It all started around 1917. My great uncle moved to Atlanta from a crossroads town in East Georgia to work at the Atlantic Steel Mill during WWI. Sometime that year, my Grandfather (around 10 years old then) went to Atlanta to spend some time with his older brother. Being that close to Tech, he naturally came in contact with some Tech guys and what was going on with the football team (1st MNC). He came back home and farmed for a living. Fast forward 40 years to the mid 50's. An early memory was sitting in the front porch swing with him singing Ramblin Wreck. He also taught me a lot of Stephen Foster songs, but that was my earliest recollection of GT. My father, who didn't finish high school used his GI Bill after he got home from WWII to attend some Vocational Agriculture classes at uga to learn how to farm better. He leaned uga, but really liked high school football. In the early 60's, I'd say that the folks around home that cared were about evenly split among Tech and uga fans. Of course in small town rural Georgia at that time there were few college graduates; only teachers, doctors, druggists, lawyers basically. Guess where many of them went to college, so the impulse was always toward the darkness. Only knew one Tech grad growing up. Dodd left Tech, vince dooley came to uga, and uga had their best teams in years in the mid 60's. The herd stampeded to uga. Our football coach at that time was an uga grad, and his arrogance about all things uga knew no boundaries. Any boys that were Tech fans were held up for extra ridicule in class and on the field. You know the drill. Yet it taught me to channel the abuse of teachers into anger and resolve, something that served me well later at Tech. It also spliced a G and a T into my DNA. When they dig up my mummified remains in 5,000 years, scientific papers will be written on the mutation in DNA that occurred in at least one East Georgia hominid in the late second millennium
I came to GT on the GI Bill and graduated in '77. Tech was everything I hoped and feared it would be academically. It made me successful professionally and financially, and I will always be grateful. Went to every home football game and most home basketball games during those years. Work forced me to move away for a few years, but moved back as soon as I could. Bought my first Basketball season ticket in 1983 and Football in 1984. Still have the football tickets, and have missed three home games in 31 years. Hewitt made me puke up the basketball tickets.