“It’s A Wonderful Life” is one of my favorite movies. Maybe that’s because the Jimmy Stewart character George Bailey reminds me so much of my friend and mentor Travis Hardy, who died last week at the age of 96.
Both were bankers who were more interested in building their communities than beefing up the bank’s bottom line.
They had a soft heart for people of good character who genuinely needed a helping hand, and they assisted them, doing so in a financially responsible manner.
Travis also was a farmer and a community leader. He and I served together for years on the board for Fayette County Farm Bureau and the Towaliga Soil and Water Conservation District.
He also found time to serve on the Fayette County Planning Commission, when that group had the foresight to create zoning rules that have allowed our county to grow in a responsible manner. He was a leader in his hometown of Brooks and in the Brooks United Methodist Church.
He delivered the mail around Brooks for a while. I remember one instance in which he took it on himself to replace a broken-down mail box and post for one of the older ladies on his route.
Doing good deeds for friends and neighbors was just in his DNA. I don’t know how he found the time to do it all.
Travis was a sharp dresser and kept a well-maintained automobile. But when those cars and trucks neared the end of their useful lives, he usually didn’t have the heart to part with them.
Like a farmer who lets aging work horses live out their final years in a pasture, Travis retired his old cars and trucks to his back yard. I understand the connection he felt to them, but others couldn’t.
Once, on the way home from a soil conservation meeting, he said I could come get his 1953 Ford grain trucks that I’d had my eye on for years. It was an old delivery truck for the Mask and Gay brunswick stew plant in Brooks that had been converted into a grain hauler.
Travis Hardy and his old 1953 Ford Mask and Gay delivery truck that was later converted into grain hauler
When we were loading it to bring it here, Travis waved to the old truck that had served him so well over the years, saying: “Bye, bye old truck.”
Some months after that, we had the truck, which hadn’t run in years, running and stopping. I fired it up for Travis, and he couldn’t have been happier.
He later donated his John Deere 95 combine, which had sat under his pole barn for about 20 years, to Inman Farm Heritage Days. It is fighting us a lot harder than the truck ever did. We are still trying to get the frozen parts freed up on it, but we won’t give up.
Travis was a loyal supporter of our Inman Farm Heritage Days shows, and he and his brother Al were featured on the cover of our souvenir program several years ago.
The Hardy family continues to display the tractors he and his brother Al showed through the years.
Travis and Al Hardy were very special to us. Like the fictional George Bailey, they both had wonderful lives.