Marshall Ramsey

Two horses and their riders stopped in the front of the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion. The rain had turned Capitol Street into a quagmire, and the two men in gray coats carefully tried to avoid slipping and falling. The news was bad enough. They didn’t need to break their necks in the mud while trying to deliver it.

Confederate Brig. Gen. John Gregg and Gen. Joseph E. Johnson stood in the front room of the Mississippi’s Governor’s Mansion. Governor John J. Pettus faced them and the bad news with a very grim look on his face.

“Raymond fell? That drunk Grant is at Jackson’s doorstep? Surely you jest. And please tell me that devil Sherman isn’t with him.”

General Johnson nodded solemnly.

The Governor sighed. Sherman had a reputation of not only being crazy, but also a vicious pyromaniac. “He’ll burn this town to the ground.”

“I’m afraid you’re correct, sir.”

All three men knew what Grant wanted. A distant train whistle answered anyway. The governor continued, “He gets the Pittsburg and Jackson railroad, angels had better be with General Pemberton and his men in Vicksburg. Are you ready to defend Jackson?

Both Generals nodded. But then Gen. Johnson said, “Tell the mayor we need to evacuate the town. Preferably toward Canton and away from battle. ”

You could have heard a mouse sneeze in the Mansion. The Governor sat down in a chair, rubbed his temples and began to write a coded message on a piece of stationary. He then finished and handed it to Gen. Johnson. “Since you’re headed to the State Capitol, drop this off to State Treasurer Haynes. The Colonel will know what to do with it. It seems that we’re about to have company and I’m in no mood to be a good host. I’d rather eat fire than sit down with Yankees.”

General Johnson looked at the Governor and said, “Looks like you might just get your wish, Governor. You might just get your wish.”

Johnson put the paper in his pocket and quickly turned on his heel. The Battle of Jackson was about to begin and he had to get his men ready. As the two Generals walked to their horses, they looked around at a town that was about to be changed forever. “God help Jackson,” Gregg said.

“And us.” Johnson replied.

Mississippi Old Capitol Building

The State Capitol building of Mississippi stood at the intersection of the two main roads in town. High on a bluff overlooking the floodplain of the ever-temperamental Pearl River, the building was designed by famed architect William Nichols and would become one of the country’s premier examples of Greek Revival public architecture. In it’s 24-year history the building had already witnessed a historic secession vote. Now it was about to watch the town around it burn.

Colonel M.D. Haynes looked at the note and shook his head. The world had gone mad. The state was already in a deficit, its economy in ruins, its men dying and now this. He called his two assistants and locked the door behind them. “The time has come, men, for us to do the unthinkable. We’re going to have to hide the state’s gold. ”

Operation Magnolia, the secret plan to move the state’s gold, had begun.

The two men looked at each other. Jacob and Isaac Bullock were brothers from a massive cotton plantation near Port Gibson. The third and fourth son of a wealthily planter, they knew they were far enough down the will that they’d have to go seek their fortune another way. They had chosen government. They worked as assistants to the Treasurer and had been hand selected as guards of the state’s reserves.

“Get the wagon and load the boxes aboard. Take it up Canton Road and head to the northeast. ”

“What about Meridian? Should we go that way?”

“No guarantee Sherman won’t go burn Meridian, too. Too many railroad interests that way. Lay low and I’ll give you the signal when it’s safe to return. Protect this gold with your life, men. Now — dismissed.”

Both men snapped to attention and said their goodbyes to the Treasurer. Thunder rumbled off to the Southwest. Little did they know it was man-made.

The clock of the nearby Baptist church struck midnight as the wagon slipped out of sight of the Capitol. Flashes of artillery and lightning illuminated the night sky as they men headed out of town. Even at the late hour, several panicked citizens were on the road trying to escape the impending invasion. A steady rain began to fall and the thunder increased in intensity. All Hell was about to break loose in Northeast Jackson.

