VALDOSTA —
A lot of people think that once you are of a certain age, it is too late to go back to school.
Laura Bailey has proven those people wrong.
Bailey, who turned 44 on Wednesday, dropped out of school in the ninth grade to help support her parents. Her mother had cerebral palsy and, when she turned 14, her father had a massive heart attack and wasn’t able to work for several years.
“I was the oldest, so I had to quit school and work to help pay bills,” Bailey said.
The Cape Cod, Mass., native, who grew up in Mississippi, eventually ended up getting married and having two children. She then found herself moving to South Georgia in 1999. “We had been vacationing in Savannah every year with our two kids and when (my ex-husband) decided to transfer, he had several choices and I said Georgia,” Bailey said. “So we looked at a map and picked out Adel. We bought a little piece of land and turned it into a farm.”
That farm would end up being one of the biggest organic poultry farms in South Georgia.
“I had about 10,000 animals,” she said. “It was a lot of work. It got really big and was so much work.”
Read more about it in today's edition of The Times.
