Hull man recalls his years of life, love and radios

Lillian Thomason relaxed in the recliner of her living room on the morning of April 11 with the radio tuned to WNEE, a new FM station that began broadcasting this month out of Hull.

Soon she heard the voice of the town's mayor, Paul Elkins, as he made a few remarks at a ribbon-cutting ceremony that was broadcast live from the antenna site less than a half-mile away.

"It came in so good. I heard every word he said," Thomason said afterward.

Her 92-year-old husband, Lance, sat in a recliner placed flush against his wife's chair. He had attended the event earlier in the day that celebrated Hull's first radio station.

Radio was once an important part of Lance Thomason's life, because for 18 years he repaired radios and televisions in downtown Athens, an enterprise that ended in 1958 when he left to work at Westinghouse.

Thomason, who was raised on a "two-mule farm" outside Cornelia in the Mud Creek community, remembers the first time he heard a radio broadcast in the mid-1920s.

"Daddy went up to the doctor's house to pay the doctor bill - there was 10 of us children - and I heard something and it wasn't normal, a voice talking in the room. They had it up real loud and it said 'WSB: Voice of the South.' I slipped out of the truck and went up the steps and I opened the door, and there was a radio playing.

"I had read the advertisements in the paper (for radios), but that was the first one I had ever seen," he said.

Thomason would later repair radios for a living, but before that happened he would learn electronics at a technical school that opened in 1938 in Clarkesville, in a building that previously housed an agriculture and mechanical school. The vocational school was opened under one of President Franklin Roosevelt's programs, Thomason said.

"We were the first vocational school in the state and there were 15 students there," he said. "I guess when I left there was around 300 students. It's a good school now." The school is known today as North Georgia Technical College.

When Thomason finished school in 1940, he left Habersham County and moved to Athens to get a job and eventually open his own radio repair business. But something ultimately more important happened after his move to the Classic City.

"I found my sweetheart here in 1942," he said.

Lillian Thomason smiled at her husband's comment as she noted that many years ago there was a popular song with the lyrics, "I found a million-dollar baby in the 5- and 10-cent store."

"That's where he found me," she said, referring to her job at the Kress store in downtown Athens.

"She was outside on the sidewalk waiting for a ride and I was going to the boarding house," her husband recalled about that first meeting.

"He asked me if I had a way home, and I said my brother-in-law was picking me up. Of course, I wouldn't have got in the car with him no way because I didn't know him," she said.

But Thomason took a liking to the young Lillian Yarbrough, who lived in nearby Hull. And the feeling was mutual.

"He started coming in (Kress) and buying candy. The candy counter wasn't my place, but I always waited on him," she said.

"She'd give me about a quarter's worth of candy for a dime," he revealed.

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