Valdosta’s “Punch” Dowling: Beekeeper, Boxer, Businessman & Raconteur

By: Scott Alderman; 229-561-1939; fcre@surfsouth.com

July 2018

A. V. “Punch” Dowling was a beekeeper and “honey man” in Valdosta during the 1900s. He owned and operated Valdosta Honey Company for many years. He was a boxer in his earlier years, when that sport was popular here and around the country in the 1920’s and 30s – before baseball got a foothold. He boxed for fun, and for a little money, and maybe for the girls. He must’ve been pretty good too, because everybody called him Punch, and it stuck.

He was also a raconteur. And parts of some of his stories were actually true. He might not’ve had the fame of Valdosta’s best-ever storyteller Ellis Clary, but he was just as good as telling tales, tall and otherwise.

I called him Mr. Dowling. That’s what skinny little 13-year old, junior high school kids like me back then called their bosses – especially one who was about 72 years old at the time and still tough and hard as nails. All of my friends had parents like mine who wanted their kids to learn the value of hard work as youngsters, even at 12 or 13 years old. And, they wanted us outdoors, because it was good for our bodies and our minds – an attitude sorely lacking with today’s generations of young ‘uns and their parents. Each of us learned it in different ways. Some worked in the hot tobacco fields, others in construction, and others mowing yards. I learned about hard work in the bee and honey business.

Get the picture: Middle of summer, 1970. Deep in the woods of the very-isolated sections of east Lowndes and west Echols counties. Wiregrass country, sandy loam, Palmetto bushes. Towering pines, thick hardwoods, and cypress swamps. Ninety-five degrees, humidity off the charts. Thousands of mad honeybees buzzing all around you. They’re ready to sting and repel the invaders who’ve upset their serene, routine workday.

But you can’t swat ‘em, cause it only makes ‘em madder. And you can’t run, ‘cause they’re faster than you. Besides, you might run into something worse – like a mad Mama bear, a gnarly boar hog, or a hissing rattlesnake waiting in an old gopher tortoise hole. Or even worse, a stinkin’ polecat (aka skunk), ready to spray its rancid mist on any encroaching varmints, human or otherwise.

If the bees weren’t enough, add a few million gnats, a dozen or so big ornery horseflies, and to supervise the whole affair, maybe nine or 10 hovering and darting Skeeter Hawks. The Yankees called ‘em dragonflies, but our name was better. The gnats didn’t hurt, but man would they pester you. These thirsty little boogers just wanted to crawl in your eyes and ears to lick a dab of your sweat. The horseflies? Now, that dog would bite you. So would the yellow flies. And for the orchestral effects, thousands of cicadas break the solitude with their loud chirring noises, building to a shrill, scratching crescendo before toning it down a bit for the next round.

Sweat rolls down your face in multiple rivulets, the salty stuff creeping into your eyes, nose, mouth and ears. Your clothes are fully soaked in your own sweat, even at nine in the morning. But you can’t wear shorts, T-shirt and sandals on this job, not with these mad critters buzzing and attacking. So here’s what you wear: Thick blue jeans. High work boots with long thick socks, the legs of your jeans tucked inside ‘em. Long-sleeve T-shirt, with long-sleeve work shirt over that. Long thick work gloves up to your elbows, with sleeves tucked in. And on your head, the required safari-type hat with wide brim and a thick net veil covering your face, head and neck. It keeps the attackers out, but keeps you from wiping the sweat away. All of this hot heavy attire, with the sticky, searing, steaming, Georgia heat enveloping you like an oven.

This is hot, brother. Dang hot. Whoever said “it ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity?” It’s both, a double-whammy of nature in the solitary sauna jungles of South Georgia. To counter it, we drank gallons of water and nibbled on hundreds of fresh blackberries plucked right off the bushes all around.

But you’re not just standing around doing nothing in these oppressive, visible waves of heat and humidity and the dead, lifeless, still air. You’re working hard, moving hundreds of 60-pound supers from dozens of stacks of artificial bee hives, and loading them onto the bed of Mr. Dowling’s old truck. Supers are the wooden boxes that hold 10 frames where the worker bees build their waxy combs and cells. These supers are full of honey, tucked into each of the thousands of identical quarter-inch cells carefully capped by the bees to seal the precious, heavy liquid inside. They’re storing food for the fall and winter when there’s not much for them to eat. We’re harvesting the honey, to be sold and shipped locally and around the country to those who prefer nature’s pungent, aromatic sweet nectar to that of man-made syrup or sugar.

