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- [00:00]
Rosetta Stone Representative
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- [01:12]
Kathryn Burns
Hey everyone, this is Kathryn Burns, artistic director of the Moth. This week we're bringing you an extra podcast to celebrate someone whose spirit helped define the Moth. Her name was Wanda Bullard, and the Moth was born on her porch. As many of you know, the novelist George Dawes Green founded the moth on St Simon's island in Georgia, where he grew up. He and his friends would gather on their friend Wanda's porch and tell stories and drink bourbon.
- [01:37]
Wanda Bullard
And sometimes we drink a lot of bourbon.
- [01:39]
Rosetta Stone Representative
And the stories would seem to get.
- [01:41]
Wanda Bullard
Better as the night wore on.
- [01:44]
Kathryn Burns
Wanda Bullard died Monday night in Savannah, Georgia. She was 62 years old. Wanda was the salt of the earth, but she also had star power. She really lit up a room when she wasn't telling stories, she was teaching autistic children in the Georgia public school system. Wanda told many stories of the Moth over the years. Most recently, she was a headliner when the Moth made a tour stop at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia. Her story was on the podcast last year, but we wanted to share it with you again in her honor. Here's Wanda.
- [02:22]
Wanda Bullard
I think that's about right. I'm Wanda Bullard. I'm the Wanda Bullard that George Green is trying to make infamous by telling stories about my house on St. Simon's and my porch that we started telling stories on. But most of what he says is true. So I'm here today to tell you a story about My father, George Bullard, he was born in 1900 in a little bitty area up in the northeast corner of Mississippi. That's very rural. Most people would call it hillbilly country. They just call it paradise. So he was one of nine children, and he married when he was 20. He and his wife had two children, and his wife died. So he raised those two daughters. And then when they were grown, he married another woman who turned out to be my mother. She was about 20 years younger than him, and they had two daughters, and I'm the last of the last. He was about 50 years old when I was born, but an incredible influence on my life. And one of the things that he did, mostly what he did to make money, was to raise and trained bird dogs that hunted quail. And if the bird dog business got slow, he'd paint a house or two. But when he got late into his 60s, someone talked him into running for office, this bird dog raiser. And he ran for Board of Aldermen, which is like city council. And he was elected. And when he went to the first meeting, he found out that his assignment was that he was the fire commissioner. Now, every previous fire commissioner had gone to meetings and made political decisions and voted and did those kinds of things, but my father didn't quite understand. And so he went down to the fire department and said, now how am I going to know when there's a fire? And they said, and you need to know, because he said, how else can I know where to go until I know where the fire is? And they said, Mr. Board, you intend to go to the fires? Of course. I'm the fire commissioner. They didn't have the heart to tell him that he was taking a step in a new direction from fire commissioner. And so they went along and they hooked the fire department telephone to our telephone at home. I was a teenager, and every time the phone rang at the fire department, it also rang in my house. Not a normal ring, one long continuous ring until you picked it up, and then you didn't listen. You didn't say anything. You just listened to find out where the fire was. And then my father would hop in his little Datsun station wagon and head for the fire. Now, one downside to it was he didn't see so well at night anymore, so he didn't drive a lot after dark. So as a teenager with a driver's license, my new job was when the fires happened at 2 in the morning, I got to drive him there. I had to keep my jeans and my sneakers by the bed in case of a fire, that we had to go help fight. Now, he knew nothing about fighting fires, understand, but he wanted to encourage those young men who were out there doing a valiant job. Well, after serving two terms, he was past 70 then, and some people were saying, well, you know, you're still going to go on. And I kind of discouraged it a little bit. He said, okay, he'll let some younger fellow come in and be the fire commissioner. So he stepped down. But he decided after he kind of retired from being the fire commissioner, that he missed being around the fire. And Boonville is such a small town that the fire department and the police department are right in the same building. You can walk from one to the other just between the door. So he'd gotten really close to all the firemen and also the policemen. They kind of considered him like a grandfather. So they tried to figure out how they can keep him hanging around because they loved my father. So they asked him if he wanted a job with a police department. Well, he's seven years old. He's never done that. He said, sure, what can I do? They said, well, when someone's sick or needs to be off a day, you could come in and fill it. Fill it on the radio. You could be the dispatcher, take calls, call out to the cars and tell the policeman where to go, that sort of thing. He said, I could do that. So they actually. I'm never sure how they maneuvered