Fred A. Birchmore Jr., Athens' most amazing and versatile citizen, is 98 years old today.
Birchmore grew up in his father's home at 178 Dougherty St., only a block away from the First Methodist Church on the corner of Lumpkin Street and Hancock Avenue. And that's where I first knew Fred. I was in his father's Sunday School class there, and I also knew Fred (10 years older than I) from the old Athens YMCA on the corner of Lumpkin and Broad streets, where the Athens Holiday Inn parking lot is now.
Fred still works out regularly at the new Athens Y on Hawthorne Avenue.
He learned tumbling and boxing at the old Athens Y, and his first major athletics accomplishment was winning the Southern Conference bantamweight boxing division (119 pounds) in 1930.
As a tumbler, he did the difficult "double front flip" with ease and he was a featured acrobat on the Y's famous boys' tumbling team that toured the South.
As a part of Fred's training with the Georgia boxers (adjacent their headquarters at Memorial Hall) Fred chose to walk on his hands down the North side of Sanford Stadium (before it was double-decked) and then across the field (before the hedges had grown big) and up the South side.
Fred also once accomplished the monumental feat of walking on his hands down the stairway of the Washington monument in the nation's capital.
He is most famous, though, for his world bicycle trip in 1934 and 1935. The trip began in the summer of 1934 by touring Europe. Then he studied international law at Cologne in Germany, October 1934 through February 1935, after which he resumed the journey: down through the Alps, to Egypt, across Central Asia, then 1,300 miles down the Grand Trunk Road to Mandalay, below the Burma Road to the Malay Peninsula, through Thailand and French Indo-China. After taking Asian freighters to the Philippines and then to California, he pedaled across the United States back to Athens. Just about 25,000 miles!
In 1939, Fred and an Athens friend, Willie Broach, bicycled to the World's Fair in New York in seven days, then across Canada to the World's Fair at Treasure Island, Calif., then down to Mexico and back to Athens - 12,000 miles in four months. They averaged 100 miles per day.
Later in 1939, Fred and a Georgia student, the former Wiladean Stuckey of Brunswick, were married; they spent their honeymoon on a two-seated bike, touring Latin America. They went 6,000 miles, including 600 miles through Cuba.
There is no doubt that Fred was an unofficial weight-lifting champion. The proof is his "Great Wall" around his Milledge Terrace home in Athens: 14-feet high, 898 feet long (three football fields), consisting of more than 9 million pounds of rock. It took five years for him to complete during the 1980s, when he was in his mid-70s. Fred stands about 5-foot-6 and weighs only 130 pounds, and he lifted many a boulder that weighed 300 pounds.
His daughter, Becky, now Mrs. Thomas Campen, is the only woman ever to win a letter on a men's athletics team at Georgia, which she did in 1965. She was unbeaten in singles and doubles tennis competition as a substitute and won the Georgia State women's singles title.
In 1969, his son, Danny, (a rheumatologist in Nashville, Tenn.) won the U.S. boys' 18 clay court singles at Louisville, upsetting Jimmy Connors in the quarters. In 1971, he led Georgia to its first SEC team title in tennis, capturing the No. 1 singles title. He earned All-America honors in 1971-72. In 1971, he earned the Rafael Osuna Award, collegiate tennis' highest honor, voted on by the players and given to the player best demonstrating good sportsmanship and competitive excellence.
One of Fred's many hobbies is collecting arrowheads, and his collection of more than 70,000 is considered one of the finest - possibly the best - private collection in the country.
He began collecting arrowheads as a boy with old Athens High's renowned principal, the late E.B. Mell, for whom Mell Street in Athens is named. The arrowheads they found in Northeast Georgia belonged to the Cherokee and Creek Indian tribes, who settled in areas where water was plentiful for cooking, drinking and bathing, and also for planting corn in nearby fields. Fred found many arrowheads in these old plowed up fields.
In later life, Fred walked the Appalachian Trail, starting in North Georgia and going all the way to Maine (more than 2,000 miles), and he found many arrowheads there, too.
He has thousands of these arrowheads in impressive displays on the walls of his home at the end of Milledge Terrace.
Germany had its Frederik the Great. Athens - indeed the United States of America - has its Fred the Great.
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