Farewell, readers, and happy trails

"Happy trails to you, until we meet again."

I've been dreading this, but all good things must come to an end. At least that's what they say. I just did my exit interview here at The Chronicle , and one of the questions was, "What don't you like about your job?" And I couldn't think of a thing.

So why am I retiring? It's like I told you before. I've just celebrated my 39th birthday again, and sooner or later somebody's going to catch on.

Before I go, I want to correct the only deliberate lie I ever told you in this column, and that was that I like only classic country music. Truth is, I love almost all kinds of music, volunteered to help stage musicals on college campuses and even wrote a musical comedy, which indirectly led me into journalism. Actually, I wrote the play, and my son Stephen wrote the music.

I came close twice to getting it staged. The second time was when I was teaching part-time at Valdosta State College. The head of the communications department there, who was a musician, was going to arrange the music and possibly produce the play at VSC, but one morning he was rounding a curve and ran off the road and was killed.

It was unfortunate for us both. Him much more so.

DEATH, DRAMA AND HOME DELIVERY: Tired of part-time teaching, I went to see the chairman of the English department and asked what I would have to do to get a full-time position, and he said I would have to get a PhD. At that time, VSC didn't have a doctoral program in English. So we just sat there awhile contemplating my future until finally he asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I'd always wanted to be a newspaper reporter; whereupon he said, "Why don't you go over to the Valdosta Times and ask them for a job?"

So I did. And I worked 60 hours a week, covering county government, the courts and the sheriff's department and got to do things like interview the hitchhiker who saw a body in the trunk of the car of the man who picked him up when the man stopped and opened the trunk for something.

The hitchhiker said he asked the driver whether he knew he had a body in the trunk, and the driver said he did.

When they stopped at the bar at the Holiday Inn off Interstate 75 in Valdosta, the hitchhiker slipped away and called the police from a pay phone.

Working at the Times was great even if the newspaper chain was so cheap we had to buy our own reporter's notebooks if we didn't want to write on the palm of our hands, and they wouldn't replace the light bulbs in the ceiling when they burned out. We could write almost anything we wanted, just so long as it was a lot.

It was there I interviewed the grandmother who had delivered her daughter's baby per the instructions of a 911 operator. She was so excited telling it, and I was so excited in writing it, I got the names mixed up and had the daughter delivering her mother's baby.

And it was there that editor Archie McKay gave me a nickname he wouldn't let go of.

One day, some seniors in a retirement home, sort of like Peabody Apartments here in Augusta, called all upset because management was going to restrict the hours their game room would be open, and Archie sent me over to get the story. By the time I got there, they'd all decided to clam up. So I went back to the newspaper, and Archie said one of the old ladies had just called and upbraided him for sending that "hard-eyed woman" over there. So from that time on, he called me "Hard Eyes."

GIVING UP TURKEY IS HARD: I'm going to miss a lot of things in retirement, mostly the people and the fun I've had writing about the Goat Man, cookbooks, Ernie , the dogs, my older sister June , the one who told me when we were little girls that George Washington's head was stored in a box in a building on Fourth Street in Tifton. She even showed me the box in the back of a dark, half-empty building as we squinted through the cracked plate-glass window.

I'm definitely going to miss writing my Turkey of the Year column, but if I was going to write it this year, the Fighting Turkey award would be shared by William "The Defender" Fennoy and Woody "The Defender" Merry for their impromptu rasslin' match before a Coliseum Authority meeting.

The Half-Baked Turkey award would go to John Butler , who qualified to run for the 22nd District state Senate seat and then "suspended" his campaign before the election.

The Flock of Turkeys award would go to the Coliseum Authority for laying so many turkey eggs we've lost count, the latest being to negotiate to hire a consultant to do long-term planning for a new sports and entertainment facility. I mean, the current facility only sucks up about $2 million in hotel-motel and beer tax money every year. Two million here, 2 million there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.

Coliseum Authority member Keith "Which Way Is Home?" Brown would receive the Penned-Up Turkey award seeing as how his estranged wife, Sabrina , had him locked up for acting like he was still the cock of the walk at her house. She, meanwhile, would receive the Ruffled Feathers award for showing up at an authority meeting and accusing her spouse and another member of doing the turkey trot.

A frontrunner for Turkey of the Year would certainly be "GratefulMother," who illegally accessed Richmond County sheriff's Investigator Richard Roundtree's account at The Augusta Chronicle and posted 24 online messages praising him beneath stories critical of him for moving off and leaving seven murder-case files, a gun, ammunition and SWAT gear in an apartment. GratefulMother even followed Investigator Roundtree to the FBI academy in Quantico, Va., and posted from there.

And, of course, former Augusta Mayor Pro Tem Marion Williams will now and forever be Turkey of the Year Emeritus.

AND IT'S A DRAW! I have it on good authority that Mr. Fennoy and Mr. Merry have resolved their cases against each other, but we won't know for sure until calendar call in state court Monday morning. If the cases remain in trial status after that, the trial will start Tuesday, according to Solicitor Harold Jones.

If they don't go to trial, do you suppose Mr. Fennoy's attorney Evita Paschal will refund some of the $10,000 the authority paid her to represent Mr. Fennoy in state court?

A LIVING LINK TO THE PAST, GONE: Someone named Selden West e-mailed Friday to ask whether Eugenia Lehmann was still living. He said he had read a 2005 column about her being a descendent of the Seldens of Westover in Virginia and wanted to know more. I called Mrs. Lehmann, and when no one answered, I checked the obituaries and learned she died Nov. 4. She would have been 101 in January. I called her daughter Mary Speir, who said her mother had been very ill with heart blockage and not expected to live since the first of October.

When I last talked to Mrs. Lehmann, I asked her how many more years she expected to be around, and she said she was afraid it was going to be more than she wanted.

"I would love to die tomorrow if I thought I could," she said. "I've outlived my life here."

But her daughter said she struggled against death. The last lucid words she heard her say were, "I know I'm dying. I never knew it was going to be so hard."

Mrs. Lehmann was a descendant of Robert Walton , brother of Declaration of Independence signer George Walton . Her mother was Jennie Lee Walton Selden . Her paternal great-grandfather, John Selden , was living at the Westover plantation on the James River when Union Gen. George McClellan ordered the family to vacate during his 1862 campaign to take Richmond, Va.

In the 2005 interview, she said, "McClellan came to the house in Virginia, and he gave my great-grandfather two wagons and he said, 'Load up anything you want out of the house and you all be gone from here next week.' And McClellan's forces moved into Westover."

John and Maria Selden had 18 children. Half of them fought for the North and half for the South, and all eventually developed tuberculosis, Mrs. Lehmann said.

"HAPPY TRAILS TO YOU, until we meet again.

Happy trails to you, keep smilin' until then.

Who cares about the clouds when we're together?

Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.

Happy trails to you, 'till we meet again."

Reach Sylvia Cooper at (706) 823-3228 or sylvia.cooper@augustachronicle.com.