Life on the Boys Ranch in Hahira was a bit different 60 years ago than it is today, but certainly not in a negative way.
Donald Alexander arrived there in 1961, having just finished seventh grade. His home life in Elbert County was not an ideal situation and he had found himself “sort of living on my own,” as he called it. But he had a friend there in Sheriff Lloyd Adger Moore, who encouraged him to make the move to south Georgia.
“I was failing in school and not doing well at all. He suggested that it would be a good idea for me to go down there,” said Alexander. “We talked several times about it and finally I said yes.”
Sheriff Moore drove him all the way down in early June, with his dad going along for the ride. He was the 15th young person to become a resident at the Boys Ranch. It was a sprawling facility back then, with 480 acres of mostly pasture land on which sat a farmhouse, two sheds and a cattle corral. The house had a dining hall, a living room and an area that Alexander called “barracks” with a series of three-sided cubicles with bunk beds. Each cubicle housed two boys in a setup similar to a college dorm room, with a small amount of closet space.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of clothes,” he said. “But we didn’t need a whole lot of clothes.”
The boys put their names or identifying numbers on their inside shirt collars and inside waistbands of their pants, so the entire load could go in the large washing machines. The boys handled their own sorting and folding when the job was done.
Meals were prepared by the cooks but the residents did the table setting, dish washing and all other typical household tasks.
Summer time meant farm work. The boys rose at 4 a.m. and ate breakfast so they could be outside by sunrise. Their mornings were spent cropping tobacco, stringing it up and hanging it in the barn. That was usually done by noon, and after lunch they spent the hottest part of the day at the Hahira swimming pool.
During the school year, a county bus transported them to their classes after they had their rooms cleaned and beds made first thing in the morning. Afternoon chores were the norm upon their return, and every school night meant more than two hours of study hall to make sure their homework got done. There was a television in the house that the boys used sometimes. Sunday morning was for church, and everyone attended either the Baptist or Methodist church since they were the only two in town.
“We didn’t complain too much about it,” Alexander said about the routine that would be considered heavy or even harsh by some today. “We rotated the chores out every month, and those of us who were considered the big boys were the team leaders. They taught us leadership, responsibility, and how to study so we could improve our grades.”
He was in the final graduating class of the former Hahira High School in 1966. From there he spent two years at a vocational school at what is now Wiregrass College, then was accepted at Southern Tech in Marietta, which at the time was a part of Georgia Tech.
Alexander remained a resident at the Boys Ranch until 1969 when he married. He never returned to Elbert County.
Armed with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, he eventually took a job at Georgia Tech that turned into a 48-year career when he finally retired not long ago. He began as a design engineer and eventually headed up all facilities engineering for new construction projects on the campus, taking a full retirement after 40 years and then coming back to work part-time for nearly a decade.