Rusty's Blog

• Ever wondered how many historic markers are in Georgia, and how many of those are Civil War-related? Downhome Traces has you covered:

  Keep watching to see a neat idea for a cell phone application.

• The white boy with the black press has a new e-zine. Boyd Lewis, an excellent journalist from 1969 through 1997 in Atlanta, will send out his Tales of Old Atlanta e-zine once per week as a Powerpoint. I’ve converted the first edition, about Piedmont Park, to a PDF for easier downloading. If you’d like to subscribe, drop him an email at boydlewis90@yahoo.com and be sure to visit his website. You can also check out the interview I did with him on Mostly ITP back in 2007 if you’ve got 22 minutes and 1 second burning a hole in your work day.

• Learn about the origin of the Junkman’s Daughter sign. It’s a cool story written up on the AJC Insider blog by Jamie Gumbrecht. Also, related to the recent Paul McCartney concert in Piedmont park, she pointed to a great story about how an Atlanta hifi store pioneered a sound engineering technique in the mid-60s that is widely-used today. I dump on the AJC (Perimeter Journal Constitution? PJC?) frequently, but I love when they do features like those.

Great Aunt Jane in 1945

Like the headline says, turn to page 38 of the Summer 2009 MCG Today Magazine and you’ll find an article about my Great Aunt Jane. MCG Today is the magazine published by the Medical College of Georgia.

Jane had a lot of tragedy and sadness in her early years, some of which is documented in the article. But she persevered through it, and it’s been exciting to see her receive recognition for the interesting life she’s led. And if you’re looking for a new media success story, MCG Today found out about Jane’s story after watching this video I posted to Youtube:

(I’m still a little embarrassed I forgot to stuff the microphone cable in my shirt)

I have a video of her telling the story of when she found out her parents died, which is one of the topics discussed in the article. I’ve been debating whether I should post it or not, as it’s intense and personal. Maybe I will since the story is public now.

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.

Atlanta International Pop Festival poster. Image from Wikipedia.

Most of what I know about Atlanta music history I read in the newspaper and heard on the radio growing up, which doesn’t amount to much. I have vague memories of hearing Alex Cooley’s name attached to radio ads on 96 Rock and Z93 for a lot of the big name acts coming through town.

Ever since I ran into this photo gallery from the Atlanta International Pop Festival, I’ve been doing some reading, listening, and catching up on lore I probably already should have been familiar with.

Inevitably, I found myself reading a lot about Cooley and his longtime business partner Peter Conlon. The two of them were behind almost every big music-related event in Atlanta and seemed to have a stake in every popular venue from the 70s through the middle of this decade.

Cooley had little music industry experience prior to the Pop Festival. He went straight from owning a pizza joint where doo-wop groups sang on the weekends to organizing a two-day festival attended by close to 100,000 drug-dropping hippies from The Strip and elsewhere, military servicemen, vagrants and more squares than you might think.

Like most of the massive music festivals put on in the late 60s and early 70s, the potential for the love fest to spoil into a deadly Altamont-like eruption of violence was palpable. The blistering heat, the lack of amenities, and the drugs combined could easily have been deadly.

Decades after the fact in this interview with WABE, the terror in Cooley’s voice is still fresh when he recalls the moment where he looked at the sea of cars coming into town for the second edition of the festival in 1970 (start listening around the 8 minute mark):

I went up in a helicopter for the second Atlanta Pop Festival on Saturday morning. [ . . . ] That was in Byron, Georgia [ . . . ] somewhere between 90 and 100 miles south of Atlanta, and traffic was backed up from Byron, Georgia all the way up The Varsity in Atlanta. And as far as I could see in that helicopter — later, Peter Conlon, who became my business partner told me that he ran into stop and go traffic at The Varsity. But at the time when I was up in the helicopter 75 was just a straight line straight up to Atlanta, and cars were just backed up the whole way. And I thought then, “My God, what have I done?” I guess I had gotten some perspective on it, and that’s when I really got frightened thinking all these people are here and do we have everything that’s needed for people to live for three days. I wasn’t so sure we did. But it’s just amazing. People cooperated and people that lived there were turning their hoses on and letting people get water. It was just an amazing thing.

The rest of it is well worth a listen, especially when he talks about Music Midtown and how he envisioned it as an urban festival, not something that would be hosted “in Alpharetta” and the obstacles the city put in front of him. There are also some great anecdotes about band riders (see The Smoking Gun if you don’t know what I’m talking about) and his parting with Clear Channel in 2004.

And search Google for “Atlanta International Pop Festival” to find hours of reading material.

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.