Second Wind
Words and Images by Terrell Manasco
When Gina Scruggs was a young girl growing up in Boldo, she sold seeds ordered from the back of a comic book.“I was always riding my bike everywhere, doing odd jobs,” Gina says, sitting at her desk, a varnished golden brown table she and her husband Carey built using the wood from an old barn. Three years ago Gina retired from teaching and became an ALFA agent, but she has been working almost her entire life.At the age of fourteen, Gina and a friend were Saturday caretakers at a daycare center. By the time Jasper Mall first opened in 1981, Gina was fifteen and was working at Jenny N’ Me. “I thought I was important because I worked at a mall,” she says with mock seriousness.After graduating from Walker High School in 1984, Gina enrolled at the University of Montevallo. “I had some neat experiences there,” she remembers. “At that time there was a close Christian group that met together, nurtured and discipled each other. I found a place within that group. The summer between my sophomore and junior year, I got to go do Beach Project where you live on the beach and work a job full time. I worked at The Gulf Buffet [in Panama City]. I was the ‘bacon layer’. Bacon at these buffet restaurants is baked, you don’t fry it.” Gina’s job was to lay each piece of raw bacon on flat sheets of wax paper to prepare it for baking during the buffet hour.“The setup was for the kids to be very intentional in sharing Christ with their co-workers,” Gina explains. “Then on weekends you would go to beach and do something to attract a big crowd. We would do slow motion football or a some talent like a drum corp. Then once the crowd was around, we would stop and say ‘Let us tell you why we’re here.’ Then one person would take the lead and began sharing Christ in a very open thing, and we would split up throughout the crowd, if anyone had a prayer request or wanted to talk. Just intentional spontaneous evangelism on a beach, and it’s still going on today. My son at Samford has classmates who did Beach Project last year.”In 1987, her senior year, Gina met a young man named Carey Scruggs. “I didn’t know him at all,” she says. “He’s from Jasper but our paths had never crossed. He had seen me at different places, and he just kind of cold called me and said, ‘You don't know me but I know you, and I was wondering if I could come to Montevallo and take you on a date?’” Gina’s eyes widen a bit, before she laughs and continues. “He said, ‘You can call Chuck Kennedy and ask him about me.’”Gina recalls the day Carey arrived to take her to lunch. “I was getting in a car with someone I didn’t know, and all the girls in the dorm up on third floor were looking out the window,”she says. “One was supposed to get a tag number, another was supposed to get a good description of this dude.”Despite not knowing him, Gina says she was excited. “It was really exotic. I had a cold call out of the blue for a date. When does that ever happen?” she says.One thing in particular impressed her. “He had a job,” she says, whispering the last word. “He worked at the sheriff’s department. He was a deputy. He had an old Toyota truck, and when he would go to the gas station or the drive thru, he would toss his [spare] coins in the console tray, so it was full of quarters. I’m like a poor college student, so four quarters for a Coke is gold. He says he had me when I saw his change,” she giggles.They began dating in February that year, but Gina had already committed to go to Thailand on a mission trip that summer, so dating was put on hold for a few months. “We didn’t work like Beach Project,” she says. “We were just on the college campuses, to the cafeterias and quads, just split up and introduce ourselves to people, and try to befriend them. It’s a real Buddhist culture. We would try to share the story of Jesus. Some of them were very unfamiliar with who Jesus is. We’d just try to increase awareness, plant a seed, pass out a book. It was a very open country. We were welcome, we didn’t have to sneak around.” Although she admits it’s hard to know if the seeds planted that year bore any fruit, Gina says the biggest impact was actually on her. “For a little girl from Boldo, it made me feel very daring, like I had stretched myself a little. You know, at one point in my life I was brave.”Gina and Carey were married in May of 1988, the same year she graduated from Montevallo.
The next Fall, Gina went to work teaching school with the Jasper City School system. The bulk of her career was spent at Maddox Middle School, with some at Walker High School. “I taught gifted, computer, English, social studies and science, and I worked in the library,” she says. “I loved every minute I taught school.” But as her twenty-fifth year approached and the spectre of retirement loomed, so did the opportunity of new and exciting adventures.Gina was intrigued. “I taught right through, had babies, kept working, and so I ended up being forty-seven years old and had built up twenty-five years in state retirement,” she says. “I’ve always worked, I like working, so I thought I might retire and start a second career, try something new.” Her husband Carey had already retired with twenty-five years in law enforcement and embarked on a successful new career with Alabama Power.Deciding to weigh her options, Gina submitted online resumes’ to test the waters. One day she got a bite. “I was offered a job at the same ALFA office where my own policy had been for years,” she says. The clincher came when her friend Dr. Robert Sparkman made her an offer. “He said, ‘I would give it a try, and if you hate it, I will hire you back,’” she says. “I gave it a try and ended up loving it.”The change wasn’t easy at first. “Kids would come up to me the first year and say ‘Why did you leave? I thought you loved teaching?’ I loved it. But I might like something else too.”There was also the inevitable learning curve. “Anybody could ask me about anything in the school system and I knew the answer,” Gina says. I went from knowing almost everything to being as green as they come.”To learn all she could about her new career, Gina completed two different professional designations with The American College that involved taking eight courses on insurance and personal finance topics. "Now when the phone rings or someone asks me an insurance question in Walmart, I know the answer and can offer advice to my friends and clients,” she says.Although the insurance business and teaching are different fields, Gina says they both require the same skills. “The skills are: how to communicate, how to motivate others, and how to help map out a plan for others,” she says. “Meeting a person, seeing where they are, finding out where they want to go, and helping them get there.”Gina and Carey have now been married twenty-eight years and have two children. Their son, C.H., twenty-three, graduated from Samford University and is an ALFA agent in Birmingham. Their daughter, Pollyann, twenty-one, just graduated from Mississippi College and has accepted a teaching position at Sumner Hill. Her husband Ross also teaches school.The Scruggs love traveling to places like New York, Chicago, Hawaii, and the Grand Tetons, but they always enjoy coming back home. “We love it here,” Gina says. “We’re in Jasper by choice. If you had told me when I was sixteen that I would be living in Jasper, I would have said ‘kill me now’, but I got out of college, came back here and my perspective totally changed. I realized what all we have here.”
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