Carol Brittain has been active pretty much all her life, and she doesn’t plan on letting a stroke she suffered in February stop her.
Brittain, who will turn 86 in December, said her oldest daughter, Perrin, likely saved her from a worse outcome that day.
“I was sitting down at the table eating a cookie, and I just felt it happening,” she recalled. “I called Perrin, and I said, ‘Perrin, I don’t know what’s going on, but something’s wrong.’ She came down here, and she said, ‘I don’t either mama, but we need to call 911.’ She probably saved me from having a really bad stroke.”
Brittain was taken by ambulance from her home on Lee Drive in Gray to the Medical Center in Macon, where she stayed a week before being transferred to the hospital rehab for two weeks. She then spent time at Autumn Lane Health and Rehabilitation in Gray and has been staying with her son, Waverly Brittain, since leaving there.
“Autumn Lane has a wonderful therapy program, and I’m pretty much using my body,” she commented last week. “I will be stronger and better when it’s all said and done.”
The former Carol Moss is not a Jones County native. She grew up in Lincolnton and has many memories of her family and childhood. She actually wrote a pictorial biography of her family.
Lincolnton, like all small towns, had its share of neighborhood stores. One in particular was unique, according to Brittain.
“I’m sure Gullebeu’s Store was the only store that allowed children of relatives and friends to charge money to their store account,” she recalled. “We charged a nickel or a dime, took the money and bought ice cream or candy at City Pharmacy or Crawford and Breazale Drugstore.”
As she got older, Brittain took part in various activities. She remembered that she was very anxious to be a cheerleader, and the student body voted on the aspiring young ladies.
“Each student trying out did their cheer on stage in the auditorium. My cheer had three sentences, and with each sentence I got louder and louder,” she recollected. “There was some laughter, but I was voted a cheerleader.”
The teenager, though, did not restrict her competition to cheerleading.
“I won the Miss Lincoln County Keep Georgia Green Beauty Contest in 1956,” she said. “The night I won the contest, I had shampooed my hair with Tide.”
Before capturing that award, however, Carol Moss had met her future husband, Jimmy Brittain. While visiting her aunt in Eatonton, she went to the community swimming pool. Brittain was the lifeguard, and Moss knew she wanted to meet him. She concocted her plan to attract his attention.
“I went on the high diving board, not the low one, walked out to the end and looked down, and I couldn’t even jump off because it was so high. It scared me, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to get down from here before he sees me.’
“So,” she explained, “I started down, and he stood up and blew his whistle, and he and every child in the pool stopped to see who he was gonna throw out of the pool. He said, ‘Hey you, it’s against the rules to go down the ladder, but I’ll come get you if you want me to.’ And that was the beginning.”
The couple dated for about two years, and Carol told her mother she was foregoing her last year in high school.
“I took a correspondence course, I think it was in English, and that helped me to get into GSCW (Georgia State College for Women, now Georgia College and State University).
“And so, after that freshman year, we were married June 18, 1958. He was at Tech, and we lived in the Techwood Apartments, poor as we could be, but happy.”
Brittain said she enrolled at Georgia State University in Atlanta, but complications arose.
“I got sick, and I didn’t know what was wrong. Well,” she explained, “I have Perrin instead of a college diploma.”
Perrin was the first of three children. She is now 66. Her sister, Leila, is 63, and Waverly is 59.
While at Tech, Brittain was a contestant in another ‘beauty contest’.
“There was a club when Jimmy was at Tech, the Dames club, and I was a member,” she recalled. “They nominated me to be in the running for Mrs. Georgia Tech Homecoming Queen.”
Brittain finished first runner-up.
Following Jimmy Brittain’s graduation, the couple moved to Florida, where he worked in the Gemini space program.
“In Titusville, there is a Hall of Fame, and his name is up there with the people that worked on the Gemini program,” Brittain pointed out.
