May the Force Be with You

In a county far, far away…

Photo by jonathan Arreola on Unsplash

I first heard these words in 1977. Friends at school and church were raving about this new movie called Star Wars.

So, the twins (my brother and sister) and I got in my dad’s station wagon one lazy summer day and went to see the movie.

It wasn’t a long trip. Down our driveway and across the street to the Twin City Drive-in in McCaysville, GA. The Twin Cities name was common in the area. McCaysville is a twin city with Copperhill TN.

Combined population: about 1600 in 1977.

They share a red light. One half is in Tennessee and the other in Georgia. Back then, you could turn right on red in Georgia, but not in Tennessee. There was some tension, because it was illegal to turn right from Tennessee into Georgia until the light changed.

But there was a more serious problem: Both areas were in decline following the closure of the copper mines.

There were a lot of jokes about the area, because of its strange ecology.

The Tennessee Mining Company first stripped the area of its vegetation. The smelting process, separating the copper from the iron and other minerals in the ground, produced sulfuric acid.

What visitors saw was like a Martian-like landscape. Nothing but red dirt everywhere. According to the Forestry Service, even kudzu wouldn’t grow. One visiting preacher joked, “The first time I came here I thought I’d made a wrong turn and wound up in Arizona.”

You could see the Great Copper Basin from the moon!

What the strip mining didn’t kill, the acid rain did. The whole mess led to the first environmental lawsuit in the US: Georgia vs. The Tennessee Copper Company in 1915.

My dad moved us to the area in 1973 when the EPA intervened. His job was to oversee the installation of acid-capturing equipment.

The operation proved too costly, and the mines closed. My dad lost his job there and later moved to the oil refinery in Lake Charles, LA just after the three of us graduated from high school. I graduated in 1978 and they graduated in 1979.

The company he worked for is Cities Service. You might know them from their two best known brands—7-Eleven and Citgo.

But in 1977, none of that was on our minds—I was off to college the next year.

And off to see the movie on everyone’s minds—Star Wars.

(In the canon, it’s Episode IV, A New Hope.)

The twins and I had a blast. We heard Rebel General Jan Dodonna utter those famous words for the first time.

And a new catchphrase entered the American vocabulary.

Happy May the fourth!

Thanks for reading,

Nikki

BTW, the franchise has made $47 billion in revenue, surpassed only by Pokémon, Mickey Mouse, and Winnie the Pooh.