George Babb never did anything just for show. What would be the point of that?
“If you’re not going to do it to get some benefit out of it, you’re wasting your time and mine,” he would say, according to his daughter, Pat Earnest.
Babb served in the Navy during World War II, and sometimes that attitude clashed with authorities.
For guard duty on a base in Marietta, Babb was issued a rifle that was supposed to be unloaded at all times, his son, Ovid Babb, said.
But carrying an empty gun on guard duty seemed crazy to Babb. What would be the point of that?
He always made sure his rifle was loaded. One morning at 2 a.m., when he handed off the gun at the end of the shift he knew he had chambered a round. The other guard did not. The second guard pointed it in the air and fired it to prove it was empty. The resounding, “boom” nearly brought Babb a court-martial.
He was taken to the base chief’s office and warned that that he would have gotten harsh punishment “if you weren’t who you were.” Babb left the office, confused. As it turned out, he had the same last name as the base commanding officer. The base chief feared Babb was a relative, so he let him off without so much as a slap on the wrist.
George Bernard Babb, formerly of College Park, died on Friday after a lingering illness, according to his family. He was 99 years old. A memorial service will be Sunday, Aug. 3, at 3 p.m. at the Chapel of Mowell Funeral Home, Fayetteville.
Those actions on the base in Marietta weren’t out of character for Babb, his daughter said.
“He wasn’t always doing the right thing, but the wise thing for everybody involved,” Earnest said. “He had a presence about him that you had complete confidence that what he was doing was the wise thing.”
Wise leader was a role Babb embraced throughout his life. Up until his early 90s, he was a certified water aerobics teacher, instructing classes of men and women age 55 or older. Sometimes he also instructed chair aerobics classes, where students used soup cans as weights. It was all they could lift.
Even when Babb was 30 or 40 years older than them, his students never questioned his wisdom, his daughter said. Sometimes, though, they questioned his intensity. He would always respond the same way.
“No pain, no gain.”
What would be the point of doing something if you weren’t going to get some benefit out of it?
That applied to all cases, whether his family liked it or not. Why ask a question if you didn’t want an honest answer?
“Does this dress make me look fat?” someone would ask, his daughter said. “Yeah,” Babb would reply. “You might want to consider vertical stripes instead of horizontal.”
It was that type of honesty and his lack of fear to use it that made Babb “one of the wisest people I’ve ever known,” Earnest said.
In addition to his son and daughter, Babb is survived by sons Newton Babb (Beth), of Woodstock, Joe Babb of Vail Colo., and Dean Babb of Atlanta; grandchildren Amy (Clay) Stewart and Beckie (Mark) Sikes of Fayetteville, Janet (Gary) Cook of Roswell, Lesli (David) Harlan of McKinney, Texas, Suzy Babb of Knoxville, Tenn., Taylor Babb of Greensboro, N.C., Charlie Babb of Moreland, Ga., and Alec Babb of the Philippines; and great-grandchildren Shannon and A. J. Stewart, Ivy and Anna Gosdin, and Kennedy, Grant and Reagan Cook.
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