He closes his eyes and sees himself, a young boy of 6 or so, standing outside the courthouse, its windows thrown open, an attempt to catch any breeze that may be sneaking through the summer scorch. He can hear the lawyer’s booming trial voice, his father’s voice, arguing the case before the jury.
He smiles. The memory is as clear as the crystal south Georgia sky that day more than 90 years ago.
James Tipton, Com 31, opens his eyes. He’s 99 now, 100 come Aug. 25, telling his story in a sunroom of the stately assisted living home in which he resides in Cambridge, Mass.
He nods when told the boyhood memory sounds like a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird. That brings to mind another recollection from that time, one not so pleasant. He remembers walking to the courthouse hand in hand with his father. They happened upon a Ku Klux Klan march.
“His hand tightened on mine,” says Tipton, who never could understand the disparate treatment of blacks and whites. Even before starting kindergarten, he asked his mother why he must refer to the neighborhood women as Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Jones, but the black washerwoman was called by her first name only. “That’s just the way it is,” he was told.
His visitor leans forward and asks for the secret to remembering so clearly the way it was. Tipton refers to a New Yorker article he read once. It was an interview with a 110-year-old Soviet Georgian man, who boasted he had always indulged in alcohol, cigarettes and women.
Tipton believes his long life and long memory have more to do with his genes than lifestyle. He too drinks now and then. He smoked for four or five years. “And I’ve enjoyed women of various ages.”
Through his reflections, Tipton helps keep his mind sharp. He tests himself about dates and names. He recites facts about his hometown, Sylvester, Ga., by rote. “Sylvester was halfway between the Atlantic coast and the Alabama line and about 100 miles north of Florida. My memory is that it was the highest piece of land in that area, 250 feet above sea level.
“I had four brothers, one died in infancy,” he continues. “The three others lived into adulthood. I was the third of the four who lived, but they’re all gone now.”
He remembers Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918, and says the news came prematurely to Sylvester, a false alarm a couple of days early. The Tipton family was ecstatic that World War I had ended. His father had been called to serve, and his pressed uniform was laid out on a bed.
Tipton first heard a radio outside a store in downtown Sylvester. “You could stand on the sidewalk and listen. I remember listening when Gene Tunney beat Jack Dempsey,” he says of the championship boxing match in September 1926.
Tipton played football in high school and at South Georgia A&M, now Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, until he sustained a career-ending shoulder injury. He transferred to Georgia Tech as a junior.
His early days at Tech support the notion that his direct ties to the Alumni Association go back farther than anyone else living.
“My two older brothers had gone to school at Mercer, then called Macon College, and had joined a fraternity. When I got to Tech, with their help, I was invited to join the fraternity, SAE. The then-secretary of the Alumni Association was Jack Thiesen, who was a member of that same fraternity. So I met Mr. Thiesen on two or three occasions during my first year,” Tipton begins.
“During that summer after my junior year when I went home to Sylvester it was the Depression. The Depression started in south Georgia long before the rest of the country. I learned on that visit that my family would not be able to afford to send me back for my senior year.
“I wrote Mr. Thiesen a letter explaining that I would not be able to come back. I very quickly got a letter back from him saying, ‘Would you be able to come back if I offered you a job as my secretary?’ My memory is it paid $100 a month. Anyway, it was enough. I was able to go back to Tech and graduate by working in his office. It was a help to me, a real big help.”
Tipton’s first residence in Atlanta was just a room off campus. The rent did not include meals, so he ate most frequently at “Frank Gordy’s restaurant, the Varsity. The Yellow Jacket was on the corner of West Peachtree, as I recall. The Varsity was cheaper than the Yellow Jacket. That’s my memory. I used to sit on a couch at the Varsity and read the Atlanta Journal in the morning.”
After graduation in 1931, Tipton stayed on as Thiesen’s secretary. In time, however, the Depression affected operations of the Alumni Association, which could no longer afford Tipton’s salary.
“One of my jobs was to remind alumni who made pledges that they owed money. When he turned me out, he told me he could continue to have me raise money from alumni, so I set myself up in one of my lawyer friend’s offices. That paid some money,” Tipton says.
He played tennis at Piedmont Park with Georgia Tech’s assistant treasurer, who suggested Tipton apply for the job when he retired. The tip led to landing the position under longtime treasurer Frank H. Houston.
