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July 2008
Crematory opponents all smoke
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I didn’t see the body. It had already been loaded into the cremation chamber.
By the end of the three-hour process, temperatures would top 1,600 degrees. Heat engulfed the entire building, so Chris Nuzum, owner and president of Cremation Society of the South, and I stepped into the chapel.
On Wednesday, the Badie Tour did what Nuzum has asked Snellville city officials and its residents to do: Have a look-see at his Marietta facility off Franklin Road.
Nuzum and his partners find themselves steeped in Snellville stew. They want to operate a crematory in a former house at the corner of Abington Drive and U.S. 78. It’s zoned “Office Professional,” a city classification that allows the operation of funeral homes, mortuaries and “crematoria” — the technical term for crematory.
Residents whose homes back up against the site are enraged — and quite imaginative. They envision dead bodies being unloaded from the back of hearses at all hours. Ashes will spew from the smokestack, coating cars and homes. Potent toxins will be emitted.
This is how crazy things have gotten: A woman recently called Snellville police to report that smoke was bellowing from the smokestack. Only one problem: The facility hasn’t opened yet and may not do so for a while.
This week, Mayor Pro Tem Warren Auld and Councilwoman Kelly Kautz expressed worries about the business’ environmental impact.
Then on Tuesday, City Manager Russell Treadway announced plans to do some research on crematories as they relate to health issues.
He may not be privy to some information that Nuzum has provided council members via e-mail and shared with me.
I won’t delve into mercury emissions, pounds and percentages, but suffice it to say the Environmental Protection Agency isn’t losing sleep over crematory toxins.
Nuzum appears willing to work with Snellville City Hall and its residents. He encased the smokestack in vinyl, among other adjustments. He plans to use a company van instead of a hearse to transport bodies.
He’s offered to attend a question-and-answer session. He even offered to rent travel buses to transport residents to his Marietta site.
Of course, he’s adhered to city zoning law.
“I feel like I have been given a ticket for speeding because I did the speed limit,” said Nuzum, who spent $250,000 on renovations. “This business is being persecuted by people who don’t want to learn more about it.”
Instead of posturing, city leaders should tell the riled residents there isn’t much government can do to stop a business located in the proper zoning classification. Tell them they’ll re-tool the existing ordinance as it relates to crematories so this kind of pickle never happens again.
I feel bad for the residents, but at least this isn’t a Love Shack. Besides, they should be ticked off at City Hall, not Nuzum.
“Everybody keeps saying we’re in a neighborhood in Snellville,” he told me. “If that’s the case, this neighborhood has a Dunkin’ Donuts in it and an attorney’s office.”
In Marietta, a condo unit is right next door to Nuzum’s business. Another one is across the street. Up the road is a Crowne Plaza Hotel, not to mention an office complex and a few restaurants.
When the crematory was operating Wednesday, I didn’t smell anything or see any smoke. Nuzum said one might see smoke — not ashes — from a crematory smokestack in the winter due to heat exchange.
After the cremation process is complete, the remains are scooped into a holding bin, then transferred to a spinner for further refining.
The ivory-colored by-product is placed in a container, or urn, along with a stainless-steel tag that identifies the body. It costs $795 to cremate a body. (Cremation Society of the South takes fingerprints and uses other measures to track and identify bodies.)
“Death is disconcerting to all people,” Nuzum said. “It’s a difficult subject to discuss, but it’s good to know that businesses exist to take care of families.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail:rbadie@ajc.com.
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Teacher ‘hit me’ : impact remains
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the 1970s, Berlyn Smith was a special needs student in a regular first-grade class in a Cobb County public school.
One day he came home subdued, a lot less jovial than usual. “He wasn’t happy at all,” recalled his mother, Alpha Smith. She asked him a couple of times what ailed him. All Berlyn, who’d suffered brain damage from an illness, could muster was “[teacher’s name] took a piece of wood and hit me.”
“That’s all he knew how to say,” Smith said. “He’d never had a spanking before.”
The next day, Smith spoke with the teacher. She admitted to spanking Berlyn. The offense: The youngster, while sitting at his desk, had let his feet dangle in the aisle. Smith explained that her son had had no idea why he’d been spanked. She asked the instructor if there might have been a better, instructive way to handle the matter.
Tell Berlyn, perhaps, not to put his feet in the aisle and why - that someone might trip, fall and get hurt.
“To paddle him and send him home without [his] even knowing why he was paddled didn’t teach him anything.”
She shared this story with me after Sunday’s column about corporal punishment, a dressed-up word for paddling, spanking or whipping. It was prompted by the Twiggs County school board’s decision to reinstate paddling in that Middle Georgia district for the upcoming school year.
