George Hunt Oliver was born in Jackson Tennessee in 1943.

He is married to Rebecca (Brown) Oliver, and the couple have four children and five grandchildren. They have two sons, both Marine Corps officers

The oldest, Chris, is married and has four children, McKenna, Piper, Houston, the sole boy, and Tate. William is married, and has two dogs. They all live in Okinawa, about 20 minutes apart.

George and Rebecca also have twin daughters, Catherine, who is married and teaches school in South Carolina, and Allison, who lives in Smithville and works for Youth Village in Cookeville. She is married, and has a daughter, Christina.

Oliver was named for his paternal grandfather, George Weldon Oliver, Sr., a country doctor, and his maternal grandfather, Elmer Hunt, who had been a plantation overseer in the town of Burns, Louisiana at the turn of the century. "Today it’s a Texaco refinery," Oliver said.

George Weldon Oliver, from Maury County, was born in 1828, and was a veteran of the civil war.

"He helped organize a regiment, the 51st Tennessee, in 1861, and he was elected as the executive officer with the rank of lieutenant colonel," Oliver told the Review. "I don’t think he’d ever fought anywhere except maybe the school yard, but there he was. On the first day of the battle of Shiloh, the 51st was wiped out. While my grandfather wasn’t killed, the 51st was merged with the 52nd Tennessee, which fought all the way through the war to Appomattox. He came back to Maury County after the war, and was later elected to the state legislature, but he caught pneumonia and died about a week after he took office.

"He married Maggie Lou Cole, and they had eight children, including my father. I don’t know that much about her, other than she had a very dark complexion, and she was six-foot-one. She towered over my grandfather. She is said to have had an amazing talent for singing," Oliver shared.

His father was Weldon Cole Oliver. "Both of my parents graduated college during the depression," Oliver said. "They both waited tables and did odd jobs to work their way through Lambeth College in Jackson, Tennessee. Both were teachers. As a teenager, when I would ask my father for five dollars and he would say ‘I remember when a dollar looked like a wagon wheel.’ And give me the spiel about how he had picked strawberries for a nickel a quart. I usually got the five dollars, but I would always have to hear the depression speech first."

His mother was Francis (Hunt) Oliver, whose family married into a local family, establishing a life-long connection that eventually brought Oliver back Smithville after his retirement from the Air force.

"One of her older sisters (Katherine) married Norval Webb Sr," he said. "She passed away not long after Norval Jr. was born, from Tuberculosis. Norval Sr. ended up living with my grandparents in Humboldt for several years, and eventually married another of my mother’s sisters, Lucille, and they moved to Smithville."

Oliver said that he has many good memories of Smithville from his childhood visits.

"The first time I came to Smithville I was about eight years old," Oliver informed. "We were living in North Little Rock Arkansas, and we came to see my grandparents. We took the train to Nashville. I can still remember the cinders blowing in the window. Then we caught a bus to Smithville. The bus stopped at the Sunrise Grill, and we got off.

"I have a lot of memories of Smithville," Oliver continued. "We would come to visit periodically. I remember sitting on the steps of Webb’s Drug Store, reading comic books. There were about two lights on the courthouse square, and they were about five watts each. I lingered too long reading comics, and I remember racing back to my grandparent’s house on Webb Street in the dark.

"I knew a few people around here. Bethel Thomas, Jr and Freddie Colvert and I would go out and swim at Colvert’s Lake. They had a concession stand where you get a hamburger or a candy bar. I thought that was really something.

"Later, when I was at UT, I would come by Smithville and have a cheeseburger at the drug store on the way through. They were great cheeseburgers, and I’d get them for free, which made them even better.

Oliver said that his childhood in Medina was a time of good memories as well.

"I was blessed to have spent my childhood during the ‘best of times,’ Oliver intoned. "Although my family moved several times during my early years, we finally settled in Humboldt in the early fifties. Life was good. Little League baseball and scouting were my favorite activities. Neighbors were really neighbors – our house was seldom locked, everybody knew everybody, and we all went to our respective churches. Vacation Bible school was an annual event. A drive in the country was a big deal to us, and kids played outside in the summer until dark. It didn’t take much to entertain us. We could play ‘kick the can’ for hours.

