Home » Archived Columnists » Page 21

Category: Archived Columnists
Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

Rev. Joe Roberts followed in the footsteps of both Martin Luther Kings, except for one 1964 Moment

Avatar photo by adminmegan

By Chris Schroder

Rev. Joseph Roberts wasn’t prepared for all the adulation he was receiving as he glided down the aisle of a church in the northern New Jersey city in which he had been named pastor of a small Presbyterian congregation a mere two weeks earlier. It was a stirring and soon-to-be embarrassing Moment for the man who would later follow Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. in the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

In a city of relatively few historically significant buildings, Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church stands as a touchstone to American history: the birthplace of the civil rights movement that changed the course of our region and nation.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

Back from Harvard, amidst detritus of Vietnam, Plemon El-Amin had a spiritual Moment

Avatar photo by adminmegan

By Chris Schroder

Imam Plemon El-Amin looks back now over his 33 years as leader of one of the region’s largest mosques, as well as the largest Muslim educational program in Atlanta that he helped establish. The Atlanta native traces his conversion from Christianity to Islam as a Moment after he returned from graduating at Harvard in 1972 and found his community devastated by the drugs and physical scars of the Vietnam War.

Growing up near Spelman and Morehouse colleges in southwest Atlanta, schools his family traditionally attended, Plemon sensed he had a broader view of the world so he applied and was accepted at Harvard, MIT and Princeton. He returned to a city in which “my friends were coming back from Vietnam addicted to heroin, or handicapped or in body bags.”

He owned and operated a paint store, and helped with his family’s construction company, but he grew increasingly troubled at the political unrest engulfing the country. He was a member of Providence Baptist Church, “an intellectual Christian congregation which included members such as Benjamin E. Mays, who was a frequent speaker. But the church didn’t have an answer for what was happening around me.”

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

Bob Williams scored his Moment announcing the Hawks-76ers sellout game at age 23

Avatar photo by adminmegan

Bob Williams was looking for a job after he graduated from UGA in 1975. The one thing he knew about himself was that he loved sports. So he wandered into the offices of the Atlanta Hawks and offered to work for free.

The NBA team accepted his offer and found a place for the man who is today president of the team and its arena.

The Hawks actually paid Bob $500 a month to go around the state and organize high school match-ups before the NBA players took the basketball court. Making deals with coaches to sell 500 tickets in towns such as Rome and Chatsworth, Bob got to know the players and later announced their games over the PA (public address) system in the Omni, where the Hawks played until 1997 (before Philips Arena replaced it).

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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?

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

Gary Price’s traumatic Moment changed his role as father and boosted his professional confidence

Avatar photo by adminmegan

Gary Price thought things were going well in his 15-year-marriage, so he concentrated on his accelerating management career at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Atlanta. Then, being “a typical male, I outsourced all the stuff at home.” His Moment occurred without warning nine years ago, when “my wife decided to walk out of the house and leave me with raising three kids, ages nine, six and two.”

Gary’s journey as a single father paralleled his rise of becoming managing partner of 1,400-plus employees at PwC’s Greater Atlanta market.

An Ohio native, Gary joined PwC’s assurance division, providing counsel to transportation and manufacturing clients after graduating from Ohio State in 1983. He moved to Atlanta in 1999 to lead the firm’s work on the Delta Air Lines account.

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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?

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

John Dewberry shared many happy Moments with his dad – and a sad one he kept secret for a while

Avatar photo by adminmegan

By Chris Schroder

John Dewberry generated a lifetime of headline-generating sports and business Moments that he was proud to share with his father, but one very personal Moment they shared – undergoing cancer surgery on the exact same day – was one John chose to keep a secret until his dad was in recovery.

“I had not told him about my cancer because I didn’t want him worrying about me,” John told us when we videotaped his Moments video. “I didn’t want him to be expending energy worrying about his son because I knew that was exactly what he would do.”

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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.

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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?

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

Milton Little’s Moment was a girl’s kiss that led to a career with United Way

Avatar photo by adminmegan

Milton Little Jr. was working for a nonprofit education and social policy research organization in New York City in 1989, when his outreach to the disadvantaged suddenly got up close and personal.

“I felt I was doing a good job of giving back because of my profession,” he said in our accompanying video. “She decided she was going to crawl in my lap, she put her arms around me and kissed me on my cheek and told me to ‘keep reading.’”

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

Hope Arbery’s Moment returned her to a childhood passion and began a home-based business

Avatar photo by adminmegan

Hope Arbery was a young successful real estate attorney when she was assigned a case for which law school did not prepare her: how to balance the demands of a growing practice with her developing desire to stay home raising two young boys.

Deliberating the issue while at home on an extended break from the firm, Hope’s Moment occurred when her next door neighbor called.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

Bo Jackson’s Moment was deciding which path to follow after his 16-year-old son died unexpectedly

Avatar photo by adminmegan

Bo Jackson was driving urgently down New Providence Road in Alpharetta on the foggy, rainy election night of November 7, 2006, hoping and praying his – and any parent’s – worst nightmare was not about to unfold before his eyes.

Bo’s Moment wasn’t when his son Parker died; it occurred months afterwards. “I was forced with a decision and a choice,” he says in our accompanying Moments video, filmed at Parker’s grave. “How was I gonna react to this tragedy? Was I gonna to let it bury me or was I going to rise above it?”

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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.”

Posted inMichelle Hiskey

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.

Posted inMoments, Moments Season 1

Lisa Borders’ Moment helping to integrate Westminster provided life and career lessons

Avatar photo by adminmegan

Seventh grade can be an awkward time for any student, but for former Atlanta City Council President and current Grady Foundation President Lisa Borders, helping to integrate an independent private school in Atlanta made it especially challenging.

“What I learned is that I had the capacity not only be at that school, but to excel, and it taught me to deal with adverse circumstances, always,” Lisa said.

Gift this article