian territory up until 1821 when the Creeks ceded this portion of their land to the federal government. The federal government placed the Indian boundary at Line Creek (the treaty actually said the “Flint River,” but this was an error). Georgia held a lottery to divide up this vast territory, an area that eventually would become Fayette, Clayton, Henry, Houston, Dooly and Monroe counties. Land lottery winners, the first white settlers here, cleared trees and carved cotton fields out of a frontier. With family members and possibly a few slaves, they planted a manageable amount of crops.

For the most part, plantations here were extremely rural and backwoods in the years leading up to the Civil War. These were not the great cotton plantations of the South; although in terms of numbers, Georgia had more “plantations” than any other Southern state. This was not the landed aristocracy who grew thousands of acres of cotton or rice and owned hundreds of slaves. That class comprised less than 2 percent of the 62,003 farms listed in Georgia’s 1861 Census. Even the fictional Gerald O’Hara, who aspired to be a great planter—who “desired his own house, his own plantation, his own horses, his own slaves”—knew that he would never win a place among this aristocracy.

The “typical” planter of the northern Piedmont, as well as Georgia and the South as a whole, was the small planter who owned two to three hundred acres of land and five to twenty slaves. Later on, historians would not even designate these properties as plantations since their acreage did not total five hundred acres. But these planters did not hesitate to refer to their properties as “plantations” and considered their interests as important as that small percentage of elite planters who controlled vast amounts of land, possessed great wealth and wielded huge social and political power.

Like the fictional Gerald O’Hara, Philip Fitzgerald was born in Ireland—in Tipperary County, however, rather than County Meath. After migrating to America, Fitzgerald settled in Fayetteville, Georgia, in 1831, began operating a store with his brother James and started buying property.

Founded in 1823, Fayetteville was a thriving center for the surrounding farm community by the time Fitzgerald arrived. There was no Atlanta (or Terminus as it was first called) and no railroad connecting the region to cotton markets. Farmers carried cotton and other marketable farm products caravan style to Savannah, returning with the goods they could not produce themselves on their self-contained properties.

Philip Fitzgerald, like the fictional Gerald O’Hara, bought at least part of his property from another local land owner who was ready to move on. A deed dated August 9, 1853, and recorded in Fayette County Deed Book G, shows Fitzgerald purchasing 1,200 acres from Henry McElroy for $4,800. One family story says this property, which had a home and slave cabins, lay between two other parcels Fitzgerald had previously purchased. In 1858, the state legislature formed Clayton County from the western portion of Henry and the eastern portion of Fayette counties with the Flint River the natural boundary between much of Clayton and Fayette. Fitzgerald’s property now fell in both counties.

The 1861 Tax Digest for Clayton County shows Fitzgerald owning 2,527 acres and 35 slaves. The 1860 Census valued his total estate at $61,000, making him the richest man, though not the largest slave owner, in Clayton County at that time. By 1860 standards, this put him far above the “typical” planter—but his was still a middle-sized plantation—and like Gerald, he came nowhere close to the status of the great planters.

The Fitzgerald plantation home, originally built by McElroy, was primitive—a typical North Georgia Piedmont farm house. As Fitzgerald and his wife Eleanor’s family and wealth grew, the house, which they called Rural Home, evolved—a second story, porches, separate guest houses encircling it—but it always remained plain.

Rural Home was, in fact, much closer to Margaret Mitchell’s mental image of Tara than David Selznick’s white-columned movie facade. Pine board, instead of the book’s “whitewashed brick”—but no columns. Darden Pyron recounts a letter Mitchell wrote to a friend: “…this section of North Georgia was new and crude compared with other sections of the South, and white columns were the exception rather than the rule….”

Also, like Tara, the house was spared during Sherman’s March to the Sea, while the farmlands and cotton fields were destroyed. In her book Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Anne Edwards wrote that the family story young Margaret heard over and over was that “when the battle was over, the Fitzgerald farm stood raped and silent, its fields stripped, its slaves and animals gone, the house emptied of most valuables. But Eleanor Fitzgerald’s dark velvet drapes still hung defiantly at the windows, and her few small personal treasures, including her sacred gold cross, were buried under the pig house in an old tea caddy.” Philip Fitzgerald, then sixty-six, said Edwards “began all over again with no slaves, no food and only three of his daughters and an ailing wife at home to help with the work.”

