Holliday, Jackson Riley, 2002 February 26

This is a Living History interview with Jackson Holliday, class of 1949, conducted by Marilyn Somers on February 26, 2002 at his home in Macon, Georgia. The subject of the interview is Mr. Holliday’s life and experiences at Georgia Tech. Mr. Holliday was born at home in the historic district of Macon, Georgia. He has one brother, Pete Holliday. His father’s family is originally from Virginia, but they settled in north Georgia a while back. His father attended Mercer University. His mother is from Perry, Georgia and attended Wesleyan College. His father was a juvenile court judge during the depression while Mr. Holliday was growing up. He still owns the house that he grew up in. He went to Joseph Clisby School for elementary school and then Lanier High School. There was no question that Mr. Holliday was going to go to college. His mother pushed him towards architecture because she thought he would enjoy it and do well. Tech was the obvious choice because of their architecture program and the opportunity to co-op. When he found out that he could not co-op with architecture, Mr. Holliday enrolled as a mechanical engineering major. His first year he lived in Cloudman Dormitory, the co-op dormitory, with a classmate from high school. Next door to them were two more boys from their high school. He was in the ROTC program. His father had been a member of Phi Delta Theta at Mercer, and Mr. Holliday joined the same fraternity at Tech. He did not join, however, until his second year. For his co-op job, he worked with Georgia Power in Macon. He helped build Plant Arkwright and was later on the substation maintenance crew there. While at Tech, he went to football games and participated in the Ramblin’ Wreck Parades as a part of his fraternity. He heard about Pearl Harbor being bombed while he was at the fraternity house doing homework one Sunday afternoon. He decided to join the Army Reserves; the reserves were called up in 1943. He was originally put in the Ordinance Corp, but he was switched to the Signal Corp when they realized he had switched majors to electrical engineering. He was in the European theater right at the end of that part of the war. He was later part of an occupation troop in Japan after the atomic bomb was dropped. When Mr. Holliday came back to the US, he came back to Tech to finish his degree. Since the GI Bill was now paying for his education, he decided to start over at Tech and get his degree in architecture. He was able to double-up on classes and do the five-year program in three years. During these three years he worked for Mr. Peabody—an architect in Decatur—a few nights a week, joined the swimming team under Coach Lanoue, was president of his fraternity and IFC, and was part of ANAK. He met his wife at the beach when he got back from the war. He had known her family from Macon, but when they met again is when they started dating. When he graduated from Tech, Mr. Holliday worked for Dennis & Dennis—an architecture firm in Macon—before starting his own practice. He then merged with some other Tech architects, and they formed the prosperous firm Matthews, Couch, Holliday, and Hollis. They have designed many buildings around Macon. Mr. and Mrs. Holliday adopted two children. They have a son who has two children and a daughter who has two stepchildren. Mr. and Mrs. Holliday used to have an old General Motors GMC motor home that they would bring up to Georgia Tech home football games. Mr. Holliday says he can go to be almost any town in Georgia and know someone in the leadership of the community because of his connections from Tech.