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Author Archives: Michelle Hiskey

Michelle Hiskey is a freelance writer and writing coach based in Decatur, and her day job is senior editor on Emory University's development communications team. Michelle worked at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 22 years as a sports reporter, columnist and Sunday feature writer, and her stories of recovery and redemption bridge unexpected places and people across Atlanta. She lives in Decatur with her husband Ben Smith, also a journalist, and their two awesome daughters. She can be reached at michelle.hiskey@gmail.com.
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Restoration after rats requires Melton’s strong will

by Michelle Hiskey

Aaron and Staci Melton, sitting at a bar table amid a decent weekday dinner crowd, still live with the damage – financial and emotional — from a rat infestation that closed their doors in late 2011.

Every day, they think about their lawsuit against their neighbor, Pet Supermarket, which is in the discovery phase in DeKalb County Superior Judge Daniel M. Coursey Jr. If a resolution comes at all, it will take a while. At stake for the Meltons is $250,000 – their lost revenue and debt for repairs.

Take away the litigation, and the Meltons still represent the psychological struggle for so many of us in middle-class Atlanta and America. Despite hard work and diligence amid economic distress, our standard of living and hope in the future have gone from security to struggle. We come face-to-face daily with this reality: forces beyond our control can quickly shut us down.

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For deliverance on Appalachian Trail, hikers rely on folks like Ron Brown

by Michelle Hiskey

On July 20, Atlanta’s Fox Theatre will celebrate the 40th anniversary of “Deliverance,” the startling and brutal film about city dwellers venturing into Georgia’s devilish Appalachian country.

A walk in the north Georgia woods today has its hazards, too – but luckily our recent group of hikers got help from a trail angel named Ron Brown.

Unlike the predatory locals in the movie, Brown is part of an super-friendly mountain hospitality corps who serve visitors to Springer Mountain — the southern terminus of the 2,180 mile Appalachian Trail — and beyond.

Thousands of outsiders show up every year to experience the “AT,” the world’s longest hiking-only footpath, which next month celebrates its 75th anniversary.

It was a hellish 100 degrees plus when we cinched up our backpacks for a long-planned overnight trip around Springer…

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For Atlanta Vietnam vets, serving hot dogs at USO a strong link to today’s troops

by Michelle Hiskey

Several times a day, military troops walk single file through Hartsfield Jackson International Airport, Atlanta’s crossroads with the world. As they parade through the heart of the airport – the airy atrium – travelers applaud and cheer. Here, the national spirit so often confined to July 4 is demonstrated every day.

On the mezzanine twice a month, the troops stop in for hot dogs and chili fixed by a group of Vietnam veterans from Atlanta. Along with America’s quintessential fast food, the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association (AVVBA) serves up something they wish they had enjoyed: public support.

The crossroads for both generations is the Jean R. Amos USO, which every day in Atlanta welcomes in a morning plane full of 240 troops returning home on what is know as “Operation R&R.” Later, volunteers bid farewell to 240 more somber troops returning to their overseas posts.

In a country full of yellow ribbon car magnets and other displays, the USO doesn’t stand alone. But these Atlanta Vietnam veterans recall how USO volunteers have always stood for them, and that’s why they now stand together — with frankfurters however you please.

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For a Roswell girl, Hawaii is a positive state of mind

by Michelle Hiskey

Allison Tilly wanted to go to Hawaii.

No was her mom’s answer. She hoped Allison would just drop the idea. She and Allison’s dad were divorcing, and they were moving. A fancy vacation wasn’t in the budget.

Allison, 8 years old, is the baby of the family — imaginative, stubborn and persuasive. She rounds up her older brother and sister to play games she’s made up.

Hawaii obsessed her. Her mother relented a bit.

After you graduate from high school, Melissa Tilly said.

For 8-year-old Allison, that meant paradise was 10 years. For her mom, it seemed even farther than 4500 miles.

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In his funkified corner of Atlanta, Romeo Cologne keeps the groove alive

by Michelle Hiskey

Whitney Houston, Robin Gibb, Donna Summer – some of the most danceable, summery voices are gone now. Disco and its imprint on pop music are becoming more distant.

But in a funkified corner of Atlanta every Saturday, the spirits of disco continue to beat through the shows of Atlanta DJ Romeo Cologne.

Last weekend’s gig at the Clermont Lounge extended his run of 17 years of Saturday nights there – about 800 shows — with a regular crowd of 200 to 300 people. When we spoke a few hours before show time, the topic was staying power.

Even disco haters can appreciate this issue: When music anchors our memories, what happens when the musicians are silenced?

