Burke’s parents were living in Evington, Va., where his father was a telegraph operator for Southern Railway. There were probably only 15 to 20 people in the town, no homes to rent, so the company furnished a stationary boxcar for living quarters, Burke says. His father picked up coal along the train tracks for a stove that heated their “home.”

George Burke Jr. was born Nov. 11, 1908, and in 1909, his parents moved to Spencer, where a second son, Melvin, was born. The elder Burke first worked at the depot there and later as a clerk telegrapher at the Salisbury train station.

Burke remembers harsh circumstances of the horse-and-buggy days that for him, and others, hardly improved economically until after World War II.

A man in a mule-drawn, two-wheel cart went house to house, cleaning out two-hole outbuildings, he recalls. His mother and father both did the laundry weekly on the back porch using tubs with a washboard. When electricity came, it meant only a cord and socket with a 25-watt bulb hanging from the center of a room. Fireplaces were replaced with stoves until the arrival of coal furnaces that needed stirring frequently until installation of a stoker.

At the same location of the present Spencer Fire Department, a livery rented a horse with saddle or wagon or buggy.

In the 1920s, Burke’s father spent $3,000 on materials to build a house, thinking he’d never live long enough to pay for it. He worked 56 years before he retired in 1959 at age 72 and died at 105 in 1990.

Spencer seemed prosperous, even rivaling Salisbury with its merchants and professionals. Burke knows he hardly touches the surface mentioning Hardiman’s bicycle shop or Rowan Motor Co. operated by B.L. Young and O.C. Godfrey that sold a four-cylinder Dort automobile, not to mention Stoudemire Furniture, Nick Brown’s grocery store, Dr. George Bishop Albright and Dr. John William Carlton, the first Spencer dentist, and a ball park where a semipro team played.

Merchants extended a 30-day credit to customers because wages were paid monthly by Southern Railway.

“No one had cash,” Burke says. “Everybody was broke and nobody knew it.”

Even doctors lived a tough life. When Dr. James Carr Eagle came out of medical school in the 1920s, he didn’t make a living and his father, who worked for Southern Railway, had to take care of him until his private practice was established, Burke says.

In the early 1930s, around 3,200 men worked at the Spencer Shops maintenance facility, about the same as Spencer’s total population. Many of the men would be classified commuters today because they did not live in the town, Burke says.

He doesn’t know why Spencer stopped growing years before the Shops folded. “Perhaps because it was a one-industry town, an obstacle to growth, whether textiles or what not. It shrivels up or becomes a bedroom community,” he says.

Spencer was composed of parents who held education in high regard.

“In the early days the town was manned by young bucks 18 to 25, strong as bulls, with relatively little education, but when bright girls were hired as school teachers, the men married them and their children went to school. Mother insisted, even if Pop didn’t,” Burke says.

“Both Mother and Dad had immense respect for what they called formal education and I call window dressing.”

Having command of the English language and multiplying 2 by 2 to equal 4 is important, he says.

Burke’s knowledge of arithmetic was more than adequate before he started to elementary school because his father taught him numbers.

Was this early training inspiration for George Jr. to tag himself a professional student?

He entered college at age 15, earned five college degrees, including a bachelor’s in English at age 71, and took dozens more courses just for sheer enjoyment.

“It’s exhilarating to look around Rowan Public Library to see what’s available from a mental, intellectual standpoint. Same goes for Rowan Tech and Catawba, too,”he says.

A sign in his own mammoth library reads: “Ignorance is not bliss, it’s oblivion.”

“If you don’t learn today, it’s your own fault,” says Burke, who is taking both Spanish and computer classes this term.

He could not find a job after getting an electrical engineering degree from North Carolina State College in 1929 — the year of the Depression.

“I worked hither and yon and ended up in Pottstown, Pa., with 10 cents in my pocket,” he says. He checked into a hotel under the American plan — no payment in advance —and spent the dime on a newspaper which he discovered was in Polish. “I couldn’t read a word!”

