My story is an account of growing up on tenant farms in Southwest Georgia—the son of hardscrabble, sharecropper parents that had only five years of formal education between them. Paid In Full is the story of the life journey of a child that came of age on a Georgia tenant farm in the 1950s. It is also a story that follows the journey from sharecropping to university classrooms and to the upper ranks of the pharmaceutical industry's boardrooms prior to returning to Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, to establish a college of public health. While there are some works that detail the plight of poor black sharecroppers in the South, this might be one of only a very few that examines the role of poor white tenant farmers during that era. My book is a story of adversity, determination, achievement, philanthropy, loss, and love—a triumph of human will over circumstance.