Small World — By Tommy Purser

What a small world this is.

Barnie O’Quinn Jr. writes this week about the closing of the Pinova Plant in Brunswick which was formerly the Hercules Plant. My father worked as a machinist at the Hercules Plant back in the 1940s. That’s why my sister and I were both born in Brunswick in the late 1940s.

The new pastor at Hazlehurst Methodist Church, the Rev. Steven Riddle, stopped by Monday to meet the good wife and I, and I mentioned to him that I saw by his biography that he was from Palatka, Fla. I, too, lived in Palatka, from the age of five to the age of 12.

Rev. Riddle explained that he lived in Palatka from about the age of 11 or 12 until he graduated from high school there.

Both of us spent about 8 years in Palatka, me in the early to late 1950s and he in the early to late 1970s.

Two decades apart but, surprisingly he knew a lot of the people I knew as a young boy. Many of those people I knew were young in the 1950s and they were 20-plus years older when he knew them.

I shared with him the fact that, at the age of 11 or 12, I and my family became charter members of Trinity Methodist Church in Palatka and it turned out he attended the same church while living in Palatka.

As I said, what a small world this is.