My family moved from Atlanta, Georgia to Boston, Massachusetts when I was a child, a dislocation that was the source of much tragedy, small and large. To be southern was to be special, but we seemed to lose our identities and our drawl overnight. At the same time, my mother discovered the price of heating oil for a drafty New England colonial home, died of shock, and then rose again to buy down booties and electric blankets. Not only were we no longer special, we had elf feet and slept in fear of being electrocuted by the blanket. Lost in the shuffle, I barely noticed that we could no longer buy Stivers' Best, our family brand, in the grocery store.
The brand hadn't been ours for a generation, even when we lived in our proper place where the dirt was red and the daffodils bloomed on my birthday. But it was founded by my great-grandfather, Theo Stivers, a miller from Cleveland, Tennessee. He moved his headquarters to Rome, Georgia in the 1930s and the flours, cornmeals, and grits were widely available in the regional grocery stores of my youth. My grandfather and his siblings grew up working for the Theo Stivers Milling Co., and the loss of it during the Great Depression was a theme of his conversation until the end of his life.
