“If there’s such a thing as a success story in this world, it’s my dad,” Derek Strickland said.
“If anybody had a right to be sorry in life, it was my father. He was born poor. He had to live in an orphanage most of his life. He worked farms all of his childhood. But Daddy made something of himself he didn’t let those circumstances keep him down and he bettered himself.”
Paul Strickland, a sharecropper’s son who became a University of Georgia basketball star and longtime Georgia State Patrol officer, was born April 28, 1934, in Clarke County. He died June 28 at age 82.
His father “grew up with “nothing,” Derek Strickland said, in a large family, 11 brothers and sisters and a lot of mouths to feed. The family was poor, but found a way to earn a living as sharecroppers.
“All of them worked,” he said. They worked and picked crops by hand. “My daddy and his sisters and brothers picked cotton. They still have the scars on their fingertips from when they picked it.”
When he was nine years old, Paul’s mother died and Paul went to a “boy’s home,” which was what they called the local orphanage. From nine to 19, the Boys’ Estate in Darien, Ga. was where Paul grew up.
He excelled in all sports, from football to track to baseball, but it was his basketball prowess that earned him a scholarship to the University of Georgia. Derek said he still has newspaper clippings with headlines that credit his dad with various game-winning points or other game highlights.
After college, Strickland joined the Georgia State Patrol, where he worked for 34 years. He retired in 1988 at the rank of lieutenant with many honors. After his passing, the Georgia Jail Association officially renamed the GJA Professional Service Award the “Paul Strickland Professional Service Award in honor of his unwavering and selfless support of the GJA and its member agencies.”
He was also one of the founding members of A & S Commissaries, a company he and his son worked at together that supplies commissary items to sheriff’s offices in Georgia.
One day, Derek remembers, he got a call from the secretary for the Thomas County Sheriff’s Office. “We tried to get a piece of business in Thomas County Sheriff’s Office, and we could never get in there,” he said, “Never could make any headway with it.” Before that day.
Derek said he noticed the whole time they were talking, Sheriff Carlton Powell was just looking at his dad. Eventually, Powell told his father, “I know you from somewhere.”
When he asked, “Where’d you go to high school?” Strickland replied that he had gone to Darien High School. “I thought I remembered you,” Powell said. “Y’all played us in the 1954 State Basketball Championship game in Macon, Ga.”
They started talking about the game like it had happened yesterday, going through the various plays, layups, rebounds, and steals. “Your daddy was a thief on that basketball court,” Powell told Derek.
Strickland later brought back a gift for Powell, a copy of a printed-out program from that basketball game. Powell said it was a well-received gesture, especially since he didn’t have many things from his past because of a house fire.
From that point on, every time they got together, Powell said he and Strickland would have a little chit-chat about their old high school days. “It was a just a coincidence that we all came to know each other,” he said.
Strickland often said, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet.”
He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Patricia Bond Strickland; sons Derek Strickland and Jason Strickland, both of McDonough; grandsons Bryson Strickland and Joshua Mundy, both of McDonough; sister, Nell Caldwell and a host of nieces, nephews and friends.
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