The Life and Times of Paul Norris

..........I was born in 1963 while my family was living in Pageland, SC. Dad was the pastor at Providence Baptist Church and mom taught school. I have two older brothers and no sisters, so I was blessed with growing up always being introduced with the title, Paul the Baby. At the age of 4, we moved from Pageland to Moncks Corner where dad became the pastor at Jamestown Baptist Church, and opened his business, Norris Photography. Mom began to teach at Berkeley high school and would for the next 35 years or so. The next year we moved out to Pinopolis after dad finished building the house. Pinopolis was a wonderful place to grow up with dirt roads, large moss covered oak trees, a lake for swimmimg, fishing, and hunting, and a lot of neighborhood kids for sand lot football and baseball games. I had what I call a leave it to beaver childhood with a wonderful family in a great environment.
..........I attended the Berkeley County Schools, graduating from Berkeley high school in 1981. I was an average student and took all of the shop classes as well as the college prep classes because I enjoyed the hands on work. I knew from about the 9th grade that I would study Mechanical Engineering in college. I was on the track team with my older brother Billy in my 9th and 10th grade years but I was mediocre at best. When track season started in the spring of my junior year, my brother had graduated and there was a new track coach. Some friends convinced me to play soccer with them instead of running track again and it was a great decision. As it turned out I had three gifts for soccer that can’t be coached. First, I was very fast for a soccer player (from my days running track) and was quickly regarded as the fastest player on the team. Secondly, I had a natural right leg kick that was an absolute cannon on goal shots. To this day I couldn’t say why I had such a strong shot--it was just there from the first time I kicked a soccer ball. Thirdly, I had a knack for getting open shots on goal. In the first game of the soccer season my junior year, the coach substituted me into the striker position about midway through the game. A few minutes later the ball bounced my way and my first shot on goal found the back of the net. A friend would later tell me that the coach was getting ready to substitute him in for me and when I scored that goal he pulled him back and left me in. I don’t recall missing a single minute of every game for the next 2 years after that goal. My senior season started with me being asked to help kick for the football team because of my strong leg. I handled the kick off duties for the entire year. The coach had me attempt a field goal to win the homecoming game with time running out. The snap was high but the holder (the quarterback, Mike Green) did a phenomenal job and got the ball down cleanly. Unfortunately, I hesitated to make sure he was going to get the ball down and the kick was blocked. We lost that game by 2 points and missed the playoffs by one game at the end of the year. When soccer season started in the spring I was named team captain and ended with me being the team’s leading goal scorer for the year.
..........While at the University of South Carolina studying Mechanical Engineering, I didn’t consider myself to be as smart as many of the other people studying engineering, but I made up for it with an enormous amount of studying. I was fortunate enough to have had a great college experience making many friends. In fact, some engineering buddies and I put together an intramural softball team and won the Class A Championship. Two notable members of that championship team were Darius Rucker (who played right field) and Mark Bryan (who played first base) of Hootie and the Blowfish fame. Darius was the roommate of a close friend and mechanical engineering classmate, Chuck Fulmer (who played second base). I was a B student in college even with all the studying although many of my classmates were A students. Fortunately for me, I was a natural engineer, and not just a very smart student studying engineering. During our senior year, it is common for engineering students to take an 8 hour exam known as the Fundamentals of Engineering. While interviewing with the SCANA Corporation, I was told by the HR department my score on the FE exam was one of the highest they had ever seen and ultimately led to me getting hired. I would come to realize that I had the ability to understand the material we studied in college and not just memorize it for a quick test grade. I wasn’t as smart as some of the students, but I was able to understand and retain the material, not just memorize it.
