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Posted inSaba Long

Peach Pundit helping Republicans find a pragmatic voice in local politics

by Saba Long

Atlanta politicos sometimes forget Republicans live, work and play in the city and also vote in municipal elections.

During the 2009 City Council elections, Peach Pundit, a right-leaning political blog I had been following for a while, had a “meet and greet” in Midtown, and only one candidate attended. That candidate ended up making a solid impression on the group of Republicans present, including Charlie Harper, the blog’s editor.

In a sea of partisan pandering, Harper is often a lone voice of reason — ready to call either side out on their respective shenanigans. Recently, he’s admonished Better Georgia, a progressive organization, for calling on Gov. Nathan Deal to publicly support Wilcox County’s first integrated prom.

Posted inMichelle Hiskey, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

In pollen season, Kirkwood’s old-school carwash hums

by Michelle Hiskey

Monday marked nine straight days in Atlanta of extremely high (over 1500) pollen counts. You can’t avoid the blanket of yellow green dust covering the city.

For Stuart Brady, the plague of pollen on our cars is almost a biblical call to atone through what his business serves: lots of water and your own elbow grease. At his Kirkwood Car Wash, three words preach from the shingled roof: “Honor Thy Auto.”

These days, the ka-ching of tokens in the self-serve machines is the reason Brady calls pollen “gold dust.” It also gives him hope that his slice of Americana might survive the relentless redevelopment that Atlanta is known for.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Cancer diagnosis led Atlanta INtown owner Wendy Binns, husband to adopt son from the Congo

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In September of 2011 at age 36, Wendy Binns was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma – breast cancer. At that Moment, the owner and publisher of Atlanta INtown newspaper joined the ranks of more than 200,000 other women – including Wendy’s mother – who are diagnosed with breast cancer every year.

Wendy had seen the toll the diagnosis had taken on her mother and her family and she knew the difficulty of undergoing treatments. But she also knew had her mother not been diagnosed, Wendy might not have been as vigilant and discovered her own diagnosis so early. The mother and daughter saw that as a gift.

“The most excruciating part of getting the diagnosis was having to pick up the phone and call her and tell her that her baby girl was diagnosed with breast cancer too,” Wendy told us in our accompanying Moments HD video.

Posted inSaba Long

Georgia political leaders are mining the state for strong candidates

by Saba Long

For Georgia Democrats, the ability to win the seat soon to be vacated by Republican Sen.Saxby Chambliss is improbable. Yet it could set the stage for the future of Democratic politics in the state.

There is much scuttlebutt surrounding the Republican primary and the merry-go-round of career politicians that have expressed an interest in the Senate race and possible subsequent open seats as a result.

Declared candidates include Congressman Phil Gingrey (R-Marietta) and Congressman Paul Broun (R-Athens).

Posted inMichelle Hiskey, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

Rain or shine, Drive Invaders make weekly pilgrimage to outdoor movies

by Michelle Hiskey

Every Wednesday night — even relentlessly rainy evenings like last week — a group of metro Atlantans reclaim a fun childhood memory and help preserve a piece of Americana that is rapidly disappearing from the nation’s landscape.

Last week, Suellen Germani and the rest of the Drive Invaders gathered to watch “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” at the Starlight Six Drive-In, the last outdoor movie theater in metro Atlanta. Instead of a playground, Germani and her grown-up movie companions each paid $7 to tailgate in the rain and watch the movie through wet windshields. The outdoor movie ritual reminds her of when she was around kindergarten age, at dusk on a playground at the foot of a giant movie screen. The memory always ended with her asleep in her parents’ car during the second show of the double feature.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Ann Curry’s Moment was served with a surprising offer at lunch two decades ago

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President and Owner of Coxe Curry & Associates Ann Curry had her Moment during a business lunch more than 20 years ago – presenting her with an opportunity that surprisingly summoned core values instilled in her decades earlier by her grandmother.

Ann’s Moment was during the summer of 1991 while she was chair of the board for Atlanta-Fulton Public Library Foundation. The library had formed a foundation to raise private money for the library system and had been working with a fundraising consulting firm, Coxe & Associates.

Posted inMichelle Hiskey, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

A vision and volunteers turn a toxic dump into Zonolite Park

by Michelle Hiskey

A raccoon’s muddy tracks are a small shining symbol of the transformation of an asbestos-laden wetland in northeast Atlanta into an Atlanta public park, and the perseverance of volunteers who envisioned that nature could trump industrial pollution.