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Atlanta’s flag insult shows how Canada forgives, inspires

by Michelle Hiskey

Last weekend, the Atlanta Braves’ home stand once again offered a reminder of one country’s grace and civility in competition – and a story of one Georgia woman’s transformed understanding of that same nation, Canada.

At Turner Field, last weekend served as a paean to Sid Bream’s famous slide that sent the Braves to the 1992 World Series. Their series opponent was back in town — the Toronto Blue Jays, whose fans in 1992 got a chance to show their character when Atlanta botched a basic national symbol: flying a flag.

Imagine that happening the other way around. Granted, at that moment, the post-9/11 patriotic fervor was still a decade away. But would Americans simply let that go as an unintentional slight to Old Glory?

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For prolific Atlanta artist “Mr. Imagination,” sleep was rare

by Michelle Hiskey

The northwest Atlanta home of Gregory Warmack, better known in modern art circles as “Mr. Imagination,” was indeed a portal to a spiritual realm. This was no airy studio with someone dressed all in black. As a self-taught “visionary” artist, Mr. Imagination sculpted his own organic world where even circadian rhythms bowed.

In thick borders around each room and hallway, his layered, meticulously encrusted creations resembled masks, animals and common items like musical instruments. With a collection of things that had already lived once as common objects, he had wired, hammered, plastered and placed them into an extraordinary new life.

A few miles from the headquarters of the world’s most iconic brand – Coca-Cola – Warmack had compelled leading museums to carve out space for the lowly bottle cap.

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Replica of D-Day cemetery asks: Who is the hero of your story?

by Michelle Hiskey

For the past nine years, at the end of May, one man’s yard in northeast Atlanta quietly turns into a replica of a World War II cemetery in France. He covers his immaculately trimmed zoysia lawn on Ridgewood Drive with carefully-place white crosses in honor of D-Day.

David T. Maddlone, who works at nearby Emory University, always sets up in time for Memorial Day. He wants people not to forget 10,000 men who died on June 6, 1944. When asked to give everything to a cause much bigger than themselves, they answered yes.

Their answer poses this question today: What does it take for someone to be a hero like that — to risk one’s life for a greater good?

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While battling Vietnam scars, memoirist receives nearly $5,000 in city water fight

by Michelle Hiskey

While Christal Presley was uncovering her and her father’s scars from his service in Vietnam, she also ended up unearthing subterranean trouble familiar to other city of Atlanta homeowners:

Water meter problems.

Despite minimal water each month, and even in a city beset by the highest combined water and sewage bills in the country, Presley’s bills were about double her neighbors’.

To write her book and solve her water problems, she had to probe what for too long had seemed normal.

Answers came from questioning authorities – first her own father, and then the city of Atlanta.

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For Mother’s Day, honoring the singular toughness of Rochelle Bozman

by Michelle Hiskey

(Michelle is on vacation, so this column is a hold-over from last week)

Rochelle Bozman wasn’t a traditional mom, or traditional single mom. But she knew she didn’t need to be.

Ten years ago, Bozman sought to adopt a kid who was hard to place. She prepared a room for an African-American boy aged 7 to 10. But a social worker called one day asking if she could come to Grady Memorial Hospital right away to pick up a newborn.

Before she lost her struggle with ovarian cancer, Bozman raised her son with a singular toughness, and in the end arranged a new family for him.

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Limelight’s notorious hustle returns in new Buckhead mural, book

by Michelle Hiskey

The disco era took a lot of secrets with it, because no cell phones or pocket cameras were around to record the evidence of today. Today, Atlanta’s most infamous disco is back after 25 years – resurrected through a bright mural in Buckhead and a new book of 1980s photos that weren’t too risqué to publish.

Documented in “Limelight … in a sixtieth of a second,” are the nearly naked patrons of the club’s “Bare as You Dare Night… the skimpy loincloths of Jungle Night … the live female mannequins stretched out on a buffet table, covered with whipped cream.
“Indulgence. Excessive. Flamboyant,” said mural artist Dax, when asked to describe the disco era through his palette of neon colors.

“It was a very artistic, creative time,” club photographer Guy D’Alema said. “It’s interesting that art is now paying tribute back to the club. It’s come full circle.”

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For Decatur’s Intown Hardware, family and creativity will survive Wal-Mart

by Michelle Hiskey

When big-box Wal-Mart announced plans to move into indie-minded Decatur, neighbors mobilized protests.

