THE ET CETERA CHRONICLES - SORRY, I'M WAITING FOR SOMEONE SPECIAL

SORRY, I’M  WAITING FOR SOMEONE SPECIAL - Some hotel guests in Dublin didn’t receive such royal treatment.  Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey was the antithesis of ostentatiousness.  He was a plainly dressed man and looked like any other gentleman traveler of his day.  Governor Dorsey was due in Dublin on the day after Christmas in 1919.  The governor was in town at the invitation of the Chamber of Commerce to address the county’s businessmen on his plan for the Georgia Cotton Bank.  

When the governor arrived at the depot on South Jefferson Street, he noticed the large crowd gathering on the piazza of the New Dublin Hotel anxiously awaiting his arrival.  He stepped from the rear of the train and decided to walk the short distance up the street to the hotel at the end of the block.  Hotel manager Stubbs Hooks noticed the visitor coming up the street.  The thought that he might be the eagerly awaited dignitary never crossed his mind. He expected only an exalted entourage would be accompanying the governor of Georgia.    In a matter of respect to the guest he told the man that he better go ahead and eat because a large banquet was about to take place.  The governor, not wanting to embarrass Hooks, told the anxious manager that he would wait and eat with everyone else.  As the governor began to mill around in the crowd, someone approached Hooks and informed him that the man he had just talked to was the man the reception committee had been waiting on.  Stunned and stymied, Hooks recovered from his blunder and greeted the governor in the appropriate manner, all the time thinking to himself, “how could I be so stupid.”

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