Laurence McCullough
June 4, 2016
transcript
(mp3 audio)
(m4a audio)
I am a lifelong member of the Julia McCullough Shivers Fan Club.
[A few initial sentences unrecorded and untranscribed.]
…sweetheart of the ΣΧ fraternity at Georgia Tech for a year, and then she was the sweetheart and the sponsor of the SAE fraternity at Georgia Tech for a year, and then she was the sponsor of the SAE fraternity at Emory University.
In those days, the way that the university fraternity system worked, was they had parties all during the year, and at the end of the year, the fraternities would throw a big formal dance, at one of the ballrooms of an downtown Atlanta hotel. Everybody would dress up in long gowns for the ladies, and formal attire for the men. After the dance, there would always be a breakfast, at a private home. And that's where we came in.
Fifty or seventy-five fraternity guys from one of those fraternities would show up around midnight at our home on West Andrews Drive with their dates, and there would be grits and eggs and biscuits. There was an outdoor Dixieland band playing—we had to warn all the neighbors around us that we were having a fraternity party at night so they'd know about it.
Inevitably as things went on, somebody or other would say to me,
Aren't you Julia's little brother?
And I would say, Yes, I am.
They would say, You know, I've been trying to get a date with your
sister for several weeks, and I haven't been able to so far. I was just
wondering, when y'all are sitting around the table at night, at dinner time,
does she ever… does she ever mention my name?
And I would say, Well… uh… tell me your name, and I'll see if
you're ever mentioned at dinner, when the family's together.
Julia and Olin Shivers got married in 1959, and began their family and got very involved in children and all that that entails in the 1960s. I was away; I was at various schools, doing various courses of study. But Julia and I reconnected in the early 1970s, when I was back in Atlanta. We reconnected and continued our very strong relationship as brother and sister.
In the late 1970s, Nancy, my wife, and I got married and we began to have our family, and, at that point, Aunt Julia kicked into a different gear. You have never had an aunt like Aunt Julia. She gave our children the first and only dog that they ever had, a golden retriever. She will be forever remembered for that.
At Christmas-time, there were always hand-embossed, monogrammed
thank-you notes and envelopes.
She would say, Tuck in there, I'm going to teach you all how to write
a thank-you note, 'cause y'all are of good breeding, and people need to
know, when you write a thank-you note, that you know what you're doing.
So I'm going to help you out on that.
And all my children would genuflect and say, Yes, Aunt Julia,
because that's what you said.
When it came time for SATs, Aunt Julia was right there, giving them drilling and helping them not only learn what they needed to know about the SAT, but also the strategy behind how to get the absolute best performance that you could, out of that.
When our daughter became interested in theatre and drama, and she began to participate in drama and a theatre group in Roswell, Georgia, Aunt Julia was there. She was there on the front row—she brought her grandchildren along to cheer, to encourage her, to support her in every way.
When our youngest, John, graduated from college, and decided to make his way
in the world in Los Angeles, Aunt Julia said, John, do you have a suit of
clothes that makes a statement?
John said, Well, I'm not exactly sure
what that is, Aunt Julia.
And she said, John, you have to dress for
success. Do you have that suit, so that when you walk in that boardroom to
make that presentation, you've got that suit on—that suit that tells
those people what you're there for? Have you got that suit that you can wear,
that closes?
And John said, Aunt Julia, I may not have exactly
that suit.
She called a friend of hers, Ben bourgeois in Los Angeles, and
said, Ben, my nephew, John McCullough, needs a suit that makes a statement.
Would you make sure that he gets one?
And Ben Bourgeois did that, and she
said, Send me the bill.
Many years ago, now, she was attending a worship service at Peachtree Road
United Methodist Church, and she was approached by the chairman of the Board
of Trustees at Peachtree Road at that point. He said, Julia, I don't know if
you know this or not, but,
he said, as a preacher, your brother is making a
lot of money at church [unclear].
And she said, Well you ought to pay him a lot,
he's the best one you've got.
I am a lifelong member of the Julia McCullough Shivers Fan Club.
And I give my thanks for the honor.
We're now going to open this up to family and friends, who want to come and celebrate Julia's life with us, now. So, if there's someone out there who would like to go next, please raise your hand, and you can come forward and speak now. Anybody would like to do that?