The heat, the bees, the sweat, the work, the heavy clothing – it was enough to scare this young punk into thinking there might be a better way to spend his three long summer months, like lounging around the old American Legion pool with his friends, or heading down to “the Lakes”. But Daddy was a friend of Mr. Dowling, who was a generation older, and one of many fishing and hunting buddies Daddy made while working at The Sports Center in Valdosta (the first in our town) in the 1950s and 60s. And my older brother Stan had worked for Mr. Dowling a few years before. So my legacy was destined, as Daddy wanted me to learn the value of hard work in a tough environment, he being a WWII vet and all that. I guess this was what they now call “tough love” today. Well … it was tough, but there wasn’t much about it that I loved.

But Daddy knew what was best and what I needed – and I wanted to make him proud. Punch Dowling was tough, smart, strong, steady, dedicated, tireless, experienced, honorable, humble, and hard-working – and still going strong at 72. A good teacher, a man of integrity, a calm soul, a family man, and a quiet but dedicated Christian. A veteran of the Great War, the first one. A member of the early Valdosta High Wildcats football team in 1914, only their second season. And like my grandparents, one of the few people I’ve ever known who was born in the 1800s.

This man made an honest and good living from a modest business, one that helped put his kids through college. One of those kids, Dr. Glenn Dowling, himself a Wildcat, later became a foot doctor and practiced for many years in Albany. Glenn was also a long-time high school football head referee in South Georgia, several times calling games under his old coach Wright Bazemore. He’s also a member of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Sports Hall of Fame.

During breaks, Mr. Dowling would entertain us with stories of his younger days in Valdosta, including his days as an early Wildcat, and as a boxer. My youth prevented me then from appreciating the stories, but when I got older and began learning more about the rich history of Valdosta and especially its football traditions, the recollections of his stories became a valuable part of my mental archives. I wish I’d told him then how much I appreciated those tales – and him too. But the adults back then understood, and they didn’t expect any thanks. They knew one day we boys would grow up and remember those good tales.

The bees bothered me something terrible, at least in the early days of the first of three summers – before I got some learnin’ about it. It wasn’t just getting stung, which didn’t happen too often. It was just learning to ignore them, and to be patient, and to not swat them or run off – and definitely, to never, ever remove the veil. Mr. Dowling was the model of calm, moving slowly and deliberately around the hive yard, always with his ever-present pine straw smoker, puffing away at the bees and the frames and the hive boxes. The smoke would subdue and pacify the bees without harming them, allowing us to do our work.

Away from the smoke, the agitated insects would go at you in droves and at full bore, their high-pitched buzzing ramped up to a fever pitch. Mr. Dowling told me the bees could always sense a rookie in the yard. My fellow worker Louie Goodin, a Dowling bee-man veteran and a few years older than me, helped me learn patience with these small but powerful little bugs. And Mr. Dowling taught me the amazing ways that bees use their tiny brains and bodies as an incredible chemical factory to produce one of nature’s treats and treasures.

Mr. Dowling had several bee yards, all of them deep and isolated in those Lowndes and Echols woods, some down around Mayday and Howell. And they were close to farmers’ fields, whose vegetable crops were great beneficiaries of the abundant, natural pollination provided by the bees. The bee yards had a few dozen hives, each a stack of supers on top of a larger hive box on the bottom. The yards were several miles apart, to give the bees multiple sources of nectar. These included the flowers of the gallberry, palmetto, orange blossom, wildflower, and other plants that grew in abundance in the woods of South Georgia.

Honey from each nectar source would have its own distinct taste and aroma, usually very subtle, but recognizable and detectable by veteran honey-men like Mr. Dowling and Archie, his elderly but able and veteran assistant. Archie was the uncapping expert, using a custom-made hot electric knife to cut off the tops of the cells, exposing the honey to be slung out in the extractor. All of this processing was done in the “honey house” building behind Mr. and Mrs. Dowling’s modest residence on North Street in Valdosta – just a few blocks from downtown.

If Archie had a last name or a residence, nobody knew. But he always showed up and did his job well. And he treated this young buck like a friend. He and Mr. Dowling could detect any minor little flaw in how the honey should taste. Occasionally Mr. Dowling would suggest to Archie that a certain batch of honey had a “whang” to it. Archie would dip his finger in it for a taste, and was the final arbiter of whether it indeed had a whang to it. If so, it wasn’t used for selling to consumers in jars, but sold to processors who used the whang honey as a food or chemical additive.