As they reached the outskirts of town, Jacob began to speak,”Mean storm tonight, isn’t it brother?” Issac listened to his brother and didn’t comment. His mind was being consumed by the darkness of his thoughts.

Isaac looked at his brother and said, “pull over. Now.”

“What?” Jacob looked down to see the muzzle of a pistol pointing at his ribs.

“WHAT ARE DOING, BROTHER?

“Look behind us, Jacob. We have enough gold to buy half of Mississippi. We can head to Mexico and buy some land. Texas is for the picking. Let’s escape this foolish war. You and I, the wealthiest planters in the Southwest. Think of how many slaves we can buy with this?

Jacob was stunned. “But our job. We swore on an oath to protect this. For the State of Mississippi. For the Confederacy.”

Isaac hissed, “Damn the Confederacy. It has killed our father and brothers. Our plantation has been burned flat. This is our chance to escape and get our revenge.”

Thunder shook the ground beneath them.

“I can’t let you do that brother. ” Jacob pulled a knife.

A loud clap of thunder masked the sound of a single gunshot. Jacob looked at his brother, started to say “But Mother,” but blood gurgled out of his mouth. He fell off the wagon.

Isaac knew that he’d never get through the retreating Confederate troops or even get the gold past the Yankees. He looked at his dead brother and then at the treasure. He took a shovel and began to bury both in the wet Yazoo clay.

When he had finished and covered both graves with brush, Isaac stood in the pouring rain and outstretched his hands. He held the shovel and began to laugh a sinister laugh. “HAAAHAHAHAHA! I’m RICH!”

Out of the low-hanging clouds, a single lightning bolt struck the worst brother since Cain, dispatching him to Hell and hiding the gold for nearly 150 years.

After many years of planning, the Fortification Street project had begun. One of the main arteries from the Interstate into Jackson, the road that runs that divides Belhaven and Belhaven Heights was aptly named. No invading army could travel on its rough pavement without breaking an axle. The politicians and community members had turned over the first shovelfuls of dirt. Now it was up to the professionals. Nick and Sam Bryant leaned against their shovels, resting. Thunder faintly rumbled off in the distance.

Their supervisor walked up to the two men. “OK, you two. It’s 45 minutes until quitting time. That storm will be here within 25 minutes. You have that time to finish digging around where that sewer line is. Got it?”

“Yes sir.”

Both men began digging. And both men were thankful to have a job. The Great Recession had cost them their construction jobs, sending both to the streets for over a year. This project was a Godsend. “With all this Yazoo Clay, it’s no wonder this street was so rough.” Yazoo Clay, an extremely expansive clay, had destroyed more buildings in this town than Sherman ever could.

Both brothers thrust their shovels into the clay one more time and hit something solid. They tried it again. Thunk.

“That sounded like wood.”

They picked up their pace and began to dig out what seemed to be a fairly good-sized box. The letters “CSA” were stamped on the preserved box.

“Should be call the boss?”

“No.” Nick answered his brother as he stuck his shovel into the box to pry off the lid. What he saw next left him speechless.

There, inside the old box, were gold bars.

“We’re rich!” Sam excitedly yelled.

“Shuddup.” Nick scolded him. “Do you want to attract attention?”

Sam said, “I know what we should do with it. Let’s go to the casino in Vicksburg. I can buy a new car, a new house. Some drugs and booze. A Rolex. Women. ” Sam’s list became more ludicrous with every new item.

“No, we need to do something else with it. ”

The storm had arrived. A heavy rain began to fall, sending all but two workers scurrying for cover. Sam yelled at his brother, “No, we need to keep it. It’s ours. Finders keepers. Remember?”

Nick said, “No. This isn’t our gold. I have a bad feeling about it. It must be either returned to its owner or donated to a good cause.”

Sam, panicked that he would make and lose a fortune in less than three minutes, lunged at his brother. Both fell into the muddy ditch. Sam pushed his brother’s face into a mud-puddle, nearly drowning him. He then picked up a rock and was going to crush his skull.