By the time he was old enough to go to school the family had taken to the road.

"My school career began at Rose City School in Little Rock Arkansas," Oliver conveyed. "My mother was a teacher there. I was born in Jackson when we lived in Medina, where we lived until I was about two. Medina was relatively primitive. We didn’t have indoor plumbing. My dad got a job with the Buckeye Cotton Oil Company in Corinth, Mississippi after the war (WWII). Then we moved from Corinth to Arkansas. That’s where I started school in 1949. My father had worked at the Milan Ammunition Plant in Milan, Tennessee during the war. Before that he had been a supervisor with the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) at Norris Lake.

"We lived in Arkansas for about seven years, but my mother wanted to move back closer to the family, so in 1953 we came back to Tennessee," he continued. "I was in Humboldt from 1953-61, when I graduated from high school. Then I went to the University of Tennessee.

"That was a series of interesting adventures, most of which you can’t print in the paper. I was not an academic. I was a social animal, but not an academic. I made some life-long friends, though.

"I graduated from UT in 1965, and I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I was admitted to law school, and I lasted two quarters. Vietnam was going full blast, and when I met the board, one of the questions they asked was ‘Why don’t you go into the service?"

"I hadn’t even thought of the service. I wasn’t anti-war, I didn’t really have any feelings on the subject. All I knew was from watching Walter Cronkite on television. But they thought it best that I exit law school and go to the service. The dean of the law school was a retired Army JAG, and another board member was a retired major, so they thought I was anti-war or something, so they pretty much told me to go and serve my country. I was in shock," Oliver revealed.

"I took every test and made every application to everything under the sun, and all I got was called for a draft physical in August of 1966," he said. "So I went. I told them I had everything from hemorrhoids to flat feet to hay fever, to whatever, and they said I’d do just fine. Be ready to go in two weeks. I rode the bus home, and the next day I got a package from the Air Force. It was a letter saying I had been accepted to officer training school. I went to the draft board the next day and said ‘See this? I’m going to the Air Force."

"That started another era in my life. I was at Lackland Air Force Base for about ten weeks, just long enough to learn how to spell ’lieutenant.’ I went from there to Chanute AFB in Illinois to begin aircraft maintenance training. I was a business major, and I applied for finance, and whatever else, but I was selected for aircraft maintenance. I didn’t know the location of a tire from a canopy, but that’s what I went to Chanute to learn.

Then he met Rebecca Brown.

"I was there for about nine months, and that’s where I met the love of my life," he revealed. "People always ask how we met, and I tell them we met in a bar. It wasn’t really like that, though, because we had an exchange there between the ROTC at the University of Illinois and our class. We had 600 second lieutenants going to school there at the time.

Oliver said he was so excited to go out with his future wife he almost lost his trousers.

"So we met, and the first time we went out I rushed home to change clothes, and that’s the only time in my life that I ever left home without a belt. She was, and still is, a lovely, charming young lady, and I was pretty excited," he said.

He said his mouth caused a little trouble with her family.

"We dated some, and then she invited me out to her house during Easter to meet her family and take her back to school at the University of Illinois," he disclosed. "I asked for directions, and she said, ‘You go 20 miles to Oakdale, take a right, go five miles and take a right and an immediate left, go a 11 miles, take a left, and it’s the second house on the left.’

"Now, we had no cell phones," Oliver said. "I drove out there, and got to where I thought was the last turn point, and there was a little girl on a bicycle. I asked her if she knew where the Browns lived, and she said ‘Yes sir. Right up there at that farmhouse.’ So I went up there, and walked in and met everybody, grandpa and everybody, and someone asked if I had any trouble finding the place. I said ‘No there was a little fat girl down the road who pointed it out.’

