The beginning of Doctors Calvin and Agatha Thrash and the work they started.

Continuing the Vision

<p>The beginning of Doctors Calvin and Agatha Thrash and the work they started.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Uchee Pines Institute

Calvin Thrash

Ann Thrash-Trumbo

Historical Sketches

I'd just like to start out by saying this whole thing is a story about grace.

It's so good to look out and see a few familiar faces here this morning.

And some of these stories may be familiar to some of you, Because you may have been here, lived through some of it.

It's all about something God did because there's no way that 2 people from South Georgia could have done what happened here.

So my father, Calvin Thrash, was born in Gay, Georgia, which is about 50 miles north of Columbus.

And Gay is just a little spot in the road.

It's, the main crop when he was growing up there was cotton, and the other big crop was peaches.

And this instilled in his heart a deep desire to leave the farm forever.

That was just all he wanted to do, was get away from the farm.

When he was about 3 years old, 3 or 4 years old, the family house burned down.

My grandfather was so panicked when the house began burning that all he had time to grab was his rifle.

He was afraid that it would go off in the fire, that it would fire in the fire.

He had ulcers, and his doctor had prescribed him cornflakes to eat.

And that was all he grabbed on his way out the door, that and the kids, his gun, his cornflakes and the kids.

They began to live with my great grandmother, my grandfather's mother.

She was older, of course, by this time, and everybody thought, oh, Miss Arielle ain't gonna live long, so we're just gonna live with her for a few years, just a couple years, till she dies.

My great-grandmother lived for the next 30 years.

And she was not a real easy person to live with, but we've all felt that that contributed to my grandmother's sainthood.

My dad's mother was a wonderful, wonderful person.

She was a school teacher, and she taught second grade most of her career.

And everybody thought that it was, in part, living with her mother-in-law that made her that way.

My father told a story of how his father insisted that every day during cotton season, he and my uncle, his brother, had to pick a full bag of cotton every day.

Now a bag of cotton isn't like a grocery bag.

It was a bag about 6 feet tall and about this big around and had to be crammed full of cotton, because all cotton was picked by hand in those days.

And so 1 day my grandfather was away from home doing some kind of business and my dad and my uncle were busy doing the things that boys do when they get home from school and somehow they just never got that bag of cotton picked and so they it finally got dark and they ate their supper and they went to bed, secure in the knowledge that there was no way that Papa would make them get up and pick cotton in the middle of the night, except that their security was absolutely misplaced.

When Papa got home, they were not asleep yet, and he pokes his head in the door of their bedroom, and he says, so boys, did you pick your cotton today?

And they're like, no sir, we didn't get that done today.

And so they went out, and by light of a lantern, they picked their bag of cotton before they went to sleep that night.

And I don't know if you're aware of it, But dad did that trick to me too.

He told me he wanted a 5 gallon bucket of beans.

And I got busy the same way, riding the bicycle and doing this and that and the other thing.

And after he got back home, he gave me a flashlight.

And I said, well, I didn't get that done.

And here you can go out and pick the beans.

But I will say this, that when he asked me to pick beans after that I picked the beans.

It turned out that he was essentially legally blind.

And it wasn't until he was 12 years old that he got his first pair of glasses.

He would sit on the front row of the schoolroom, the little schoolhouse where they went there in gay, and he would press against the side of his eye because that distorted his focal length just enough that he could see the blackboard if he looked really hard and sat right on the front row of the school.

When he was 12, he got his first pair of glasses and he said that the whole world just opened up.

All of a sudden he could see leaves on the trees.

Prior to this, when the occasional, very rare airplane would fly over, All the children would run out of the schoolhouse and would look, there's an airplane, there's an airplane.

And now he could see airplanes in the sky.

Everywhere that he went, he set academic records.

And this opened doors for him to go to college and eventually to medical school.

And this was his ticket off the farm forever, he thought.

My mother, Agatha Thrash, was born in Baxley, Georgia.

Now if you've never heard of Baxley, I'm not surprised.

Perhaps you've heard of Brunswick, Georgia, Or perhaps you've heard of Valdosta.

Maybe you've heard of Savannah, if you haven't heard of any of those other towns.

But South Georgia is where she grew up, way south, close to the Okefenokee Swamp.

She was a country girl, grew up on a dairy farm.

While her dad was a dairy farmer, her mother was a school teacher.

She also taught second grade in Baxley, Georgia.

Her father, Norwood Moody, was a godly man, a good man, eventually became the sheriff of Appling County, of which my mother was inordinately proud.

But 1 day as they were talking, She would follow him around the farm, helping with various tasks.

He gave her a horse, and she named the horse Nell, I believe.

It's been a while since I've heard this story.

But she would ride the horse to bring the cattle in when it was time for them to come in and be milked.

Any time she wasn't with her dad, she was on her horse.

1 day, as she and her dad were talking, just going about their chores in the dairy.

My grandfather said to my mother, he said, baby, he said, if I had my life to live over again, I would be a doctor.

And that sparked in her mind a great desire to be what he thought would be the ultimate in a life career.

She, from that point forward, wanted to be a doctor and nothing else was interesting to her.

This is her first year class student identification card for the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.

She saved all of her ID cards from every year of medical school.

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Historical Sketches

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