Jeff Whitten, Correspondent.

The traffic keeps getting heavier in front of the house Billy Mock designed and built in 1973.

The brick ranch style home with a double carport sits nestled among pines and scrubland perhaps 100 yards off Highway 280, not far from the entrance to the new Hyundai plant.

Soon the highway – in the process of being four-laned --will almost be in Mock’s front yard.

Still, Mock, who on Jan. 10 celebrated his 100th birthday, can remember when the road running from Blitchton into Pembroke wasn’t paved, and therein sits a perspective on the twists and turns a road, and a life, can take.

His father was a streetcar foreman in Savannah when he moved the family out to Bryan County in the 1920s, while renting a place in Savannah to be closer to work. Trips out to Bryan County on weekends were adventures, riding in an old Model A Ford.

At some point in the 1920s, Mock and his family moved to Black Creek, where he went to the old Black Creek School – his mother taught there -- and Mock grew into his teens in Bryan County, going on to attend high school in Pembroke until he thought he might drop out to work in the Savannah shipyard.

“I wasn’t going to go back to high school my last year, but decided I’d better get my education,” Mock said, adding that the principal at Pembroke High told him he could come back to finish school but needed to keep his grades up.

Mock did and got his high school diploma in 1943.

“That was the best thing I ever did,” he said.

Then the Army came calling. Mock’s draft number was called five days before Christmas. He spent time training in Florida and California, a journey that started after his number came up with a train ride to Atlanta.

“I had to catch a train to Atlanta and stay there over Christmas,” he said.

Mock had trainings and certifications in radio and telecommunications but he didn’t want to get stuck on the top of a telephone pole when the shooting started so he was trained as a mechanic and then sent to Okinawa at the tail end of World War II.

“The fighting was basically over by then but you could still here the popping every once in a while,” he said.

From there, Mock was sent on the USS Leon to South Korea where he worked on trucks “and still had to do the Army part of it.”

He remembered working on a part truck, part half track made by Studebaker called the M29 Weasel. He recalled waiting in South Korea for several weeks after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki “just to make sure they got the message.”

He was finally mustered out and sent home to help his parents, who were farming in Bryan County.

“They needed help, so the Army let me out to come home and help them,” Mock said. “I did this, that and the the other to make a dime.”

He remembers cutting wood by hand for $3 a cord at a time when gas was 16 cents a gallon.

And then one day, Mock, who after working seven years as a forklift driver at Union Camp said he woke up feeling he wasn’t getting anywhere.

“I told my mother and father I was going to take a two-year course in mechanical drawing,” he said.

But it turned into more than that. “When I got there I fit in pretty good, kept a B average on everything and they let me take a fourth course during the summer.”

From there, Mock began taking classes year round at Georgia Southern Teachers College, as it was known then, and decided to get into education himself, which in turn led to master’s degrees in teaching, counseling and administration.

“I was getting pretty old by then,” Mock recalled. “I was 31 when I started teaching, and after 11 straight summers of going to school I decided I wouldn’t do that anymore, but there were a lot of things I wanted to do.”

He taught in Chatham County schools, bought the land on which he now lives and helped out his parents “every minute I could get up here.”

The road took another turn. The house Mock designed and built – he drew up the plans and oversaw the construction when he wasn’t teaching – was complete in 1973 and his parents spent their last few years there.

These days the home is filled with the things Mock collected over the years, including hand carved wooden items and pottery that show his talent for working with his hands, and books of photographs and certificates from a life of public service.

And life went on. Mock continued to teach school in Savannah, retiring after 35 years at the age of 65.

Mock then got into politics. He ran for school board, having some ideas about how education should be run, and won. And won some more. Mock spent 21 years on the Bryan County Board of Education, trying to help how he could.

He also married a local lady named Rose Floyd and the two live happily with their 16-year old dog Buddy, and Mock and Buddy both enjoy the simple things in life like naps and bowls of ice cream.

There’s more. Mock was key to the old Black Creek School getting repurposed into the administrative offices for Bryan County Schools.

“They wanted to tear it down,” he said. “That was too strong a building to be torn down.”

Mock, who believed board members should know what’s going on in the schools, eventually decided he’d done all he could for local education and stepped down.

“I tried everything I could do to make it work better, and it was time to let someone else have a turn,” he said, and in 2008 his last term ended.

Fully retired, Mock can now muse over the changing ways of a changing world. He came up in a time with “country people who always worked,” because there was always work to be done. And so he worked.

Now, with Hyundai setting up shop next door with a small part of which on once land owned by Mock, he’s philosophical about what’s happening, joking that he’s “changed gears with the times so much over the years some of them are about stripped.”

Still, it is what it is. In April 2022 a tornado shattered trees on his property, and getting help in getting them cleaned up took longer than he thought it should. Compared to what has come since in his neck of the woods, the tornado wasn’t nearly as disruptive.

“I’ve got mixed feelings about it. I know it’s supposed to be progress,” he said of the Hyundai Metaplant, although he was skeptical the automaker can find enough people to fill all the jobs at the plant. “I don’t believe they can hire enough people because not enough people want to work anymore.”

Not as hard as Mock, anyway, who recently found a project to get accomplished once the widening of Highway 280 got underway. He owned the house he was born in, so he had it moved out of the way and remodeled.

“I’m used to working,” Mock said. “Not everybody worked hard, but I did. You got off school in the evening and you found some work to do.”

Editor’s Note: Alex Floyd contributed to this story.