Many days for long stretches Dorsey Nobles is the only soul rambling among the 31 buildings of the old United Methodist Children’s Home. He figures he has about 1,000 keys to everything on campus that needs opening. Except for now room after room sit mostly empty, silent for the first time in generations.
“This place used to be so vibrant, with children everyplace,” Nobles said. “Then I think about all the staffers who were here, and wonder how they’re doing.”
Nobles worked 27 years for the Home as a building and repairs specialist. He was hired in May 1990, by the legendary administrator Bev Cochran, who said back then, “Just promise that you’ll give me two years.”
He’s now outlasted them all. In April the UMCH announced the sale of its entire 77 acres to the city of Decatur for $40 million. In June, in a move he never saw coming, the city hired Nobles as the only UMCH employee to stay behind.
When the sale became official, the 53-year-old admits his anxiety was palpable. The UMCH is leasing a single-story office complex in Tucker, and Nobles figured that any landlord would have an established maintenance team.
As a Decatur employee, things couldn’t have worked out much better. Nobles and his wife Luann have a house on the property’s north end. More than that, for Nobles every inch of this property is sacred, from the lake, to the woods, the ancient granite barn and, especially, the Gothic Revival church.
He first arrived on campus in in Nov. 1971, at seven the youngest of six children, with four siblings coming with him. They’d been raised in the old Techwood Homes housing project. Their dad was an alcoholic and their mother left for good in the late 1960s, though he’d reconnect with her in 2000 and eventually forge a close bond.
“When he was drunk my dad hit all of us,” Dorsey said. “He didn’t spank us, he beat on us.”
On their first day in the UMCH cafeteria, Nobles, his three brothers and sister watched as the other kids, around 70, stood in the buffet line. Cochran, then in only his second year as administrator, urged the Nobles kids to join in.
“Sir,” young Dorsey said, “we can only afford to eat once a day and we’ve already eaten today. If we get in that line, our Dad will beat the hell out of us.”
Cochran, at 6-foot-4 and 250 pounds, looked closely at the child, got down on one knee and said, “As long as I’m breathing that man won’t touch you again.”
The next day Cochran packed the Nobles kids into his rickety station wagon and drove them to J.C. Penny, buying each two complete outfits and shoes.
Cochran would remain intertwined with Dorsey Nobles’s life until his death in August 2016. A former Georgia Tech football player, he arrived at the Children’s Home in 1969 with degrees in psychology and business administration, and experience as a social worker. Long before his 2012 retirement UMCH children described him as “Jesus with skin on.”
“He had an uncanny ability to connect,” Nobles said. “He helped me through my divorce, and helped me with my finances. But he was close to everybody. He knew everybody’s name and what they were doing long after they left here.”
Nobles aged out of the Home in 1982 after graduating from Avondale High. He lived for a while with two of his brothers in a Lithonia trailer park. He spent 5½ years in the Navy before getting hired by the Norfolk-Southern Railroad based out of East Point.
Looking for more of a 9-to-5 job with less travel, Nobles returned to the UMCH in 1990. Since then he has seen the resident population diminish as foster-family based care irrevocably replaced on-site congregate care.
Cochran discontinued congregate care altogether in 2010, but long before he’d sold off all the remaining UMCH land south of what is now Katie Kerr Drive. It was only a matter of time before the home would move away altogether.
But Nobles knows the present silence is only temporary. In January the city will begin preparing a five-months long master planning session for the site. Eventually the playing fields will again be full and the administrative building bustling.
Nobles said he’d love to see a senior center here, along with after school programs maybe a building dedicated to children with disabilities. What is known for sure, the administration building will get named for his old mentor Cochran.
Years ago Nobles suggested to Cochran that he should someday be buried in front of that building next to UMCH founder Jesse Boring.
“No, Nobles, that won’t work at all,” Cochran said. “You’d have Boring here, and next to him you’d have me, who’s very boring. Wouldn’t work at all.”
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