Growing up in rural Georgia, A. Paul Cadenhead despaired of ever getting an education. The challenges of poverty, the Great Depression and World War II stood in his way.
“We didn’t even have electricity,” recalls Cadenhead, 86. “We were a sharecropping family, and I was the sole support for my mother and three younger siblings. I dropped out of high school, and it wasn’t until a teacher made arrangements for me to work the second shift in a cotton mill that I was able to get back in.”
But Cadenhead nurtured a dream of going to college and, eventually, law school. After high school, his mentor stepped in again, making arrangements for him to attend vocational school near Carrollton. While there, he met the president of the fledgling West Georgia College, a two-year institution of higher learning that later became the University of West Georgia.
The college president, Irvine S. Ingram, was so impressed by Cadenhead’s determination that he helped him enroll and find financial support.
“It was a very small school and just 8 years old, and I had to work and pay every dime of my tuition,” said Cadenhead. “After finishing in ’44, I went right into the service.”
Even though he trained as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne, the Austell resident didn’t see any action. “We were doing simulated jumps on Aug. 8, 1945, and the second bomb was dropped on Japan on Aug. 9. That ended it all.”
For Cadenhead, the end of the war was a new beginning. The GI Bill helped him attend Emory Law, from which he graduated in 1949.
“From the time I was 10 years old and saw real injustice around me, I knew I wanted to go to law school,” said Cadenhead. “I thought lawyers could prevent things like that. And I’ve never veered from that belief.”
During an illustrious law career, Cadenhead never forgot the start he received at West Georgia.
“West Georgia and I have grown together through the years,” he said. “I always kept up with the university. And it was where I met my wife: One of my jobs was firing the boilers at night, and when she’d hear me hitting the pipes as I shoveled the coal, she’d drop food to me out of her window. When the old dorm was torn down, the university took a brick from the window and gave it to us. We’ve been married now 67 years.”
For years, Cadenhead has been an active supporter of the school, now a four-year institution with about 12,000 students. He was a long-serving member of the university’s foundation board, and in 1992, he and his wife rallied alumni from the 1940s to establish the I.S. Ingram Scholarship, an endowment fund for underprivileged students, given in memory of the former West Georgia president who helped Cadenhead enroll.
On the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary in 1995, he honored his wife by endowing the Davenport-Cadenhead Scholarship with an initial $50,000, $1,000 for each year of their marriage.
Through the years, Cadenhead has earned various accolades for public service from Georgia State University, Emory and the Atlanta Bar Association. But it was the honor bestowed by West Georgia in December that was the most nostalgic. Sixty-eight years after earning his first degree there, Cadenhead was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, a distinction given only 12 times before in the school’s history.
“For me, West Georgia was the only college I knew,” he said. “It was also the only place I could afford. I pledged on my honor to never forget it. My goal was to spend my latter years in the payback mode in sort of a delayed payment for the benefits that were given to me earlier in life.”
During the ceremony, Cadenhead also delivered the commencement address, in which he summed up his long relationship with the school.
“In a word, I have never left West Georgia,” he said, “and West Georgia has never left me.”
“Milestones” covers significant events and times in the lives of metro Atlantans. Big or small, well-known or not — tell us of a Milestone we should write about. Send information to hm_cauley@yahoo.com; call 404-514-6162; or mail to Milestones, c/o Holly Steel, 223 Perimeter Center Parkway N.E., Atlanta, GA 30346.
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