For Morris Baxter, the Great Recession hit six years before the rest of us. In 2002, he lost his six-figure salary record label job and all the perks: the prestige, the travel, the expense account, the corporate card and the national hip-hop record promotions. Bitter and negative, full of self-pity, he had to find a way to reboot his life.
Category: Archived Columnists
Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2
Jerry Farber’s Moment was the first time he performed comedy for 300 guests – unexpectedly – at age 13
By Chris Schroder
Most people wouldn’t subject themselves to ridicule on their birthday – but then again, Jerry Farber and other professional comedians aren’t like most people. The veteran Atlanta entertainer and nightclub owner will celebrate his 75th birthday and career as a comedian with a traditional comic roast this Saturday night, March 2 at his Buckhead club.
Had it not been for Jerry’s Moment 62 years ago – when a terrible band and even more terrible comedian were losing the attention of 300 guests at his own bar mitzvah – Jerry may never have become “Atlanta’s Stud Muffin of Mirth” and “The Cowboy of Comedy.”
Posted inSaba Long
Fulton County Republicans propose legislation to fix dysfunctional county
“Fulton County is dysfunctional and overtaxed.” That sentiment has been the hook to a long song being sung by North Fulton Republicans for many years.
Three years ago, as a member of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, Lynn Riley sat in front of the county’s ethics board in response to a complaint by a few Democratic state representatives from the Fulton County Delegation. Her attorney during the case was State Representative Wendell Willard.
Now serving as the chairwoman of the Fulton County Delegation, Riley has cosponsored, with Willard and other North Fulton representatives, legislation that will enact sweeping, “burn the barn down” changes to the governmental structure of the state’s largest county and parallel legislation to allow for the re-creation of Milton County.
Posted inMichelle Hiskey
Amid loss, no tears from these Atlanta clowns
February in Atlanta is circus month, and but not all the clowns are goofing under the Big Apple and Ringling Bros. big tops.
Far from the spotlight, for all but two weeks a year, a local troupe of clowns managed to practice their craft for tiny, tough audiences: some of the sickest kids in Georgia, even some who are dying. As clowns, they’ve kept their show going on this year even after sudden loss in their own ranks.
For the surviving members of the Big Apple Clown Care Unit, creating laughter in the face of heartbreak has transformed them far more than wearing a funny hat, a fake nose and makeup ever could.
Posted inMoments
Larry Gellerstedt’s Moment led to creation of one of nation’s most successful children’s hospitals
By Chris Schroder
In 1995, Larry Gellerstedt III had a difficult choice to make. For nine years, he had been CEO of Beers Construction, a $1 billion firm his father had led before him. The firm had successfully served two long-standing clients that were also bitter rivals by dividing Beers’ healthcare division into two teams.
Things got awkward when the Egleston board asked Larry to follow his father onto its board even though he had led construction for its biggest rival. “I went to the chairman of the board and CEO at Scottish Rite and asked if this would be OK,” Larry said. “And they said no, it would not be OK – they wanted me to be on the Scottish Rite board.’”
Posted inMichelle Hiskey
Mardi Gras vibe inspires survival for Cajun and zydeco dancers in Atlanta
Carolyn Barbay of Atlanta climbed out of the grief she had over losing her husband by re-discovering the music of her home state of Louisiana and learning the Cajun two-step and waltz.
Instead of driving eight hours, she only had to travel a few miles to the Knights of Columbus Hall at Buford Highway near Lenox Road, home of the Atlanta Cajun Zydeco Association’s monthly fais do do (parties) featuring a live band playing authentic swamp music.
She found a tribe bound not by blood, geography, language, culture, ethnicity or religion, but by a deep love of the forward-driving, accordion-centric sounds of Acadian music from Louisiana.
Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2
Sally Bethea’s Moment led to a career of fighting for the Chattahoochee River and its tributaries
By Chris Schroder
Chattahoochee Riverkeeper Sally Bethea began her work with environmental conservancy groups in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until hearing Robert Kennedy Jr. make a stirring speech that she had a Moment that ignited her deep enthusiasm to focus her efforts on Atlanta’s waterway.
“I was looking for something that would get me involved in giving back and doing environmental advocacy in a more place-based and specific results sort of way,” Sally said.
Posted inSaba Long
Transportation Camp attracts usual suspects to explore transit advances
Technology is disrupting nearly every aspect of the transportation industry — whether its state-of-the-art robotics revamping the automobile assembly line to a computerized conductor system navigating the railroad tracks or a mobile application providing real-time train and bus locations.
