A Walk Through Time- Harold Corry

 Bull Corry leans back on a bench beside a vintage Coke machine outside his Oakman restaurant, The Bull Pen Steakhouse.“He was a great dad,” Bull says in his Southern bass drawl, speaking of Harold Corry. “He took us hunting and fishing. He was a belt-whoopin’ dad, thank goodness. I needed that.”From the time Bull was born, his dad worked as a mail carrier until he retired. “Back in that day, that was a great job,” Bull says. “On bad days we didn’t have school because a lot of the roads was dirt. I rode on the mail route with him and helped push the car out of the mud.”Bull spent much of his youth on the family’s cattle farm. “When Richard Nixon resigned, I was at the cattle sale at Morris, Alabama. I saw it on TV at the cattle sale cafe,” Bull says.But his father had a dream, which eventually became Old York Farms. “This is what he wanted to do,” Bull says. “Dad could look at something and envision it. I would have never had the concept to build this restaurant in this direction. We never used a blueprint. We’d draw it on a napkin.”Then Mr. Corry died in 1997 and left the farm to Bull.“It’s sort of like gambling. It’s hard to quit,” Bull grins. “We borrowed a ton of money and built this restaurant and then Dad died, but we’ve been very fortunate.”One thing Bull says he’s learned from his dad is “don’t quit.” Relating a funny story about an overturned manure truck, he grins. “That’s the way you have to look at life. If there’s that much manure, there’s bound to be a pony somewhere.” 78