"About two minutes later, the little fat girl walked in the house. It was Becky’s little sister. I got a few cold stares over that one. I was always sort of a shoot-ready-aim kind of guy. My mouth has gotten me in some trouble. She’s an attorney now, and married to a retired two-star Air Force general. They’re nice people. I think we got past it."

He said marriage had to be postponed until Rebecca’s education was complete.

"We were serious in our relationship, but she was a sophomore in college, and I couldn’t marry her until she graduated," Oliver said. "I think education is very important. Now my wife is a sharp gal. She’s ten times smarter than me, but my mother and father graduated from college and were teachers, I was a college graduate, by the skin of my teeth. All my children, and I have four wonderful children, have college degrees, three have masters, some multiple masters, and I thought it was important for her to complete her education. She has taught for most of our married life. She taught at DOD (Department of Defense) schools in Europe, and she also taught here in DeKalb County after we retired."

Then the adventure began.

"Soon after we got married I was sent to Spain," Oliver revealed. "We were there for about a year, and I went to Vietnam. Our first child was born while I was there. My wife was living with her mother in Illinois. I didn’t see him until he was ten-and-a-half months old. It was quite a homecoming. When I came back I was ordered to Utah, at hill Air Force Base. We lived there for a couple of years, then we were in Ohio for four years. I swore that I would never live anywhere north of the Ohio River again, and luckily it worked out that way. It’s too cold up there, and there are too many tornados.

"I traveled a lot. My job as an inspection team chief had me gone about every two weeks, for two weeks. That left my wife with the responsibility of corralling four kids, and everything that went with it. Our second son was born in Utah, and the twins were born in Ohio, so she had her hands full."

His career eventually led him back to Europe.

"I went from Ohio to England AFB in Louisiana. I was getting bigger and bigger jobs, and more responsibility, and I got an assignment to go back to Spain. The job was more demanding, twelve hour days, and you’d go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, but we did get to see a lot of things. It was a lot of fun the second time around, because we visited a lot of places as a family. Spain is a beautiful country. We were there for four years, and I was assigned to Ramstein, Germany.

"I became a team chief of a traveling maintenance inspection team, again gone every other two weeks. It was a busy life. We made many friends in Germany who still come to see us. I went back to Arizona briefly, and then back to Germany, where I retired."

Oliver said that if he could go back he wouldn’t change a thing.

"My military career was very rewarding," he said. "Very educational. I went in out of necessity, because it was either fly with the Air Force or walk with the Army, but I’ve been more places and seen more things than most people dream of. It broadened my horizons. It gave my family and I an opportunity to see and experience things a lot of people don’t. With my team I traveled from Norway to turkey and everywhere in between. For a guy from Humboldt Tennessee to have seen the top of Norway, 300 miles above the Arctic Circle, and the beaches of Normandy, I’ve seen the ruins at Ephesus, I took the boys to London to see ‘Cats,"

Childhood memories led him back to Tennessee in the end, however.

"Toward the end of my career, I started thinking I would like to go back to Tennessee," Oliver shared. "My parents had passed away in West Tennessee, and I didn’t have anyone there anymore. My mother in law was in a nursing home, and we needed to care for her, so we bought a lot in Smithville, built a house, and moved her to the Webb House. We’ve been here ever since. I couldn’t have retired in a better place. Middle Tennessee is a beautiful place. You can hunt and fish. You can visit Nashville and not have to live there."

He said he has found time to serve the community in his retirement.

"Since I’ve been back here I’ve gotten involved in the community," Oliver added. "I’m trying to give a little back. I’m proud of my Rotary Club membership. We’ve done a lot for kids, like scholarships. We do things for senior citizens, and we’ve helped people who are trying to get their GED. It doesn’t cost me anything but a little time, I’m glad to do that. I think it’s very important to help the community any way you can."

Oliver said that the most important piece of advice he has is to get an education.

"The older I get the more I understand how important education is, and what we need to do to try to get as many people educated as possible in a field they can excel in."