Nearly 250 technologists, planning students, professional experts and other transportation enthusiasts gathered at Georgia Tech for TransportationCamp South, an “unconference” organized by New York City-based Open Plans — a transportation technology and planning startup. Previous launch cities include San Francisco, New York City, Montreal and Washington, DC.
Posted inSaba Long
Atlanta’s ‘start up’ community — turning hype into reality
Bash it all you want but the beauty of Twitter is moments like the one I had a week ago. I stumbled upon an online conversation about the ecosystem of Atlanta’s startup community and its relation to the city’s transit access – namely connecting the Atlanta BeltLine to MARTA.
The irony is hours before that tweet exchange took place, Scott Henderson, the executive director of Hypepotamus – an open gathering space for startup companies – gave me nearly the same line in an interview. “Density begets serendipity.”
Posted inMichelle Hiskey
George Bailey, teenage suicide and a temporary goodbye
Stories of recovery and reinvention inspire us, because they show us possible routes out of our own valleys. These stories prove that we ordinary people are capable of extraordinary resilience.
Each week since August 2011, I’ve told stories like that here. The column will continue, but without me for awhile. Starting next week, another writer will take over this space: Ben Smith, a former AJC reporter who is also my husband. He has written here previously about chicken nachos and his trail adventures.
My attention turns to my personal story of recovery. I believe that we must be brave enough to open up a dialogue about a subject full of stigma and denial: mental illness. If we don’t, too many of our stories, especially our children’s, will keep ending too soon.
Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2
Ken Thrasher’s Moment led him to re-evaluate his career path and launch a new business
By Chris Schroder
In 1979, Ken Thrasher was enjoying a successful career at what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers in Atlanta when he and his wife heard a Sunday sermon that prompted him to re-evaluate his life and to start his own business. Today, Bennett Thrasher is the ninth largest accounting firm in the city and its origins can be traced back to Ken’s Moment in the pews at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Snellville.
Ken and Cathy – then his wife of three years who was succeeding in her own career as a sales representative – were not unlike other couples: Busy climbing the corporate ladder without much perspective on their long-term paths.
As the couple listened to Pastor Fred Moore describe the importance of setting priorities in life, recounting how people often get so caught up in their careers that they neglect more important things such as family, Ken began to recall a Friday night during his high school years.
Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2
Herb Nelson’s Moment was watching 12-year-old son collapse on basketball court
By Chris Schroder
Three weeks ago, Herb Nelson sat in the bleachers as he watched his 12-year-old son playing on his all-star basketball team when he had a Moment that changed everything – his son signaled to his coach that he needed to be taken out of the game. A minute later, his son slumped to the floor and didn’t get up.
“He took a shot, kind of looked like he was tired, and asked to come out of the ball game,” Herb said. “About a minute later, he collapsed on the sideline.”
Herb and other family members rushed over to Jeremy Nelson and worry struck, as it would strike any parent. They watched as a doctor – also in the stands that night – check Jeremy’s vital signs.
Posted inSaba Long
Open U.S. Senate seat could have a domino effect on Georgia politics
For a few politicians and political advisors, the past few days have been filled with rapid fire text messages and battery-draining cell phone calls about the biggest news to impact metro Atlanta in quite a while — the 2014 election to replace retiring U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss.
The first — and only to date — polls released jointly by political consulting firms H.E.G. and Apache just hours after the announcement already has Georgia Republicans and Democrats strategizing on how to ensure their party secures the open seat.
Posted inMichelle Hiskey
For 15 years, the mark of an Atlanta newcomer: a 678 phone number
Fifteen years ago this month, 678 became Atlanta’s third telephone prefix, and every call became a 10-digit dial. Today, when smartphones let us tap to connect, it’s easy to forget past milestones in how Atlantans connect – and what those turning points meant in the perception of the city’s growth and who we are.
For many native Atlantans inside I-285, there’s 404 and everything else. That’s what they grew up with. The 770, 678 and 470 will always belong to the Johnny-come-latelys and suburbanites.
The 404 prefix is dialed into their identity, a shared jersey number for the veterans on Atlanta’s home team. It is a holdover from a simpler time, before the rest of us got here and made life a whole lot more complicated.
