MOULTRIE — George Walker remembers that when Puddin’ Mason reached high school, some of the members of their group of friends that played ball together in northwest Moultrie finally learned what his given first name was.

“It was John,” Walker said. “But we never knew him by anything but ‘Puddin’”

Mason said his mother started calling him by that name when he was a child and it stuck.

“She said I was sweet as puddin,’” Mason recalled recently from his home in Lithonia. “Even my teachers called me that.”

And on the football field, basketball court on baseball diamond, John Wesley “Puddin’” Mason was just as sweet.

By the time he had graduated from the Moultrie High School for Negro Youth as a member of the 31-member Class of 1950, he had starred in all three sports and ran on the track team as well.

Mason was the first athlete at the school to earn letters in all four sports and he was especially proficient at football. In fact, when the Rams All-Century team was selected, Mason was named to the team as a running back.

His athletic accomplishments in Moultrie and at Fort Valley State and his long career as an educator have led Mason to the Colquitt County Sports Hall of Fame. He will be inducted as a member of the Class of 2008 at the annual banquet to be held on Thursday, Oct. 2, in the high school cafeteria.

“He was a prime athlete,” says Walker, who was the center on the 1949 Rams team. “He was not tall, but he could do it all. He was an excellent quarterback. He was just an exceptional athlete. Whatever sport it was, he excelled at it. He lived it.”

Mason played quarterback and running back for the Rams and was coached by Hall of Famer A.F. Shaw, who had coached his younger brother in the late 1930s.

The team ran a single wing and Mason remembers going to Brunswick to play a game and having chase down snaps from center that went over his head.

“He liked to have killed me that day,” Mason said of his center, who happened to be his boyhood friend George Walker.

Mason was the captain of the 1948 and 1949 Rams teams and the team won two district championships and a South Georgia title during his high school career.

Following his last season, he was selected to play in the high school all-star game.

Mason played first base and center field on the baseball team and was an All-District selection. He also played guard on the basketball team and competed in the 100-yard dash and 440-yard relay for the Rams.

Fort Valley State offered him a scholarship to play football, but a back injury suffered while playing for the Rams hampered him while he was at Fort Valley State. He also ran track at Fort Valley.

And while his athletic career never took off at Fort Valley, Mason made good use of his time there, earning a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education. He later earned his master’s degree in guidance and counseling.

His first teaching job was at Holley High School in Sylvester, where he also coached girls basketball and track, boys baseball and was the backfield coach on the football team.

He produced girls track teams that finished second in the district and second at state and took first place in a national meet.

From 1966-1970, he also directed a summer recreation program for youth in Worth County.

It was at Holley High that first got into guidance and counseling.

After 13 years at Holley High, Mason moved to Atlanta, where worked in the public schools for six months.

He then took a job with the Department of Corrections, working at the Phillips Correctional Institution in Buford, counseling prisoners and helping them earn their General Education Diplomas.

He worked for the Department of Corrections for 18 years before retiring in 1994.

He was named the Teacher of the Year in 1993.

Mason called his work with the Department of Corrections “gratifying.”

“I felt like I could relate to them,” he said.

Walker says, “He felt like he could be an inspiration and a mentor, teaching black males who were incarcerated.”

Mason has three sons. Wesley Mason, his oldest boy, played in the band at Moultrie High and now is in the real estates business.

His two younger sons were involved in athletics at Moultrie High.

Middle son Darrell Mason played basketball for Roy Saturday and youngest son Maurice Mason played running back for the Packers from 1978-1980.

Maurice was the Packers leading rusher in 1980, averaging nearly 6 yards a carry.

When he joined the varsity, Maurice was issued jersey No. 5, which he wore for three seasons, not knowing when he received it that it was the same number his father had worn so successfully 30 years before.

“People still call me No. 5,” John Mason said.

Mason and wife, the former Gwendolyn Holton, live in Lithonia, where he exercises daily at the South DeKalb YMCA and follows the Fort Valley State Wildcats during football season. He has four grandchildren and one great-grandddaughter.

Mason still has family in Moultrie and return often. He is a regular at the annual Ram Roundup.

“John was so well-liked,” Walker said. “Everybody always wants to see Puddin’ Mason.”