Charles Arthur Floyd came squalling into the world on his family’s farm at the midpoint of the winter season. It was a fallow time in the northwest corner of Georgia. Cottonseed and other crops would soon be planted, but for now the growing fields were fast asleep. Pink and white dogwood blossoms were months away from erupting on the mountainsides among the stands of hickory, thickets of mountain laurel, and tangles of wild honeysuckle.
The baby arrived just thirty–four days into 1904. It was the third day of February—the month named for Februus, a Roman deity associated with purification who eventually became god of the underworld. This Floyd was a child of Aquarius. The baby was born on a Wednesday, and, according to those who followed astrology, that was a lucky day for Aquarians.
The Floyds were Baptists, Democrats, and hardworking farmers rooted to Georgia’s red chocolate clay. They did not pay much heed to the influence of stars and planets on human affairs, except when it came to the planting of crops or a coon hunt under the harvest moon or as a topic of conversation when chores were completed and they searched the night heavens for streaking meteors.
Dr. Richard S. Bradley, who rode in his buggy from the nearby community of Folsom to deliver the baby at the Floyd home, charged a fee of $7.50. the Floyds paid every last cent, but it took five installments—two dollars initially, followed by one dollar in paper currency, a dollar and twenty-five cents worth of corn, two dollars in greenbacks, and a final payment of a dollar and a quarter that was not made until November, nine months after the boy’s birth. Many years later in her published memoirs, Ora Lewis Bradley, the attending physician’s widow, recalled that the Floyd baby boy “had good, law-abiding parents and grandparents. He was a fine, pretty baby, weighing ten pounds.”
The Floyds were known to be solid citizens. They were respected and trusted. It was said that they “were as good as gold.” So neighbors were pleased when the word spread across Folsom and the nearby town of Adairsville, seven miles to the east, and through the hollows and over the hills in Bartow County that yet another Floyd had been born.
The latest Floyd baby’s birth was not of much consequence to anyone except the immediate family. Business went on as usual, with not a newspaper notice in the small county papers. Naturally, the newspapers in Atlanta and the larger cities were filled with more important events. Old men, who congregated at the square to whittle and spit, and peddlers, who paused at country stores with their wares, had plenty else to gab about.
After all, it had been only a month since the death of James Longstreet, the Confederate general who had been raised in Georgia. Longstreet fought at both battles of Manassas, at Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga, and in the Wilderness Campaign. While the Floyd baby’s birth marked the forty-third anniversary of the formation of the Confederate States of America, life for these hardscrabble farmers had scarcely changed since the days following the war.
Less than two months had passed since brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright, self–taught inventors from Dayton, Ohio, had made their first successful flight from a “heavier-than-air machine” at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. And, of course, there was the big news out of St. Louis. After almost six years of frantic preparation, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—destined to become the “grandest of all world’s fairs”—was only a few months away from opening, complete with John Philip Sousa and his celebrated band.
There was also much talk in Adairsville of the panic in the demoralized cotton market, a run caused by a struggle between southern growers and the domestic and foreign mills. During the previous week, prices had gone through a series of convulsions, fluctuating up and down like never before in the annals of the cotton exchange. Trouble was also brewing abroad. Marines were fighting Columbian troops in Panama, where the United States was attempting to build a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In Asia, it had become apparent that Russia and Japan were just short days away from a formal declaration of war, their rival ambitions in Korea and Manchuria the chief cause. The New York Times reported that there were “crowds of wrinkled, filthy Chinamen assembled at the stations, and among them, like young oaks, towered the stalwart Russian frontier guards, with pale, energetic faces, and wearing sheepskin hats.”
On this particular day, February 3, 1904, the birth of another boy baby in rural Georgia didn’t seem to matter much. There were too many other considerations.
Off the northwest coast of France, search parties looked for bodies and survivors in the wreckage of capsized ships and shattered cottages after a tidal wave swept the Brittany shore.
In Newark, New Jersey, a fourteen-year-old boy, despondent because he had been discharged from his job delivering packages for a local store, swallowed a dime’s worth of carbolic acid and killed himself.
In New York, a mass meeting of coffee and cake saloon waitresses was called to discuss organizing a union because the women were anxious “to be relieved from the tyranny of long gowns,” which annoyed them when attending customers. A boy in that same city, named Norman Rockwell, had ten candles to blow out on his birthday cake.
In southeast Washington, D.C., at his family residence of 413 Seward Square, John Edgar Hoover—just a little more than a month into his ninth year and considered an aloof mama’s boy by the other lads attending the Brent School—read from his Bible before going to bed.
That evening in the nation’s capital, following a banquet attended by veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, who just forty years earlier had fought in the Civil War, President Theodore Roosevelt spoke for a half hour about the duties of citizenship. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, recently retired after more than four decades spent battling Confederates, Indians, and Spaniards, nodded in agreement as the commander in chief delivered his fiery speech through clouds of cigar smoke. When all the talking and applause stopped, the guests bundled up in overcoats and hats and hurried to their carriages and hacks. The old warriors no longer feared rebel bayonets and minié balls, but the threat of pneumonia hiding in the damp night air gave them pause.
To the north and west of Washington, winter raged in the darkness. Steamships departing New York that morning for European ports faced high winds and frigid weather as far as the Grand Bank, southeast of Newfoundland. Temperatures over most of the nation were far below the seasonal average. There were storm warnings all along the Pacific coast. The wide sweep of a snowstorm isolated northern New York counties and tied up train service across the Midwest. Mail delivery was halted because of snowdrifts as high as the coaches in the railroad cuts. In Indiana, passengers had to abandon stranded trains and seek shelter and food at farmhouses or hire farmers to take them to nearby towns by sled.
Down in Georgia, even in the shadowy mountains, the winter was not as severe. Warmer weather beckoned, and during the night and early-morning hours, fresh winds descended from the west and flushed the chill from the forests and fields. Hounds curled up in straw beds with gnawed hog bones and dreamed of treed bobcats and fox chases through thickets and meadows. From the forest’s edge came the resonant voice of an owl, a bird of wisdom and ruler of the night. Hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo. Then there was a hush. And soon the owl’s call came once more. And again. Finally there was silence.
Inside the Floyd home, it was as a quiet as a mouse wetting on a cotton boll. Oak and ash logs burned in the fireplace and shadows from the flames danced on the walls and ceiling. The lingering smells of supper mixed with wood smoke. There was also the slight scent of corn whiskey in the air from an elated father’s solitary toast to his newest child. Beneath a goose-down quilt, the baby snuggled against his mother’s breast. Charles Arthur Floyd had survived his first day on earth.