Posted inMoments, Moments Season 2
New Season of Moments – sparked by a Friday morning conversation – returns next week
I seem to remember Moments. I can’t tell you the name of the movie I saw last week, but my friends look to me to remind them of scenes from our childhood and high school years. I also remember the day I came up with the idea for this Moments column that we’ve been publishing since last January.
It was on September 7, 2011 – just a few weeks after Maria Saporta asked me to join in the fun and contribute a weekly column to this increasingly popular journey in journalism that we call SaportaReport – that the idea first struck me. I was sitting quietly at a table at On the Border restaurant in Buckhead as my Friday Morning Men’s Fellowship group. My weekly table-mates were discussing the Bible passage in which Saul was struck by lightning – and blinded – while on the road to Damascus.
Posted inMichelle Hiskey
Amid change in Oak Grove, chicken nachos never dip as a Saturday ritual
South Philly owns the cheesesteak.
The deep-dish pizza rose from the north side of the Chicago River.
The best chicken nachos ever can be found at a butcher shop and delicatessen in north suburban Atlanta.
That’s no brag, just fact, according to the regulars who swarm into Oak Grove Market every Saturday for a plate of the eatery’s number one seller.
More than a taste, the nachos are a tradition that helps keep this small business going in the recession, and gives people a one-of-a-kind experience that they won’t get at a chain restaurant. It’s the same recipe, the same day of the week, at the same place – chicken nachos transformed into a social anchor.
Posted inMichelle Hiskey
Waffle House, Waffle Palace set stage for family memories and cult status
As a transplanted Northerner, I misunderstood Waffle House for many years. Wasn’t it just a kitschy Southern chain of roadside dives, frequented by truckers, cheapskates and all-night partiers?
So wrong. Way too many stories, families and milestones stack up at the Waffle House against that easy bias. The restaurant’s 24/7/365 reliability across a network of locations has been going so strong for so long (since 1955) that American culture – not just Atlanta’s — is scattered and covered with Waffle House stories.
Locally, the Waffle House mystique is celebrated on stage with last week’s return of the home-cooked play, “The Waffle Palace: Smothered, Covered & Scattered 24/7/365,” at the Horizon Theatre.
The play’s cast and writers met up with restaurant fans and regulars last weekend at the Waffle House Museum in Avondale Estates. The line between real waffle memories and made-up waffle drama melted like butter on a hot griddle.
Posted inSaba Long
Local entrepreneur plans to make Atlanta the tech hub for the Southeast
Atlanta Tech Village is not an technology incubator; it is a community center for tech companies and tech startups, David Cummings says explicitly.
Cummings recently sold Pardot, a marketing automation company he cofounded, for $100 million, and he is on a mission to bring cohesion to Atlanta’s technology sector. He plans to do so by creating Buckhead’s first technology community center, Atlanta Tech Village (ATV).
Conjuring up the idea just two months ago, Cummings has already secured a building and tenants. Located at 3423 Piedmont Road, where the Atlanta Business Chronicle currently is located, ATV will be centrally positioned between the north Fulton tech companies, investors and Tech Square, Georgia Tech’s technology hub.
Posted inMichelle Hiskey
Counting squirrels adds quirk to Inman Park
By Michelle Hiskey
In the 1880s, a dreamy question created the east Atlanta neighborhood of Inman Park: “What if… the streetcar connected downtown with a posh suburb?”
Today, a funky obsession has connected neighbors there: “What if all the squirrels came down from the trees and attacked us in an apocalyptic nightmare?”
From the imagination of local writer Jamie Allen came the acorn that grew into the Inman Park Squirrel Census. From this nutty (to some) idea unfolded a modern fable, a tale of harnessing curiosity and technology to transform how we see our surroundings.
Grounding their wildlife watch is some hard cash: through the social media incubator Kickstarter, the squirrel census recently raised $9,000 to form an LLC and print and sell vintage-style posters of where the squirrels are.
Posted inSaba Long
New arts organization – c4 Atlanta – to foster creative class and intown revival
For two metro Atlanta natives, Jessyca Holland and Joe Winter, their employer’s downsizing forced them to the drawing board. Just hours after getting the boot, the two met for coffee and drafted a business plan for an arts services organization that we now know as c4 Atlanta.
The organization is one of nearly 2,000 cultural non-profits in metro Atlanta that generate more than $502 million in revenue, according to a recent Atlanta Regional Commission analysis. The Great Recession shook the foundation of many arts-related organizations with inevitable downsizing of programming and staff, and for some, shutting the doors.
