Season 1 of Moments
When Noel Khalil moved to Atlanta in 1983, chasing development deals on the affluent north side of Atlanta seemed as natural to him as it was unusual to the white men who dominated the industry in that part of town.
After closing a few deals in the northern suburban counties of Atlanta, Noel was surprised when the secretary of Atlanta’s most prominent African-American developer called to say her boss, Herman Russell, wanted Noel come to his office for a meeting.
By Chris Schroder
Chuck Leavell leads a musical life that most guys would trade everything to have – playing keyboards for the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton the Allman Brothers and later next month with John Mayer – but his Moment was one all the ladies will love.
Now at age 59, looking back on all that rock ‘n’ roll, Chuck really wants to talk about his true loves: his wife, family and his deep abiding care for the environment, support for which he is spending an increasing amount of his time and treasure.
By Chris Schroder
For more than 20 years, Bill Nigut was a mainstay of Atlanta’s WSB-TV’s political coverage and it looked like he would end his career there – until the day in 2002 when his Leadership Atlanta class walked into a non-profit taking care of international refugees in Clarkston. That was the Moment that changed his life.
“Compared to what those people are doing in Clarkston, all I do is blab on television every day,” he thought. “I really need to make a change. I need to get across the wall that separates reporters who are observers from the leaders who are making a real difference in our community.” Today he’s Southeast director of the Anti-Defamation League.
As I watch Dr. Evelyn Wynn-Dixon glide into her stride, telling her life story, I try to brush away a nagging premonition that we might soon see her firing up a Monday night crowd at a national political convention – but then again, other people’s premonitions is how she ended up in the mayor’s chair of Riverdale, Georgia.
Evelyn was driven to find a way out of her situation for both her and her children and serves now as an inspiration to her seven grandchildren and others who meet her.
Steve Nygren’s decades-long work amidst the rolling farms and forests of Chattahoochee Hill Country in south Fulton County is akin to a sculptor carefully studying each sliver of stone before slicing it from an eventual masterpiece.
Steve’s Moment occurred in 2000 when he and his daughter were jogging along the property line and their bucolic run was disturbed when they came upon bulldozers tearing down trees in the forest next door. Many in his situation would have shrugged their shoulders and planted a long row of leyland cypress. Others might have bought a different farm, further from Atlanta. Steve decided to stay and fight. His life changed, again, that instant.
If a boss in Philadelphia hadn’t called Chris White into his office one moment 35 years ago, hundreds and perhaps thousands of men in Atlanta would be a lot more spiritually adrift today. Count me as one of them.
Within a few years, a hundred men were walking into an Atlanta restaurant at 7am each Friday to hear Chris lead them through a a few passages of the Bible. Chris can look back on a brilliant case study of word of-mouth marketing, counseling men to be leaders in the office and servants to their wives and children at home.
The economic downturn has been tough on millions of Americans and 24-year-old Atlantan Josh Starks was just one of the recession’s many casualties. By the afternoon of October 13, 2010, Josh said he had “pretty much lost everything that I worked hard for in life. You name it I lost it, or had to get rid of it to pay a bill or because I couldn’t find any work.”
When he woke up that Wednesday morning, Josh didn’t plan on that being his last day on the planet and he certainly didn’t plan to be on that night’s TV news, attracting headlines around the world.
To view Josh Starks’ Moments HD video, click here.
I thought BeltLine visionary Ryan Gravel would say his Moment was when he looked at a map of the city of Atlanta, saw the 1800s-era railroad tracks outlined and had an “ah-ha” moment. He says he’s often asked if the idea came to him all at once, but it actually marinated slowly, sparked during his senior year in college when he rode trains all over Paris and later when he returned to the traffic-clogged streets of metro Atlanta.
“My moment was in 2003, when I realized we might actually build the BeltLine,” he said.
Please view our HD Moments video with Ryan Gravel.
SaportaReport is re-running Season One of Moments for your enjoyment. This column originally published in January 2012.
When a young Sam Massell went in to see his boss, the future mayor of Atlanta thought he was in line for a big raise. Instead he got fired for all the right reasons and it was one of the best things that ever happened to him – and our city.
