The Peelers of Gaffney South Carolina and Raw Buttermilk

  It was last Thursday I think it was my sister and I took an hour long retrospective of Gaffney's Peeler family sparked by a facebook post of my fellow Citizen of the Month the fall of 68 at Gaffney High School, Susan Peeler. I think I was nominated by Lillian Ashley who played Basketball with Susan and was in the Latin Club, later to find out a first cousin of Flossie Black, the first lady of Gardner Webb College for a couple decades who preceeded me as a Furman grad by just a few years.

    But this is about the Peelers a political force in the state with many branches. Susan's brother Bob was in a room with Karl Rove in 2000 at the Hyatt in Greenville SC where the group made presidential history deciding go negative on John McCain and flipped GOP primary results by 30 odd points and propelled George W to two terms in the White House. Bob was Lt Gov at the time and two years later lost to Marc Sanford in the GOP gubernatorial primary. Their brother Harvey, the oldest is now the House Speaker of SC. And there is twin Brother Bill who married Pam Lipscomb of the Beta Club and they saw my sister at Pete's in Easley about three years ago on the way to Clemson.

    And I got to say Bob is in the Frontline Documentary of Dubya rise to power shown back in the fall of 2000. I'm watching and the drama thickens and all of a sudden there is a lineup comes out from behind a curtain in Columbia and W is in the center and among the eight or so is Bob Peeler and I'm thinking Ive know this guy since fourth grade at Central Elementary in Gaffney and all of a sudden though i'm well into my forties at that point the whole world has weightier dimensions.

    So that said, Susan's posting of a picture of her Mother's Ladies Society at Limestone Baptist opposite the College up from the quarry was a lot of fun. Various of Susan's cousins, and there are a bunch of them started weighing in but it was left, proud to say, a former member of my Dad's Bethany Baptist Church, Margaret Wilson, who gave the definitive answer at the request of Susan's Cousin Frances Peeler to name them all.

   And that sparked a conversation between my sister and me about Clyde Peeler, now deceased, in her class and Kent Clary, another cousin who made the highest score on the SAT of anyone I knew of at that time and went to Duke School of Hospital Administration. We tried to figure among the Brothers Smith, Clyde and two others who was who and where did Kathy Peeler who went to Emory and later to Libya fit in. And that got us to LD Peeler a year younger than me, who I think may be Frances Brother, not sure though my sister found em all; and turned Up LD down in Starr SC with his own 30 odd Jersey cows now at Milky Way Farms you can find online.

   He testified on video at his site about drinking Raw Milk with his Uncle Smith--Susan and the politicians Dad--at Peeler dairy of the sixties. They always had a special page in every Gaffney Cherokeean Annual, of a child and their classmates drinking Peeler's milk. I am pretty sure Peeler's had to contract for the entire county school district so you can see right there where Politics has its rewards.

    So upshot was LD site says you can purchase his brand at select outlets in the Upstate including Winslette's in Easley which by the Grace of God is about two miles from my sister's house.

    So when my niece Katie picked me up Friday to take me to my current living situation, we had to stop in and get a quart. I'm about to apply it to some cornbread for my whitefish filet in about two hours.

     Little pricey but I think I'm in at least quarterly if the cornbread is good here not long now. But I got to tell the Peelers this. Late Friday night I opened the fridge door and took a swig of what I thought was some two percent generic brand, but turned out I had gotten a dose of the Raw Buttermilk from Milky Way.

     A little bit of a shock but not bad at all. Hope all the Peelers appreciate this with as much affection and fun as I just had in the display of it all. In fact me and many products of Central Elementary owe it to them for those glass bottles with the straw hole in the top that was a communal test of our dexterity at lunch when the world was new and most was yet to come!