A legal campaign began. Anti-Wal-Mart yard signs popped up. Across the road from the planned development, Tony Powers keeps the keen eye and taste that has made his family business – Intown Ace Hardware – survive and succeed.

As the world gets more homogeneous, his answer is a more diverse identity. His store’s evolving eclecticism mirrors the funky flowering of Decatur itself.

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Gary Edwards challenges stereotypes of accountants – and stereotyping in general

by Michelle Hiskey

It’s that season of certainty – tax season, representing one element of life we can all truly count on. And those who do the counting for us—accountants—are similarly bound by stereotypes: suits and numbers, professionally bound to never deviate from a norm.

Then there’s Gary Edwards, who naturally draws attention with his South African accent. His charisma builds as he tells stories from his world travels and shares insight about building friendships an increasingly global industry.

But he’s more than a stereotype buster. He’s also had his own assumptions shattered.

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Away from Facebook’s social circle, a connection to sacred circles

by Michelle Hiskey

This is the last week for “Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism” at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. Through May 6, “The Sacred Round: Mandalas by the Patients of Carl Jung” is on exhibit at the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art.

These kaleidoscopic circles offer a way to greater mindfulness that is so easy to lose – and thus so much more valuable — in today’s swirl of information, networks and distractions. In the age of technology, a mandala is a simple tool for staying focused.

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Common ground with the homeless raised as Easter approaches

by Michelle Hiskey

Regardless of religion, we all are equaled through humbling moments.

The Palm Sunday service at the Church of the Common Ground in Woodruff Park repeatedly chipped at the gap between the homeless worshippers and those who were much better .

Staring into a street person’s face to see the face of Christ is a stark discovery of one’s own neediness – for status, approval and fleeting comforts.

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Through writing and golf, Furman Bisher taught about life and death

by Michelle Hiskey

When Furman Bisher came into my life in 1986, I was fresh out of college, a whippersnapper sportswriter in awe of the legendary Atlanta Journal columnist. Aged 68, he seemed positively ancient.

Over the next quarter century, I studied the way he worked and wrote, and we became friends through our shared interest in golf – a sport that connects people of diverse ages and abilities.

When “the Bish” died a week ago, to me he was a young 93, because he changed my view of what it meant to grow old.

He did this by example — by living and writing the way he played golf.

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Andrew Crawford’s metal gates are passages of his own creative risks

by Michelle Hiskey

A garden gate by Andrew T. Crawford is a frame of beauty and a joy of metal.

It’s also a sign of the artist’s mid-career transformation.
Eleven of Andrew T. Crawford’s organically inspired gates frame the daffodils, tulips and hyacinths in the current exhibit, “Atlanta Blooms: 300,000 Watts of Flower Power” at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, through April. “I learned that you can change how you do something without changing what you do,” said the successful blacksmith who switched gears into more sculpture art at age 40. “Because of that freedom, I’ve done more honest work and met with more success.”

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Coyotes: Wily, hungry and attracted to Atlanta’s buffet of outdoor cats

by Michelle Hiskey

For those who link the ki-yotes’ plaintive howl to the romance of an old Western — the distant soundtrack as the cowpokes tell stories around the campfire – forget all that.

Coyotes’ story in urban Atlanta is about pests, pets and prevention.

Last week, Dr. Chris Mowry, a biologist from north Georgia who has studied coyotes, described their gritty survival skills to a crowd gathered at Fernbank Science Center for a forum titled, “How can humans and coyotes co-exist?”

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After quake, Braves pitcher Buddy Carlyle’s family helps stabilize Japanese single mom

by Michelle Hiskey

After 17 years in pro baseball, the Carlyles are used to rapid shifts in the foundation of their family’s life.

That’s why their family supporters are so precious to them, and that’s why when the earthquake shook Japan on March 11, 2011, the Carlyles pitched in to care for Akane Nakagawa, the single mom who had cared for them, and for her community that suddenly, desperately needed help.

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Georgia family with 14 children gives back through basketball fundraiser

by Michelle Hiskey

On Saturday at 7 pm at St. Pius X Catholic High School gymnasium, you can see a team of local lawyers show up on a different court against a squad of Atlanta doctors with a prescription for winning.

The game, billed as “Jawbones vs. Sawbones,” will be played the weekend before the ACC college basketball tournament in Philips Arena. March Madness kicks off with a bit of March Malpractice.

“I hope their cardiologist brings his paddles,” one lawyer joked in an email.

The game benefits Side by Side Clubhouse, a day program for people who have experienced traumatic brain injury – a population that has swelled with returning troops. Brain injuries have also become more publicized through athletic concussions.

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