“The job of assistant treasurer did not include living expenses, but I had gotten to know Arthur Armstrong extremely well. At that time he was secretary of the Athletic Association. In addition to that, he had responsibility for the dormitories,” says Tipton, who became a live-in residence hall supervisor and was the first at Techwood Dorm.
“The president was still Brittain when I was in the treasurer’s office. I had a driver’s license, as I recall, and I would drive him on occasion on trips he would take. I have a letter from him recommending me,” says Tipton, who remembers Brittain as “not really too fat but a little bit stout and a very friendly man. He had a lot of friends scattered over the state of Georgia. When he had a speech or something, he could have a state car drive him. Every time he arrived at a new location wherever I’d driven him to, he would bow down and pick up a little piece of the Georgia earth and stick it to his [lips] because he loved the state of Georgia so much.”
Tipton knew everyone at Tech at that time, “most of them favorably, one or two not so. It was because of being in the treasurer’s office. People came into the treasurer’s office to get their paychecks and various other things, so I got to know them and they got to know me.
“George Griffin was a very good personal friend. George Griffin was a reserve officer in the Navy. In order to keep that up, he had to go on cruises,” says Tipton, chuckling as he delivers the punch line: “He got seasick on every one of those cruises. He told me that.”
Another good friend was librarian Dorothy Crosland, who hired “three quite attractive assistants,” newly graduated women from the University of Georgia, during Tipton’s days in the treasurer’s office. One of those young ladies was named Betty Reynolds.
“I would go down to talk to Dot Crosland fairly frequently. On one occasion, she said, ‘Jimmy, why don’t you ask Betty Reynolds for a date?’ I said, ‘Well, she’s 10 years younger than me.’ But I did. It worked its way fairly quickly,” Tipton says.
By that time, Tipton owned a car, and he recalls once driving Betty to her family’s home in Jonesboro via a back road. “I remember parking with the lights on and simply talking — talking,” he says emphatically. “All of a sudden a car rolled up and it was a cop. He inquired about what was going on here. Someone had complained. So we moved along.”
On another drive, he took her to see the house he owned in Marietta and, once there, asked her to marry him. She accepted.
Tipton’s job in the treasurer’s office led to other opportunities as well.
During a two-year absence of the regular moderator, economics and social science professor John A. Griffin, Tipton hosted a weekly 30-minute talk show on WGST, Georgia Tech Round Table, that, according to the Technique, was “one of the oldest, if not the oldest, public service programs being broadcast over any Atlanta radio station.”
An article in the student newspaper in the fall of 1939 listed Tipton’s upcoming discussion topics, including international relations, public health engineering and college life.
Tipton also did some public speaking and says he was discussing pacifism at the YMCA, now the Alumni House, on Dec. 7, 1941, when someone burst into the room with news that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.
Two months earlier, Tipton had been reassigned from the treasurer’s office to the Georgia Tech College Inn, “what we called the Robbery, the bookstore and cafeteria. I was the manager, until I was taken to the Army,” he says, not mentioning an April 1942 Technique article that refers to the establishment as Tipton’s Tea Tavern.
“The draft took me to Fort Benjamin Harrison just outside Indianapolis. I arrived there in January of ’43. I was sent to be checked physically, and the weather was something like 20 below zero. I stood in line, and you know, lines were long. By the time I got to the building where the medical unit was, I walked up the steps and got inside, and almost immediately I was met by a nurse who pricked my finger. No blood came out so I was sent back and told to return the next day. The next day I didn’t have to stand in line. That time they did get blood,” says Tipton.
One of Tipton’s best friends while at Tech and many years afterward was English professor Glenn Rainey.
“Through him, my life changed eminently. He introduced me to people at Atlanta University and Morehouse College. The dean at Morehouse, B.R. Brazeal, became a personal friend because of Glenn Rainey,” says Tipton, noting that in the 1930s and ’40s, treasured friendships between blacks and whites were rare, particularly in the South.
“Glenn Rainey introduced me to 
Lillian Smith while we were both at Georgia Tech. She changed my life enormously. If you don’t know about her, you should. Her father ran a girls camp just outside Clayton, Laurel Falls Camp for Girls. Lillian took over the camp” after her father’s death and continued to write as a social critic, particularly of segregation, Tipton says.
After he was drafted, Tipton’s wife stayed on in the rooms they were renting, until she was “kicked out for carrying on a business against the wishes of the owner. She was helping Lillian Smith get her magazine distributed from Atlanta. When I came out of the Army, my wife had moved to Clayton to work as Lillian Smith’s secretary. The magazine was called The South Today. It went through several names.”
