Branching Out Beyond the Bank and Back
By Brad McEwen
It was shocking enough when Kevin Sproul told me how his first attempt to enter law enforcement, way back in 1979, ended with a failed polygraph test, a few tears and the painful disappointment of his loving, retired Marine father.
But that life-shaping tale—one that showed the young man the often unintended consequences of our actions, but also helped spur his burgeoning Christian faith—didn’t hold a candle to the story that followed—one of the many moving accounts recently shared by guests of Beyond the Bank.
“Fast forward three years later and somehow the Sheriff had heard about my lifestyle change and he called me,” Kevin explained. “I’d been praying, so all I can say is, it was a God thing. People say it’s coincidence. Whatever. I say it was a God thing and that’s where I am today.”
But at the time, that God might have been involved at all was pretty difficult for the rookie jailer to see.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” said the Sheriff about his first day at the Dougherty County Jail. “In 1982 we didn’t have the internet.
“I walk into the jail that night at 11:30; our shift came on at 11:45. They introduced me to some other people; they showed me the man who was going to train me. And one of the most bizarre things happened.
“At 12:15 that night—I had only been there about 45 minutes—there was some kind of commotion going on in the back of the jail. There’s five of us men there working, and one matron, a female that handled the female inmates. They look at me, they tell one man to stay at the control desk. The other three go behind the door. They get these burlap sacks, probably four feet long, and they pull these big sticks out, and they wrap the straps around their wrists and they grab the keys to the cell.
“They said a few choice words and they went to the back and they told me to follow them. Well, these three guys, they’ve got sticks, I don’t have nothing. It’s my first night on the job. I’m scared to death.
“So, we go to E Block at the back of our jail, and they open this big panel that has these levers on it, and these green and red lights,” he continued. “One of them looked at me and he said, ‘Does the watch that you have on have a second hand?’ I had an old Timex watch on and I looked at it and I said, ‘Yes.’
“He said, ‘Ok here’s the deal, we’re going to walk back down here and when we point to you, you open this lever up.’ And I’ll never forget it, it was the sixth cell room in E Block. ‘We’re going to go in for 60 seconds. If we’re not back, you shut us in here and go get help.’
“I’m now shaking in my boots. I looked at them and they said, ‘NOW (do) you understand us!? 60 seconds. It’s very imperative that you understand us and you go get help.’
“So, they go back there, they (point at me). I’m waiting—seconds go by, and we’re getting close to 50 seconds, and I hear all kind of commotion. It sounded like they were hitting everybody with the sticks they had.
“All of a sudden, they bring three males—two African American and one Caucasian male—they bring them out in to the corridor area, and they drag them on the floor and they tell me to shut the door.
“They take them up to what we used to call the drunk tank. One of the guys went in there and I heard them hitting these guys again, these inmates. They said something about ‘You won’t see the sun come up in the morning if we have any more problems out of you!’
“They shut the doors, we walk into the office and I’m almost in a daze here. I really don’t know what I’m viewing or seeing. We go in the office, they get some paper towels, they wipe these sticks off, they put them in these burlap sacks, they stick them behind the door, and the guy that was working the counter turned and said, ‘Now which one of y’all is going to train the rookie tonight?’
“I never saw an incident report. I didn’t see anything.”
That our now-Sheriff spent the rest of his first night on the job in somewhat of a stupor is understandable. What he had witnessed had shaken him deeply. In fact, so much so, that he had made up his mind he had likely made the wrong decision pursuing a career in law enforcement in the first place.
But fortunately for this community, and the countless lives he’s touched, he leaned on just the right person for comfort.
“When I got off at 8 o’clock that morning, I go home and I call my mother,” Kevin continued. “I told my mother this, I said, ‘I’m calling Mr. Adler up (and) I’m going back to work at Pabst Blue Ribbon. I don’t know who, or what, this God things is, or what I’ve gotten myself into mom, but let me tell you what I just watched last night.’
“Bless my mother’s heart, she’s resting in peace now, but she said, ‘Honey, you’ve got to give God a chance at this. If you don’t like what you saw last night, why don’t you be the Sheriff of Dougherty County and change it.’”
