Sweet Tea: Well water, add Mema’s sugar

MACON — When they asked me to fill in and host “Sweet Tea,” the first thing I thought of was my Mema’s actual sweet tea. She lived out in the country on Bear Branch Road in Houston County, walking distance from the unincorporated hamlet of Kathleen and a Hereford cattle pasture that is now a potato chip factory.

Mema’s tea was memorable because it had what tasted like a sulphury tinge of well water, which the Dixie Crystals never could drown. Mema arrived in Georgia in 1921 after coming to America to be with her father. Her mother had died in her hometown on a remote mountainside in what is now Slovenia. She was 9.

Her name was Mary Sercer Kovac. She was a cook. For 37 years, she ran or helped run the kitchen at the famed and since recently demolished New Perry Hotel in Perry. The columned icon was a landmark along U.S. 41 in the days before I-75. Travelers en route to and from Florida couldn’t resist its Southern fare, its white-linen tablecloths, its azaleas. Mema worked well into her 80s and family lore has it she once cooked fried chicken for hotel guest Harland Sanders, perhaps better known as Colonel Sanders. (He may have even raved that it was better than his, because it was.)

Mema died in 2003. She was 91. I remember her when I travel her old haunts in Houston and Pulaski counties, places I’ve come to know from growing up here in the midstate — and reporting and telling the human-interest tales of these parts for 35 years.

I always feel close to her and can almost taste that sweet tea of hers when I’m on assignment in places around Kathleen and Sand Bed and Bonaire and Oaky Woods and, yes, greater Hawkinsville, where a couple of the stories I’ve included below are set or bear datelines.

BAMBOO IN THE BOONIES

Hawkinsville isn’t really the boonies, but the subhead above seemed alliterative and rhyming enough to highlight a recent piece I wrote about an 85-year-old bamboo grower on the outskirts of Pulaski’s county seat.

My grandfather, “Papa” Joe Kovac, ran a timber mill on the Ocmulgee River there until it washed away in the mid-1920s in a flood. He was born in 1887 and he, too, had come from the former Yugoslavia and was friends with a local banker and director of the Pulaski Forestry Association, a fellow immigrant named Nicholas Cabero of Plataria, Greece. These days at the northwestern edge of Hawkinsville there is a Cabero Road, which is paved, and it lies about 6 miles due south of Kovac Road, most of which is dirt.

The bamboo farm is on Cabero Road, and its overseer, Daphne Lewis, took a circuitous route to land there herself — all in the name of raising the tall-growing grass she describes as “a total ecological miracle.”

🐼 READ MORE: She moved to Georgia at 70 to grow a peculiar crop. At 85, she’s a guru.

BOILED PEANUT PARADISE

Not far away from the bamboo grove, on over across the Ocmulgee, lies another jewel of Georgia agriculture. The home base of Hardy Farms, known for its boiled peanuts that are sold in supermarkets and at roadside stands, sits at the edge of a field along the road to Eastman.

This time of year, prime boiled peanut season, makes me hungry for the salty earth oysters that cousins Ken and Brad Hardy cook by the ton. When I met them a little more than a year ago to write about their family enterprise and their beloved green peanuts, they told me that they even ship to New York City eateries.

“Boiled peanuts,” Ken Hardy said, “don’t put on airs.”

🥜 READ MORE: At these boiled peanut stands, a Southern tradition steams into the future

SIPS FROM AROUND THE SOUTH

🎤 Nashville, TN: Dolly Parton’s SongTeller Hotel recently opened in downtown Nashville. The Tennessean newspaper reports that the hotel was one of the projects Parton had been working on before her August death. The newspaper notes a standard king room costs a touch over $400 a night, and one guest package includes “a framed print of lyrics from their favorite Dolly Parton song.” More from The Tennessean