THE CONGRESS: Voice of the 84th

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Cowpeas & Sweet Potatoes. Walter George, the only son of Robert Theodric and Sarah Stapleton George, was born in a sun-blistered pine house in Webster County, where his father scratched the hard clay to bring forth thin crops of cotton, cowpeas and sweet potatoes. Young George's reading material was his grandfather's collection of the Congressional Record. Recalls George: "The congressional style was ponderous in those days, but I learned to like it." One day George rode into nearby Preston on the back of an elderly mule. The village belle saw the youth, laughed at him, and found herself on the receiving end of one of Walter George's first public speeches. Its peroration: "This mule of mine is a worthy burden-bearer on our farm. He does his work most uncomplainingly. To laugh at me, Miss, is a reflection cast upon this good animal."

George worked his way through high school (taking a year off to teach grade school), and toyed with the idea of becoming a dentist. But the drill-and-chisel profession lost a recruit when Judge U. V. Whipple, an orator of local renown, failed to show up for a Masonic convention on the Methodist camp grounds in Preston. Someone suggested that 16-year-old Walter George, the best high-school orator in those parts, stand in for the missing speaker. George was willing, spent 30 minutes preparing himself, then delivered a rousing 40-minute oration on the duties of a citizen to the Government, using Robert E. Lee as his shining example. It was a whopping success; George decided that the law was the field for him. Medals & Mobs. He went to Mercer University (which, in 1947, named its law school after George), won medals for extemporaneous speaking four years in a row, took the Georgia and Southern States oratorical championships in his first year of law school, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and received his law degree in 1901.

Just as George was looking for a place to start practice, a young lawyer in the little (pop. 2,200) county-seat town of Vienna (pronounced Vy-enna) decided to move on. George bought his practice and 5O-volume library for $300, hung out his shingle on a weather-beaten frame building just off Vienna's courthouse square.

With only two weeks to prepare his cases for the new court term, George figured that opposing attorneys would expect him to ask for delays and would therefore neglect their own homework. He was right: when court opened, George was ready, and the others were not. In that term George handled more cases than any other Dooly County lawyer, won nearly all of them. Vienna's attorneys were delighted when, six years later, George took himself from competitive practice to run for prosecuting attorney of the Cordele judicial district. In 1912 he was appointed a district court judge, once broke up a lynch mob (the intended victim was the white killer of a county official) with the eloquence of a speech from the steps of the Cordele Opera House.