By his own admission, things didn’t change overnight, but during his four years working as a jailer, Kevin said he only ever saw one similar incident, but nothing to the magnitude of what he witnessed that night.
But as painful as that night was, it did provide the fuel Kevin needed to press ahead and commit himself to a life of working to improve not only the community as a whole, but the lives of each and every citizen he’s been blessed to come in contact with.
For Sheriff Sproul, every step of the journey—be it the shame of disappointing his father, or finding the courage to stand up to injustice—has been vital in his growing into the man he is today.
To say that I was blown away, not only by Kevin’s stories, but also his candor and vulnerability, is a gross understatement. That interview occurred nearly four months ago, smack in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, and those tales only scratch the surface of what our Sheriff shared with me that day. But nary a week has passed that I haven’t reflected on what he shared and how I might draw inspiration from it for my life.
‘To Whom Much is Given, Much is Required’
I’ve thought often lately about another Beyond the Bank podcast I did last fall, when I had the pleasure of getting to know the indomitable Dr. Fonda Thompson, Executive Director of Dougherty County’s Open Arms, a nonprofit which serves homeless and runaway teens.
I didn’t know anything about Open Arms, let alone who Fonda Thompson was, prior to that interview. But over the course of thirty-one of the most powerful minutes I’ve ever spent getting to know somebody, I learned not only know about the crucial, and incredibly challenging, work Open Arms is doing in our community, but I also got to experience the burning fire Fonda has for serving the neglected and abandoned youth of this community.
I’ve been fortunate in my career to have met some pretty amazing and inspirational people, in fact, too many to even name. But I’d be hard pressed to recall someone whose fierce desire to help others quite literally brought me to tears.
It was a couple days after the interview, and this particular night I found myself sitting on the back patio, essentially feeling sorry for myself. I was having one of those occasional stretches where it seemed everything I touched went sideways and no matter how well I planned my day, I just couldn’t seem to catch a break. I was stressed about work, stressed about the kids, heck stressed about life in general.
In truth, I was having myself a good, old-fashioned, woe-is-me pity party.
All I could think about, sitting out there at 9:45 on a Thursday night, is that the last thing I wanted to be doing was listening to the audio of Fonda’s interview to find any areas of dead air or crosstalk that needed to be removed before the interview was ready to release in podcast form.
Begrudgingly, after a few salty words muttered under my breath, I resigned myself to just pressing on and getting it done.
So, I hit play.
I was only half listening at first. I mean, I had been present for the actual live interview after all, and the first few minutes of the recording just sort of floated through my head without me really registering the actual words I was hearing.
But then the timbre of Fonda’s voice changed.
There was a slight rise in volume, a growing intensity, a rawness. There was emotion-deep, strong emotion. I could feel it, percolating through my Airpods and hitting my brain like a live wire.
This is what I heard:
“When I was in the second grade at Stringfellow Elementary in Moultrie, Georgia, my second grade teacher said that I needed to be in Special Ed,” Fonda said. “She said that I could NOT read and that I would NOT graduate from high school.
“But there was one teacher, another second grade teacher, who said that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this child. And between my parents—my mother, my grandmother and my great grandmother—fighting for me, they moved me into her classroom.
“So, when I watch these kids come into Open Arms, and people have labeled them because this has happened, or that has happened, it’s just not fair. Just because somebody labeled you, or your past, it doesn’t determine where you’re headed.
“At Open Arms I saw kids who had given up on themselves, who were not going to be who God had created them to be. And just watching them give up on themselves is what made me want to be at Open Arms, want to stay at Open Arms.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Are you ever gonna leave?’ I tell people, ‘When God says it’s over, that’s when it will be over. But until then, I’m going to continue to fight for these young people who need a voice.’”
Despite Fonda’s conviction to serve what many deem the forgotten children in our community, she freely admits it took some time for her to be able to balance her desire to see them succeed, with witnessing the painful reality that some of these children are facing.
Having started part-time answering crisis phone calls on the night shift nearly 25 years ago before working her way up to her current position, Fonda said she went through a lot of growth learning to battle the intense emotions that come with seeing children who are scared and hurting.
But true to her nature, she found solace in her faith and has stayed the course.