Zonolite Park is 12 acres near Briarcliff and Clifton Roads, where for two decades beginning in 1950, freight trains stopped at the W.R. Grace Co. plant and dumped as much as 1,225 tons of raw material for attic insulation marketed as Zonolite. The park’s reinvention also shows how a supply chain can bring in business and killer byproducts. Reversing that damage took a chain of volunteers willing to help restore the ecosystem.

Posted inSaba Long

Invest Atlanta hoping to attract energy of young entrepreneurs to town

by Saba Long

For the past few years, many corporate and city leaders believed the Atlanta Development Authority (ADA), headquartered in a drab brick building, did not properly reflect the energy of the city.

What the research and development team is to a company, a development authority is to a city or state.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed is pushing the city to sharpen its competitive edge, starting with the rebranding of the Atlanta Development Authority, now known as Invest Atlanta.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Bill Clarkson’s Moment, battling a patient in a mental ward, propelled his career leading Atlanta’s Westminster

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Bill Clarkson, who recently announced plans to retire after 23 years as President of The Westminster Schools, remembers the Moment that prompted and propelled his career as a chaplain, educator and administrator. It wasn’t in the hallway of a school or a church – it was in the hallway of a psychiatric ward.

Bill was an 18-year-old freshman at Duke University and, as a financial aid student, needed a part-time job to help pay for his ungraduate degree. He found the job at the University psychiatric hospital – a line of work that seemed to align nicely with his interest in pursuing a psychology major. He worked four-hour shifts as a psychiatric attendant three days a week.

“You got to wear a white coat and look pretty official, but basically you were there to aid the doctors and assistants,” Bill recalled in our accompanying Moments HD video.

Posted inSaba Long

Solar energy — Georgia’s newest economic development opportunity

by Saba Long

Our capital city is often the state’s poster child for innovation delivery, but we may have just been one-upped on an unlikely category — sustainability — specifically renewable energy..

Situated between Savannah and Atlanta, Dublin is not the first place to come to mind when considering a government entity interested in a public-private partnership to provide solar energy.

Teaming up with Greenavations, the city and county recently announced a new project to install over 4,000 solar panels at Dublin High School. The move is expected to save the school $100,000 in the first year alone.

Posted inMichelle Hiskey, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

With guts and WordPress, Judi Knight reinvents herself and others

by Michelle Hiskey

Judi Knight saw it coming.

Atlanta property owners were falling into quick defaults over what she saw as “crazy loans.” Her loft conversions stopped “flying off the shelves.” She had to get out of the real estate business before the bubble burst.

On top of that, she’d gotten a divorce and had even let her license to practice psychology in the state of Georgia lapse, something her friends had urged her to maintain for job security. “I knew I wanted a different life,” Knight said. “It was like Cortez burning the ships. I didn’t want something to fall back on but I didn’t know what I wanted.”

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Alicia Philipp’s Moment demonstrated how a mentor helps many others stand up – literally

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By Chris Schroder

Alicia Philipp, president of The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, had her Moment 16 years ago when she spontaneously asked a question to a crowd of people and was surprised when nearly all of them stood up. That Moment taught her a lot about the value of mentorship and the special nature of her own mentor, Dan Sweat.

“I asked everybody in the audience who had been mentored by Dan to stand – not really knowing what the response would be,” she said.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Dennis Creech’s Moment sparked a career that helped Atlanta’s brand as a green building leader

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Dennis Creech, who today is the executive director and co-founder of Southface Energy Institute, was in graduate school training to be a systems ecologist when he had his Moment. Throughout his education in the 1970s, his focus had been aimed at improving environmental conditions, but it wasn’t until that day at Emory University that a, well, light bulb went off that pointed him in a unexpected direction.

As he was studying smog, acid rain, and even the water crisis of Atlanta, it dawned on Dennis that there was a common denominator to many of the threats to the environment’s health and sustainability – the consumption of energy.

Posted inColumns, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

After 41 years of pizza-based memories, Everybody’s closing

by Michelle Hiskey

Forty-one years of Everybody’s Pizza will end Tuesday, March 19 when the Druid Hills restaurant closes, and scores of longtime customers have been streaming in for their final fix, circling back to a place on the North Decatur roundabout that has been a hub for family milestones, and to say goodbye.

