LEW AND RICO

The Oddest Couple of Them All 

In the 1930s, two of the most different people you ever saw, met and became friends in Durham, North Carolina Duke University.  One studied he principles of law and the other studied the teachings of God and His son, Jesus.  Lew was born on October 10, 1909 in the sleepy hamlet of Whigam in Grady County, Georgia on the Florida border.  Rico  was born on January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda,  California - some three thousand airline-miles away from South Georgia .  Both came from relatively poor backgrounds.    Both loved playing the piano and singing with family and friends. Lew was a Methodist and Rico  was raised with the steadfast belief in God in the Quaker comunity of  Whittier, California, just south of Los Angeles. 

After studying at Young Harris College and Emory, Lew left his home in Wadley, Georgia to attend the Divinity School  at Duke.  Rico  came to Duke to get a law degree.  Rico was invited to join three Methodist Divinity students in a two-room apartment.  Rico drew one of the preachers as a room mate, and Lew the other preacher as a room mate. Each young man paid $22.00 a month for a clean  room and great food and fun. 

Supper time was the highlight of the young men’s day.  The four students ate together.  Afterwards, the quartet sang popular songs of the day and played games for a frolic of fun.  Rico and Lew were both pianists.  One of the young Methodists played the fiddle.  Fun times were had by all.  Years after they parted, Rico and Lew still remembered the fun times they had at Duke.  

The affable Lew went home to Georgia to preach the Gospel and marry the beautiful Edith Myrtine Slade, daughter of Charles Simon Slade and Ophelia Selena Adams, on November 5, 1936 in Lee Street Methodist Church in Americus, Ga..  Edith was also a very talented singer and musician and the couple spent nearly fifty years performing for church members and friends. 

Rico  moved out of the boarding house to the law school dorm and complete his degree in 1937.  Then Rico, with his diploma in hand,  traveled back home to practice law and climb the ladder of his extraordinary life.    Rico  met Thelma Ryan, a former clerk and typist, who studied at the University of Southern California.  They married in 1940.

Rico  joined the U.S. Navy at the age of 29. Richard Milhous In January 1942, Nixon became an attorney for the Office of Emergency Management in Washington, D.C. where he worked until he accepted an appointment as lieutenant junior grade in the United States Naval Reserve on 15 June 1942. Rico  learned how to fly planes and manage air operations. He was released from active duty on 10 March 1946. He was promoted to Commander in the Naval Reserve on 1 June 1953. He transferred to the Retired Reserve of the Naval Reserve on 1 June 1966.  Rico  threw his hat into the political ring where he remained for a quarter of a century.

Twenty years after he left law school, Rico sent Lew and his wife a photo signed with sentiments to his old friend.  In 1960, Lew’s friend from Wadley flew him to a mass meeting in Atlanta, whre Rico and Lew were reunited.  Rico invited Lew to dine with him, one more time for old times’ sake.  Afterwards the men exchanged Christmas cards and greetings on a semi-regular basis. 

Later that year, Rico found his way into the national spotlight for the second time.  He had been elected to public office in 1948 and again in 1952 and 1956.  It was going to be his greatest moment, but Rico lost the election to a handsome, smiling Yankee from the Northeast.  Rico, always serious when I came to  the law and politics, was devastated. He ran for public office in 1962, only to suffer yet another discouraging loss.  Then the war in Vietnam came along and the country  was turned upside down and was about to burst into flames. 

Here is the time to open the bag and let the cat out.  That cat, whom I speak of as Rico,  was the Vice President of the United States from 1952-1960 and in the tumultuous year of 1968 was elected as the 37th President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Lew was the Rev. Lewis Shannon Holloway, Sr., who came to Dublin in 1968.  Rev. Holloway had moved every three to five years,  as Methodist ministers do,  all over South Georgia including Pineview, Wadley, Arlington, Ashburn, Pelham, Claxton, Rose Hill (Macon), and First Methodist (Warner Robins.)    Over the years, Shannon and Edith would travel to Dublin to attend South Georgia Conference meetings and to preach and sing at revivals. 

The Holloways were flown to Washington to attend Richard Nixon’s inauguration.  The couple attended many of the festivities. For the fashion minded, Edith wore a traditional long evening dress with a coordinating mink stole.  Shannon wore the requisite dinner coat and black tie.   By the way, the red carpet and one of Patricia Nixon’s dresses which she wore at Nixon’s second inauguration, were made in East Dublin at Mohasco and J.P. Stevens plants. 

Shannon Holloway’s musical talents were so admired that he recorded an album of his favorite hymns, so that his admirers could listen his wonderful voice in their homes anytime that wanted to. 

Shannon Holloway died on November 22, 1981 in Abilene, Taylor County, Texas, at age of 72.  He was buried in Fincher Memorial Cemetery, Meansville, Georgia.  Edith was laid by the side of her beloved Shannon in January 1998. 

In the end,  politics, as it usually does, ruins a lot of once good and honest people.  I loved and adored Shannon Holloway, who during his tenure at First Methodist Church, taught me about the principles of faith, hope, and love, in a quiet and assuring way.  

I can relate to the pre-Watergate Richard Nixon.  Like my father, he was a Naval pilot.  My mother vetoed the Navy’s request to activate my father to active duty in Korea.  Like my father, Nixon was a lawyer.  In 1973, I saw Richard Nixon and a half dozen high ranking politicians at Cong. Carl Vinson’s 90th birthday celebration at Mercer University.  Little did my father and I know, but the quiet, short, grinning man who greeted us at the door of the law school would win the next presidential election. His name, of course, was Jimmy Carter.  During the height of the Watergate Scandal, President Nixon got in his limo and headed quickly out of town, much to the chagrin of CBS’s watchdog reporter, Dan Rather, whom I had to tell that the President had left the building. 

Without defending Mr. Nixon, I do wish that he had maintained many of his steadfast beliefs of his Quaker upbringing and remained the man that Shannon described as “quiet and assuming - a wonderful Quaker man who was as poor as I was.”