“When I first started, I would go home and cry every night,” she continued. “And I would tell myself, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this;’ until one case where a two year old was brought into the shelter.
“She was brought to the shelter, but before then, she had to go to the emergency room because of sexual abuse by mom’s boyfriend.
“And I can remember not crying that night. But being as angry as I could be. From that, I started praying harder. That’s the first thing that gets me through.”
And not only does prayer get her through, it continues to fuel a passion for service that is seemingly unquenchable. Although she had been there more than two decades at the time of our interview, it was clear Fonda was, and is, a long way from slowing down.
“I live on, ‘To whom much is given, much is required,’” she told me. “God has given us these children. He has given these children to us and it is our duty to take care of them. It is. I know I’m preaching. I’m sorry. I just believe as human beings that we are to share some of that. We’ve got to share it. There’s not enough of it in the world.”
She may have been preaching, but it’s exactly what I needed to hear right at that particular moment. Sitting there on my back patio, now fighting back my own tears, all of the things I had been worrying about seemed so insignificant.
So what if I had a full plate at work. So what if being a husband and father can be a tough, often thankless job. So what if my bank account balance wasn’t as lofty as I had hoped.
My blessings were (and are) numerous. And thankfully I had Fonda to remind me.
Focus on Being Content
The feeling of contentment that washed over me that night on my patio felt good, especially considering how tough finding contentment can be. And, of course, that feeling also got me thinking about another recent Beyond the Bank interview.
Unlike Fonda, when I welcomed Dougherty County Administrator Michael McCoy to a Beyond the Bank interview last fall, we had already met. So, I already knew Mike was the epitome of cool, one the nattiest dudes in town and an incredibly thoughtful and friendly guy.
But like every Beyond the Bank interview that came before, by the time we wrapped, I not only felt a great sense of kinship with my guest, I also left having experienced something lasting and powerful.
Michael will be the first to tell you it took a minute for him to grow into the man he is today. Like most of us, the march of time brings with it a wisdom that only comes from living life.
In Mike’s case, one of the lasting changes that has come about in his life, since he and his wife moved to Albany more than two decades ago, is his inner feeling of contentment.
“Here’s another reality,” Michael told me, as he explained the transition from working in a specific department in government into the position of an administrator. “You have really no control over whether you get in administration, regardless of what you look like, because at that level it could be political. Period. It just depends on the circumstances. So, on my journey, I really focused on being content.
“Why is that a big deal for me?
“In the the early 2000s, you had the dotcom boom and everybody was becoming an overnight millionaire and balling was a thing. And I wasn’t. I was making less money than I would have been making had I not gone to graduate school and just went to work straight out of undergrad. And I wondered, what in the world?
“And of course, most of my friends were engineers and they were doing much better, buying houses and I was working for a small local government and I wasn’t making much money at all,” he continued. “And, of course, it’s human nature, you want to participate too.”
Thankfully Michael was able to lean on his past and the lessons he learned, whether he knew it at the time or not, from his forebears in Texas.
“I got to thinking about my grandparents and how they lived such contented lives,” he said. “And I watched some of my peers, who seemed to have the trappings that we were told you’re supposed to pursue, and they didn’t have that same contentment. Matter of fact, it was discontentment.
“I was young at the time. I didn’t really totally understand what I was looking at. But I was constrained economically and I was wondering what am I doing wrong?
“At any rate, I like to read and I listen to NPR a lot and got exposed to a lot of different ideas. And, of course, being here in rural Georgia, running into a lot of older people who never stayed at the Ritz Carlton, (who) enjoy fishing on the banks of the Flint River, happy as all get out. And that was always fascinating to me. There was no desire to even chase that. And so, at any rate, I ended up getting to a place of contentment, just being grateful for where I was in life.”
In fact, that new found perspective was so intense, it was almost shocking to those around him. To illustrate, Mike told me about a colleague who had encouraged him to apply for a city manager position. Mike explained that he’d followed this supervisor’s advice and went ahead with exploring the opportunity.
He said he went all the way through the interview process, and had actually landed the job, when something inside stopped his hand at the 11th hour.
“I was going to sign on the dotted line and something said, ‘No, go back to Albany; you can’t do this,’” he said. “I didn’t feel comfortable. I told the folks, ‘Hey, you know, thank you for the opportunity but I’m going to go back to Albany.’
