Waters pens book, continues ministry

Many people jump from career to career without having a clearly defined goal.  Not so for Doyce Waters, who is both a retired law enforcement officer and a minister. Over the span of 60 years he has demonstrated that his commitment to public service is unwavering and on the road to do that, he has touched many lives.

Waters was born Aug. 1, 1940 in Nantahala to Dwight and Dorothy Waters. Raised on a small farm, he remembers a poor but happy childhood. In his book, “Memories of Nantahala’s Yesteryear,” he talks about how their house had a board roof that leaked so bad that when it snowed his mother would sit buckets under the leaks and catch the water for cooking, drinking or bathing. They didn’t have indoor plumbing and, as the only boy, if one of his sisters had to use the privy in the middle of the night it was his duty to escort them out there by the light of an oil lamp to keep the “haints” away.

Like many boys his age when he graduated from Nantahala High School he enlisted in the Army and was promptly sent to Korea.  “I decided that there was something more to life than pulling corn on Nantahala.” When he returned from Korea in 1960 he was sent to Fort Hood, Texas. One day he and some of his friends decided to go into town to the drug store to get a Coke and sitting there at the counter drinking a Pepsi float was the prettiest girl he had ever seen, Martha Jo (known as Jo to everyone). He and Jo married that same year and when he decided to leave the military they moved back home, landing in Bryson City.

It wasn’t too long before they realized that the $1 per hour that he was earning wasn’t going to be enough to support them so they pulled up roots once again and moved to California where members of his family had moved to get better work cutting tunnels beneath the Sierra Nevada Mountains.