LaGRANGE, Ga.
In the early 1980s, Stanley Shepherd took great delight in taking down Sykes Smith.
At the time, Shepherd, a senior at LaGrange High School, played nose guard while Smith, a sophomore, was the center for the football team. The two would go head-to-head during practice.
“We were buddies on the field,” Shepherd recalled. “Yeah, but he liked to pound me in the ground,” Smith said with a smile.
Now the two are pounding nails together as they build a Habitat home for Shepherd; his wife, Jacqueline; and their five children: Niasia, 9; Elisha, 5; Joshua, 3; Samuel, 2; and Nasia, 8 months. The Shepherds’ house is one of 22 being built on the Hillside site of the Jimmy Carter Work Project this week.
Smith, a professional homebuilder by trade, is serving as project leader on the construction of the Shepherds’ home. That role didn’t come up by chance.
“I’m the vice president of the local Habitat board,” Smith said. “When I saw that Stanley’s application was approved, I said, ‘I’m going to build that house.”
Shepherd is glad his old friend is in charge.
“All of the Habitat houses are good,” he said. “But I got a professional building mine.”
The Shepherds have been renting a home with three bedrooms and one bathroom. The house has no central air conditioning or heat. And the rent is $150 more than they will pay each month for their own four-bedroom, two-bathroom Habitat home.
After graduating from LaGrange High, Shepherd played football at Eastern Kentucky University and then semi-professional ball for the Macon Chiefs. Knee injuries finally sent him home. After a short stint in law enforcement, Shepherd became a limousine driver. His wife, a stay-at-home mom, heard about the Jimmy Carter Work Project
through a relative and sent an application to the local Habitat board.
She said the couple had tried once before to buy a house through conventional methods. Those house payments were hundreds of dollars more than what they will pay now.
“This is a miracle from God,” Jacqueline Shepherd said.