We’d always get back to the honey house just before lunch. Then it was feast time, mostly on Mrs. Dowling’s full course meal of fried chicken or ham or roast, and platters of the freshest-made southern vegetables you could find – all cooked that morning, some fresh-picked from her back-yard garden. Or, on occasion, Louie and I would walk down the street to the Dairy Queen, and eat three or four double half-pound “Brazier” burgers, a pound or so of fries, and drown it all with a big chocolate milkshake or “Co-CO-ler” (southern for “Coca-Cola”). This was all necessary to keep replacing those million or so calories we burned every day, and the gallons of sweat.

After lunch, it was siesta time for Mr. Dowling. Like so many generations before him, he rose before dawn, worked hard all morning, ate a full lunch, then took a good nap, especially in the long hot summer days. Then he’d get up, fully-refreshed, and go to work again, toiling steadily until the sun began to set. This is the way our body clocks were wired going way back, which is why we still get drowsy after lunch.

Of course, Louie and me made better use of our two-hour lunch time. He had the car and the girls and was older than me, so I’d hang out with him some, or walk a couple blocks to downtown to look around the stores. Or go to Vinson’s Drugs for an ice cream soda, or maybe an RC Cola and a Moon Pie, that cheap but famous and delectable southern delicacy.

At the bee yards in the woods, Mr. Dowling supervised the work, sometimes looking in the larger hive boxes on the bottom of the stack. He was usually seeking the queen bee, whose sole but critical job was to lay eggs in empty cells on frames in the hive box. The queen was blocked from going above the hive box, to prevent her from laying eggs in the supers, whose cells and comb could then be filled only with honey for harvesting. Above the hive box was a thin metal strip called an extruder, with multiple small holes sized just right to allow the worker bees to pass through, but not the slightly larger queen. Each hive would hold five or six supers on top, with one queen in the hive box on the bottom. The hive box also held the only door to the hive, a small slot-like port on the bottom that helped worker bees control entry to the hive by potential predators.

When we got to the yard, Mr. Dowling removed the top cover off the stacks of supers, and placed a mesh cover sprinkled with a little carbolic acid, to help drive the bees out of the supers. This allowed the bees to remain at their home in the woods, instead of trapping them in the supers full of honey, which we hauled back to the honey house in town for processing. After we loaded these honey-laden supers into the truck, we’d place other ones with empty frames over the hive box for the bees to start the process of building comb and making honey all over again. The bottom hive box remained for the queen for egg-laying and for young worker bees to grow up.

Like any veteran beekeeper, Mr. Dowling could spot the queen after just a few seconds of pulling a frame out of the hive box for inspection. She was the one just slightly larger than all the others, surrounded by a crew of a half-dozen or so highly-specialized servant worker bees who had been promoted as primary caretakers of the queen. These anointed workers would continuously and meticulously watch over, groom, clean, care for and protect the hive’s most valuable member. The queen perpetuates the life, health and future of her colony with constant egg-laying. Other worker bees in the hive are midwives, nurses, babysitters, housekeepers, carpenters, air conditioners, repairers, and soldiers. Some supervise the process of the tiny eggs growing in their cells into full-fledged new worker bees. Others clean and maintain the hive and its environment. All of the worker bees become instant soldiers if an invader threatens the hive.

Queen bees get old, unproductive, die, or swarm away to start a new hive. When this happens, the workers will pick one cell with a growing bee larva inside, and feed it just a slightly different nectar diet called “royal jelly”. Somehow only this tiny chemical difference produces a new queen bee instead of the usual worker. She emerges from the cell at maturity and immediately starts her job of laying eggs. Of course this comes only after mating with a male drone bee, who is allowed into the hive by the workers (all female) for the sole purpose of mating with the queen. His job in life completed, the drone is ceremoniously expelled from the hive, and will be killed by the female workers if he hangs around. Social scientists might find this to be an interesting experiment in gender domination.

Another bee miracle happens when a new source of nectar is found, sometimes a mile or more away from the hive. One worker on the bee scouting team will head back to the hive to do “the dance” for the other bees. This amazing little pirouette somehow tells the other bees exactly how far, and exactly in what direction relative to the compass bearing of the sun, the new source of nectar is located. It’s all they need to know, their tiny little specks of brain matter somehow already filled with their own personal GPS system, several million years before man figured it out on a computer.

