BY TERI R. WILLIAMS PHOTOS BY RUTH ENGLISH
Little
Blue
Trucks
& farm
animals
William King is known as the "man with the
goats," but his life story hangs on deep roots,
family and friendship–all the things that make
life grand.
The first time a comment was made in “Your Mind Online”
in the Vidalia Advance referring to William King, it went
something like, “I don’t know who the old man is in the
blue truck with goats in the back, but whoever he is, I’d
love to buy him lunch.” No one knows who made that first comment.
William has often been the topic of conversation in “Your Mind
Online” many times since. But to whomever it was, I can tell you that
lunch with Mr. King would be worth every moment of your time.
When I drove out to the North Thompson Community to meet
the eighty-one-year-old man who carries metal goats in the bed of
an old 1950 blue International truck, I had no idea we were related.
Our families, it seemed, shared an ancestor named Littleberry
Columbus Thompson. The house Littleberry Thompson built in the
1840s for his new bride, Mary Moseley Thompson, still stands today
because William’s brother, Larson King, and his wife, Johnnie Mae
King, donated it to Brewton-Parker College’s historic community for
preservation in the mid-90s. It’s a house William remembered well.
Born in 1939, he was the sixth of Frank Alton King and Flora Bell
Chalker King’s seven children. World War II had just begun in Europe.
Like many families in rural Georgia at that time, William’s father was
a sharecropper. With seven children to feed, Frank King also did parttime
work cutting meat in a grocery store. It was there that he would
suffer a fatal injury. “My father fell while working and broke his hip.
They operated on him, but he got gangrene, and they had to amputate
his leg,” said William. “Penicillin was not available, and he died from
infection.” (Note: Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but it would be
1942 before the first patient would be treated with the lifesaving
82 TOOMBS COUNTY MAGAZINE