My obsession with the mythical Tara came to an official end. Now I had to find what I believed to be the true inspiration of Margaret Mitchell’s novel—Rural Home.

My search suddenly became easier.

I called Betty Talmadge. I knew that Ms. Talmadge had purchased the crumbling Tara movie facade from the MGM backlot years ago. I had often wondered about it—what it would be like to see it restored to its 1939 glory. I also knew that in 1981 Ms. Talmadge had moved Rural Home, in great disrepair, to her own property for safekeeping—but only now did I care about that.

“I want to see the old Fitzgerald homestead,” I said.

“Oh, Honey, you don’t want to see that. It’s a mess.”

“No, Ms. Talmadge, I really want to see it.”

From my home in Fayette County, the road to Tara heads east on Georgia 54 through Fayetteville, onto McDonough Road and straight to Lovejoy Plantation.

I inspected the movie facade first. Pieces of roof, window frames, peeling dark green shutters, doors and the infernal square, white, faux brick columns were piled in stacks—dirty and desolate looking but tagged and labeled with letters and numbers. The Atlanta History Center had taken the double palladium-style front door, and it was now enclosed behind glass in a Gone With the Wind exhibit. But these other pieces—which once made up a movie facade so classy it was featured in the November 1939 issue of House & Garden magazine—lie sadly waiting for the time when they, too, might be reconstructed again.

“Are you ready for Rural Home?” Ms. Talmadge broke the silence. I nodded and we turned away.

Betty Talmadge saved Rural Home from destruction back in 1981. “I bought it over the telephone in thirty minutes,” she told me. “One thousand dollars, and I had to move it and clean up the mess left behind.”

She said she went out to see what she had purchased and as she stood looking at it, wondering how she was going to move it, all she could think of was “what have I done” and “why have I done it?”

The oldest portions of Rural Home stood in sections raised on cement blocks in the back of her pasture: a two-story structure with broken window frames and panes; a smaller one-story section stood a few feet away. One entire end of this section was open where it was once attached to the main house and a gaping hole took the place of what was once a chimney. Weather-and-age-worn clapboard—very plain—definitely, no columns.

In the History of Clayton County, Stephens Mitchell, Margaret’s brother, wrote that the “old house was ugly, but comfortable and surrounded by huge oaks of great age.”

The original portions dated from the 1820s Ms. Talmadge told me. Just four rooms. “I took down the Victorian trim,” she said.

It was hard to imagine Scarlett chattering away to the lounging Tarletons here after seeing Selznick’s white-columned splendor; but it was easy to imagine a young Margaret Mitchell spending her summers here and returning to this house and the story of her great grandparents when she wrote her great Civil War novel.

I looked at Betty Talmadge, wondering what inner voice of hers had led her to the ownership of these symbols of the antebellum south.

“Just think,” I whispered, “You have the ‘real’ Tara and the ‘mythical’ Tara.”

“I know,” she replied softly.

As I left Betty Talmadge, I knew I had just one more thing to do and then nearly forty years of “searching” would be over.

In 1938 Mitchell provided a description of Tara and its environs for an artist drawing up a plot plan of the plantation to aid in the movie production. She placed the plantation on the north side of a road that headed west to the Flint River, Twelve Oaks and Fayetteville and east to Lovejoy and Jonesboro. I pulled out my copy of the plot plan and my county road maps. Now, it was time to match the house to the land where it belonged.

I headed west toward Fayetteville on McDonough Road. On Folsom Road, called Fitzgerald on an old topo map, I took a left. As I drove my car up the road’s incline, I thought of how Gerald O’Hara’s Tara was “a clumsy sprawling building that crowned the rise of ground overlooking the green incline of pasture land running down to the river.” At the end of Folsom, where it dead ends into Tara Road, I came to the top of the hill. Straight ahead, I looked out onto the rooftops of what is now a huge recently built subdivision with roads winding down the north side of the hill. To the west was the incline down to what I knew was the bottom land of the Flint River. I turned my head directly to the right and there, along the side of the road, were the crumbling remains of a brick chimney. And to my left, among the briars and weeds, were traces of an old foundation…Tara.

