Small Town Famous – A Visit with Dwayne Thompson

By Tracy McCoy

When you leave an interview with 12 pages of notes, you smile because you know you came to the right place for a great story! This is a story about a man who is famous for many things like riding motorcycles, spending a night or two in the pokey, working hard and making some of the most incredible home furnishings ever created in these hills. The stories I get to share with you are so entertaining and downright funny that you’ll be telling them to your friends around the firepit. So let’s get started.

To spend an evening on the porch with Dwayne Thompson, three amazing dogs and the love of his life, was most certainly my pleasure. I wasn’t there to talk about furniture or business, rather life back in the day, funny stories and some sad ones. The evening passed faster than I hoped it would. I enjoyed visiting with the Thompsons.

The land where Dwayne and Cecile have made their home has been in the Thompson family for three or four lifetimes. “All the Thompsons in this county can be traced back to two men, or so it seems, I like we’re all kin.” Dwayne said. Back when he was born there were no babies born at the Rabun County Hospital, so he was born at Angel Hospital in Franklin to RE and Bernice Thompson of the Timpson Community. “My mama never drove a car or had a license. She loved to read the bible, work crossword puzzles, fish and dip snuff. She had a real sweet tooth so we always had a little something sweet at the table, even if it was just a little homemade jelly for the biscuits,” he continued. “My daddy was a bootlegger. We had the first drive through liquor store in the county. You could pull up behind the house and buy a dozen eggs, a Coca-Cola and a jar of liquor. It was that way my whole life.” Dwayne’s dad spent some time behind bars for distributing and transporting illegal liquor but so did a lot of other daddies who had mouths to feed. “Times were tough and life was hard while he was building time, we didn’t have much money. I never questioned why we ate potatoes, butter and eggs two times a week, in fact I liked it then and I like it now. But I know it was because there just wasn’t enough money. People didn’t know they were poor, they just lived and most people here were all the same. Hell, we were the first people on the creek with a TV, then we were the first to have a washing machine and then we got a color TV so I thought we were doing pretty good.”

Dwayne has worked hard his entire life starting when he was in elementary school. He hoed corn and beans for his grandmother and she paid him .25¢ per cow if he’d go before daylight and milk. Remembering those days he told me, “She had two cows and I’d take a lantern and a pail and walk in the dark to the barn to milk. By the time the school bus came I’d been up for two hours already. I went to school everyday with .50¢ in my pocket. I didn’t mind it. I liked being up that early, down at the barn with the cows. Every morning I got to watch the sun come up. I like work and I like money in my pocket.” By the time Dwayne was in 7th grade he got his first job working during the summer in Dillard selling produce. Harley Wall was his boss and Henry Dillard owned the business. The next year he worked as a janitor and cut grass. “I learned early that if you want money in your pocket you gotta work for it!” he said.

He grew up near Talmadge Hollifield’s store (now Black Bear Creek Antiques) and he shared this story with me. “Talmadge liked to get things over on you, he was a jokester. Two of my cousins and I were going to camp overnight across from the store in the woods behind my grandparent’s house so we stopped at the store to buy bait and the supplies we’d need. Things like Beanie Weenies, sardines and crackers and of course we had to get my Uncle’s Prince Albert”, he said with a wink. As we were leaving Talmadge walked out and started talking to JM York. JM said ‘Talmadge I guess you heard about those Mawtails over in Hiawassee coming this way. They say they are as tall as a man with a tail like a beaver.’ Talmadge replied ‘Yeah, I hear they swing that big tail and knock trees down with it. Ain’t nothing like a Mawtail, downright scary.’ Well, we looked at each other and said ‘aw, there ain’t no such thing’ and off we went across the field to camp.” The boys set up camp and started a fire as the sun began to set. Right about dark they thought they heard something in the woods and the three young boys remembered the conversation at Hollifield’s store. “We kept hearing something and then the trees began to shake and then we heard a low growl. Rocks came rolling off the side of the mountain into our camp and hiding behind a log with the hatchet in my hands, I was ready for those Mawtails,” Dwayne said. “Then we heard the growl again except this time it was a little more like a squeak. We looked at each other and knew that noise was coming from a Booger box. Next thing we knew Talmadge’s daughters came down out of the woods. He’d sent them over to scare us. We reminisced with the girls and made it through the night.” If you don’t know what a Booger box is, it was made from an old Quaker oatmeal canister with a hole in the bottom, a string tied with a button on the end. When you drug that string through the hole it made a growling sound, until it squeaks.