A bolt of lightning hit the transformer above the two men, knocking power out for all of Belhaven and showering the ground around them with sparks.

Sam, shaken, stood up and dropped the rock. He stood there silently looked at the gold and at his brother.”OK, God has spoken.” Nick, wet, muddy and equally as shaken just nodded his head.

At 5 a.m. the next morning, three miles west of the Old Capitol Building, a man walked up to the back door of the city’s biggest soup kitchen. There he found an old box with a note attached. He bent over, opened up the envelope and read these words:

“Dear sir. You helped us when we were unemployed and on the street. Now we’re going to help you. Please accept this small donation of $35 million on behalf of our gratitude.”

When he finished, he opened the box and saw 22 gold bars (with two missing). He reread the note one more time, looked to the sky and then fainted.

Operation Magnolia had finally come to an end.

A single hemp rope dangled from the darkness. The man, bloodied and scratched, hung onto it with his blistered hands.  He felt his forearms burn.  The muscles in his fingers were beginning to cramp. He looked down — he could see nothing but inky blackness.  He was literarily and figuratively at the end of his rope.

Sweat poured down his forehead into his stinging eyes.  If he wiped his brow, he’d fall.  But he couldn’t fight much longer.  His muscles began to scream a bloody scream.  His right hand began to fail first. And then the left.  Never a quitter, the man let go and began to plummet. The darkness swallowed him and his screams.
“Wake up. WAKE UP!”

The man felt something, or someone jostling him.  He groggily opened one eye to see his wife standing over him.  “WAKE UP, you were having THAT dream again.”

He looked at his wife of 20 years.  She was a pretty as the day they married. Time had etched slight canyons around her eyes, but otherwise, Cathy could pass for a woman half her age. He nodded his head. “Yeah.  I had THAT dream.”

It didn’t take Freud to interpret what THAT dream meant.

David Hammack loved to fly. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, he had been a successful fighter pilot during the first Gulf War. He and his F-16D Fighting Falcon had been the terror of the Iraqi Air Force, downing one MIG in the air and destroying 12 on the ground.  Coming home sporting the Distinguished Flying Cross, Captain David Hammack decided to leave the military and chase the money.  He took a job flying MD-88s for Delta Airlines out of Atlanta. (or as he liked to call it “he was a heavy equipment operator.”)  He and Cathy moved out of base housing into a nice home in Peachtree City, Georgia and begin to live the highlife. Cookouts and parties followed. Then came the flights and long absences away from home.  David moved up to Boeing 767s and began to fly transcontinental routes.  He now saw more of the world and less of Cathy.

In a hotel room near Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, he said a simple prayer.  “Dear Lord, please show me the way to being able to take control of my life again.”

When he opened his eyes, he noticed the Plane & Pilot magazine sitting on the table near his bags. “Funny,” he thought. “I don’t remember seeing that. Some other pilot must have left it.” He got off the bed, walked over to the magazine, picked it up and began flipping through its pages.

There, on page 20 (next to the ad for the Rolex GMT), was love at first sight: A Piper Chieftain PA31-350. And in that French hotel room (with a lot of help from the banks), Falcon Air Charter Service was born.

When he got home, Cathy looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Need I remind you how much money you make?!?”

“Life is about more than money. It’s about freedom. Freedom to control your own destiny. Freedom to live your own life.”

On August 1, 2005, David Hammack left Delta Airlines and he and Cathy moved to a small airfield in Mississippi.

All their friends thought they were crazy moving to Mississippi, but Cathy’s parents lived nearby and she knew that there was a steady supply of doctors and business people who needed to get to the Gulf Coast to play golf or fish.  Memphis airport was too far and this allowed them to try to start a family in a place with a little slower pace than Atlanta.  They moved into a small house near the airfield and David began to offer flights all around the Southeast. Never had a man been happier.