I gave reasons why corporal punishment should be banned in Georgia’s public schools. They were backed by Alphonsa Foward Jr., director of the New Life Academy of Excellence Inc., a Norcross school that my first-grade daughter, Olivia, attends.
As imagined, the column generated tons of response, and save for one nut who posted an inappropriate comment in my blog, readers were serious. On topic. Many fell in the no-spanking category.
Robert Fathman, president of the Ohio-based National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools, e-mailed a response: “Your [child’s] principal is a wise man,” he wrote. “African-American kids are hit at more than twice the rate of white kids, and Hispanic kids are hardly struck at all. There are cultural divides all over, and no one should be in the business of picking up a board and hitting someone else’s child.”
Smith, 72, a retired paraprofessional, explained that she had a personal story of why campuses are no place for paddling. Back to her tale.
When she talked to the teacher who’d spanked Berlyn, she uncovered the truth. The educator had been spending weekends in Tennessee attending to a sick parent. When she returned to Cobb, she’d head straight to school with no respite. Exhaustion was the reason she brought out the paddle. Nothing else.
“She said she just didn’t have the energy to handle it,” Smith said. “And she was a seasoned teacher.”
Just think, Smith asked, how many children might be unjustly paddled - possibly abused - on campuses where corporal punishment is permitted. She’s right. One is too many.
“I hurt thinking how many children are being spanked, beaten - whatever - by teachers and parents who are taking their own frustrations out on the kids,” Smith said. “And not accomplishing anything.”
Today, Berlyn is 44 years old. He lives with his parents in Loganville.
About 20 years ago, the teacher who’d paddled him died. His mother made note of her passing.
“The first thing he said is, ‘She is the one who paddled me, right?’ ” Smith said. “He has never forgotten that.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Stinging thoughts of school spankings
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I can still see the paddle and the principal who wielded it. Mr. Banks. As old-school as they come.
He had holes drilled in his wooden paddle to cut down wind resistance. To make that sting really bite when wood met behind.
That’s the way it was back in the day, when I was in school. Corporal punishment, at least in elementary school and middle school, was de rigueur.
Now, in Twiggs County, it’s back. The middle Georgia county’s school board recently voted to reinstate paddling. Parents, according to an Associated Press report, will have to sign a permission slip for their kids to be spanked; they also can opt out of the program. Witnesses must be present when the punishment is meted out.
The debate on whether to paddle or not, if it even deters improper behavior, continues to rage on. Generally, I’ve found that pro-spankers base their assessment of the matter on two factors:
It’s the way they were raised. It worked for them, and they weren’t severely scarred or demeaned by it. “A good whack on the behind never hurt anybody,” they say. “That’s what’s wrong with kids today,” they opine. “They don’t fear getting their butts spanked.”
They think paddling kids will help restore order in schools gone wild. Maybe, just maybe, it will fill a vacuum in which too many kids, on too many campuses, show scant respect for their peers, much less teachers. Fear of what’s to come, notably pain, might curb behavior, they reason.
To spank or not to spank. It continues to be the question. Twenty-eight states have banned corporal punishment in schools; Georgia allows school systems to decide whether to paddle.
Make no mistake: Paddling is a quick fix. A sure-fire way to get one’s attention, to briefly change behavior. A consequence, it is hoped, of a last resort that inflicts pain, perhaps embarrasses and sends a message: Your behavior stinks. Stop it. Now.
But old-fashioned values, coupled with old-school strategies like paddling, are archaic in modern society. Twiggs County school officials are paddling against a strong current of pedigreed opposition. Practically every leading association on the planet has screamed “no” to corporal punishment in schools. (Examples: The American Psychology Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the National Association of Elementary School Principals.)
Alphonsa Foward Jr. is director of my daughter’s school, New Life Academy of Excellence Inc. in Norcross. He’s against paddling in American schools, particularly given the country’s diverse populations.
“Discipline is different for different cultures, which suggests a variety of disciplining [strategies],” he told me. “In today’s society, with so many different ethnic groups, it would make corporal punishment difficult.”
Moreover, Foward doesn’t think paddling has ever been as efficient in curbing behavior as pro-spankers tend to believe. It wasn’t the paddling that dictated respectable behavior. The times did.
“Children were taught respect at home, and they knew they had to respect their teachers,” he said. “Values were taught at home.”
I have full faith in Mr. Foward and the way he runs New Life.
But I wouldn’t want him, or any school official, spanking my kids.
That’s my job.
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Formerly resilient spirit hits its limit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He amazed doctors three years ago with his return to the rink so quickly after double-hip replacement surgery.
Five months, to be exact.
John William “Jack” Stein II’s post-surgical recovery was so remarkable doctors at Resurgens Orthopedics at St. Joseph’s brought him on board to advise hip surgery patients. To tell how he’d learned to walk - and skate - again.
