Rusty's Blog

Amber and me on the Beltline

If the weather stayed like this forever I’d sleep in a tent in my yard. It makes even the most mundane errands a pleasure. I drove over to our storage unit to drop off an extra interior door we had sitting around with the windows down, iPod on shuffle… Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse, Mountain Goats, Hank Williams, Radiohead, various Motown, whatever …everything that came on sounded like I hadn’t heard it in years.

Sometimes in high school and college, when gas was cheap, I’d drive around aimlessly with the windows down for hours on end playing music too loud, getting lost, finding my way back. The first hint of springtime weather always reminds me of this.

Yesterday we walked a stretch of the Beltline between Glenwood Park and Boulevard. We saw a cold storage building with what looked like effigies hung outside, walked across the cool arched bridge over Ormewood, and took lots of photos. By the end of it my shoes were full of sand and we were planning our next walk. I hope we can see most of it before the kudzu grows too thick. Walking it makes me see what a fucking tragedy it will be if it never gets built. Many parts of this city are as beautiful as anywhere I’ve been in their own backwards way, and are fascinating to watch change (or not change) through the seasons.

Grilled mushroom burgers

There was also a lot of good eating, with trips to Highland Bakery (order the Country Fried Steak Benedict), The Pecan in College Park (delicious but overpriced Southern cooking), and to my back yard to fire up the grill for the first time this year (grilled mushrooms are going to go in almost everything I make for myself for the foreseeable future).

It may sound like some hippy shit, but I’m trying to just appreciate life and tune out all the bullshit that doesn’t matter. I find myself stopping in all sorts of places to take in the air or the sounds or the sights or the company and commit them to memory. Like Amber dancing to cheesy 80s songs from her old box of 45s we were playing an hour or so ago.

That’s what I want to spend my energy on, and fuck the rest of it.

My mom is on furlough from her job this week, which isn’t great on one level, but it did mean we got to eat lunch together today at Carolyn’s in Midtown. Last night I explained on the phone to her that it’s close to the corner of 14th and West Peachtree.

“You take 75 South to the 14th Street exit and hang a left,” I said.

“I know. I did grow up there, you know,” she said with a hint of exasperation.

She lives in Marietta now, but grew up in the same house on Calhoun Street near the Georgia Tech campus that her father grew up in.

As we ate today, she discussed a vacation she took recently with my dad to Oregon where they were given a private tour of the Spruce Goose. Then I told her about the trip to St. Augustine Amber and I are planning for next month, mentioning that we were going to go on a ghost tour.

“Mostly, I think ghost tours are a good excuse for people who are into history to talk about history without other people realizing they’re hearing about history,” I said.

We discussed other explanations of supernatural occurrences: materials absorbing sounds, hallucinations caused by poisonous chemicals, the Theory of Relativity.

Then my mom asked, “did I ever tell you about the Ghost of Calhoun Street?”

When my grandfather was a teenager, both his parents were killed in a car accident. They were severely burned and died about 24 hours after the fact. My Great Aunt Jane, who is my grandfather’s little sister, gave an account of this story when the Medical College of Georgia interviewed her a few months ago. I also have a video of her telling the story I will publish eventually.

Some years later after they died, a screen door on the house at Calhoun Street would slam open and shut over and over again at night. My mom and her brothers and sister heard it too. They would get up to look at the door sometimes, but there was no indication it had been jarred loose from its frame.

My mom said they figured it was just blown by the wind. My grandfather took it down one day, but the sound of a screen door slamming open and shut never stopped as long as they lived in that house.

I have not been writing much about mundane things in my life recently because for a while I wanted to just sit back and enjoy them and not think about them. I’m sick with the tail end of a cold right now and not enjoying my life as much as usual this week, so this is a good time to take note of a few things since the week is otherwise shot to shit.

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As you may have read elsewhere (Amani, Buzz, Doug, Grayson, BfD and BfD again and BfD again again, any more?), CBS 46 invited a group of about 25 Atlanta bloggers for what it described as a summit.