this. They paid him to do this. So he was going along really normal with that job, and everything was looking good. And then one day he got to work and found this most amazing thing. They had a prisoner. Now, in all the time he'd been. In the months that he'd been there, they had not had a prisoner. So this intrigued my father. So he'd work on the paperwork a little bit. He'd go back and talk to a prisoner. And by noon time, he was liking this young man, even though he had hair way down here, which my father hated. So when he went out for lunch, he brought the young guy back a couple hamburgers and went back and talked to him some more. And he said, son, why are you in jail? He said, well, I had a little too much to drink last night, Mr. Bully, and they arrested me for public drunkenness. My father said, well, that's not too bad. Why doesn't somebody come and pay your bail? He said, well, I'm from Corinth, Mississippi. Now, that's about 20 miles up the road from Boonville. He said, I think If I could see my father face to face, he might loan me the $200 to pay my fine. But I'm not sure how he's gonna react to a call from the Boonville jail. My dad mulled that over a little bit. He's a real good Muller. And he said, you know, if I were to let you go, could you go up to Corinth and find your Daddy, borrow the $200 and be back here before my shift ends at 5? The young man was liking the direction of this conversation. He said, Mr. Bullard, I appreciate it, but they impounded my car, so I don't have any way to get to Corinth. It's 20 miles. My daddy said, well, is it a blue Chevrolet? He said, as a matter of fact, it is. He said, oh, it's out in the parking lot. I can find the keys. So with no authority to do anything but type on the radio, he searched through the desk, found the keys, and not only turned the prisoner loose, gave him a getaway car. About 4 o'clock, the policemen started coming back in off the shift, and they went back to check on their prisoner. They weren't used to having a prisoner either, and they discovered, to their dismay, they didn't have one. And they said to my father, Mr. Bullard, what happened to the prisoner? And very nonchalantly, because he just didn't see that he'd done anything wrong. He said, oh, I turned him loose. You what? I turned him a loose. Why did you do that? Well, he just seemed like such a nice young man. And I told him he needed to go get his $200 and come back and pay his fine. They said, well, how's he gonna get the car in? He said, oh, I gave him his car. So they're sitting around mulling around, saying, okay, what are we gonna do to make this go away? Because they didn't want my father to be in trouble. They wanted him to be able to continue coming in and hanging out and working on the radio. So they decided. One man said, you know what we'll do? We'll tell. We'll remind the chief of police that George Bullard helped get him elected. Another one said, I got a better idea. Let's just tear up all the paperwork, the arrest report, everything, and let's just pretend none of it ever happened. Now my father's standing over in the corner listening, and he said, no, we're not going to do either of those things. That young man will be back with the $200. I'm waiting here until he gets here. One policeman observed, it might be a pretty long wait, but my father's thinking about that young man and how they had kind of bonded in those few hours. He remembered telling that young man as he left, now, if you can borrow $200, pay your fine, get a few more and get a durn haircut. That was my father's only parting advice to him. So the policeman stood around and 4 o'clock came and went. 4:30, 5 o'clock. No young man. Nobody was surprised except my father. My father said, well, he's just running a little late. And they waited till 5, 25, 30. And they said, Mr. George, your shift was over at 5. Why don't you go on home? We can take care of this. My father said, didn't I tell you I was waiting till he got back? Yes. So they just started. The guys that had come in at 4 o'clock wouldn't go home either. Their shift ended, they wouldn't go home. The new guys were coming in. They were trying to fill them in on what was going on. And all of a sudden, strange looking young man walked through the door. Nice clothes, clean cut, short hair. And he walked up to the counter and he stopped. Nobody paid him any attention. So in a minute, he said, excuse me. And one of the policemen went over and said, can I help you? He said, yes, sir, I'm here to pay my fine. And he said, what fine? Nobody recognized him but my father. And he said, $200. You guys arrested me last night. My fine is $200, so I'm here to pay it. And he's counting out $20 bills. Nobody in the room is making a sound. They're all just, you know, they're all stunned. Except my father, of course. He knew he was coming back. And they write him out a receipt. And he's looking around the room at all the policemen, talking to each other in quiet voices. And he's kind of imagining what the atmosphere was probably like before he returned. So as a parting thought, when he got to the door, he turned around and said to my father, Mr. Bullard, I'm sorry I was late getting back. I had to wait in line at the barbershop.
- [13:34]
Kathryn Burns
Wanda Bullard was a veteran teacher who worked with emotionally disordered students in Georgia. Most Sunday afternoon, she hosted a cookout where all were welcome. The story shared on her porch inspired our founder, George Dos Green, to start the Moth.