“I’ve been playing hockey for 44 years,” Stein told me in February 2005. “I wasn’t going to give it up… . I slowly worked up to walking two miles a day, but I’d have tears in my eyes. The pain was brutal.”
I wrote about Stein when he played forward in an ice hockey game to benefit Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta. He played on the metro Atlanta police team. The cops lost 7-6 to the firefighters. Stein - a bear of a man at 6-foot-2, 220 pounds - scored two goals.
In recent years, Stein’s health soured. It caused him to retire from his job as a bike patrol officer with the Gwinnett County Police Department. He had been a cop 21 years, three of them in Greenwich, Conn., his hometown.
Last year, he had his feet operated on, but the surgery wasn’t successful. Another surgery was required, something that didn’t sit well with this former narcotics detective. Then, in January, he had a back operation, followed in April by hemorrhoid surgery.
“That one did him in,” Becky Stein, his wife, told me. “It was an excruciatingly hard surgery, and he still wasn’t recovered from it.”
His cheerfulness, needless to say, nose-dived. He was sad because he had to quit police work. Sad because he had to quit skating. Becky Stein said the last time he skated was eight or nine months ago.
“We were just talking the other day, and I said, ‘Jack, you can play hockey again,’ ” she said. ” ‘Just go back to public skating and try to build the muscles back up.’ I knew he was depressed. Well, not depressed. Down is a better word.”
He suffered from insomnia and took to sleeping in the basement. It was darker there, and the morning light didn’t crack through so early. It’s where he retired Friday night.
Saturday morning, Becky Stein woke up first. She tip-toed around their Lawrenceville house so as not to wake Jack. Time passed. The former high school All-American and semi-pro, 51, still hadn’t come upstairs.
So Becky Stein went downstairs. Her husband of 16 years had committed suicide.
On Wednesday, a funeral Mass was held at the Catholic Church of Saint Monica in Duluth. Attendance was huge, what you’d expect for someone who loved police work, pets and playing sports. Local police officers, as well as those from nearby communities, paid their respects alongside family and friends. So did the Badie Tour.
Johan Moeller Jensen of Suwanee couldn’t attend his friend’s funeral because he’s on vacation in Denmark. He used to play forward alongside Jack for a Duluth hockey team.
“Jack was our oldest player, but what he didn’t have in his legs anymore, he had in his understanding of the game,” Jensen wrote in an e-mail. “We would often joke with the younger players that they should look for Jack out on the ice, then just sit back and watch and learn.
“He will be missed.”
Updates:
- Cathryn Bouchard has joined her twin sister. Cathryn died Tuesday around 3 p.m. - the same time that Corynne, 19 months, died on May 4. They are the daughters of Justin and Kristen Bouchard, formerly of Lilburn, but current residents of Frisco, Texas.
The twins suffered from a fatal neurodegenerative disorder - Niemann-Pick Type C disease. I recently wrote about the Bouchards’ campaign to raise $1 million to aid research for a cure. (www.angeltwins.org.).
- Turns out Parkview Team Georgia is not metro Atlanta’s first recreational league team to make it to the Dixie Majors World Series. That would be the 2007 Brookwood team, which plays in Bethesda Park. Sources quoted in Tuesday’s column said otherwise.
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Home run personal for player
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Before the game, he visited his sister’s grave.
At the grave site, Austin Chambers made a birthday promise to Abigail Grace Chambers, barely 7 weeks old when she died of a rare disease on Aug. 19, 2007. Big brother made a promise: to hit her a home run.
On July 14, Parkview Team Georgia played the Duluth Wildcats in Bunten Park for the Dixie League state championship. It was the bottom of the seventh inning, Team Georgia was down 7-4. Two outs and two men on base. Austin, 16, a right-hand hitter and second baseman, was at bat.
Whack! The ball climbed higher and higher.
“I thought I’d hit it too high, and that it was just going to pop up,” said Austin, a rising senior at Parkview High. “But it kept going and going.”
He rounded third base crying. His father, Sam Chambers, is Team Georgia’s third-base coach. He cried, too. July 14 - game day - would have been Abigail’s first birthday.
“I didn’t find out [about the birthday promise] till we were on the way home from the game,” said Chambers, manager of the Mountain Park Athletic Association Senior League all-star squad. “It was a storybook finish. Just a storybook.”
As the game wore on, the story got sweeter.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, Andrew Johnson, 19, hit a three-run, walk-off home run. Game over, 10-7. With the victory, Team Georgia became the 2008 Dixie Majors state champs. They’ll compete in the Dixie Majors World Series, which begins Saturday in Dyersburg, Tenn. The squad would like to rent minivans for the historic trip.