Five years later, Jimmy Brittain went to work at the base in Warner Robins, and the couple did not hesitate in their decision to settle in Gray.
“We wanted to raise our children in a small town and not in a city,” Brittain said, “and it just seemed like the place to live when we would pass through when we would come home from Florida at Christmas.”
Several years after the Brittains settled in Gray, Mary Ann Hamrick shared some information with Brittain.
“Mary Ann talked to me and said that she had gotten some interesting facts about the Keep America Beautiful program,” Brittain recalled, “and she wanted to know if I would consider doing that. I said, ‘Well, I think I would like to do that.’ it sounded like something I would really enjoy.”
Ed and Mary Ann Hamrick drove her to Alabama to learn more about the program.
“Driving back from there, I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’” The new part-time coordinator started the Keep America Beautiful program in Jones County in 1978.
“We started with not very much money in the budget,” Brittain pointed out, “but we did a lot of fun and wonderful things. The volunteers were so awesome to work with, and I enjoyed that.”
She said that the group adopted Gray-Jones County Clean Community Commission as its local name.
Brittain enjoyed her ‘part-time’ job, and she learned how to secure funding.
“I was part-time, but there were things I wanted to do, and it took more time. But,” she quickly added, “I loved it, so that was okay.
“I had never written a grant before, and when I did the first one, I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it because I didn’t know if I would get it or not. But we did,” Brittain shared, “and I believe it was around $18,000. I bought a forklift for the recycling center with that.”
She apparently became very proficient at grant writing, as the local organization received seven from 1990-96.
There was more than money. Thanks to the efforts of Brittain and the volunteers, local projects led to state and national recognition on numerous occasions.
“We won 16 state and national awards,” the retiree recalled, “seven of which were first place in the state, and two were first place in the country.”
There was one, however, that she said “was really a surprise to me. I received the Professional Leadership Award from Keep America Beautiful in 1981. It was presented in Washington D.C. There were four given in the United States that year.”
The local organization also received the first-place national Keep America Beautiful System Award in 1983.
Brittain detailed various projects of the local KAB program: puppet shows in the elementary schools; glass and newspaper drives; hamburger cookouts when fundraisers ended; and one special endeavor, assisting with the construction of a Scout Center.
“Mr. Eston Altman, who was such a kind, generous man, wanted more than anything to build a scout center,” she recalled. “He came up and talked to me at City Hall, and I said, ‘Well, Mr. Altman, I can try to help you raise some of the money for that center.’” Brittain said Altman matched the organization’s donated funds and a grant from the state. “He gave $25,000 of his own money.”
The Scout Center was not the only real estate that earned the attention of the Clean Community Commission. Located adjacent to the courthouse is a parcel that was developed into a park area. In fact, it bears the name of the 18-year director: Carol’s Park.
“That was my last project,” Brittain recalled, “and I was just so thrilled the county gave us the property to develop the park. It really has been used quite a bit. They have Bible readings up there, and people get married up there. In fact, Leila did.”
Brittain noted that she didn’t name the park.
“I guess the Clean Community Commission did, but I am certainly honored.”
Brittain, who lost her husband to leukemia in 2015, has been retired almost 30 years now but spent 10 years helping with the family Christmas tree farm. Grade school children would visit, and Brittain tried to both entertain and educate them.
“I talked to them about trees and what they did for us, giving us food and giving us building materials. And,” she added, “I told them ‘I want to show you where Santa Claus spent the night’. One little boy said ‘that ain’t true’.”
During a visit to her home, Brittain pointed out pictures in the hall. One was a photo of a handkerchief that her father bought for $1 while in Germany during the war.
She recalled that, when her father left for the war, she and her mother took him to the train station.
“I can remember it like it was yesterday,” she said with emotion. “He tapped on the window when the train went by and waved. We spent the night in Atlanta, and I was crying. Mama said, ‘Carol, are you crying?’ I said, ‘No, my eyes are leaking’.”
