Dr. Joe Young is truly a native of all of Calhoun County. He was born in Bruce, attended school in Calhoun City, but the bulk of his county roots are in Vardaman, more specifically, Ellzey.
Young’s great grandfather Millard Fillmore Young operated a hardware store in Vardaman in the first half of the 20th Century. His grandfather Hollie D. Young started Young Hardware in Bruce, and when his father Hollie Spencer Young completed college, they started a hardware store in Calhoun City in 1956-57.
“We moved to Calhoun City before I started the first grade,” Dr. Young said. “All my grandparents and family lived in Bruce, so I really knew more people in Bruce than I did Calhoun City, even though I went to school in Calhoun City.”
He was raised in a house his father built on Young Avenue near where the swimming pool and tennis courts are today.
“My father bought some property on a dead end road and he cut a street across it and built a house on it,” Young said. “When we built there all the property west of there was just pasture.”
Young has great memories growing up in Calhoun City, referring to it as very much like the fictional Mayberry from the Andy Griffith Show.
“In fact, my father looked like Andy Griffith and my Grandmother Young looked a little like Aunt Bee. My wife still laughs about all of that,” Dr. Young said. “It was a very simple lifestyle where everybody worked six days a week, and your life centered around going to church on Sunday.”
Education was valued very highly in the Young household and young Joe never questioned whether he was going to college, although he wasn’t positive what he wanted to do.
“I knew for sure I didn’t want to work in the hardware store the rest of my life. That wasn’t for me,” he said.
“When I was 14, my Grandfather Young had a stroke and we took care of him at the house for almost a year before he died,” Young recalled. “At that time, you had Dr. Crocker who made house calls. Dr. Russell Cannon was alive then. I can’t remember how many nights, it seemed like once a week, my parents would call them in the middle of the night to come over there for medicine or whatever. Many nights they would come in their pajamas and give him a shot. One night, Dr. Cannon came and my grandmother had a baby grand piano and he sat down and played for an hour at 2 o’clock in the morning. He wanted to see how that piano sounded. He was an interesting character.”
That exposure to the medical field led Young to explore career options in that area.
“The mentors for me growing up were the physicians that were there. Dr. Webb was in Calhoun City. Dr. Guy Farmer had come to town and the local dentists, Dr. Tommy Norman and Dr. Carter Dobbs were very encouraging.”
He attended Ole Miss and would soon after enter a career in dentistry.
“When I graduated from Ole Miss, Mississippi didn’t have a dental school, but I had some friends whom I had met their children when I worked for Alpine Camp for Boys,” Young said. “They were trying to get the dental school started here, and I was actually in the very first graduating class in 1979.”
Working at children’s camps, Young gained an appreciation for pediatrics and worked for two years at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson with the children’s clinic and then went to the University of Kentucky in Lexington for two years before coming back to Jackson. He partnered with Dr. Heber Simmons in 1986, and the two have been providing dental care for Jackson area children ever since.
“The fun you get to have with children and being able to be an encourager for them, it’s a good profession and it’s been very good to me,” Young said.
When he’s not working, Young, 62, enjoys teaching Bible classes at First Baptist Church in Jackson and studying genealogy.
“I don’t get back to Calhoun near enough, maybe four or five times a year, unfortunately mostly for funerals,” Young said. “Sometimes I’ll take off and go for a pilgrimage just to ride through the country. To me the interesting part of the family research has been on the Young side. Ellzey is where it all started and where the family is. My mother’s family is the Spratlins and Murphrees. Arthur Spratlin was my grandfather.”
Young’s great great grandfather was T.W. Young, better known as “Captain Tom” in his day. He fought at the Battle of Shiloh in the Civil War. He married Sallie Blue, meaning Dr. Young is kin to the Youngs, Blues, Spratlins and Murphrees of Calhoun County.
T.W’s son Millard founded the Young-Crawford Hardware Store in Vardaman with his sister, which originally adjoined the funeral home.
“They actually built the caskets at the hardware store,” Young said. “I remember my father saying the first time he saw a cigarette lighter in a car he didn’t know what it was. It was in a hearse and he stuck his finger in it and burned it real bad.”
“When we closed the hardware store in Bruce around 1972, we found a lot of the hardware for those caskets in the old counters.”
Young spent his youth working for his father and great uncle Rex Martin at the Young Hardware Store in Calhoun City.
“My great uncle was an avid story teller and that was the hangout for the old retirees,” Young said. “They would sit on the picnic table we had up front, and as a young child I heard lots of war stories a young boy should have never heard.”
Among his other early memories were of Christmastime and the family tradition of going to the Spratlins for Christmas Eve.
“One of my memories as a child is just north of the red light in Bruce there was a little white house and some man had dressed up in a Santa Claus suit and was standing on his front porch and waving at all the cars going by,” Young said. “I remember saying ‘Santa Claus is already in Bruce, we’ve got to hurry up and get home to Calhoun City.’”
B.J. Bennett was another big influence and great story teller. Young recalled one Sunday afternoon in his youth when a group of his friends decided to go drag racing east of Bruce on the highway.
“We had a girl with us who got out to drop the flag so of course you couldn’t pick her up,” Young said. “B.J. Bennett called me the next day and asked, ‘Did you leave a girl standing on the highway? Well I’m not going to tell your dad, but if you ever do something like that again you’ll have your dad and me to answer to.”
Young routinely studies up on family history and many of his relatives have compiled quite a compilation as part of the “Vardaman History Project.”
He and his wife Beth, a native of Jackson, have been married for 35 years. They have two sons, Spence, a Jackson attorney, who with his wife Dorthy have two sons; and Stewart, a pharmaceutical salesman in Dallas, who has a son with his wife Brittany.
“Playing with our three grandchildren is one of our favorite hobbies right now and we have another on the way this September,” Young said.