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Note: My Dad was born into a large family. He was number ten of fourteen children. Four children died young. My Daddy and his siblings were a fun loving family. I never heard a cross word exchanged between any of them. Sometime during the 1920s my grandpa McCleskey retired from farming and moved his family to Atlanta. For some reason, my Dad did not finish his education. It may have been that every member was needed to work and contribute to the family. Or he could have had a learning disability. I can say, that his lack of education, greatly harmed his business experience. By 1930 he is an apprentice pressman at The Atlanta Constitution. My Dad did tell me that he learned to be a plumber as a young kid by carrying the plumber's tools and being a helper. My Mother told me that one of the reasons she was attracted to Bill McCleskey was his love of children and her boys especially. The first time he came to pick her up for a date he got in the baby bed with Bobby. Mother met Bill as a stand-in for a blind date. A couple she knew arranged a date with a friend to go swimming. The friend worked at "The Atlanta Constitution" and they were to pick him up at the newspaper. When they drove up Bill was the person waiting. The friend was called back to work and had persuaded Bill to fill in for him. Bill did not have a car and he would ride the trolley to East Point to pick her up for their date. I do not know how long their courtship lasted. Bill helped Estelle find a"legal aid" attorney and obtain her divorce from Joseph McDaniel. They were married at the home of his sister Minnie and her husband A. B. "Bud" Foster. Estelle's sister, Mary Lynn Holt, and his younger brother John "Jake" McCleskey were attendants. Some of the first photos I have after they married are in the front yard of Mr and Mrs J L Pickett's home on Stewart Avenue where they rented rooms. Several of these photos will be on a page in this album. I do not know how long they rented from the Pickett family but long enough for my aunt Mary Lynn Holt to meet their son Claude "Pete" Pickett. Romance grew into love and they married.
By 1939 the Bill McCleskey family were living on Langston St off Stewart Ave. This is the home I came to from Crawford Long Hospital. Mother told of that eventful day. The stay in the hospital after a baby was rather lengthy in those days, I believe, a week. Another custom or requirement was for the new mother and infant to go home in an ambulance. Aunt Mary Lynn rode in the ambulance with Mother. Bill drove so close to the ambulance and so recklessly they were afraid he would run into the back of the ambulance. I was born just thirteen days after the beginning of World War II. Daddy did not come home for several days after 1 September 1939. Hitler's German Army invaded Poland and "The Atlanta Constitution" was putting out numerous "EXTRAS." Just before my first birthday in 1940, they moved from Langston St to Flecther St, again, off Stewart Avenue. I believe this was the first home they bought. This is the home of my first memories, the home we lived in during the entire war and the home where Bill McCleskey started his plumbing career. At first, he continued work as a pressman at The Atlanta Constitution and did plumbing as a second occupation. Daddy was in his early thirties when the US entered WW II. He had three children and worked for a newspaper. I do not know how he was ranked in the draft but he was not called into service. The first day of school for first grade I walked to George W. Adair Elementary with Bobby from this house. After school we walked to our new home at 831 Stewart Ave. It was not a new house but a new home for us. By this time Daddy had quit the newspaper and was running ABC Plumbing company full time. He opened his shop on Pearce St, just a block from our new home. My fondest memories from childhood are from the time we lived at 831 Stewart Ave. I will cover them later. We were all there, Daddy, Mama, Harry, Bobby and me. In November 1945 Doug arrived and for a short time Grandpa Holt lived with us. For six years I had my Daddy's full attention, now his time was shared with Doug. Mother did the correcting and Daddy did the spoiling. Mother tells the story about the "only whipping" Grandpa ever gave her. I do not remember Daddy ever giving me a whipping and if he corrected me I do not remember. We were big buds and I was truly "Daddy's Little Girl." All was well with Daddy and I but not with Mama and Daddy. For whatever reason, stopping school early or having a learning disability my Daddy had trouble with reading and math. That does not bode well for a business that needs both. Mother helped him all she could but she could not do the estimating for him. I believe ABC Plumbing went bankrupt. It was also at this time that I