Exchange Club of Albany celebrates 80 years

ALBANY — As club president Kay Griffin rightly pointed out the “sea of orange” inside the main banquet hall at Albany’s Exchange Club Fairgrounds Friday, dozens of members gathered in their signature orange shirts to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Exchange Club of Albany.

The Exchange Club, which Griffin said was originally chartered on Sept. 18, 1936, with 20 members, all under the age of 35, has long been one of Albany’s most recognizable civic clubs, whose members have worked tirelessly to make their community, state and country a better place.

In honor of the important milestone, the club’s regular Friday meeting became a celebration of the group’s history, where members shared interesting facts about the club and some of their favorite memories. Griffin unofficially started things off by giving a quick breakdown of the early history.

“It was very successful,” Griffin said of the club’s first group of members. “They had young men, and these men had to be under the age of 35. The war (World War II) came along and took most of the members, and consequently so many of them had joined the military that at the end of May there were only seven members left. They surrendered their charter in 1943. The club did come back in 1946 and received another charter. The National Exchange Club gave us credit for those two years, so they’ve put our date at 1936.

Griffin also shared how things have changed since those early days where low membership nearly ended the club before it really had a chance to make an impact.

“Now we have grown in number, and we’re the third-largest club in the District of Georgia, and we’re in the top 10 in the nation,” said Griffin. “We have 49 of our members who have over 25 years of being in the club. Out of those 49 members, we have a total of 1,006 years. That’s almost a third of our membership. We value each one of you.”

After club member Wes Sadler led the group in a special cheer of “It’s great … to be … in the Exchange of Albany,” another of those long-serving members, Bucky Brookshier, who has been in the club for 46 years, took the podium as the day’s speaker.

Brookshier, who is known by many in Albany as a funeral director and later part owner of Kimbrell Stern Funeral Directors, and for his 26 years as Dougherty County Coroner, didn’t share much in the way of historical information. Rather, he took the opportunity to share some of his fondest memories of being a member of the club since September of 1970.

“Forty-six years creates a lot of memories,” said Brookshier. “It’s hard to put them all into context so I’ve tried to hit a few highlights on a few things.”

Brookshier’s first shared memory was of his first year in the club, which was the year the Exchange Club first occupied its familiar home on the fairgrounds at the corner of Westover Boulevard and Oakridge Drive.

“It was all new,” he said. “The buildings were new. We were still running power to builders. Some of y’all know the tower in the back lot, that was where we used to help put electricity. We’d have a man climb out on a ladder, lay a ladder out on top of it and lay it out to a pole and put wire nuts out there and provide power for the community club buildings out there.”

Brookshier told about the advent of the large parking lots on the grounds, and about the first few years of directing fair traffic and turning it into a game among members.

“(Butch Griffin) and some other folks my first year or so were the ones riding the lines looking for parking areas,” said Brookshier. “And, of course, you had Pete Peters, Clayton Powell and Joe Nichols, Skip’s dad. They were the gurus of the parking lot. They ran it. And what they said we did.

“We had a good time, we had a lot of fun out there on the parking lot. And we worked hard. Originally, when we started off, we charged 25 cents a car. Saturday night, we’d have a raffle to see who could guess how many cars we parked on Saturday because Tuesday through Saturday the crowds always got bigger every night. Tuesday was the smallest crowd, Saturday was the biggest crowd. And we parked something, without bad weather, around 5,000 cars on Saturday. So everybody would put a quarter or a dollar in, and we’d raffle it off at the end of the night.”

Another of Brookshier’s recollections involved incidents of bad flooding.

“One year we had rain and it rained about 6 inches in about two hours,” he said. “We were flooded out here. I mean the whole area was flooded — the midway, the parking lots. And we had to get cars out because it was during the fair that (the rain) came. We spent hours getting people out and getting them unstuck.”

Of course that wasn’t the only flooding Brookshier remembered, so he told the group about how the Exchange Club played a small role in the recovery from the Flood of 1994.

“As coroner, I was involved with over 407 bodies that were recovered from Riverside and Oakview cemeteries, and as we were recovering them we needed somewhere to store the bodies,” he said. “I called Larry Griffin and asked if we could use the fairgrounds, maybe the back part of it. And he said, ‘Why don’t you use the hog barn?’ I said, ‘That would be a great idea if we could do it, keep the caskets out of the sun.’ And we also had bodies that were coming up out of the caskets, and we had them in pouches.”

In all Brookshier said more than 40 refrigerated trucks were parked at the fairground after the flood, holding bodies that needed to be identified.

“That was five months of pretty tough work,” he said. “I went from a part-time coroner to a full-time coroner, and from a full-time funeral director to a part-time funeral director. But it was great that the Exchange Club would let us do this. It was quite an interesting ordeal.”

Yet another of Brookshier’s memories included having a little fun at the fair at the expense of some carts the members were using to handle parking lot duties.

“We took the governors out of them so we’d get full power,” Brookshier said. “You talk about something that would fly. Those things would fly down the midway. I took off in one and was going wide open. I took off across Westover parking lot, and next thing I know there was nothing but a cloud of smoke back there. We put the governors back on all of them. That was just some of the things that happened over the years.”

After a few other members shared memories, those who had attended the celebration gathered for a group picture and made sure they got a piece of the special 80th anniversary cake.

Known to many as the organization that presents the annual Southwest Georgia Regional Fair, which this year will be held for the 70th year, the Exchange Club of Albany has also made an impact through several of its programs, chief of which are the organization’s Americanism programs like its Freedom Shrines, which have been erected in several area schools, and its battle to prevent child abuse.

To learn more about the club, visit its website at exchangeclubofalbanyga.org.