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You should read Doug Monroe’s piece from 2005 if you aren’t familiar with Paul Hemphill’s life and work.

I’ll just share scans of autographed copies of Paul’s books I’m blessed to own.

The first two were given to me by a friend and former DeKalb Neighbor colleague, who comments here as Blue sometimes. He’s responsible for turning me on to Paul’s work, for letting me tag along on a Government in Exile night at Manuel’s where I got to meet him, and for arranging to have these two copies autographed.

Long Gone by Paul Hemphill, autographed inside cover

Nobody's Hero by Paul Hemphill, autographed inside cover

The third is a copy I bought and stood in line to have autographed at his big signing party at Manuel’s a couple of years later.

Lovesick Blues by Paul Hemphill, autographed inside cover

I will always keep these.

God, Family & Country

A couple of months ago in an antiques store in Chamblee, I stumbled upon this LP titled God, Family & Country, recorded by the “irrepressible” former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox in 1971:

Album cover: Lester Maddox - God, Family & Country

This was the same store where I saw Malcom X air fresheners, and where we bought a turn-of-the-century bookshelf. It’s probably about time to take another trip over there to see if there’s any other neat furniture or unintentionally hilarious artifacts.

I don’t have a record player (I am about to remedy that), so this just sat on my shelf for a couple of months unplayed. Last night, I found out psychedelicatessen posted an MP3 archive of God, Family, & Country back in April, along with scans of the front and back album covers.

The back cover is chock full of pearls of wisdom from the former governor. Here are a couple of my favorites:

I never took a trip on drugs and got turned on for crime, anarchy, alcohol, drugs and immorality because I took a trip down the aisle of my church in 1932 and got turned on for God.

I will avoid obvious jokes. Next:

Not until recent years have I learned that I lived in twenty-five years of poverty, underprivileged and disadvantaged and didn’t know it. I just thought I was poor… And knew that I was privileged to be born an American… Under the private enterprise system where regardless of my material or social environment that I could make it.

Yes, the guy who shooed a black restaurant patron away by waving a gun at him and didn’t go to jail for it because he was a white man wrote that anybody can make it in the private enterprise system regardless of social environment.

So, how is the album itself? Here’s a sample track called Common Man which best encapsulates the rest of the record (from the psychedelicatessen rip, click over to his site to listen to the rest):

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The content is about what you’d expect: vague opining about the Yew-Ess-Uv-Ay’s plummeting morality and how the path to salvation is through God, Family and the Free Enterprise System. Unsurprisingly, the governor doesn’t have much of a singing voice. He was, however, a hell of a whistler and did at least have a passable backing band. Some of it borders on surreal in its unbridled earnestness, like overhearing a group of middle class teenage white boys talk amongst themselves after they read their first Ayn Rand novel.

Paul Wilson 45: Hippie Invasion and Poison Gas

Paul Wilson was a guy who did not take too kindly to the hippies I mentioned in my last post invading Byron, Georgia for the second edition of the Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1970. He was so mad he put out a record called “Hippie Invasion”:

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Rips of these songs from the original 45 were posted earlier today by Greg at the “irrepressible” Atlanta Time Machine. As a bonus treat, it had a B-side called Poison Gas which has an equally interesting story behind it that even includes a Lester Maddox tie-in. Click over to the Atlanta Time Machine for the full scoop.

Perhaps I only called Lester Maddox’s backing band passable on God, Family & Country because I had listened to Hippie Invasion a few moments earlier.

If you want some cheap entertainment, drive around to local antiques stores and look for boxes of old postcards like the one Amber and I went through at Avondale Antiques this past weekend. Sometimes the cards themselves have neat photos or artwork on them. Sometimes they’ll have something interesting written on them. You can usually buy them for a dollar or two if you feel guilty about standing there and reading without buying something else.

Atlanta Postcard from 1945

The most interesting part of this card to me is it appears as though the Stone Mountain monument is drawn on it in the second A and maybe the second T. The idea of the Stone Mountain monument goes as far back as 1912, but work on carving it didn’t start until 1964. Maybe there was something else that just looked like Stone Mountain? What else could it be?

