I probably got more out of Georgia, not just working in a funeral home but the whole black/white thing. I didn’t do embalming but drove the ambulance, drove the hearse, would go to all the funerals, would be there when families would pick out caskets. It was a black funeral home and it was a totally different experience for me. I had never, never — first of all I had never lived with blacks before. I worked with them. But secondly just the whole aspect of the funeral business and then I got interested in that a little bit in terms of — the cost was astounding. The amount of money that people would spend for caskets and services just shocked me. Because in these families a lot of them didn’t have much money but they went to such an effort and my mother died when I was fifteen and it just made me think about why people would spend so much money for somebody who’s dead to be in a casket to go in the ground that, you know, will just eventually disintegrate anyway. But they would put themselves into debt to do it.

People would have funeral home jokes and stuff but I really — Waycross was where I got more into kids, schools and I worked in the Head Start there. That sort of started me off and I’ve been working with kids ever since as a side to my legal practice really. So that was another aspect, an indirect aspect of Williams-at-Home in terms of having life impacts.

Jeff Thaler '74