By Neal Wooten
Since my new memoir is set in this area, I’ve received a lot of calls from folks telling me they’ve read it. So, when the phone rang on January 5th, and an older gentleman said he enjoyed the book, I thought nothing of it.
“Thank you,” I said, “Who am I speaking with?”
His answer sent chills down my spine. “The man who delivered you.”
The next day, I paid a visit to Dr. Gibson, and it was great. We sat on his sofa like two old-timers might sit on a park bench, whittling and discussing the weather. He’s in amazing shape for a man about to turn 97 and still gets around with a cane, is still quiet and unassuming, and still sports his familiar mustache.
I quickly realized I could stop asking, “Do you remember that?” because the man remembers everything. We talked about my one and only visit to see him, not counting that fateful day in 1965 when he was the first person I ever saw, and he remembered that appointment in detail.
“You were doing standup comedy,” he said. “And you had that comic strip in the Times Journal. I miss that comic strip.”
I finally realized my mouth was wide open and closed it. No one remembers that comic strip. But Dr. Gibson does.
He remembers being a soldier in 1945 and getting ready to be shipped off to the South Pacific, but the bombs were dropped, and it was over. He remembers growing up in McNairy County, Tennessee, and going to high school with Sheriff Bufford Pusser. He remembers visiting a building built on the Mississippi/Tennessee line so they could sell alcohol in the Tennessee side and have a casino in the Mississippi side. He remembers being a doctor in Tennessee and a traveling drug rep telling him about the doctor in Rainsville, Alabama, retiring.
The only thing he couldn’t recall was the exact number of babies he delivered. He was the doctor in Rainsville from 1958 until 1995, so he knew it was over one thousand.
He invited me back to his personal office, which was a testament to his life and career with pictures, articles, mounted deer heads, and a huge, mounted boar head. He flipped through his phone and showed me the picture of the eight-point buck he got last year. As we exited his office, I stopped to admire the collection of artifacts he brought back from his trip to Africa.
As I left his house, the feelings of nostalgia were strong. He was so much a part of all our lives on the mountain for so long, many, like me, from our first breath.
