One of the many unforeseen advantages of the years I spent working in my family’s wholesale hardware business was the familiarity it gave me with many places across eastern Georgia and South Carolina, and northern and central Florida, where we had roughly 1,000 or so retail customers, spread over a dozen or so sales territories.
First, I got familiar with their names and towns by working their orders as a summer order clerk, in high school and college. After I got out of graduate school in Athens and came back home, I was prevailed upon to join the business full-time and take over the credit and collections dept. At that point, I became more familiar with their purchasing and paying habits, and which salesman handled their accounts.
I have written of some of these customers in a series of earlier columns, two years or so ago.
Recently, this familiarity came into play when I heard a very interesting story on the radio coming home from work one day, as it was about an elephant refuge near a small town in southwest Georgia, where we once had a small account.
Yes, an elephant refuge! In Georgia, of all places.
I am willing to bet that no one listening to that story that day, except folks living in and around Bainbridge, Georgia, had any idea where Attapulgus was. But I did, as we once sold to Attapulgus Feed and Seed, when Jim Taylor from northwestern Florida was the last salesman who serviced that area before I closed the business in late 1983.
The story was about a young woman of 21, Carol Buckley, who started out studying exotic animal management at a college in Los Angeles, and one day saw a man walking in front of her house with a baby elephant on a leash! Now, that “baby elephant” was still 600 pounds, but a far cry from the 12,000-pound adult it would later grow to be.
The story related that she was entranced by the unusual sight, and followed the man down the street to the tire business he owned. He’d bought the elephant to use as a mascot, and kept it in a trailer on premises. The woman asked the man if she could help him take care of it; he did; and she eventually bought the elephant from him, and her life changed dramatically.
After teaching it some basic tricks, she turned into a full-time elephant trainer, traveled the world, and wound up founding an elephant refuge for retired circus animals, in Tennessee. She later founded “Elephant Refuge in North America” on a large tract she purchased outside Attapulgus, GA, a small town of about 500 a few miles southeast of Bainbridge.
I have been to Wild Animal Safari outside Pine Mountain, just north of Columbus, and written of my visit there.
That place is more like a smaller version of the Jacksonville Zoo. But ERNA caters specifically to elephants, and is geared towards giving older elephants a comfortable place to spend their final years.
It was an amazing story! I have never heard anything like it. I have only seen elephants a time or two when a circus came to town, when I was growing up – and then not up close.
The things one learns when listening to the radio sometimes!
Rafe Semmes is a proud graduate of (“the original”) Savannah High School and the University of Georgia.
He and his wife live in eastern Liberty County, and are long-time Rotarians. He writes on a variety of topics, and may be reached at rafe_semmes@yahoo.com.