FOR THE FIRST TIME - PART V

 FOR THE FIRST TIME.  

Chapter 5

    This week I present another chapter in a long line of “firsts.”  Of course, “firsts” are never absolute because there was no one who was everywhere all of the time to verify, chronicle and document that it was truly for the first time.

 

   Former Trinity Crusader football coach, Tracy Ham, led his Georgia Southern Eagles to back to back national championships in 1985 and 1986.  Drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1987.  Ham, an MVP, leading rusher, league champion, and member of the NCAA Hall of fame was the first CFL quarterback to rush for 1000 yards in a season. 

 

   Carol Porter, formerly of Dublin, became the first female in Georgia to win a major party’s nomination. 

 

   Thomas McCall, a long term resident of Laurens County who served as Surveyor General of Georgia from 1786- to 1795,  is considered as the first major cultivator and winemaker in American history by the Georgia Winegrowers Association.

  

 Tal Prince, a Dublin car dealer,  was killed in a 1971 Daytona 500 Qualifying race (then an official NASCAR race) making him the first driver killed at Daytona in a Grand National Race.

  

 Charles Robinson, Jr., of Dublin, was the first African-American to become certified by American College of Healthcare Administrators and was selected as Georgia’s Health Care Administrator of the year in 1977.

  

 

   Birch Johnson, a native of Dublin is a first call trombonist in New York, an Emmy Award nominee for his music on the “Guiding Light” (227) and a member of the “Blues Brothers” band.  

 

 Dublin’s Nella Braddy Henney (far left) was a widely published author and editor, who wrote a biography of British journalist Rudyard Kipling.  Henney was the first writer to write a biography of Anne Sullivan, who gained world-wide fame as the “Teacher” of Helen Keller. Henney became close personal friends of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller (second from left,) the latter of which visited her at her old family home in Dublin during a stop at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Dublin in 1945. 

 

   Gov. George Michael Troup, a long term resident of Laurens County, was the last  person in the history of Georgia to be regularly elected by Georgia Legislature (1823) and the first person in the history of Georgia to be lected by the people of Georgia (1825.)  Troup is one of only three Georgians to served as Governor of Georgia, the United States Senate, and the United States House of Representatives.

    The Rev. George Linder, once a Laurens County slave, was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1868 during Reconstruction.  Rev. Linder, a local Methodist Minister,  and the other 32 African-American legislators were among the first to serve in a state legislature in the newly United States of America. 

    Dublin High School and U.G.A. scholar-athlete,  Tina Price Cochran, was a state high school and college tennis champion at Dublin and the  University of Georgia. Tina was the first female to obtain an athletic scholarship at the University of Georgia. She set several records for the women's basketball team at Georgia.  Top 15 draft choice in the first Women's Professional Basketball League in 1978.  

    Lt. William Arlington Kelley, a former Dublin High School football coach, was the first Army Air Force Pilot in the Pacific Theater in World War II to complete his service ending 30th Mission.  Kelley and most of his crew were killed in a crash while returning home aboard the “Dauntless Dotty,” the first B-29 bomber to complete 30 missions.  

    Rubye G. Jackson was the first woman to serve as an assistant Attorney General of Georgia in 1966. She grew up in Brewton and began her legal career in Dublin.  

    Dr. Eleanor Ison Franklin, a native of Dublin, was named a director of a medical department at Howard  University Washington, D.C.  Dr. Franklin was the first woman to serve in that capacity.   Dr. Franklin was also the first woman, black or white, to head a medical department in an American university. 

 

   One of the first African-American scientists to work at NASA,  Dr. Robert E. Shurney, a native of Dublin,  was one of the agency’s top physicists,   receiving honors for his designs of the tires for the lunar rover on the Apollo 15 mission, as well as his training in weightless environments and his innovative designs of the toilet for the Skylab space station in addition to his designs of eating utensils and solar panels for the Skylab.  This widely heralded scientist accomplished all of these feats without the benefit of a high school diploma.