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203 Coda After it was over and the people of Newnan agreed to forget, Mattie Cranford lived a secluded life in the town raising her children. She died in 1922 of pneumonia, only fifty years old. Her brief, circumspect obituary made no reference to her role in Coweta County history.1 Of the children, Mary Estelle, who was four at the time of her father’s death and who allegedly was cuffed to the floor by Sam Hose, never married. It was she who told her grandnephews and -nieces about the Cranford tragedy, much to the displeasure of others in the family. She died in 1966. William Herbert Cranford, born in 1892, served in the Marine Corps in France during World War I and was wounded in action, partially blinded by mortar fire. A decorated veteran, he died in 1969. Clestelle (Clessie) Cranford, born in 1896, married Luther Franklin Hancock and had two daughters. Known throughout her adult life as “Doll” Hancock, she lived until 1984. The baby, Clifford Alfred, became a colorful figure in Newnan. Blind in his left eye, as a result, most believed, of the violence of that evening when Sam Hose was said to have slammed him to the floor or heaved him across the room—still another version had it that Hose tossed him out the window into the bushes, where he suffered the injury—young Cranford grew up working odd jobs such as carrying water during the building of the county courthouse . Mary Louise Ellis describes him as having an “enterprising spirit as a small child,” and in later life he owned various businesses including a restaurant, an oil company, and a service station.2 Judge John Herbert Cranford says of his grandfather, “He was an honest man but very stern, straightforward. People called him ‘Tan.’ They liked him, but he was not someone to fool with.” The nickname 204 Coda “Tan” derived from his identification by other children as a “Pitty Tan”— “Pitiful” or “Poor Thing”—due to his bad eye.3 Tan Cranford grew up to be a big and sometimes violent man. In 1934, Newnan, like many textile mill towns throughout the South, was the site of work strikes that crippled the industry for a time. In September of that year, Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge made headlines nationwide when he sent the National Guard to Newnan to round up and arrest the strikers, who were held without representation at Fort McPherson outside Atlanta.4 It was during these “labor wars” that Tan Cranford started his restaurant on Sewell Road off Highway 29, on the west side of town. The people he hired to build it were nonunion labor, and according to local stories, the pro-union people blew it up before it was finished. Undeterred, Tan Cranford rebuilt it and audaciously named it the Dinemite (pronounced “dine-a-mite”) restaurant. “So he had a sense of humor, a wit about him,” his grandson recalls. “But he could be a hard man. He had to be. During World War II, he served a lot of soldiers coming from Fort Benning or McPherson, and sometimes he had to be rough with them.” Soldiers, especially northern ones, who showed disrespect could quickly find themselves the object of Tan Cranford’s wrath. He would toss unruly GIs out of his place or, as on one occasion, jerk a rude soldier through a car window if the soldier misbehaved . Tan was also known for the dog he owned during that time, a Great Dane that he got from the army, a huge dog that could rise up and place its front legs on the big man’s broad shoulders so that they faced each other in a kind of dance. Cranford would feed it blood gotten from the local meatpacking company, and people would come to the restaurant to watch this beast lap the blood from a bowl. The dog died soon after his master’s death in 1952.5 Tan Cranford’s relationship with blacks reflected the standards of his time. “He wasn’t any more racist than anybody else during that period,” his grandson remembers. “He considered the blacks who worked for the family as a part of the family.” This attitude was also found in his son Clifford Andrew, who served as court solicitor in Newnan for decades. “He will enforce our laws, showing partiality to none but fairness to all,” one of his campaign flyers read...
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