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DEL.ICIO.USA woodsman with a heart big as Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When Bill Oettmeier invited me to the Okefenokee Swamp more than 20 years ago, I was not certain whether it was to duel, socialize or pick the spot in the swamp for my shallow grave.
Thus began, from his strong disagreement with the views and characterizations expressed in a column on the timber industry, a friendship that extended for more than two decades. The friendship ended this week. I write too late of my affection.
The blessing of a career in the newspaper business is that it has brought me, often because of initial disagreements, into the world of people like Bill Oettmeier of Fargo, Ga., on the western edge of the Okefenokee just north of the Florida line.
Over the years following that first visit to the Superior Pine Products Co. lands in Clinch and Echols counties, our paths crossed, often for friendly debate on policy issues: conservation, public education, rural development, taxation and the like. He was a passionate environmentalist and conservationist, gentlemanly in the Southern tradition, but resolute in the cause of forestry.
Besides charm and a superior intellect, Oettmeier possessed a quality that I find irresistible — an abiding love for the people and the soil of Georgia. Wish the best for them, for Georgia’s people and places, and no mere policy disagreement will ever intrude on friendship.
If ever actions demonstrated a love of place, Oettmeier’s did. Or, actually, it was most always the actions of Oettmeier and his wife, Patricia, the first mayor of Fargo. A logical choice she was, too. At the time of my initial visit to unincorporated Fargo, she had decided the town needed recreation for seniors. So she persuaded the state and a family business to donate two old houses, which were joined. Townspeople, at her urging, contributed $10,000 to buy a ceramics kiln, and every Tuesday seniors gathered for arts, crafts and fellowship.
Bill and Patricia, or Trisha as most knew her, were a team for 44 years, constantly pursuing ways to make life better for people on the edge of the swamp, even setting up the Oettmeier Foundation to continue serving the community.
When the Clinch County school board voted in 1991 to close the tiny school at Fargo because of a state regulation, the Oettmeiers organized an effort that raised $12,500 to take the whole town to Atlanta to appeal to Gov. Zell Miller. The governor opted, instead, to go to Fargo.
The school did close, forcing children to ride 30 miles to Homerville. But nine years later it reopened for the youngest children, thanks to a 1998 charter school law. Gov. Roy Barnes attended the school’s dedication — inspired, no doubt, by the persistence of a man whose concern for public education the governor had recognized in naming him to the state Education Reform Study Commission.
When next I heard from Oettmeier, he was proposing his most far-fetched idea for Fargo — a new state park. The state had not created a new park in 10 years. But Fargo got its park, to emphasize environmental education, prompted by Mayor Patricia Oettmeier’s dream and a gift of 317 acres on the Suwannee River from Superior Pine Products Co., the company Bill and his father served for 81 years. “We wouldn’t have had a park there had it not been for the Oettmeiers,” says state parks director Becky Kelley
My last correspondence from Bill came on Feb. 8, as usual concerning a matter of public policy, and a bill he expected to come before the General Assembly to eliminate the requirement that the state forester be a forester. “My prognosis is very bad but that does not keep me from being concerned about Georgia,” he wrote.
When last we talked outside the state Capitol, he had told me, almost as an afterthought, about the discovery of prostate cancer. Georgia, not cancer, was then on his mind.
The cancer, he now said, had metastasized. Treatment produced minimal results. “I told the oncologist I was not coming back. I feel great, then go to see him and he tells me I am dying. Humph.”
“I came to the conclusion that I had never been able to relive one day in the past, nor live one day in the future and today is great and I am going to enjoy it. … Life is good. Now tell me about you.”
Life, in the example you set, is good, Bill. Today at 1 o’clock, family and friends gather at Fargo United Methodist Church to bid farewell to a good and exemplary life. The Georgia he loved and the critic he befriended mourn his passing.
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