Charley Floyd’s boyhood was not particularly remarkable. As a baby, he survived a bout of pneumonia that came close to snuffing out his life. He spent many of his formative years in the Deep South, in a typically rural early-twentieth-century household that was governed by a strict father and religiously devout mother. His parents, blessed with ample and equal amounts of country horse sense, love of family, and stamina, tried to pass these qualities on to their offspring.
Given their own upbringing, Walter and Mamie taught their children to be courageous in the face of adversity, to hoe row crops until their muscles burned, and to respect their elders. Both of them believed in disciplined children. They were staunch advocates of the old adage that good manners were a sure sign of good breeding. It took no time at all for Charley and the others to learn this fact. A sassy tongue was likely to result in a mouth filled with soapsuds. Those caught in mischievous acts were treated to a trip behind the woodpile with Walter or an on-the-spot ass whipping from Mamie. Either way, the punishment meted out was unforgettable.
The Floyds had no time for frivolity. It was true that Walter had a penchant for a nip of moonshine whiskey now and again and enjoyed running his hounds, and that Mamie, like many other rural ladies of her station, partook of a discreet dip of snuff behind her lip. Except for these simple pleasures and a very occasional community dance, however, they kept their noses to the grindstone. There was always plenty of work to be done. Even in the early 1900s, Georgia was still attempting to overcome the deleterious effects of the Civil War as well as the problems brought on by Reconstruction and the panic of 1893, the nation’s worst depression of the nineteenth century. The state was slowly becoming more industrial but faced the social, economic, and political woes that accompanied the transformation of a region that had previously been totally agrarian.
Walter Floyd was not the kind of man to sit around wringing his hands and pondering the past. He had mouths to feed. He managed to put plenty of bacon and bread on his family’s table by hiring on as a fireman for the Western & Atlantic Railroad on the run between Chattanooga and Atlanta. However, when he was injured in a train accident in the days before workmen’s compensation, Walter was forced to quit riding the rails and had to look elsewhere for other employment. He soon went to work in the bauxite mines. Discovered in 1883 in northwest Georgia, bauxite had become a major business as the industrial applications of such minerals and ores became apparent. Bauxite’s most important use was for the production of metallic aluminum. Vast deposits of bauxite, varying from a few hundred to many thousands of tons, were discovered near Adairsville and other parts of Bartow County. Mining companies in the area needed men and mules to work their operations.
The attraction of earning wages by taking bauxite from the earth wore thin. Walter Floyd was a farmer at heart. Georgia dirt was caked beneath his nails. He longed to breath air scented by pine trees and manure. Before too long, the lure of making a living by raising cotton—still the staple crop of the South—pulled him out of the mine shafts and open pits and back to his trusty plow and team in the fields. He did not have to look far when it came to finding dependable help. His young sons Bradley and Charley, even as small boys, could handle a hoe with the best of them. When it was time for autumn harvest, the entire Floyd family turned out with their long sacks to pick cotton.
And as they toiled the land, Walter and Mamie continued to augment their family. Four children were not enough. Emma Lucille arrived on August 28, 1905, and on May 13, 1908, a third son blessed the Floyd home. Walter and Mamie named him E.W. The rest of the family was never quite sure what the initials stood for or whether they really were anything more than just letters. Some thought the E might be for Elmer, the first name of Mamie’s father, and that the W was for Walter. No explanation was offered. All of his life, the boy was called E.W. Four-year-old Charley was just delighted no longer to be the youngest boy in the family. He would tease his little brother as Bradley had teased him.
During Charley’s early years, Walter moved his family at least once. They left the Folsom community and moved closer to the heart of the town of Adairsville, to a frame house on Hotel Street.
When they were old enough to trudge off to school, the Floyd kids still had to tend to their daily chores at home. That meant rising before sunup for early morning milking and egg gathering. After school, there was wood to cut and the fields to weed. Fortunately for the Floyd boys, the Georgia summers were long and the winters short. They managed to find time to break away from their farm tasks to explore the woods and pick up pieces of Indian pottery from the creek banks and freshly plowed fields. They used their penknives to dig Civil War musket balls and slugs from tree trunks as big around as four men. They swiped watermelons and peaches, shot squirrels and rabbits, and found the best swimming holes and secret caves. They also listened to the battle stories of the varicose old men whose faded Confederate uniforms of butternut and gray were folded neatly as shrouds in cedar chests.