..........I started dating my wife, Melinda, in 1982 when she was only 15 years old. We went to the University of South Carolina together, and one month after I graduated, we got married. I started my job at SCE & G and she finished her degree in Education. Life was good. After graduation, Melinda began teaching in Columbia’s Richland School District 1. At that same time, we found out that she was pregnant with our first child. It took three years for us to get pregnant so when that stick turned blue, we were over the moon! Melinda was so excited that she busted into my office to announce the news for everyone to hear. That extreme high in our lives led to our extreme low. The hospital paged me on April 17, 1990 to tell me that Melinda had gone into labor at six months and I had to get to the hospital fast. Two hours later, our daughter died coming into the world. There was the reassuring sound and sight of her heart beat on the monitor even though we struggled to cope with what was happening, and then minutes before she emerged, it stopped, forever. Life was too tough to face so we hid in Santee for a few days. Through this horrible ordeal, we discovered that Melinda had an incompetent cervix and would always go into labor early without intervention. We were devastated because we had always wanted four kids. In August, Melinda was in a car accident. Four weeks later, she was still experiencing nausea. It never occurred to us that we could be pregnant again so soon and so easily. I had to work and care for Melinda who was on bedrest for the entire pregnancy. We had a 50% chance of having a successful pregnancy. On April 18, 1991, Joshua Paul Norris was born in the same hospital, in the same room, with the same nurse exactly one year and one day later than his sister and on his great grandfather’s 80th birthday. After one week in the NICU, Joshua came home. York, SC became our new home when Paul was transferred to the propane cavern when Joshua was 4 months old. We knew we were pushing our luck, but when Joshua was 18 months old, we became pregnant again. The announcement at the Thanksgiving dinner table was met with shocked silence. After seven months on bedrest and 15 trips to the hospital to stop labor, Jasmine burst into the world. Our family was now complete. We rented a small trailer in a pretty rough neighborhood. For two years we would drive by the plot of land we bought in The Timbers and just look because we could not afford to build yet.
..........In March of 1996, we built our first home. We unloaded the Uhaul into the garage and then took the kids Trick-or-Treating. We made memories in our little section of the world and the kids made friends for life. Melinda could not bear putting the kids in child care, so she concentrated on being an at home mom in spite of the school loans it took her years to pay off. She was a regular volunteer at both kid’s schools. Melinda and I had settled into a comfortable existence. Then came the day I announced that I felt that God was leading me to quit my job and start my own business. Melinda was not supportive of this idea—she even demanded that I acquire a retainer for at least one years salary in order to gain her support. Imagine her shock when I did just that! With my dad’s help, I spent one year doing regulatory work. I again came to Melinda and announced that I wanted to start my own propane company and she needed to be my office manager. She said no way! I told her that God was leading me. She told me that if I raised $100,000, she would support me. Melinda and I had managed to save about $2000 in our ten years of marriage, so imagine her surprise when I presented her with a bank statement with a hair over $100,000 in it. We started Love Propane Gas from the ground up. It was hard work and took many hours of our time, but we loved dealing with most of the customers we came to know. We were blessed…the kids had everything they needed, we went to Disney World, and spent a week each summer on the Outerbanks. Out of the blue came a huge shock—my mom had stage 3 ovarian cancer in her mid sixties. Her parents had lived well into their 80’s and 90’s, so this wasn’t supposed to happen.
..........It was nearly impossible to travel the three hours to Charleston to spend time with mom and run our business. We did some deep soul-searching. Our decision was to sell our business and move back home to the Low Country as soon as possible. The company that bought our business questioned why we would want to sell at this time because our business would be worth many times more in only a few more years with our growth. But that wasn’t God’s will, and mom didn’t have a few more years. We had been gone for over twenty years. Our new home was to be built on a plot of land on the Intracoastal Waterway on Johns Island. We could not afford the high rent in the area so we lived in a 30 foot camper tucked away in the woods onsite while we built our house. Unfortunately, Mom never saw the house. I held her hand as she died in January 2004, three months after we moved home.
..........When Joshua was born premature, we were told that he would most likely be sickly and have learning problems. At this time, Joshua is a junior at Charleston County School of the Arts. He has been to Junior Scholar Camp three summers in a row and is a candidate for Governor’s School this summer. The average SAT score at his school is 1650 and he scored a 2030 out of 2400. He is now visiting colleges and is active in Aikido. Jasmine is in the ninth grade at James Island Charter High School, and has been successful in basketball and modeling. Many famous modeling agencies including Wilhemina and Elite are waiting for her braces to come off in June. She is playing Upward Basketball because practices at her high school took up too much homework time. The kids keep Melinda on the road, but we only have a small amount of time left with them at home.
..........At a time when we thought we would be entering the twilight years of our marriage, I feel that God has led us to a new chapter…politics. Our lives have reached a huge time of change…Joshua will be leaving for college, Jasmine may be leaving the country to model, and now I will be entering the political arena. I have renewed my subscription to the newspaper and I am watching the news again. The time for me to sit idly by while society around me deteriorates is over. The situation of the country we live in will grossly affect the lives of my children. I have to do what I can so that their children will have the life and opportunities I had and have done my best to give to my own children. If our country continues to deteriorate, our grandchildren will one day look up at us and ask what happened and why didn’t we do something. So I must stand up and be a voice for restoring the American Dream, so that I can look my grandchildren in the eye one day and tell them we did.

	."HELP RESTORE THE AMERICAN DREAM"