As Sam recalls, “I went in shock. At 24, those were heavy words.” He tried talking his boss into keeping him, reciting all his excellent work, but it was all for naught. Instead his boss urged him to go into real estate, “the real market in this city.” Please watch our 2-minute video of Sam’s Moment.
SaportaReport is re-running Season One of Moments for your enjoyment. This column originally published in January 2012.
When we sat down with former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin in the conference room of her new office at Purpose Built Communities where she is now the CEO, she was clear she wanted her Moment to be “strategic.” It wasn’t until we were packed up and leaving a little later that we truly understood her meaning – giving us a sense that she’s been strategic since she was a young child in a Philadelphia dance class.
Video Shirley Franklin’s HD Moments Video.
Consumer advocate Clark Howard came home for Thanksgiving from his sophomore year in college and faced a very grim household. From the sad faces he found around his family’s dinner table, he knew something bad had just happened.
When the dishes were cleared from Clark’s holiday table, his father asked him to stay afterwards to talk with him alone. Clark’s first guess when he saw his relatives’ faces and his father’s “awful” face, was that his father was going to announce that he was dying, he told us in our Moments HD Video.
My brother Jack and Karen started a New Year’s Eve tradition a few years ago amongst their retired friends at Big Canoe in the north Georgia mountains that is unusual.
It’s perhaps the only New Year’s Eve party in America for which people call up the hosts all afternoon and ask, “What time does the ball drop?”
You see, Jack starts playing a videotape of the previous year’s Times Square ceremonies about 9:30pm so everyone can go home early and be in bed before anyone notices the “new” year looks a lot like the previous one.
A few weeks ago, I saw Clark Howard working out at the YMCA. He and I seemed to be on the same every-other-day schedule at the time. I try not to stop and talk to celebrities or well-known people. I have no interest in autographs and I try to respect their privacy. But Clark was a year ahead of me in high school and I had interviewed him once before for our school magazine in the early 1990s.
Please watch our one-minute video preview of “Moments,” our new weekly glimpse into the men and women whose own personal moments have changed metro Atlanta: http://goo.gl/uc5h0
Two former mayors, Sam Massell and Shirley Franklin, former Georgia Tech graduate student Ryan Gravel who envisioned the Beltline, radio personality Clark Howard – and many others who aren’t so famous – will share their insights into a time when everything changed in their lives. The videos will last only a minute, but we’ll place them into context with an adjoining column.
When I was an editor of my weekly paper in college, I was invited by Staige Blackford, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, to join a lively morning coffee group. You never knew what the gathered professors or writers were going to discuss each morning, but you knew the conversation was going to be interesting.
When SaportaReport launches our Thought Leadership pages in January, readers of this website will be able to join a lively discussion on a wide variety of subjects over the course of 2012.
For nearly three years, SaportaReport has brought you closer to the issues and the diverse personalities that comprise our metro area. Beginning in January, we’ll bring you a little closer with “Moments,” a new column featuring an interview with and a one-minute video of famous and not-so-famous metro Atlantans.
We’ll ask each to share a moment in their lives when, suddenly, everything changed. As we catalog these moments, we hope they’ll add even more value to the mosaic of metro Atlanta stories our team of journalists is weaving on this website called SaportaReport.
By Guest Columnist CHRIS SCHRODER, publisher of saportareport.com, president of Schroder Public Relations and a former newspaper reporter and publisher
A few years ago a woman called me in desperate need of communications help. She had just left a top law firm in the city, was hanging out her own shingle and was hoping to attract clients to her new business. She had one minor problem: She could not begin to explain to me or anyone else what it was she actually did in her job.
By Guest Columnist CHRIS SCHRODER, a former newspaper reporter and publisher, is president of Schroder Public Relations in Midtown Atlanta and chief operating officer of saportareport.com
I fancy myself to be a professional communicator – and after 22 years as a newspaperman and 9 years of running my own public relations firm in Midtown Atlanta, I suppose I have a little bit of “street cred.”
But it doesn’t take long for me to be humbled, particularly by my 94-year-old mom.