Shelly and Paul Legato drove from Athens Saturday night to pay homage to her neighborhood restaurant growing up and the spot where he proposed in 1996. From their marriage came daughter Stefanie and granddaughter Heidi; also along for the evening was their fourth generation, Shelly’s mother, Kelly McGlaun-Fields.

Posted inMichelle Hiskey, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

In Africa, former Atlantan helps kids One World Futbol at a time

by Michelle Hiskey

For a couple of weeks in 1996, Sandra Cress helped bring the world of soccer to Atlanta. Today she lives in Nairobi and is helping children around the world live healthier lives through one tough soccer ball that stays round when they kick it.

The standard soccer balls used across Atlanta suburbs don’t stand a chance in the thorns, glass and barbed wire of the developing world. There, kids create makeshift balls of rags or whatever they can find. Cress said she saw kids kicking a ball made of old fruit taped together.

The virtually indestructible One World Futbol, made of a hard foam similar to that in Crocs sandals, has already transformed Cress’ world and should inspire anyone with deep knowledge, contacts and enthusiasm that do not seem to fit in the present job market. The indestructible ball offered Cress an opportunity to come full circle in her passion for soccer and expertise in humanitarian aid.

Posted inSaba Long

Coming of age in a time of war

by Saba Long

Ten years is a lifetime when you are coming of age. For me, it has been a decade spanning adolescent angst to the nervous excitement of newfound freedom with life on a college campus to presently building a career and attempting to create a life of fulfillment.

Next week — March 19 to be exact — marks 10 years since the start of the Iraq War.

The day the United States was attacked and the Twin Towers came down, I watched my classmates cover their mouths in shock as we watched the news channel continuously loop the planes crashing, forever scarring the New York City skyline.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Meredith Leapley’s Moment was when her father closed his firm, sparking her to just start her own

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By Chris Schroder

Meredith Leapley’s Moment happened when the phone rang in 1999. Having moved to Atlanta from Maryland just a year earlier to run a branch of her father’s construction company, her heart sank when he called with some disappointing and life-changing news.

“My father called me and told me he was going to close our business and I was going to have to come back home to Maryland,” she said.

Still in her mid-20s, Meredith felt as though she was just establishing herself in Atlanta. In that year, she had grown so fond of her new city that she resolved to make a bet on it, deciding instead to stay and start her own construction business here.

Posted inMichelle Hiskey, Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

For African-American women, a hairstyle can be a tricky decision

by Michelle Hiskey

For African-American women, unemployment is 12.3 percent nationally, 13.1 percent in Georgia. That tough reality helped draw more than 100 black women to an event last week at Georgia State University focused on one decision that each of them faces:

What to do with my hair?

For them, preparing for a job interview or the first day of work isn’t as simple as deciding whether to go with the regimental blue-striped or the red power tie. Around the country, disputes over African American female hairstyles have led to accusations of wrongful firings and discrimination lawsuits.

Atlanta is where people notice, too; for example, TV news viewers spent decades obsessing over local anchor Monica Kaufman Pearson’s changing ‘dos.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2

Raymond King’s Moment in the doctor’s office led him to leave bank, lead Zoo Atlanta

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By Chris Schroder

Zoo Atlanta President and CEO Raymond King remembers the Moment the doctor looked him in the eye and said, “You’ve got lymphoma.” Today, he looks back on it as a blessing.

“I often joke with people that if you can be guaranteed of surviving it, then I would recommend cancer to you because of what it does to your outlook on life and how it allows you to see how blessed you are,” Raymond said.

Posted inSaba Long

City of Atlanta hosts key tech ‘Startup’ events; launches first ‘Govathon’

by Saba Long

The growth and support of Atlanta’s technology community was on display this past week with nearly each day showcasing a segment of the City’s startup firepower.

Dubbing itself “the largest gathering of startups since the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895,” Startup Rally kicked off Monday, Feb. 18 as an expo and internship fair. It also was the official launch of Startup Georgia.

The event featured a network of speakers, sponsors and technologists including Steve Case of Startup America; Sig Mosley, a well-respected venture capitalist; Scott Henderson, executive director of Hypepotamus; and even Jermaine Dupri of So So Def Recordings.

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