Then there was Mr. Dowling’s truck – a pale blue 1953 Chevy with wooden slats built around the bed in the back. He was indeed a frugal man, like most hard-working people of the Depression. Among the group of supplies always in the truck was a case of oil, since Old Blue might make it only 40 miles or so before it needed a new quart to stay lubed up. It also had a great air conditioning system, which came from being able to ride in the bed in the back, with a nice breeze cooling you down on the way back to town. No one back then worried about any laws to keep teenagers from riding in the back of a truck – it was just part of the job. How proud I always felt when we got back into town, slowly going up the shaded North Ashley Street next to the Court House … ridin’ shotgun and holding court in the back of the old blue Chevy, with a hundred or so boxes full of honey under my watch, and a few bees trailing along.

Another great privilege I had was going to Ma Groovers with Mr. Dowling. Our workday started early, and we were at Ma’s place at six in the morning to eat the best breakfast in the history of the world. Older Valdostans remember this plain little restaurant down on South Patterson Street, knocked down many years ago. It was, as I’m told, the original Southern Home Cookin’ place in town. There really was an elderly Ma Groover who owned and ran the place, and I think she lived in an apartment on site next to the restaurant.

Always a jokester, Mr. Dowling would carry into the restaurant a little pint liquor jar – filled not with booze, but with honey. The amber-colored liquid looked just like whiskey as he would slowly pull it out of his pocket, making sure everybody was watching, and pour it over his hot homemade biscuits. Any new customers there would be shocked to see this elderly gentleman apparently getting ready to take a snoot of whiskey early in the morning. It worked on me the first time too. Later Daddy told me it was one of many of Mr. Dowling’s famous tricks.

When all the honey had been harvested and the honey house was full of supers packed with the liquid gold stuff, we started processing. This meant Archie would uncap the cells with the hot knife, and Louie would load the full frames into the big electric extractor. This machine would spin around fast and sling the honey out of the cells. It was then pumped into a cooker, heated just enough to pasteurize it, then sent to the storage tanks – no added ingredients. Then we filled, capped and labeled the jars, all by hand. Some jars we put honeycomb in, by leaving some frames capped, with the comb cut into pieces and placed in the jars by hand, before being filled with honey. Then we’d pack jars in boxes, to be delivered locally, or shipped directly to consumers, stores or grocery warehouses around the country.

Mr. Dowling also shipped queen bees to people who wanted to start their own hives. This involved a wire mesh wooden-framed box, with a small enclosed container inserted that held a queen bee and a few workers, and some sugar wax for food. The rest of the box had more worker bees, and a can of Karo corn syrup with a punched drip hole to feed the workers. This whole rig was shipped to customers, and somehow it worked to get folks started in their own little bee business.

Most of us know the other value of this superb little bee creature – pollination of plants, flowers, and crops. In their quest for nectar, bees unknowingly collect pollen on their legs and bodies. When they go to another plant or flower, some of that rubs off to fertilize the new plants. It’s an intricate and amazing process of symbiosis between insect and plant, all taking place in millions of places and ways every day – Mother Nature’s finely-tuned little mix of mutual beneficiaries. By itself, the tiny bee isn’t much. But put several thousand in a hive, working in harmony, and look what you get. It takes 50,000 bees to make one pound of honey.

Mama would smile when she saw my nasty, dirty, sweaty work clothes every evening when I got home. But she didn’t mind washing them, and feeding me a huge dinner every night to sate my ravenous appetite. She and Daddy knew I was working, making some money, staying out of trouble, learning some good new stuff for my brain and my body. Good parents know what’s good for you, even when you’re not sure. Mama and Daddy’s youngest boy was growing up, physically and mentally, shaped by their good parenting, and good men like Mr. Punch Dowling.

It was my privilege to work for this man for three summers. And it really was work – tough, hard, hot, sweaty, dirty, and unglamorous. Sometimes I wanted to quit, or complain, or even cry – but I didn’t. I wanted to make my parents and Mr. Dowling proud, so I hung tough and “powered through” as they say today. And I was rewarded with a nice little wad of cash in my pocket every Friday, good for saving, and buying new school clothes, or maybe some new 45 records. The best part came later, when my parents would beam with pride after Mr. Dowling called them to say what a good and hard worker I was.

For this important part of my life, part of my growing up and coming of age, and just a little late … I say “thank you” to Mama and Daddy and Mr. Dowling. And – begrudgingly – to all those hard-working little honeybees, who taught me about hard work, physical and mental discipline, and the incredible miracle of one of God’s amazing little critters.

END