(Update 1:51 p.m. – I misread the Wikipedia entry. The carving started sometime in or after 1916, stopped in 1928, and was resumed in the 1964. However, it still appears the card is based on artists’ conceptions of what would be there, and not what was actually there at the time. So it’s still strange. See this postcard on eBay that Greg linked to in the comments. Thanks Greg!)

Click through to the full version of this post card to read a note from Carolyn to Eddie written on March 8, 1945. Note also the “give to the war fund” post mark.

Inman Park Festival Postcard from 1980

Here’s the 1980 description of the Inman Park Festival found on this post card:

Stately Inman Park, Atlanta’s first suburb (c. 1890), hasn’t been the same since “urban pioneers” began rescuing its Victorian homes from slum lords in the 1970s. Each April the locals celebrate the neighborhood’s revival with one of the Southeast’s more offbeat festivals. It includes an elegant tour of homes, a bizarre parade, arts and crafts show, flea market, live music, and a host of jugglers, clowns and mimes. Y’all come.

I feel cheated that I never saw any jugglers when I went a couple of years ago.

The artist credited with the card’s design is James Flournoy Holmes, who is also notable for art on several Southern rock albums, including The Allman Brothers Band’s Eat a Peach and The Marshall Tucker Band’s first self-titled album.

Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau Postcard from the 1980s

Click through to the full version and check out CNN’s archaic computers, the Fox Theatre’s pre-digital marquee, and the Hawks’ awesome Dominique Wilkins-era uniforms. What I really want to know is what the hell is that structure in picture on the bottom row, second from the left?

Postcard from The Wren’s Nest

I don’t think this postcard is all that old. I’m guessing 1990s. Lain, do you have any idea?

(Update 2:30 p.m. – Lain thinks it’s pre-1985, but not much earlier. Read his comment for a full explanation.)

(Update 2:21 p.m. – I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Atlanta Time Machine’s awesome collection of Atlanta postcards. Just wait until after business hours to check them out. If you’re like me, you’ll get sucked in and spend hours there.)

After I started research about my grandfather’s playing career at Tech High and Georgia Tech last year, I had the idea that I might want to write an Atlanta history blog since I don’t know of anyone writing one. Speaking with my Great Aunt Jane recently has made me even more interested in the idea.

If you want to know how a lot of the posts would read, surf over to this Pecanne Log entry about Atlanta’s seedy past culled from various sources. That post even gave me an idea for what I’d name the blog: Snake Nation. Snake Nation was one of two sections of Atlanta “inhabited by the criminal element,” a “wicked suburb” which was “a great annoyance to the good citizens of Atlanta.” Perfect.

I have a lot of ideas for posts. I’d probably start out combining tidbits I found in books and old newspapers with some of my own family’s history. There likely would never be a shortage of material for “this day in Atlanta history” posts since Atlanta history is well-represented in books, but I’m betting there’s a lot of anecdotal history like Jane’s floating around that hasn’t been published many places, if at all. Ultimately, that’s what I’d like to find and write about.

Jane has been writing down her memories, which span about 35 single-spaced pages at the moment. To give but one small example of the stories I’d like to find and publish on this hypothetical blog, here is some of what she wrote about “Grandpa Tarrant” (my great great great grandfather William T. Tarrant). Emphasis mine:

Grandpa Tarrant was born in 1858 in Atlanta, on Whitehall Street, which was one of the main streets at the time. Atlanta was first called Terminus because it was where the first railroad into the town terminated. It was later named Marthasville after the daughter of an Ex-Governor, Wilson Lumpkin, who had been most active in getting plans for expanding the railroad systems. By 1845 Marthasville had three railroads that opened up transportation in all directions. This was the beginning of making our city into the “Gateway of the South.” In 1848, just ten years before Grandpa was born, the legislature incorporated the town and named it City of Atlanta. At the time it had twenty-one citizens, and its city limits were set a mile in all directions from the depot. Grandpa told us at the age of nine he remembered waving good-by to his daddy as he got on the train to go fight in the Civil War. His father had moved the family down to Stockbridge near some of his relatives when the “March to Atlanta” started in Tennesseee.

