Editor’s note: When Brian Shedd of Ellijay announced on social media recently that he and fellow American Legion members in Georgia were going to make a special visit to Augusta, the writer of this article contacted him and made a request.
When Brian Shedd visited the War Veterans Nursing Home in Augusta recently with fellow American Legion members with the idea of spreading Christmas cheer, he had no idea of the gift that awaited him. Shedd, who is the director of the American Legion Riders motorcycle enthusiasts of Post 82 in Ellijay, was asked to visit a friend of the writer.
George Clarke, a career newspaperman who served as publisher of the Dalton Daily Citizen for many years, is 97 years old and has lived at the nursing home for several months now. Shedd said meeting Clarke was “like getting to see my grandpa again,” explaining his forebear had a ministry of visiting nursing homes and he sometimes tagged along. He elaborated on the reason for the visit.
“Every year the American Legion, the Ladies Auxiliary and the Sons of the American Legion in Georgia go up there to Augusta,” he said. “The first day we go into the veterans hospital (Charlie Norwood Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center). We sit through about five or six hours of them going over what all they have accomplished through the year, the new technology they’re coming up with and the new prosthetics and robotics that they’re doing.”
Shedd said a “really interesting” finding is in the field of gene pool therapy.
“They’re trying to figure out why, say (as an example), you had got exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam and had no effects whatsoever, and I got exposed to it and it was life-threatening and ended up killing me,” he said of the research. “We went through (the hospital) and toured the new parts of the facility, and the reason we do that is the American Legion, the Auxiliary and the Sons all go to Congress on the national level and lobby for more healthcare and benefits (for veterans). They want to show us why we’re raising the money to help them do what they do.”
On to the ‘Blue Goose’
After the tour de force of the hospital on Friday two weeks ago, the Legion members went to the nursing home on Saturday.
“We always go to the Blue Goose (the name for the Georgia War Veterans Nursing Home because of its bright blue color) and visit with the people there,” Shedd related. “It’s a little more special to me because my grandfather had a ministry in Toccoa, Georgia. For almost 60 years he and another fellow went to the nursing home and the jail there and ministered to everybody, I had gotten used to doing that when I was a kid. He did that every Wednesday and every Saturday, and on Saturdays if I was able to go with him I went, too. We’d go visit everybody in the nursing home in all the rooms, then they’d end up congregating in the main dining hall and we would sing hymns and there was a couple of preachers that would come preach.”
Shedd was asked to visit Clarke as a favor to the author of this article and his wife, Teresa, who are friends.
“They took us into one of their main halls and I visited with about 40 different veterans, and we took bags of gifts in and handed them out and candies and things like that, just something to help them enjoy the holidays a little bit better,” he said. “Because a lot of the folks in there don’t have any family left. I found Mr. Clarke and said, ‘Mark Millican came here two or three months ago and visited with you,’ and he said he remembered and reached up and said, ‘He gave me this hat!’ and put it back on his head … he’s still pretty spry. It’s so cool.”
Shedd added, “He grabbed ahold of me and hugged me and said, ‘Thank you so much for coming from my home to visit me!’ It just tickled me, and I was so glad I could go visit with him because he’s special. It made my whole trip, it really did.”
The American Legion posts around Augusta have taken a special interest in the hospital and nursing home there, he noted.
“Two of the five posts in the area were coming to the nursing home every month, and would take a van full of the veterans over to the legions and serve them meals and play games with them, bingo and stuff,” explained Shedd. “And they loved to play bingo. Then when everybody got sick during COVID they couldn’t do that anymore. So the American Legion Riders got together and raised enough funds to buy a bingo light-up board — one of the big ones — and donated it to the Blue Goose so they would have it for them to play bingo when nobody could come visit them.”
When told it sounded as if the visit to the veterans nursing home had made Christmas special for him, Shedd replied with emotion, “You just don’t know how much — it was like getting to see my grandpa again. It brought back some good memories. He lived to be 98 and was a World War II veteran, a radioman in the Philippines. And just getting to see somebody and have them say what he said about coming to see him from home, that really made his day — and mine, too.”