Rusty's Blog

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.

Both of these videos with my Great Aunt Jane were shot a little over a month ago and I just now got time to go through the footage and edit it. For now, I’m only posting videos from her which contain information that I think is interesting to a broader audience outside my family, but I might post more later.

Great Aunt Jane reacts to photos from Grady taken the night of the Winecoff Hotel fire

Allen Goodwin, who runs winecoff.org and co-authored The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America’s Deadliest Hotel Fire, contacted me after watching my first video interview with Jane. He asked me a few follow-up questions about the interview, and also asked me to show Jane a couple of photos he had to see if she recognized any of the subjects. She didn’t unfortunately, but she still offered a few interesting tidbits, which are included in this video:

Great Aunt Jane remembers The Skullbusters

I’d always heard about a group called The Skullbusters from my mom growing up, as her dad (Jane’s older brother) was a member. I never had a grasp on exactly what it was or what they did, but I did know a lot of people who were in it went on to become influential figures in politics, sports and business in Atlanta. Jane answers some of my questions in this video:

Amber has written several posts related to class consciousness recently, and it’s gotten me thinking about some of my experiences.

My mom worked and my dad stayed at home and didn’t work while I was growing up. If you were to hear my mom’s salary, you’d probably think we were rich. She owned her own business for over a decade, and at its peak her stated income was in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars per year.

But it didn’t work out quite so neatly either.

For one, my dad had an illness about spending money for a long time. I don’t know what the total damage ended up being, but I know at one point they were carrying tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt along with all their other bills. A lot of that paid for radio equipment that is still gathering dust and mildew in their basement or storage area, largely forgotten about.

For another, a lot of my mom’s salary that wasn’t paying down the insane credit card bills ended up going back into her company.

And for yet another, our house always looked like a goddamn bomb went off in it. Some of this was laziness. A lot of it was there being no money for basic maintenance because it had already been spent on other things. There has been a cockroach problem there for as long as I can remember. There’s lot of water damage from messed-up pipes.

And yeah, they valued education, and were paying to put both my brother and me through private school for a while. I transitioned to public school in the fifth grade, while my brother remained there all the way through high school.

So, we had a lot of the advantages, privileges and trappings that upper middle class or rich people have. But there was never a point where we were wiping our asses with dollar bills either. All the money that came in went back out the door. Both my parents are in their 60s now and still working, which I sure as hell wouldn’t be doing if I were rich and in my 60s.

I mostly identified as middle class, figuring that’s what it all balanced out to and since that was the lifestyle we generally seemed to live.

That meant when I was in private school, I was somewhat embarrassed about having friends over to my house. In large part because it was messy, but partially because there was a nagging feeling that they were looking down their noses at me (which they may or may not have been).

Amber talked about diversity at her private school and how intellect was appreciated and not made fun of. Culturally, my private school experience was more stereotypical, with a very homogeneous (i.e. almost entirely white) student body. But the appreciation for intelligence was evident there, as I learned when I went to public school the next year.

The fifth grade curriculum at the public school was mostly identical to the fourth grade curriculum I had at the private school, so I didn’t feel like I learned a whole lot that year. I didn’t quite fit in with the public school kids either; I felt a little above them, which I’m sure was equally as baseless as feeling inadequate around the private school kids.

As more time passed in public school, I eventually settled back into thinking that the rich people/preppy kids were looking down their noses at me, while simultaneously being aware that my family had a lot of luxuries that many of the other kids’ families didn’t have.

I am not trying to say I had it particularly rough, because I didn’t. I had it pretty easy on the whole. If I have a point in writing this, it’s that I think class labeling doesn’t really work as it’s typically applied. There are too many variables involved to just pigeonhole someone as poor or rich or upper middle class or lower middle class or whatever else.

I’ve been trying to make good on a goal I set more than a year ago to record more family history. My mom and I went to visit my Great Aunt Jane this past Saturday to shoot video of her telling stories about her life. We knew she had been a nurse, but we didn’t know until Saturday she had been a night supervisor at Grady Hospital in Atlanta on December 7, 1946, the night of the Winecoff Hotel Fire.

The Winecoff Hotel Fire was the worst in history at the time, and remains the worst in U.S. history, with 119 fatalities. In this video, she recalls her experience working in the morgue.

More information about the Winecoff Hotel Fire:

• Winecoff.org
• Winecoff Hotel Fire Documentary
• Winecoff Hotel Wikipedia entry
• Firefighter411: The Winecoff Hotel Fire

This is the third video episode of Mostly ITP. To get embed code for the video, click here.