Until the fall of 2008 when the Great Recession began.

The airline charter business had already been suffering. Fuel prices had been eating into his margins (and everyone else’s household budgets) and trips were the first thing cut from peoples’ budgets. The Great Recession hit and business trips fell off considerably. Steak turned to chicken turned to Hamburger Helper.  The bank, for obvious reasons, still wanted to be paid.  Food and rent be damned.

David groggily walked across the kitchen and looked out at the moonlit Piper Chieftain sitting in the hanger. It had now become an albatross hanging around his neck.

“God. You’re not very talkative, are you? Because you never answer my prayers.  You’re just going to sit there and watch me fail? Don’t you listen anymore?”

Fear had turned to anger, blasting from his heart like lava erupting from a long dormant volcano.

“Come to bed, David. You can’t solve this at 3 a.m.”  Cathy came in and put her arm around him. She didn’t say anything else. She was a scared as he was.

The next morning, coffee flowed like the Mississippi River.  David sat in the trailer parked between the hangers and desperately waited for the next charter.  The phone was silent. Nothing. He threw a wadded ball of paper (a past-due notice from the bank) in the air and hoped for someone to walk in for a charter.  Desperate times require desperate measures. But he didn’t care anymore.  He was about to let go of his rope.

Just then, the wind blew open the trailer’s door.  The bell clanged and a man walked in sporting a briefcase.  He was six-feet tall, brown-headed and had a neatly trimmed beard. On his wrist was a Rolex GMT (like the one in the ad) and he wore a fairly expensive suit. “I hear you do charters to the Coast.”

“Um, yes sir. When do you need to go?” David’s pulse quickened. After a long drought, it was going to rain a little.

“As soon as possible if that is OK. I’ll pay a little extra.”  The man opened the brief case and pulled out some $100 bills.

They were in the air before you could say “Destin.”

It was an uneventful flight. The Piper Chieftain cruised comfortably at 6,000 ft, allowing a beautiful view of the Mississippi and Alabama countryside. The pilot allowed the stranger to sit in the front seat with him.  “Can I offer you a soda?”  The man shook his head no politely.  “DTS, This is Falcon 7. Requesting clearance to land on runway 1.” The flight was over almost as soon as it began.

As the plane taxied to a stop, David noticed some commotion off the right.  He killed the engines, hopped out and helped his passenger with his luggage.  “Thank you for flying Falcon Air!”  The stranger nodded and looked at the people surrounding what looked like a little girl slumped over in a chair.  An ambulance sat parked and EMTs feverishly worked on her.  A woman ran over to David and screamed, “You have to help us!”

The hot Destin sun and accompanying humidity caused him to began to sweat profusely by the time he ran over to the group.  A man looked him in the eye and began to speak forcibly (if not with a hint of panic.), “You have to help us. My daughter must be flown to St. Jude’s in Memphis immediately. She had a heart condition and must have surgery. Surgery they can’t do here.  Our other plane has broken down and we need to hire you to get us and her doctor to Memphis.”

David waved at entourage and the EMTs helped the little girl to the plane.  “What’s her name?” The man, who had obviously been crying, looked up at him, “Cathy.”  As David fired up the Piper’s engines, he knew this would be his most important flight ever.

The Piper, with a much heavier load, clawed at the sky. Gravity finally released her grip and the twin-engine plane soared into the Florida sky. No one spoke a word until they crossed the Mississippi border.

“Thunderheads. Severe thunderstorms are between us and Memphis. Radar is lit up like a Christmas tree. This doesn’t look good.”

“Can we fly over them?” The mother looked at David with panic in her eyes.

“Negative.  Those storms go to 45,000 feet.  We can’t climb that high.  I’ll have to thread the needle. Everyone get buckled in. ”  David’s stomach sank. What he was about to do was nothing short of stupid.  But there was a dying little girl in the back of his plane. He just hoped he didn’t get them all killed.

