by Dean Poling
HAHIRA — Nancy Wainer thought Dr. Jesse L. Parrott was the most wonderful man in the world.
He was a handsome physician and considered by many to be one of the county’s most eligible bachelors. He often tooled around Hahira and Valdosta with the top down in a red convertible.
And Nancy Wainer was crazy about him, though Jesse Parrott didn’t know it. And the feeling wasn’t immediately reciprocated.
Nancy Wainer was a girl, a young teen-ager, dating a boy who was the nephew of Dr. Parrott. She was introduced to the physician as “Uncle Jesse,” a man 16 years her senior, but every time she saw Jesse Parrott, Nancy Wainer’s heart raced.
Once, the physician joked with her: “When are you going to grow up and be my sweetheart.”
“He was just teasing,” she recalls years later. “He didn’t know, but he was setting my heart on fire.”
He didn’t know either that in a few years, his jest would become prophesy.
Jesse and Nancy Parrott have been married 53 years. They raised two sons, Jonathan and Stephen, and have six grandchildren.
He practiced medicine for decades in Hahira, at the former Smith Hospital, and continued seeing patients into his late 60s, until macular degeneration affected his eyesight and he closed the practice in 1984. He then volunteered with detox patients for more than a dozen years.
She has been involved deeply in the community and the region. He is the author of four books and celebrated his 90th birthday on Dec. 23 of last year.
They were both involved in the politics of the community. She was the first woman elected to the Hahira City Council. He served as Hahira’s mayor from 1955-58 and again from 1987-93. He was serving his first term as mayor when they were married on April 23, 1955.
What had been a jest about Nancy Wainer growing up to be his sweetheart became a reality when she did grow up and, Jesse Parrott says, “I thought she was cute.”
Nancy was away at college and he came to Athens to visit her. She was in her late teens and he was in his early 30s. “Many of the Valdosta girls asked me,” she says, “‘Why are you dating that old man?’”
Jesse Parrott wasn’t old, but he had already had many experiences by the time of their courtship. He had moved to Lowndes County many years earlier with his parents, Glen and Lily Price Parrott. Jesse was a teen-ager. His father moved to Lowndes County to take a teaching job. It was the Great Depression, a difficult era for most Americans, especially for a teacher, Jesse Parrott says. There were hardships.
Jesse joined the Navy, returned home. Dr. Raymond Smith, for whom Smith Hospital was named, saw potential in Jesse Parrott and funded him in medical school. After his studies, he returned again to Hahira and stayed, practicing medicine, caring for his widowed mother, and tooling around in his convertible.
They tell an anecdote well crafted through the years of how he had once regularly cruised through the college as a young man, looking at the girls, and he knew it was time to stop when the girls started calling him “sir.”
So, Jesse and Nancy met again. She older and away at school, except for weekends when she returned to her Valdosta home, where she grew up the daughter of Dave and Emma Burnet Wainer. Soon, those weekends home involved visiting with Jesse Parrott.
They dated for about a year before Jesse proposed in December and they were married in April in Valdosta’s First United Methodist Church. He was 36. She was 20. They left the ceremony in his convertible, the top up. The words “He’s Hooked” and “Just Married Courtesy Winchester Rifle” sprayed on the side of the car.
Married, she left school, which leads to another anecdote, a family joke, that she married so she wouldn’t have to take a physical-science class. But the real work had begun. As a physician, the couple had to catch time when they could.
“He worked like a dog,” she says. “I realized from the first he was a very busy, very dedicated doctor.”
She credits her mother’s example and advice as helping her in those early years of adjusting to marriage. Her father was a Valdosta contractor. Her mother advised she be patient with her husband; as a doctor, his was a serious job with long hours and he would come home tired and need comfort.
Often, youths will look at older couples — ones that have been together for years, who finish each other’s sentences, or call each other “Mama” or “Daddy” from their years together raising children, the older couples who wistfully tell stories of how they met — and mistakenly think this older couple had it easy. They love each other so much, and it’s so apparent still, that everything must have fallen into place for them. But it is rarely, if ever, so. These older couples were once young, too, in the early years of their relationships, working jobs, keeping house, raising children, trying to make ends meet, dealing with misunderstandings and arguments.
Nancy Parrott recalls an instance when she had made dinner and was waiting for Jesse Parrott to come home. She waited and no sign. He was a doctor and she thought, perhaps, he is dealing with an emergency. She could wait no more and went looking for him. She saw him on a street corner shooting the breeze with a neighbor.
She became so mad, she decided at that moment to leave him and return to her parents. Halfway to Valdosta, she had cooled off, turned the car around, and drove back home to her husband.
“Too many couples today are ready to call everything off too easily,” she says. “You have to have dedication in a marriage. A commitment to one another. Being patient. Sticking it out. It’s not 100 percent lovey-dovey all of the time. It can’t be.”
“A successful marriage requires some effort, and it should be a pleasant effort,” he says. “There is such a thing as a pleasant effort. It is a pleasant effort.”
Their pleasant effort was she worked the house and raised the boys, with all of them making time together around the demands of his practice and the hospital. Every Thursday was date night for Jesse and Nancy. They kept a balance of independence and dependence. They each had their own interests and duties, which sustained them when apart, but they were very much united when together. Their weeks were busy, often apart from one another, but they have never vacationed one without the other.
Faithfulness is a must, the Parrotts say. So is patience. One should enter marriage with an assurance of commitment to the other person. God is important.
“Couples need to do a lot of praying and stick with the marriage,” she says. “You can’t quit. You have to work at it.”