I’ve been asked if maybe its time to take down the posters of Clark Gable and Gone With the Wind that hang on the walls in my office. Funny, I had thought of that myself. Kind of an end of an era for me. I’ve spent nearly forty years and traveled hundreds of miles to realize a myth. The “real” ended up sitting practically in my own back yard. And that “real,” in some unexplainable way that I still haven’t sorted through yet, has been the much more satisfying experience.

By P.J. Hoff P.J. Hoff, a certified meteorologist, picked Georgia’s Coast as a home after 20 years as a weather analyst for newspapers, radio and television in Chicago.In my 20 years as a weatherman for television and radio, I was asked many questions: the question most frequently asked was, “Weatherwise, where is the best place to retire?” The closer I got to retirement age the more I began to ask myself that question. I figured that in two decades of weather forecasting I had at least earned the right to retire to a place where I would be compatible with the climate.I was serious about it. I researched it. My wife and I vacationed in areas where we thought we might like to live. Always partial to the seashore, we visited coastal areas all around the edge of the United States and Canada. In the end, we picked Georgia’s Golden Isles as our home, and here’s why.A good climate should meet four requirements:1. It should have a daily mean temperature of around 65 degrees. The range between the two extremes should be moderate – just enough to avoid monotony.2. Relative humidity should be fairly constant – around 50 or 60 percent.3. There should be a moderately good movement of air to avoid stagnation.4. There should be abundant sunshine, broken up by enough clouds and rain to break the monotony of endless sunny days.You can’t find a climate that meets all these conditions, but some come closer than others, and the closer you come, the less aggravated will be weather-induced illnesses, and the slighter the strain on older bodies trying to meet the stress of violent weather changes. Another thing to consider is how the weather affects you personally. Weather affects people differently. If you’re hit on the head with a bolt of lightning, you can be reasonably certain that weather has affected you, but there are more subtle influences. Some people with sinusitis have fewer attacks in moist climates, others fewer in dry climates, so individual differences must be considered.Here’s how Georgia measured up to the basic requirements.Tepmrature Average annual temperatures range from 60.7 degrees in the extreme north central to 65.4 in the southeast. The average number of days with a temperature of 32 or lower ranges from 110 in the north to about 10 in lower coastal regions.Humidity Relative humidities are comparatively high in most of Georgia because of the nearby Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, with a high frequency of wind flow from these warm bodies of water. Year-round average humidity is near 85 percent at 7am, dropping to about 55 percent by 1 pm. That is an average of 70 percent, which is above the second requirement. Because of the closeness of the warm waters, we have warm humid summers and short mild winters, resulting in this higher humidity.Movement of Air Because of the lack of high coastal mountain ranges, we have the required good movement of air of the third requirement. Smog is caused by temperature inversions, warm layers of air above cooler layers, trapping air below it so that vertical motions are stopped. If an area is hemmed in between coastal mountains and high pressure over the ocean, smog develops, as often happens on the Pacific coast. There, far-out suggestions have been made to solve the problem, like tearing down the coastal range in order to let fresh air into Los Angeles. Climate in places like this can’t be considered healthy. Those affected by smog are mostly older people, asthmatics, cardiacs and the physically weak. Fortunately, we have no coastal mountain range along the Georgia coast, so ventilation is abundant. If there is high pressure over the ocean, we have winds from the ocean; if the wind is from the west, there’s nothing to stop it but a few barbed wire fences.Sunshine The fact that sunshine is abundant is supported by a variety of interesting statistics. Savannah averages 105 clear days a year, Columbus 112, Macon 115, and Rome 105. In winter, Rome averages five hours of sunshine a day, while the southern part of the state gets six. When summer comes, the state as a whole averages nine hours of sunshine a day; the northeast gets 50 percent of the possible sunshine and the south gets 60 percent. Then we have cloudy days and Georgia’s normally abundant rains to keep it from getting monotonous.I