The town of Adairsville offered other diversions for the Floyds. Charley and his siblings played around the Adairsville depot. Among the chief attractions were the drugstores. There were several to choose from: Scott and Bowdoin, Dykes and Whitworth, and Dr. Gary Bray’s Drug Store. An occasional visit to the drugstore was a treat for any farm youngster. It was almost better than swigging a bottle of Coca-Cola, the soda water that had started out in 1886 as a hangover cure brewed up in an iron pot in the backyard of an Atlanta pharmacist.
The smells at the drugstore wafted across the room like a magical tonic or elixir—perfumes with the aroma of honeysuckle and lilac, bay rum, scented tobacco, Sen-Sen, and tar soap. The shelves were lined with apothecary jars filled with herbs, spirits, and other potions. Country physicians toting little black bags came in to chat with townspeople about politics and weather or to whisper about “some darkie” who had been lynched for insulting a white woman. Amid the din of gossip, the pharmacists worked their mortars and pestles, concocting remedies for the doctor to deliver in person to house-bound patients. If there had been time, Charley could have stood there for hours and watched the druggists filling prescriptions and doling out free advice.
Sometimes when Charley and the other Floyd children lingered around one of the drugstores scheming the best way to spend a nickel, they occasionally encountered the socially elite of Adairsville—matronly ladies or elegantly dressed teenaged girls—discussing the latest Symphony Club musicale or perhaps the Happy Hour Society’s winter picnic staged at the Masonic Hall, complete with evergreen-bough garnishes. The Floyd girls lacked the satin slippers, brocaded dresses, and ornamental combs of these wealthy folk, but they were never ashamed of the pinafores Mamie sewed for them. They were as presentable as anyone making the rounds of Adairsville on Saturday afternoons.
Adairsville also boasted two well-stocked department stores to serve the public. At the Adairsville Mercantile, there were men’s suits, collars, hats, dresses, shoes for the entire family, corsets, bolts of yard goods and lace, as well as fancy foodstuffs, animal feed, and live poultry. The town also supported blacksmith shops, a livery stable, a half dozen grocery stores, a jewelry store, banks, and a millinery shop, where each season a milliner “from the style centers of America” was sent to introduce the latest in hats. Several young local ladies were also chosen to go to Cincinnati in order to learn the millinery business.
For a short time, there was a bakery, but since most of the local women did their own baking, it soon closed its doors. Down the street, the Bailey Meat Market was more successful. The proprietor, a Confederate veteran with a distinctive voice, thanks to a Yankee bullet that tore through his throat, sold links of spicy sausage, prime steaks, and roasts to townsfolk who didn’t butcher their own meat as the Floyds did every autumn.
Adairsville, in the first decade of the century, also provided enough business to support two photograph “galleries.” Customers paid from fifteen cents to a quarter for postcard-size photos of themselves and family members posed in front of a landscape backdrop.
In the autumn of 1907, Walter decided to capture his growing family on film. But he wanted something more substantial than a postcard remembrance. He did not hesitate for an instant when he was asked to shell out a hard-earned dollar bill for a full-sized family picture. For the formal portrait, Walter slicked down his dark hair. He was clad in a necktie, dark suit, and a clean shirt with starched collar. His lace-up shoes suggested a recent shine. He sat as stiffly as a spinster, with baby Emma perched on his knee. Standing by their father, with ribbons in their hair and dressed in white frocks, were the girls, Ruby and Ruth. Bradley stood beside his sisters. He wore a bow tie, and, at nine years, was already almost as tall as Mamie. Her long hair was done up, and she wore a fine high-necked blouse and a floor-length skirt. There was no way to tell that she was pregnant with E.W. As the photographer worked the shutter of the big box camera, Mamie’s hand barely touched the shoulder of her youngest boy, who was standing in front of her.
There was no intimation that Charley Floyd—a wide-eyed lad of three in short pants—would one day have a price on his head.