Ted Polk, a geologist who came to Magnolia in 1968 to work for McAlester Fuel Co., retired from Arkla Exploration Co. in Shreveport in 1975. He and his late wife Nancy, who retired as the librarian at East Side Elementary in Magnolia, built a house on N. Lakewood in 1970 but also owned a 1905 home in Minden, Louisiana, that they inherited from her parents.
“We spent 30 years working on the house in Minden,” he said, but he cleaned out and sold the house when Nancy passed away about four years ago. He gave most of the antique furniture to their children Martha and Jim, and other things to son Bob, but donated some artifacts to South Arkansas Heritage Museum in Magnolia. He retains, however, numerous boxes of letters exchanged between his and Nancy’s family members, which he has carefully catalogued in binders.
Ted is originally from Hamlet, North Carolina — a graduate of first Duke University and then Texas A&M University — and he met Nancy when she was a research librarian with Humble Oil & Refining Co. in Texas. “I was working downtown in Houston. That was 1955,” he said. “We decided we’d get married after about six months of dating.”
When Ted and Nancy settled in Magnolia to be near her parents, they were done moving around. “We decided we didn’t want to get back to the big cities, ever,” he said. He drove to Louisiana and Texas to work, came home in the middle of the week, drove back to wherever he’d been, and came home on weekends. When both were retired, they spent a great deal of time traveling to see their younger son, Bob, who was in the Army and moving from base to base across the country.
In October, Ted and Bob marked an item off their bucket lists: hearing President Jimmy Carter teach a Sunday School lesson at his church in Plains, Georgia.
“Since he's not there every Sunday, we checked on the internet and found that he would be there October 8,” Ted said. “We knew this would be one of the last times that he would teach since he recently was diagnosed as having brain cancer. And he is 93 years old. He has been a world citizen since his time as president and has established the Carter Center in Atlanta, where his trips and activities are planned. His Habitat for Humanity program has helped so many poor people in various countries around the world.”
Son Bob came to Magnolia from his home in Alexandria, Virginia, to do the driving for his dad on the trek to Georgia. “Bob had the idea to go,” Ted said, “and I said, ‘Well, Bob, if you’ll organize it and get all the [motel] rooms, and all that, I’ll buy your plane ticket and rent the car.’”
Their trip was not a direct one — they made several unplanned stops along the way — and ended up lasting five days.
“The first was at the battlefield in Vicksburg,” Ted said. “This is my favorite Civil War battlefield and one that Bob and I had often visited. This time we wanted to drive to the place where General Grant met with General Pemberton to arrange for a ceasefire and terms of surrender for the Confederate forces. It’s on a bluff overlooking the Confederate gun emplacements just a short distance away.”
One of the stops Ted enjoyed most was in Selma, Alabama. “This is the town where the civil rights movement began in 1963 and climaxed in 1965,” he said. “We walked across the Edmond Pettus Bridge, where so many black people suffered from the whites as they tried to march 53 miles to the capitol in Montgomery to complain to Governor George Wallace.” Many of those marchers were beaten by state troopers.
At a small museum at the foot of the bridge in Selma, Bob and Ted met Henry Allen, who was only 17 when the second, successful march was organized and made by Dr. Martin Luther King and those who followed him. “Henry went on to serve his country in the Vietnam War and retired as the first black fire chief of Selma,” Ted said. “He wrote a book about his life which is most interesting. He’s just a fascinating man.”
Allen’s book is titled “Marching through the Flame” and is available from amazon.com. “Every other sentence in there tells about how God has treated him so well,” Ted said.
Near Tuscaloosa, Ted and Bob stopped to visit the museum telling the story of the Tuskegee pilots, black men who flew missions in World War II. “The old hangars are now museums showcasing their history,” Ted said. “A short film tells how these men, who were so discriminated against by the white Air Force officers, turned out to be real heroes and top notch pilots. ABC’s Robin Roberts’ father was one of them. This was one of the highlights of our trip.”
In Columbus, Georgia, Ted and his son visited the National Civil War Naval Museum and the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning. “Bob was here at the very beginning of his career as an Army infantry officer,” Ted said. “We even found ‘Iron Mike,’ a statue representing the infantry. It was by this statue that he proposed to his wife-to-be.”
The Polk men were up before daylight on Oct. 8 to make their way to Maranatha Baptist Church, to be among the first to be seated in the sanctuary at 6 a.m. “I imagined that the bad, rainy weather would keep most people away. Man, was I wrong!” Ted said. “We shared umbrellas with people until we were told to line up one by one to be inspected by the Secret Service. Before entering the church, we had to empty pockets and have everything checked. A body scan was the final check before being allowed to enter the sanctuary. The Secret Service was present during the service and throughout the area. They don’t turn loose of an ex-president.”
Ted and his son were among the group given instructions on how to greet the former president. They were told not to touch him, take a photograph of him, or ask for an autograph. During the instruction, the woman explaining it to them asked if anyone was from North Carolina.
“I loudly yelled out, ‘I’m from North Carolina,’ something I always say if given the chance. She asked, ‘What team do you like?’ to which I yelled out, ‘Duke!’ To the astonishment of everyone in that church, she said, ‘You two move up to the front.’ The crowd applauded and were all so very happy for this old man and his son.”
Soon afterward, President Carter entered the sanctuary and asked several people where they were from. “Before he began the lesson, which was from the book of Galatians, he told us that he was concerned about what was happening in North Korea and said that he had been in that country three times in the past,” Ted said. “As he talked, he walked back and forth in front of the pulpit area. It was really a well thought-out and enjoyable lesson.”
After Sunday School, Ted and Bob stayed for the church service, and they were allowed to have photos made with Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn.
Later that day the Polks visited Carter’s boyhood home. “Jimmy’s dad was a peanut farmer and prominent in the Plains community. Jimmy worked on the farm in the early years of his life. After a brief tour of Plains we were ready for a good night’s rest before our journey back to Arkansas,” Ted said.
On the return trip they made stops at the church where Dr. King spoke to organize the march from Selma, and at the museum between Selma and Montgomery that tells the story of those days. “It is a place well worth visiting,” Ted said. Another stop was in Vicksburg again to visit the old courthouse that survived the siege of the city in 1865.
“Inside the courthouse is probably the best museum of Confederate artifacts anywhere,” Ted said.
A few miles after crossing the bridge from Mississippi into Louisiana, Bob turned the car northward to visit the ancient mounds that were built some 3,500 years ago, a place Ted hopes to revisit.
“It was too late for a car tour, but maybe I’ll return someday,” Ted said.