How We Got Our Name

Back in the mid 1950's, four boys started spending a lot of time together hunting, fishing and visiting juke joints on the weekends. The hunting and fishing were out of necessity to help keep food on the table.

Visiting the juke joints was just something to do on Saturday night.

One afternoon before Thanksgiving, the group started on their hunting trip across the 1500-acre tract of land located close to where Benjamin Sexton lived. Benjamin noticed that Eddie Dillard was carrying a paper sack with pork & beans, hot dogs and a loaf of bread. Benjamin said, "Eddie, you better leave that mess here because you will be dragging that sack before you get across that doom."

A few weeks later the group was at one of the local juke joints, and Benjamin was wearing a large coat with a lot of fur around the collar. As he stood next to a window that was very low to the ground, a fellow he knew started heckling him about the coat being an old bear coat. Benjamin took about 30 minutes of this bull before reaching through the window and jerking this fellow inside and stating, "This is a bear coat and I killed the bear and took his coat. What do you plan to do about it.?" The fellow was trembling and dangling about five 5 inches from the floor begging to be let go. Benjamin let him go and said, Don't you ever mess with me again, boy, because I belong to the LONESOME DOOM GANG." The name stuck.

After graduating from high school in the early 1960s, the gang split and went their separate ways. In 1999 Eddie Dillard decided it was time the gang got together before they all were pushing up daises. So he started communicating with the rest of the gang. In December 2000, they had their first reunion in Atlanta, Georgia. They had such a great time that they agreed to meet again the next year around the same time in Topeka, Kansas where James Jenkins had made his home.

The group met in Kansas and had a great time. James cooked a whole hog and after a night of eating and drinking iced tea, James said, "Why don't we do something other than eating, drinking iced tea and telling lies?"

"Why don't we form an organization to honor our teachers and church leaders that kept us out of jail and on the straight and narrow?"

The next year, 2002. the organization was up and running.