In 1978, I graduated from high school and I had absolutely no idea what to do with my life. I had no direction, no dreams, no aspirations. Nothing.

I got a job that summer after graduation driving a dump truck at a sand and gravel pit. I was 17 years old. It was 10 hrs days Monday - Friday and half a day on Saturday. Minimum wage. The route I drove was about a quarter mile long. One quarter mile from the dragline where I was loaded with wet smelly dirt to the hopper where I dumped the load to to shaken and screened into the mountains of sand and gravel.

Over and Over and OVER!!! For 10 hours a day driving a huge dump truck with no power steering and no air conditioner. It was hot and dusty. There were no lunch breaks, no rest breaks, no restrooms, no shade. Just mind numbing boredom, grime and heat.

Even in that dismal condition, I didn’t have a plan. I was too busy working to find a good job.

Of course I was still living at home, because I certainly couldn’t take care of my own basic needs.

Then one night, at home, the phone rings. You older folks will know the kind of phone I’m taking about. That black Southern Bell phone that hung on the kitchen wall. It had a rotary dial on the base, and a black spiral wound cord on the receiver that stretched a mile long. We were on a party line.

No, young people!!!, it was not a “party” line as in, “Let’s get together and party”. The phone line was a shared line with our neighbors. But I digress, that a whole different story.

Anyway, our phone rings and my mom answers the phone. “Oh HEY, How are you?” I can tell she is talking to someone she knows and is excited to hear from.

Then after a few minutes, I hear her call out to me.

“Greg!……………. Your Grandpa Coleman wants to talk to you”.

That was odd. ???? He never called to talk to me.

So this is where I need to stop and tell you the back story. I need to catch you up on the past.

Grandpa Coleman (John Lewis Coleman) is my mother’s step father. For all intents and purposes, He was my mom’s father. He married my grandmother (Frankie) when my mom was very young. He was the man that to her WAS her father. He was the only father she ever really knew.

Johnny Coleman married my grandmother on the heels of WW2. Johnny was a WW2 army veteran. Frankie was a “Rosie The Rivitor” working in the shipyard in Brunswick, Ga during WW2. After WW2, Frankie and Johnny met and a few years later they married. Frankie came with a ready made family. She had three young children, Curtis, LaDon, and Frances (my mother).

My mom says, speaking of Johnny, “He loved us when we weren’t that lovable.” Speaking of the trouble her older brothers would get into back then as mostly unsupervised rambunctious heathens.

After WW2, the USA entered a period known as “The Post War Boom”. Mr. Johnny Coleman, Frankie and the three kids moved from place to place following construction jobs. Bridges, paper mills, factories.

In the 1960’s my grandfather started working for Georgia Power Company in construction. He was a mechanical foreman. My memories from early childhood to young adulthood are of all the places in Georgia he worked. He was part of every Ga Pwr power plant construction in the 1960 -early 1980’s. Rome, Millegeville, Baxley, Cartersville, Eatonton.

I learned to dive off a diving board he built on a dock at Lake Sinclair, when he worked at Milledgeville’s Plant Branch.

Grandpa Coleman, Me, my dad at Lake Sinclair. On the porch of the single wide trailer they lived in at every construction site.

I thought he was the smartest man I ever knew.

When I was a teenager he would take me to see his job site and he would explain to me and my dad how everything was built and how it worked.

When I was around 16 years old he was working construction in Baxley, Ga. at the Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant. Back then there was a little trailer park coming into Baxley called the “Red Dot” trailer park. My Aunt Peggy’s family rented out places to setup a trailer for construction workers. So he had a place there in the Red Dot trailer park during construction.

So now we return to our “phone call” story.

“Greg!……………. Your Grandpa Coleman wants to talk to you”.

As I answered the phone and said “Hello Grandpa”, he said,….

“Grandson”……. He always called me “Grandson“ when speaking to me.

So this next part was said with words that your could almost read as a suggestion or maybe that he was asking me to do this thing for him.

I assure you it was not the feeling. He spoke to me like he had a plan, like he knew what needed to be said, and that I needed to listen.

He said….

“Grandson….. I’ve got an interview set up for you next week with a man at Auburn University. His name is J Mangum, and he is the man in charge of the cooperative education program at Georgia Power. He will be at Auburn University next Wednesday and you have an appointment with him.”

“I want you to go and talk to him about going into Engineering at Auburn University and working your way through school by working as a Georgia Power coop student”.

Then, he added,

“I want you to try this. Just try it. if it doesn’t work out, that’s OK, But I want you to try it.”

All I could do was swallow hard being dazed and confused, and simply say, “Yes, Sir”.

That was the late Summer of 1978. That one phone call changed my life.

I had no direction. No ambition. I did not have a solid educated. I was not a great student. I had no desire to go to college.

One Man, one phone call changed everything.

John L. Coleman built things. He had a 3rd grade education. He taught himself to read. He built a family. He built a life. He helped build an Industry. He built a legacy and that legacy includes me and all that is mine. My education, my career, where I worked, where I live, my family. Everything changed for the better because he invested in me.

He changed my life…. with just one phone call.

PS.

My youngest son Coleman is named in honor of this man.

The Phone Call that Changed My Life.

“Go Tell Peter”