looked into several other factors that affect Georgia weather when contemplating my retirement.Two bodies of water – the Atlantic and the Gulf, control the state’s weather. Most of the rain over Georgia and the rest of the eastern part of the country comes straight out of the tropical waters of the Gulf. The warm humid Gulf air has regular paths it likes to travel – over the central plains of the nation, up the Mississippi and over the Atlantic coast. Then, meeting cold continental air, it rises, cools and gets to work building cloud masses and rainstorms. The southern states see a greater variety of items from the Gulf’s bag of tricks. We have three kinds of storms: heavy rainstorms of the kind that frequently take place in later winter; in spring and summer, thunderstorms and tornadoes, often with torrential rains; and in late summer and fall, the tropical storms that sometimes turn into hurricanes.Average rainfall ranges from more than 71 inches in the northeast down to 40 inches in the east central sections. Averages don’t tell the complete story of course. There was that fellow who failed to make it wading across a river that had an average depth of four feet. In 1959 Flat Top had 122 inches of rain and in 1954 Swainsboro in east central Georgia had only 15 inches. But those are extremes.The lower east coast receives the state’s greatest rain amount during September as a rule because of rainfall resulting from late summer and autumn tropical storms. Snowfall is of no significance – only the extreme northern mountains have an annual average as high as five inches.Before deciding on Georgia for retirement, I made a study of hurricanes and tornadoes and found some surprises. The state is seldom hit directly by the hurricanes that frequent that Atlantic Coast. The bend in the coast, called the Georgia Bight, has something to do with it. Gulf hurricanes must come overland, which weakens them because their source of power is warm water. Those moving along the east coast of Florida tend to recurve to open water and the Carolinas.There have been exceptions. In 1947 the first attempt to modify a hurricane by seeding was made on one churning north of the Bahamas. It made an unusual hairpin turn to the west and hit Savannah. Whether it would have done this without seeding is still not known. While a few others have made similar hairpin turns without seeding, notably Doria in 1967. After the 1947 experiments, the National Weather Service made stricter ground rules, seeding only storms that are several days from populated areas.Our barrier islands have led a comparatively charmed life. If statistics is your cup of tea, since 1700 only 17 hurricanes have affected the Georgia coast, and 11 of those were minor. One of the minor ones was Doria, who couldn’t make up her mind and turned back down from the Jersey coast. She got close enough to unshingle a few Golden Isles roofs. But on the measuring stick of casualties and dollar-damage, she was a minor leaguer. Major hurricanes affecting the Golden Isles occurred in 1804, 1812, 1881, 1898, 1911 and 1940. Only two of the 17 had centers moving over the Golden Isles – a minor one in 1837 near Darien and the major one in 1898. Its center moved over Brunswick, causing a storm wave that carried floodwaters clear up to Newcastle Street. So we’ve had only one sockdolager in 274 years. A pitcher with that low an ERA would be an instant Hall of Famer.As for tornadoes, several can be expected in Georgia – the annual average is 18. And most of those are in the western third of the state. Their highest frequency is in the spring – 50 percent coming in March and April. Statisticians give some consolation to people living in tornado areas. The probability of a tornado striking a given point is .1363 – or about once in 250 years. In figuring potential casualties, more than just the tornado frequency has to be taken into consideration. It has to be a combination of high tornado incidence and the concentration of population.Any weather condition, good or bad, may have unfortunate results if it lasts too long. It’s depressing simply because its monotonous. It’s also harmful physically because the body tends to become less adaptable to change and, therefore, is more vulnerable to change when it does come. We choose Georgia because it supplies a diversity of climate. The four seasons are here but come on with a crash. Summers in the section we chose, the Golden Isles, are admittedly hot and humid, but moderate air-conditioning removes the stinger, and fall comes to the rescue. When fall departs and winter takes over, there isn’t a drastic change. We walk the beaches in comfort on most winter days. And spring… spring is for the poets. We can be proud of Georgia weatherwise and otherwise.