Background Information/History In Eatonton, Georgia on March 14, 1921 Samuel Truett Cathy was born to James B. and Lilla Kimbell Cathy. Cathy’s parents named him in honor of the famous Baptist evangelist George W. Truett and he was raised in the Southern Baptist community. Cathy’s father was a successful farmer prior to his birth however at age 4, there was a boll weevil attack on the cotton fields and Cathy’s family was forced to move to Atlanta where his father took a job as an insurance salesman (Hattwick, 2009). Cathy’s father was struggling to make ends meet so the family began to take in boarders during the 1930s. For a dollar a day, renters received two meals a day and slept two or three to a bedroom. In addition to Cathy, his two brothers, four sisters, and two parents, they typically had seven or eight boarders. This made things a bit tight in a slum-like crowded small …show more content…
One of those experiences involved his Sunday school teacher, Theo Abbey, who would fill a void that Cathy disparately needed filled. Cathy’s father, although a good man, did not fulfill Cathy’s need for attention and love as Cathy states in his book, “My Sunday school teacher recognized somehow that I had a father who never told me he loved me…. I think he sensed my isolation because he reached out to me and became a model of the loving and caring father…. Through his teaching, Mr. Abbey gave me a better understanding of the Bible, but more important, he displayed to me a loving and caring spirit. He visited Techwood Homes (a public housing facility where the Cathy’s lived for a time) often to see me and others in our Sunday school class. He also invited us occasionally to go with him and (his son) Ted to his cabin on Lake Jackson.” Cathy would later say, “In time I came to understand that I could choose the type of model I would follow in life and I chose the example of Theo Abbey” (Cathy, 2002, pp.