I never felt a sense of place growing up in Marietta or living in Knoxville when I went to school there. Much of my mother’s side of the family lived in Atlanta proper for about 100 years before moving to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. There is something comforting about living and working here that comes from this connection to the city’s history. Technically I live a few hundred feet outside the city border, but I still feel an obligation to be a caretaker of that lineage since I’m close enough.

The part that deflates me about the blog idea is the time commitment necessary to do it right would be too much for me right now. I’d want to, and have to, enlist the help of some co-conspirators. Having been on the other end of the “do you want to do a bunch of work for no pay?” question more times than I’d like to recall, I understand that the grocery store doesn’t accept good will and exposure. So I’m not optimistic that will work out.

I should note, for example, that I haven’t fact-checked the passage I quoted from Jane. That’s something I’d have to at least make an effort to do if I were writing a dedicated history blog, which could get very time-consuming very quickly.

So it may be a while. It may never happen. Maybe someone like the Atlanta History Center will start writing a really awesome blog with factoids like Peccane Log put together, and I can just be content to read it and continue research about my own family.

And it may be that something like this exists right under my nose and I just haven’t stumbled across it yet. Please tell me if that’s the case in the comments.

Update, July 4 10:13 a.m. – Actually, I probably wouldn’t call it Snake Nation since the Atlanta History Center ran/runs a “social club” by that name. I’m going to try to check it out if it still exists. It’s hard to tell since there doesn’t appear to be much recent online activity since 2007 and I can’t find info on the website.

I failed to mark the actual day (Thursday, Jan. 29) that we bought our new house on my blog, but I do want to write something down. So here’s a summary of some recent events:

• The process of buying and closing on our new house went surprisingly smoothly. It was quick and there were no major snags to speak of.
• Everyone we dealt with was both nice and competent. Our agent and lender were awesome. I’m now Facebook friends with both the seller’s real estate agent and with the closing attorney. The seller left us chocolate and champagne in our fridge.
• To be that person who talks about social media and calls it by its name for a second, it’s a very small world now. As soon as we walked in the office for the closing attorney, we were instantly recognized from Flickr photos Amber had tagged “East Atlanta.” Tagging Flickr photos “East Atlanta” causes them to show up in a badge on the EAVBuzz website, which is where the attorney saw them. There were already people talking about us and the house on there (which was simultaneously nice and a little weird).
• We’re planning to paint three rooms before we move in: the bedroom, the guest bedroom/Amber’s office/pole studio, and the kitchen. In that order, meaning if I’m sick of painting or we run out of time after the first two rooms are done, the Tennessee Orange kitchen may have to wait until after we move in. I’ll eventually want to paint my office, but it can wait until later.
• Painting will probably take us longer than it takes some people because I’m a firm believer you always need to use a coat of primer, even if the walls are already painted. Some of you will probably think that’s overkill since the walls are a slightly off-white cream color now, but you’re wrong.
• I’ve been shopping for tool sheds. I’d love to build one, but time, money, Amber’s aversion to wood sheds, and my aversion to plastic sheds won’t permit right now. We need to have some sort of storage out there by the end of March. That seems to narrow the options to an Arrow Shed. I dread buying one of these because of all the people writing about what a pain in the ass they are to put together. If you have a better idea, please share it.

That’s it for now. The lease on our apartment doesn’t run out until the end of March, which ought to give us a decent amount of time to paint and get moved over there. That date will creep up quick though, I’m sure.

This is two minutes of footage of birds I took in Piedmont Park this morning. Included: ducks, robins and mockingbirds.

I’ve also uploaded a higher-quality MP4 that’s a little less grainy than the blip player if you’re interested. Download here (about 43 MB).