realized he drank to much. Mother and Daddy did not talk about money in front of us but she did nag. I was very resentful of her nagging for he was my hero. In the Fall of 1949 we moved into my Daddy's shop on Pearce Street. I assume they sold the house on Stewart Ave to pay off his debts. I never ask Mama and she never volunteered the reason. We lived in the shop several months while Daddy and sub contractors built the house at 2060 Dodson Dr. In Mother's personal papers were the contract where she bought a portion of LL 199, 14th District, Fulton County, GA for eight hundred dollars. They must have paid cash for the lot with the earnings from the Stewart Avenue home. She then offered the lot for collateral to Fulton County Federal Savings and Loan Association for a loan of $6,500 dollars at 5% interest. All of the legal documents list Estelle McCleskey's name only. This is another pointer to Daddy's bankruptcy. Mother picked the plans out of a magazine and ordered the blue prints. I do remember that the house was to have two bath rooms but she turned one into a utility room. The house was a three bed room home with a screened in back porch. Over the years they enclosed the porch and made a den and then added a covered deck off the kitchen. Soon after we moved into the new house Daddy's drinking became worse. I know he lost his driving license for a while. During this time Mama would drive him to work every day and pick him up. He was working for another plumbing company and receiving a regular check. Daddy was the silent type. He would let others do the talking. He must have been terribly unhappy about losing his business. I was young and into being a teenager. It has taken me years to understand the currents of those days. Mother and Daddy did not fight in front of us. One day he was gone and Mother told us he was in a sanitarium to stop drinking. It worked. For over thirteen years Daddy was sober. Doug does not even remember his drinking days. Doug remembers the family being very involved in Central Christian Church at the corner of Dodson Dr and Campbellton Rd. Al Peacock was the minister. He was the minister that had married them some fifteen years earlier. Mother sang in the choir, Daddy, at first helped with the up keep of the church. Next he was in charge of the physical plant, then he became a Deacon. It was a happy time for them and they had many friends. Other than our closeness to Aunt Mary Lynn and her family and Gertrude Pyron Robbins, Mother's longtime closest friend, their church family were their friends. After Daddy stopped drinking and recovered from his bankruptcy he established another plumbing company. Bobby was still at home and helped him with his work, so he called his new company W. E. McCleskey and Sons Plumbing Co. Thinking back over these years caused me to remember Daddy coming home from work, almost always by 5 o'clock PM. When the weather was nice we would sit under the pine trees in the side yard, they would drink coffee and we would visit. Our next door neighbors would sometimes come over and all would discuss the days work or world happenings. Dinner time was promptly at six o'clock. Our Dodson Dr house sat on an acre of land. Now Daddy could run his company from the house. Estelle was book keeper and secretary. I graduated high school in 1957 and went off to the University of Georgia. Daddy, Mama and Doug continued their close association with Central Christian Church, Al and Maggie Peacock and their church family. Nineteen fifty-seven was really the last time I lived at home. The 1961 summer, I graduated college Mother and Daddy drove me to San Antonio, Texas and the beginning of my life as a working single lady. Actually I was a Lieutenant in the United States Army but all of that will be covered later. I met John and we were married in nineteen sixty-two. In January nineteen sixty-four John and I were flying home from Washington, D C and had a short stop-over in Atlanta. Daddy, Mother and Doug came out to the airport and we ate dinner. When Daddy ordered a beer with his dinner you could have knocked me over with a feather. That was the first time I saw him drink alcohol since the early fifties. Mother came to Houston and stayed with us a few weeks when Chris was born in May 1964. Then I took Chris home to see Daddy at the end of summer. I have one picture of Chris, Mama and Daddy made in their livingroom. On October 8, 1964 Daddy was stung by a bee or wasp that was on the lip of his soft drink. His helpers rushed him home and then on to South Fulton Hospital were he was pronounced dead from a laryngeal spasm. He had an allergic reaction to the insect sting and his throat swelled shut. William Emory McCleskey was but fifty-four years old when he died. He was the first of his siblings to die.
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