When Dwayne was around 15 years old he got a Honda motorcycle and he was all over the place on that bike. He remembers a neighbor coming by the house to ask his dad “RE can you please keep that boy off the road?” Putting a set of wheels under a teenage boy makes them hard to slow down. “Daddy would let me go hunt, so one time he took me to Chester York, who was a game warden and a good friend of daddy’s. Chester took me over to the Coleman River Refuge. One of my best friends was Joe Hollifield and we were gonna camp and hunt up there. Well, it took some time, but I finally killed a deer, but it had horns about as big as a thimble. When I drug it back to camp they asked me ‘What are you going to tell them at the checking station when they ask you how you could tell it was a buck before you shot it.’ I told ‘em I didn’t know what I’d say. They told me to tell them that I heard his balls rattle when he jumped the fence. I strapped that deer on my Honda and headed for the checking station to tag the deer and pick up my license. When I rolled up with that deer there were four big burly game wardens standing outside. Well shore ‘nuf, they asked me how I knew it was a buck since those horns were so small. So I told them exactly what they said I should. Three of them laughed but there was one that didn’t laugh, it made him mad. He took me over to the side and had me scared to death. He called Chester and the next thing I knew I had my license in hand and hopped on my Honda and to the house I went with the deer.”

The stories and the laughter, a random passing of one of the three dogs laying around on the porch of the Thompson home was making for a really pleasant evening. I asked about those high school years and Dwayne said, “Well, you see I got into quite a bit of trouble. Like one time somebody shot out the red light by the Dairy Queen on New Year’s Eve. A couple days later somehow I got arrested for that. They rolled up at my house to take me to jail on a Sunday morning and my mama was pretty upset with me.” Another time, somebody set off a couple sticks of dynamite at the Lake Rabun Boat House and I somehow got the blame for that too.”

“I had a buddy who joined the Navy and he was coming home for leave. Me and a friend were going to pick him up at the Atlanta Airport. I’d never been to the airport, I didn’t even know where it was. I was driving a log truck with no bed. We wanted to do something funny so we bolted a tall Pabst Blue Ribbon beer ban to the rail of that truck. All the way down the road we got “thumbs up” as we passed other cars. When we made it back to Clayton, somebody from the Sheriff’s office got after us but somebody out ran them. The next morning we were all three droopy eyed and pitiful from drinking too much the night before. We were riding around Pinnacle and Sheriff Hubert Page and Deputy Ralph Woods got behind us and turned the lights on. They’d already been looking for us so we pulled over and Hubert jumped out of the car and grabbed the beer can and gave it a jerk and it didn’t move and it made him so mad. They searched the truck but found nothing and they had to let us go. I had to be good for a while after that.”

“Then there was the time that a couple friends and I were out in an old ‘56 Ford. That thing wouldn’t cut a donut for nothing but somebody else had been cutting donuts under the red light and over at Five Points. My friend just had to try it, so he tried to spin it around but that old truck wouldn’t do it, but wouldn’t you know the law pulled up right about the time he tried. We all got

arrested for cutting donuts and it wasn’t even us. While we were in the back seat of the law car I had a pint of liquor in my pocket, they whispered ‘what are you gonna do?’ I slid it under the front seat and left it with ‘em. They took us to jail, threw us a blanket and we went to bed. They let us out the next morning.” That time Dwayne was innocent, well sorta.

One time Dwayne thought he’d try his hand at making a little moonshine, just “for the heck of it”. “I didn’t know where to sell it so I just spent the winter sipping on it and anybody that came by could drink a bit,” Dwayne said. “My brother-in-law came by and had a little too much. I took him home, he’s about 6’2” so I drug him through the front door and left him in the floor with a note on his chest that read “Don’t worry sis, he ain’t dead just too much of the good stuff. I think she was at church. I laid low for a few days.” Probably best he did.