Tipton joined Betty in Clayton after he received a medical discharge in 1944 and taught at Rabun County High School for a short time until Rainey helped him acquire a job with the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Tipton was a good candidate, he says, because he was “liberal enough” and had established relationships within the black community. Some memos Tipton wrote while at the FEPC are cited in the book Labor in the Modern South.
The FEPC was established by President Franklin Roosevelt in an effort to improve job opportunities for blacks and their treatment by employers. Tipton twice saw Roosevelt in person, the first time while he was at Tech.
“My memory is that Franklin D. Roosevelt came in a limousine and rode around on the track waving his hat,” says Tipton, who was only about 10 feet from the president. He saw him again after he and his wife had moved to New York City. With the help of Smith, Tipton had obtained a Rosenwald fellowship to attend the Teachers College of Columbia University. “He was running for re-election for the fourth time. He was already sick. He also drove in his limousine with the top down. It was a very cold, damp, wet day. He took off his hat and waved it to the crowds. That helped him die too early, I think. He died shortly after he was elected the fourth time.”
Tipton’s life changed dramatically after moving to New York. He acquired master’s and doctoral degrees in education at the Teachers College. His 1953 dissertation, Community in Crisis: The Elimination of Segregation From a Public School System, tells about has work over several years with the schools of Gary, Ind. And he and Betty, who had been told she would never bear children, adopted first a daughter, then a son. Tipton counts the day he met the baby girl as one of the happiest of his life.
“We got a call from the social worker to come and see a child. When we were shown the 2-month-old, the social worker said, ‘Why don’t you pick her up?’ I reached down, nervously, and picked her up, and she went to sleep on my shoulder,” he says.
While a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, Tipton obtained a Fulbright fellowship to teach overseas. “I applied for one in India. I had read books by Nehru and Ghandi. But I was asked would I accept one in Pakistan? The job was in the sociology department in a master’s degree program at the University of Panjab for one year.”
So the Tipton family spent 1958-59 in Pakistan. They returned home via a side trip to England. While there, Betty began feeling poorly. Once home, she visited the family doctor, who told her she needed to consult an obstetrician. She gave birth to a healthy son, Bob, AE 82, MS AE 84, born in time to accompany the family on Tipton’s second overseas teaching assignment, in Kabul, Afghanistan, from 1962 to ’64 through a U.S. Agency for International Development grant.
The family then settled down for a long tenure in Connecticut. The Tiptons had intellectually stimulating parties with “all sorts” of guests, once even a newly defeated Connecticut congressman, a Republican — the only Republican for whom Tipton has cast a vote, in elections with Democrats from FDR to Hillary Clinton.
“I would have preferred Hillary for various reasons. I’ve been disappointed with Obama, over this nuclear business especially,” says Tipton, who for many years was on the board of the Streit Council for a Union of Democracies. “I voted many times for losers. Adlai Stevenson, I cried when he lost. I thought he would have been far better than Eisenhower, though Eisenhower did surprise me a bit.”
During his tenure at Eastern Connecticut State, Tipton continued to speak out for civil rights and tears well in his eyes as he remembers April 4, 1968, the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis. A black student slipped into a meeting Tipton was attending on the university campus, leaned down and whispered in his ear, “Martin has been shot.”
Life marched forward. Eventually, the Tiptons divorced. He felt he should leave the university, where Betty, now deceased, also worked and where today a room and scholarship are named for her.
“I already had friends in Puerto Rico, so I took a part-time teaching position at a private university,” where he taught social science for a time. He moved to Cambridge, where daughter Laura lives, after he realized his Spanish wasn’t good enough to allow him to live out his retirement years in Puerto Rico.
Until a few years ago, when a fall left him dependent on a walker and curbed his frequent outings, Tipton routinely attended brown bag seminars given by Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Harvard.
These days he reads a lot, a variety of material. On his coffee table is a hardbound edition of Huckleberry Finn, which he is rereading, the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine and a novel, So Far Back, which Tipton instructs won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2001.
Tipton is leaving the planning of his 100th birthday party to his daughter. “She had one with a fairly large number for my 90th. We’ve been talking about it. It will be a smaller number of people. She wants to do something, if I live so long.”
He and his visitor smile. They both think there are stories yet to tell.
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