He had been hired to change steam pumps to electric in the coal mines and worked sun-up to sundown for 65 cents an hour. The job lasted six months; then the miners went on strike.

His next job paid 25 cents an hour and lasted about a year before he returned home to live with his parents. He was out of work for two years before being hired by WPA, a program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration.

“FDR was the greatest president we ever had. He gave us jobs,” he says.

The government didn’t finance soup kitchens during the Depression. A woman in Spencer, with neighbors pitching in, prepared food for the unemployed.

The Burkes never owned an automobile until 1932 when he won a new Plymouth sedan by sending in a jingle for a national contest sponsored by a cigar company.

Until it was sold, the Plymouth sat parked in front of the Burke house and no one drove it because the family couldn’t afford gas.

“A dollar was a dollar,” says Burke, remembering how he wasted 15 cents on three 5-cent ice creams when he first arrived on the college campus in Raleigh. “We were broke, and I bought ice cream.”

People who had nothing learned to do with less in those days, Burke says.

“The instinct to survive is very strong; you can put up with a lot,” he says, wondering if the present generation could face such hardships.

Young people don’t understand the ’20s or ’30s any more than he understands the Civil War, Burke says.

Nowadays, it’s instant gratification, he says. Kids expect Dad to buy a car when they turn 16. “You must earn material things in life if you’re going to appreciate them,” he says.

His income improved somewhat when he went into service, graduating from Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga. He spent $1,000 on a new car rather than buying Reynolds Tobacco Co. stock.

“I bought a new Mercury. If I had just bought the stock. ... I was in the Army with no guarantee I could come out of it, so I bought the automobile,” he says. “Choices are chances. You have a series of options today that are not there tomorrow.”

He passed his Army physical. “I wasn’t as big as a minute and weighed 85 pounds, soaking wet, and firing a rifle knocked me back a foot,”he says. “I didn’t participate in anything requiring brawn.”

Military officers lived a country club life until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, he says. Burke, released in November, returned to service. “I hadn’t even straightened out my clothes when I was called back and sent to Fort Benning.”

In service six years, he spent the war years stateside. He married Beatrice Wade Thornlow in 1942, and she followed him to the various camps.

The electric tension in the air during World War II was indescribable.

“You could feel it everywhere, every minute of every hour,”he says.

Burke wondered about the 2 million young men scrambling for jobs after the war ended.

“I had no idea how this country was economically, the money came from somewhere,” he says, adding with a laugh, “I still don’t know where it comes from.”

Realizing he would never make it in engineering, he pursued law, a subject which intrigued him in the ’30s after he took a correspondence course through LaSalle University. With Bea by his side, he went to Duke University, where he earned an LLB degree in 1948 and an LLM in 1950.

Admitted to the bar, he practiced law briefly in Roxboro with his attorney brother and later was a judge in recorder’s court before returning to Rowan County. In Salisbury, he was a lawyer, judge and solicitor.

“All the lawyers I practiced with are all dead and gone, except Bob Davis, and that’s not counting the old group that was ahead of me.”

When he lost his hearing, he left his law practice. “If you can’t hear what the witness is saying, you’re aren’t much help for your client,” he says.

Law today is not the law of yesterday; it’s strictly business. Once, doctor, preacher, lawyer and teacher were considered time-honored professions.

He’s proud of one accomplishment during his lengthy career: eliminating North Carolina’s 200-year-old rule of charitable immunity.

And he’s still busy today: While today’s younger people hire landscapers , Burke takes on the challenges of maintaining a large yard in Milford Hills, as well as spacious house with boat, pier and sizeable lot at Lake Norman.

Burke claims his early dreams came from reading Zane Grey and Rudyard Kipling. He learned to love the printed page, and he still does.

For 15 years, he’s planned to read “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.” The hefty volumes wait on a table, along with “French in Action,” a 56-hour course. “If you study, you keep your mind from atrophying,” he says.