RE Thompson, Dwayne’s dad got a job working as a night watchman for the film crew of the movie Deliverance in 1970. His job was to watch the equipment. He was well liked by the stars and crew. When the movie was over they gave Mr. Thompson a lot of the props. One was the dummy that they threw off the cliff in the movie. Dwayne and some of his friends dressed the dummy up in his daddy’s clothes and put one of his hats on it and set it at the top of the stairs that led to the road in front of their house. People traveling the road would wave and blow the horn as they passed by, thinking they were waving at RE. One night a bad storm came through and blowed the dummy down the stairs leaving it laying on the edge of the highway. That next morning Mrs. Thompson got a call saying “Bernice, RE is laying down on the side of the road.”

When he wasn’t getting into something, Dwayne was an excellent student. He was very good at Math, took Mechanical Drawing and Wood Shop where he excelled. He remembers Coach Snyder telling the boys they might as well just take business math so they could pass it. That made Dwayne mad, he signed up for Algebra and aced it! In his Senior year he was named “Most Popular”. His friends, classmates and sweet wife remember him as being polite and kind. He was famous for his ability to create amazing things with wood before he even graduated. He made gun cabinets and furniture for friends and family. After high school Dwayne attended North Georgia Technical School studying woodworking. He decided he would renovate the inside of his parents’ house. Building new furniture and redoing the kitchen for his mom. There was a traveling preacher who came to the Presbyterian church nearby and he saw Dwayne’s work and told the owners of Habersham Plantation about him. They scheduled an interview for him and when they figured out that he could build anything they wanted he was hired. He worked there for a couple years and then decided he’d rather build things for people around home. That is how he became the Dwayne Thompson who is famous for incredible

craftsmanship and home furnishings. Dwayne summed it up this way, “I have built some really nice furniture for some really nice people.”

We continued to talk about “the good old days” when you knew everybody, when people helped others for no gain. We talked about when you could drive down the road and never pass a car. “I remember if the moon was full on a Saturday night I could drive my friend home over by the fish hatchery and we’d drive with the lights off and the radio playing all the way and if we met a car it was Marley Cannon or JR Lunsford, patrolling.” We agreed that times were simpler then and people had each other’s backs and were there when you needed them. I guess people our age always remember our youth with fondness as the world gets more complicated, cold and impersonal. We long for cool evenings on the porch with friends with no sounds except the flutter of a bird’s wings or an occasional bark from a resting dog. Oh, life is good and we are all blessed to have such fond memories and to have grown up or spent time in these mountains. As the years pass you find that it doesn’t take as much to please you and the sweetest memories are the ones made with those you care most about.

“I loved spending time with my Grandpa Thompson. On Friday I’d get off the bus and ride to Grandpa’s to spend the weekend. He’d take me to Welborn’s old store and I’d get a Nehi Grape and a candy bar. On Sunday my dad would drive his ‘53 Ford Truck to come get me and three cases of moonshine. Two cases behind the seat and one under my feet on the ride home,” Dwayne recalls.

He had one more tale for me that evening. “One time I drove my restored 1947 Ford truck all the way to Colorado with a friend to climb a mountain on a motorcycle, but we didn’t figure for the snow. We didn’t climb a mountain but we had a good time anyway.”

Cecile remembered being at the Dairy Queen one day and she saw Dwayne coming on that motorcycle and he popped a wheelie before the red light on Hwy 441 and held it all the way to the Shirt Factory! So when they started dating she told him if he wanted to marry her he’d have to give up motorcycles and never play golf, Dwayne said, “I thought that was a pretty good trade.”

I asked what he liked to do when he wasn’t working and he said “Work. I guess I like to fly fish, I like to cook and I like to drink and have a good time.” I asked if there was anything he’d always wanted to do that he hadn’t done yet and his response was, “Well I thought about becoming a country music singer, an airline pilot or a brain surgeon cause I am pretty good with my hands, but I guess I am a little bit old for all that now.”

The sun was setting over the Persimmon valley as I left the Thompson place and I kinda hated for our visit to end but I sure enjoyed it while it lasted.