“On the road again; just can’t wait to get on the road again” is a refrain of a once-popular song by Willie Nelson. For Beth Hamrick, it’s pretty much her life as a wife and grandmother.
Hamrick, 71, is the mother of two doctors — Miller Hamrick, now in Savannah, and Maribeth Bosshardt, who lives in Lookout Mountain. Both have four children. Their father, Carl Hamrick, died suddenly in 2010.
“I have eight grandchildren, ages 14 to 3, so I’m busy going back and forth,” Hamrick shared last week, adding that she had just returned from her son’s home and would be travelling to Lookout Mountain next week.
The Jones County native and part-time Gray resident is also on the road just about every day. Her husband of two years, Phil Brannen, owns a Ford dealership in Perry.
“We live in Perry at night. I stay in Gray during the day, but now, like on Fridays, he’ll come to Gray,” she explained. “So we’re just back and forth. But it works.”
Hamrick, daughter of Elizabeth Washburn Bowden and Walter Bowden and a 1971 Jones County High graduate, has lived in Jones County practically all her life. She grew up on Turner Woods Road before it was paved, and one of her favorite activities as a youngster was riding horses.
“When I was a young girl, I’d say 10 to 14 or 15, I rode horses every day with Earlene Hamilton,” Hamrick said.
She recalled that Lake Jonesco Golf Course — as it was known in those days — had a snack bar and beach.
“Earlene and I would get up in the summer. We’d get on those horses, and we would ride to the golf course,” she shared. “We’d stay all day sunbathing. We’d tie the horses, take their saddles off, tie them up on the side, let them eat grass, spend the whole day, get back on them about 4:30 in the afternoon and ride home.”
Hamrick had a couple of other horse stories to share, including one when her favorite pony, Tonka, threw her in the Stewart Avenue neighborhood, across town from her home.
“It scared me,” she acknowledged, “and I had to get him home. So Mama came and led the horse through town, holding onto him with her hand out the car window, all the way through town to Turner Woods.”
A black bear in Jones County
Then there was the time her father was riding another of their horses down Turner Woods Road, running wide open, Hamrick said. A family that lived further out of town owned a black bear and kept him chained in the yard.
“That horse saw that bear, and he reared up,” Hamrick said. “We were standing in our yard, and we could see down the road; daddy came hauling it back home. I remember mama just laughing. She thought that was the funniest thing you’d have seen.
“Those are true stories,” she remarked.
Following graduation, Hamrick entered the University of Georgia and was set to leave four years later as an honor graduate.
“I graduated there with a degree in psychology, which I have used extensively, but not to work,” she laughed.
However, her high school sweetheart, Carl, a year younger, was also at UGA, and she didn’t want to leave. Hamrick — still Bowden then — entered graduate school, but during the next semester, Jones County Elementary School Principal Dallas Frazier called and said he needed a first-grade teacher.
“I said, ‘Well, Mr. Frazier, I can’t teach.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you can. The only thing you’ve got to do is agree to get your Masters in Education.’ And, I was broke, so I thought, you know what, I need to do that.
“So I moved home and started teaching first grade. And those children, I don’t know how they learned to read, but I know some of them now, and they did well. They did learn to read.”
Hamrick started teaching in 1975 and went to night school to obtain her Masters. Carl graduated in 1976 with a degree in Parks and Recreation, but when he came home, he and his brother, John, bought a building supply business. Carl and Beth were married in December of that year.
“I taught school at Gray Elementary and loved it,” Hamrick said. “Thought I’d never quit. I taught five years. Then I got pregnant with Miller, and so I said, ‘I’ll definitely go back when he goes to kindergarten.’ Well, then I got pregnant with Maribeth.”
The new mom never went back to teaching. Instead, she became the bookkeeper for the new family business, Hamrick Building & Supply.
“I did the books and the payroll and the taxes, all that part of the business,” she explained. “I worked there pretty much full time, or worked every day, usually, but half a day. It depended on what was going on with children. I was taking them to school.”
From rover to running
Hamrick reflected on activities she enjoyed while raising the two children and traced one of them to her high school days.
“I loved basketball. Wasn’t that good, but got to play … That was a big part of my teenage years at Jones County.”
Girls basketball teams at that time used a “rover,” who could cross the half court line, able to play on both offense and defense.
“I was the rover, which meant all I could do was run,” Hamrick said kiddingly.
That turned out to be the case about 15 years later.
“I’ve been a runner,” she pointed out. “I started running when I was in my 30s, and ran until I was 62 just about every day. Now I’m a walker because I got worried about falling. So now I walk about three, four miles a day, just about every day.”
Hamrick shared that the family attended the Methodist Church while raising their children, and she was a Sunday School teacher and on committees.
“I was on the Pastor Parish committee forever,” she said. “It’s kind of like a liaison committee between the preacher and the congregation.”
Hamrick was an active Pilot Club member during those years and served a term as president. She was also involved in the annual fundraiser for cancer, Relay for Life, at the time one of the biggest events in the county.
“It was a lot of work, but we made lots of money during those years,” she declared.
The building supply business had prospered over the years, helping put the two Hamrick children through school, when Carl died suddenly in 2010.
“He had a heart attack right there in the store, and I had just talked to him,” Hamrick recalled. “He was at the store, and he loved his work. But, he was too young; 55 is just a baby.”
John Hamrick became ill soon after his brother’s death, stayed in the hospital for nine months, and died about two years after Carl.
“We sold the business right before John died,” she said, noting that longtime employee Kenny Faulkner bought it in 2012. “Actually, I worked for him. I just kept working.”
Faulkner has since sold the business, Hamrick said.
“When he finally said he was going to retire and quit, I said I will, too. So, that’s when I quit working with that.”
In the years following Carl’s death, Hamrick started looking at managing their acreage, particularly the timber.
“I have done a lot as far as cutting timber, then replanting, going through all that,” she explained. “And actually, last year, I got conservationist of the year, and I laughed and said, ‘I have no idea how I got that.’ You don’t think taking care of stuff like that takes time, but it does.”
Dating … again
Hamrick recalled she had been a widow for about eight years when she started dating Brannen in 2018.
“I was 64 when I started dating. And that was crazy, too,” she asserted, “dating at that age. I tell people it was hilarious because it’s just like when you date when you’re young. But you’re old; you get all nervous.”
Hamrick related that when Brannen first asked her to dinner, she called her daughter.
“I said to her, ‘He called and asked me to dinner, and I said I would go, but there’s no way in hell I’m going.’ She said, ‘Mama, go on. It’s just dinner.’ I can tell you; I was so nervous. You know, it was just like being a teenager. But, anyway, here we go. I did it, we married, and here we are. Who would have thought that?”
Hamrick believes she has done what her late husband would have wanted.
“Carl and I started dating at 15. We grew up together. He was just a precious person. And I’m so thankful that I had him as long as I had.
“Though, I had a good friend when I was going to get married that was a good friend of Carl’s, too,” she went on. “And he said, ‘Beth, do you think Carl would want you to get married again?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, he would want me to, and I would have wanted him to.’ I said, ‘Really. I used to tell my friends, if something happens to me, y’all divorce your husband and marry Carl, because he’s real sweet.
“That’s the truth because he was a good husband. But,” Hamrick quickly added, “Phil is too. In fact, my children even laugh and say, ‘Mama, I don’t know how you got two sweet men’. And I said, ‘I don’t either, because I can be hard to love!’”
