EDITOR’S NOTE: This is another installment in our twice-monthly series “Life Stories,” profiles of everyday people who lend us insight into life and times in Mercer County.

THEY SAY each person has only one life to live, but that depends on how you measure a lifetime. Life expectancy for men born in the United States in 1909 was just under 50 years. So how about Harold Bankston, who will double that number on July 4, his 100th birthday?

Or you could measure a life in terms of experiences rather than longevity. Harold has had jobs ranging from store window display designer to deck hand on an ocean-going freighter. He has been secretary to a lumber magnate, store-room clerk, railroad employee, self-employed TV repairman, artist, house painter, gas station owner, and industrial foreman. Many of his jobs were short-term, but he worked at Greenville Steel Car Co. in Hempfield Township for 45 years.

He has lived in more places than he can count, about half of them in the South and half in the North. And he has been married not twice, but four times.

Harold started his many lifetimes in Roberta, Ga., where his grandfather had a mercantile store. Before he started school, the family moved to Atlanta. His sister Virginia Estelle was born there. They moved again to Macon, Ga., where his father ran a store.

“Then Dad became a telegraph operator for the railroad, and we moved several times when the railroad assigned him to different places. We were living in Asburn, Ga., when the (1918) flu epidemic broke out. My aunt, two cousins, my mother and I all got sick. A cousin died from it, and my aunt died later in a hospital. Dad claimed he never got it because he kept himself covered with Vicks salve.”

Harold went to several schools in Savannah, Ga. When he graduated from high school, he got a job as secretary to the owner of Penn-Waller Lumber Co., who lived in Mercer House, the house featured in the book and movie “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”.

“He was a funny old dude,” Harold said. “He carried his lunch in a paper bag. Once he accused me of stealing a peanut butter sandwich from his desk drawer.”

After working a short time as secretary of the president of another lumber company, Harold became store room clerk for the Savannah-Atlanta Railway. When he moved up to be clerk at the American Railroad Association, life was good.

“At that time it was great to be a railroad man. I was making about $200 a month, high pay in those days. And I enjoyed playing saxophone in the National Guard’s 118th Field Artillery Band.”

Harold eloped to South Carolina with his girl friend, Lula Dempsey. Unfortunately, that was just before the stock market crash of 1929. He was bumped from his job back into the storeroom, then out into the railroad yard, where he painted for 42 cents an hour – less than a third of what he had been making.

Harold’s father also lost his job. Through a friend, he eventually found a job with Bessemer Railroad in Greenville.

“He came up here and worked a month. Then he sent for Mom and the kids. I had a vacation and railroad passes from when I had a good job on the railroad. So my wife, my mother, two sisters, and I came by train from Savannah.”

Harold found a job painting at Steel Car for 80 cents an hour, twice as much as he was earning in Savannah. But before long, his wife Lula was pregnant, and she wanted to move back down South so her uncle, a doctor, could deliver the baby.