The plane began to shake violently. One of the EMTs vomited.  Then the second one did, too.  Lightning danced between the clouds, threatening the small interloper.  And then it happened: A bolt hit the right engine, causing a blast and flames.

David had a flashback to the flak over Kuwait.

The right engine was on fire.  David struggled with the controls, all the time repeating the Lord’s Prayer.  He flipped a series of switches and managed to extinguish the blaze.  Oil covered the engine cowling. Burnt oil.  He killed the engine before it blew and fought to fly the plane with one engine. The father sat silently and the mother cried over her daughter. “OK God, I know you don’t listen but I really need you this time.”

The wounded Piper struggled in the storm.

And then it happened, the storm parted and the sun lit the passenger cabin.  Up ahead was Memphis International Airport.

“This is Falcon 7, we have an inflight emergency.  We are on one engine and have a very sick little girl on board. We need an ambulance to St. Judes IMMEDIATELY.  Requesting clearance to land. Tell the Fed Ex boys to cool their jets.”  The plane dropped out of the sky.

There was no sweeter sound than the sound of rubber tires meeting black asphalt.

An ambulance met the plane on the runway and the little girl was whisked off to surgery. David limped the plane over a nearby hanger, killed the remaining engine and got out to inspect his wounded bird.

He looked at his plane’s burnt engine. How they got through that storm, he’d never know. Now it was just another bill he could not afford. Not only does it pour when it rains. There is lightning, too.  He sat down against the landing gear, put his head in his hands and said, “Why God?”

“Excuse me?”  A voice woke him from his pity party.

It was the father.  “My wife went on to the hospital. I wanted to settle up with you. Thank you. You saved my little girl’s life. No, you saved all of our lives. That was the best flying I’ve seen since Vietnam.”

“Thanks. You flew?”

“F-105 Thunderchiefs.  I felt like I was being shelled over North Vietnam during that storm.  Don’t worry about your plane’s engine. I got it. ” The man waved his check book.  “And I have another business proposition for you. My company is a Fortune 500 company.  Our pilot just retired and we need a new one.  You’re as good as I’ve seen — outside of myself of course.  How’d you like to fly for us.  We’ll buy your plane, too and add it to our fleet.  I’ll double what you made as an airline pilot.  I need someone like you making sure we make it safely home.”

David said yes before he could think about the deal.

“Thanks again, David. Here’s my card. Call me Monday and we’ll work out the details.”

As the man walked toward the waiting Jaguar sedan, David looked into the front seat of his plane and found an envelope. It must have been from the previous passenger, the strange man who had led him to Destin in the first place.  He carefully opened it and unfolded the letter.

“Dear David,

I was listening.

God.

David looked around the hanger and then up at the sky.  Off to the east, he could see the thunderheads on horizon.  He then picked up his cellphone and called Cathy. “Honey, you won’t believe this.”

That night, he had THAT dream again — the one of him letting go of the rope.  And when began to fall into the darkness, two giant hands caught him and held him safely.

Nearly 10 years ago, I had just finished speaking at the Millsaps Arts & Lecture Series, the crowd was dispersing and my dad walked over to me. He had never heard me speak before and he just stood there quietly. Then he broke his silence and said, “You know, you’re the first person I’ve ever known who said at the age of eight what they were going to do when they grew up — and then did it. ” It must not have been easy on him when I said I was going to chase a crazy dream like being a cartoonist. Paying for college, having your son aim for the moon  (for a career that had less than 100 jobs) and then end up as a high school janitor after graduation isn’t easy. But he (and my wonderful mom) did the one thing that I pray I can do for my kids — they believed in me. Not only was I given a great set of genes, but I was given the support to use them.

On this Father’s Day, I honor my dad Dave Ramsey. He’s a good man, a great dad and one of the most successful men I know (you ought to meet my sisters, then you’d believe me.)  Thank you for the genes. Thank you for the example. Thank you for the support.  And thank you for being my dad.