Like many families in Toombs County during the 1920s, Claude and Ethel Pye were
farmers. Merle was born in 1924, the first daughter after four sons. (There would be
thirteen children in all.) In addition to farming, her father also drove a school bus, which is
how the family often traveled. “When the school was getting rid of the old buses, my dad
actually bought one for us. There were so many of us, and we were always visiting someone.
Mother would bake cakes and pies, and we would load up in that bus to visit relatives.”
Merle was sixteen when she graduated high school since there were only eleven grades.
In her last year of school, she represented Lyons High School (now called Toombs County
High School) in a literary writing competition. “There was a list of ten things to choose
from. I had no idea what the first nine were about, but there was something just familiar
enough about the tenth one that I could shoot enough bull to get a thousand-word essay
out of it,” she laughed.
Late that night after the competition, the Pye family awoke to the sound of a car horn
blowing outside their house. “It scared us all. With four older brothers, you just never knew
what they might get into. But Daddy went outside to find out what was going on, and
when he came back in, he said, ‘That was Mr. Williams.’ He was the school principal,” she
explained. “He said he just found out that I had won the literary competition.” As a result,
Merle was offered a scholarship to UGA.
Five days before she was to leave for college, she gave the Valedictory speech at Lyons
High School. “When I was told I was the Valedictorian, I had no idea what that word even
meant,” she smiled. “Then when the librarian, Mrs. Williams,” who was also the principal’s
wife, “found out, she got permission from one of my teachers to let me miss class without
being counted absent and helped me get my speech together.”
If the school principal and his wife had not taken a personal interest in Merle’s future,
this story might have turned out quite differently. “I was very quiet, believe it or not,” she
laughed. “Mr. Williams went with me and my dad to UGA. When we got there, there was
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