“I walked in the director’s office and he was all excited and he was like, ‘Yo, Mike, you’re about to, you know, fulfill your potential,’ and all this. And I said, ‘I think we’re going to be together for a little while longer.’ And he was like, “What!?” And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to stay here man.”
“’But, you know, you could have doubled your salary and had the potential to make (a bunch of money)!’
“And I was like, ‘Eh, it’s not about the money for me,’ which is crazy. It should have been, because I needed it.
“But there were other factors that were of more importance to me than money. We were doing fine here, you know. We were very comfortable, all of our needs were met. So, I ended up staying.
“For some reason, I felt like I needed to be here and so I stopped thinking about it. And one day I just accepted, ‘Well, you might not become a manager anywhere.’ And I was ok with that. If it happened, cool. If it didn’t, I was good. That whole experience helped me.”
Not only did that experience help Michael grow as person, it also had the benefit of keeping him in the Albany community he’d come to adore, which is something positive for all of us.
It’s All About Community
And while we’re on the topic of adoring the Albany community, that was a primary focus for several other Beyond the Bank interview subjects who recently sat down with me to share their stories and discuss their passions.
Be it long-time resident and businessman Bo Henry talking about the joy he derives supporting just about any local event or initiative that comes his way, or recent Albany transplant Harry Day contrasting the reaction he received from colleagues when he lobbied for a transfer here, with the incredibly warm embrace the community gave him when he and his Lee County-bred wife arrived to start their family, nary an interview has gone by in the last year without some mention of how special Albany and its residents are.
And as someone who has spent the bulk of the last five years committed to shining a light on that very same fact through Beyond the Bank, I couldn’t be more pleased.
As a matter-of-fact, pleased isn’t even a suitable word for how that makes me feel. Words like elated, joyful, encouraged, inspired, and awestruck would be more apt descriptors.
In truth, if there’s been any negative that’s arisen out of the last dozen or so Beyond the Bank interviews, it’s only that the incredible stories—like those of Fonda and Sheriff Sproul, and those of Harry, Bo, Jeretha Peters, Sherwood Christian Academy Headmaster Dr. Brian Dougherty, AB&T board member and businessman Justin Jones, and many others—haven’t reached as many folks as I would have hoped.
While we’ve tried diligently to spread the word and reach as wide an audience as we possible with Beyond the Bank, there’s only so many avenues for spreading that love.
I’ve been blessed during my tenure at AB&T to have written dozens of Beyond the Bank feature stories highlighting our community and its people, but sadly, in today’s fast-paced world—filled with easily digestible headlines and soundbites—the written word can only reach so many folks.
It was for that reason that 2021 saw us expand Beyond the Bank into the growing world of podcasts.
While it’s been somewhat of a steep learning curve figuring out the nuances of multi-track audio recording and navigating the dynamic world of podcast hosting platforms, as I sit here today, I’d have to categorize that transition as a success.
That said, it still bothers me that unless you’re a podcast listener, or such a loyal fan that you’d track it down in any format, you may not have enjoyed the profound experience of hearing the powerful stories of determination, passion, gratitude and love we’ve captured on Beyond the Bank over the past several months.
And that needs to change.
In the coming months I will continue to focus much of my energy on the Beyond the Bank podcast, as I truly believe it to be an incredible platform for sharing the many inspiring stories of our citizenry.
Moving forward we will be showcasing the podcasts at abtgold.com and delivering each episode via email to our many loyal subscribers.
However, fans of our original format can also expect to see more of the written word throughout the coming year as we look to continue recognizing this area’s greatest resource by any means at our disposal.
The bottom line is, regardless of the delivery method, shining a light of appreciation on the countless souls who work tirelessly for the benefit of the entire community, remains a top priority and something I am ever committed to and humbled to be a part of.
No matter the method, we will continue to go Beyond the Bank throughout 2022 and beyond.
And for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to check out our Beyond the Bank podcast yet, you can enjoy all of Season 1 and our current Season 2 by clicking here.
Enjoy the episodes referenced above:
Connect with Brad – 229.405.7212 - [email protected] - @BradGMcEwen
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