Hundreds of people who mourn the loss of Paul McCoy hadn’t met the man and didn’t know a lot about him. What they did know was his simple gesture that became part of their everyday lives. It gave them a small connection to something precious.
He was the man in the swing in his front yard who waved to everybody.
Maybe that touched them because of its contrast with the feel of so many daily interactions nowadays: getting cash at the bank without seeing a person, getting a message by phone with no voice. Maybe it was because so few of us know our neighbors. Whatever the reason, it did touch them.
“It’s strange to say we will miss someone we really didn’t know but we will,” wrote one of several well-wishers on an online condolence site. “If he had that kind of effect on strangers, I can only imagine how he impacted the people he knew personally.”
Paul McCoy, 82, died June 24 at his home in the Clayton community near Canton.
“We had more than 300 people pass through my house that didn’t even know him,” said his daughter Amy Manous.
They didn’t know McCoy spent his entire life in one place; or that he had worked briefly for Lockheed, then for more than 20 years at “the cotton mill in Canton” before retiring and “loved to go to ballgames at Waleska baseball field,” his daughter said. Or that “when Momma passed” about 11 years ago “it broke his heart, he never got over that.”
After his wife Doris’ death was when he took up sitting in the yard and waving to anybody driving by. First he sat at a picnic table, his daughter said, then got the swing.
“I think he wore out two or three swings,” said Brenda Barton, a neighbor who “moved next door to Paul’s family when I was five years old, so I’ve known him 62 years now.”
“He was a Canton landmark,” said Rachel Gazaway, another neighbor who “sort of knew him. I knew who he was” and had been waving back to him five years or more. “It’s just something about a sweet old man that sits outside and basically welcomes you home” each day with his smile and his arm thrown up.
She was delighted to find McCoy as a sort of landmark on Google Maps. Look at the street view of his address, and there he is. Waving, of course.
He was a landmark of kindness, his daughter and others said. Those passers-by probably didn’t know that if “anybody got sick in the community he’d sit up with them all night,” for example, Manous said. Barton said, “Paul was the type of person that you could not, not like. He was just a good person. If anybody needed help, he was always there to help.”
Here’s another thing most probably didn’t know: When Barton thinks of him, she said, “I think of him raising his brothers. I believe Paul was 16 or so when his dad passed away and he was just a young boy when his mother died. Paul dropped out of school and took on raising the boys. He was 16 or 17 years old. He took on the washing and learned to cook. He made sure they went to school every day and made sure they had food on the table when they came home.
“I can still see Paul,” Barton recalled, back around 1951, when the area was still farm country, before the roads were paved. “He’d be coming up the dirt road, barefoot, and had his pants turned up three or four cuffs, and he’d stop by and say to my mother, ‘I’m trying to learn how to cook this’ … He learned to do everything from scratch.”
Everybody called him Pawpaw, Manous, his daughter, said. “He loved it, he was Pawpaw to all the kids,” and kids loved him. Tokens children brought by after he died included a butterfly, a teddy bear and a picture of his swing.
“A lot of people have asked us to leave his swing in the yard,” she said. As a reminder.
“I always thought,” wrote one of the people who hadn’t met McCoy, “that he would have a personality and disposition equal to his wave. Warm, friendly, the type of person who never met a stranger. In some small way his waving was a reminder to me that good is still tipping the scales against bad in this world.”
In addition to his daughter Amy Manous and her husband Travis, survivors include daughter and son-in law Paula and Mark Pohlman of Canton; brother Fred McCoy of Canton; and grandchildren Jonathan Manous, Tyler Blalock, Brittany Manous, Cindy Manous and Tiffany Blalock.
About the Author
