Page 84 - some-stuff-i-wrote-and-some-stuff-i-didn't-(2011)-h-morris-williams

Some Stuff I Wrote (2001) H. Morris Williams

Track By Telegraph?

September 14,1993

Telegraphic Track Meet... One year in the early 1930s, CHS had no travel money for its
track team. Other schools in the conference faced the same problem. Rather than cancel the season,

they all got together and invented the “telegraphic track meet.” Here’s how it worked. Each team
stayed home and held its own track meet with no opponent present. The teams simply competed

against the clock and the tape measure. Each coach monitored and recorded his own team’s.results
using the honor system, then telegraphed the results to conference headquarters which determined
the winners. The CHS tracksters got a special reward for their efforts - they were permitted to take

a swim in nearby “McColskey’s pool.”
A dream come true ... Halijeane Chalker (CHS, 1940) grew up in Lake City with a dream

of someday living in faraway places with strange sounding names. Then she did something to make
her dream come true. She traveled to Paris and studied French and other foreign languages at the

Sorbonne. She then applied to the State Department to enter the “foreign service field” and was
accepted. She worked her way up an d eventually served as foreign service secretary to two United

States ambassadors: Clare Boothe Luce in Italy and Edward T. Wailes in South Africa. By working
hard and being venturesome, she made her own dream come true.

Ten little Fort White Indians, plus one ... In 1916, Fort White school teacher Pearle
McDaniels had a first grade class with eleven students. Remarkably, five pairs of those students had

the same last name: Sammie and Geraldine Shoemaker; Lois and Lola Dennis; Charlie and Cecilia
Lord; Doris and Salome Brown; and Howard and Florence Kinard. Franz Greene was the eleventh

class member and the only one not to have a “pair.”
Friends for life ... Lake City’s Bill Epling and the late Claude Crapps of Live Oak were

classmates and good friends in their boyhood days at Lakeland High School. After their graduation
in 1925, life took them in different directions but they both attended their class reunions and kept
th
in touch. When they attended their 65 class reunion back in 1990, they were the only two “boys”
left in the class. Claude died a short time ago and now there is just Bill, the only remaining male

member of the LHS class of 1925.

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