“It’s a lot easier with three or four vans as opposed to 13 vehicles,” Chambers told me. “I could talk about every one of these kids forever. They are amazing.”
To defray costs, the team has collected money from people and businesses. More is needed, though. Waffle House No. 1054, at the corner of Indian Trail Lilburn Road and Lawrenceville Highway, has stepped in. The team will receive 10 percent of all sales ‘twixt the hours of 2 and 9 p.m. through Thursday, said Diane Canfield, a veteran employee who lives in Lilburn.
“How about letting Gwinnett County know that this is the only team from Georgia,?” she wrote.
Parkview Team Georgia faces Team North Carolina at 5 p.m. Saturday in its first game of the World Series. I wish them well.
Tammy Chambers, Austin’s mom, wrote in an e-mail that the state championship game was extra special because of Austin’s birthday homer. But she stressed something else.
“This was a TEAM effort,” she wrote, capitalizing the word to stress its importance. “It was special to all who participated.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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A word that shouldn’t be in anyone’s vocabulary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I posed the subject the other night, while my son and a friend were watching Batman.
First, some background.
Last Sunday, on Fox News, vetted civil rights leader Jesse Jackson was caught on tape whispering to another guest crude comments about Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Obama, he lamented, was “talking down to black people.” Jackson said he wanted to “cut his (genitalia) off.”
Those comments alone are worthy of a 600-word column, but I wanted to talk to Miles and Jonathan about something else Jackson said during his microphone gaffe. In comments publicized days after the story first broke, he apparently used the “n-word.” It was in reference to the blacks that he was chiding Obama for talking down to.
And that’s what I wanted to talk to the boys about. That word. The n-word. The potency of it. The double standard that engulfs it. The ease in which some people - including some blacks - include it in their vocabulary.
No doubt, the most level-headed black person likely would pitch a fit, be outraged, up in arms, ready to apply fisticuffs, if a white person addressed them that way. Oddly, some of those same people have no problem saying it, being called that in good spirit by other blacks or tapping their toes to music that spews it lyrically.
The argument is that, when blacks use it, they claim ownership of it, deflower a “degenerative nickname” that - according to The African American Registry, a history website (www.aaregistry.com.) - dates to the early 1800s.
It’s a logic and explanation that rings hollow. You can dress it up in kindredship and use it as a defiant show of camaraderie all you want. You can call it a cultural signifier, distort its spelling, and attempt to give it street swagger and coolness.
Do all these things. Know what? It doesn’t trump its true meaning, its historical context, its symbolism and degradatory origins.
And because it’s so intertwined in the American psyche, we have Jackson, a prominent pundit, caught on a hot mic. Foot stuck in mouth. Using it. It’s an unfortunate yet teachable incident.
Two years ago, I wrote a column about a student calling my son the n-word when he was in fifth grade. At the time, Miles had never heard it, didn’t know really, its significance or what it meant. He surmised it was no compliment. He and I had a talk then.
On Thursday night, I used the Jackson situation to reiterate something he’s heard many times before, a topic I’ve written about in this space. I wanted to be certain that he, and his friend Jonathan, understand. Certain words, like some comments, are best left unsaid. This, to me, is one of them.
After the Jackson incident, a reader posted a comment in my blog saying that “all” blacks use the n-word, just that some do it in private. Nah. Not only does my family not use that particular word, we don’t ascribe similar terms to any group of people.
The Badies, as are many families regardless of skin color, better than that.
How about you?
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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African art a treat for kids
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gail Crecelius served as tour guide for kids on a field trip to see a remarkable exhibit at the Jacqueline Casey Hudgens Center for the Arts. She sounded just like a grade school teacher when she talked to them, especially when she gave them the “museum rules” - no touching the art and so on.
Turns out Crecelius is studying to become a teacher at the University of Georgia. She’s interning this summer at the museum. One of her duties is to give tours of “Gifts from Africa: Bronzes, Art and Artifacts.”
The exhibit - part of a collection owned by Susan and William Rochfort - features fine bronze castings, masked headdresses and other objects from the Republic of Benin, near Nigeria. It’s a sight to behold.
The Badie Tour stopped by Wednesday to observe as kids from the Early Literacy Academy in Lawrenceville had a look-see. Initially, they were quiet. But as they wound their way through the 230-piece display, they piped up, became more talkative, inquisitive, engaged.
At one point, Crecelius had to ask them to pipe down because all the kids were talking at once. “Shhh,” she said. “We have to take turns.”
The collection is on loan at no charge with the stipulation that students on organized academic trips aren’t charged admission. So this fall, public and private school field trips will be able to see the exhibit for free.
That’s right. Free.
“That doesn’t happen very often these days with school field trips,” said Teresa Osborn, interim executive director of the Gwinnett Council for the Arts. “Its been exciting to have an exhibit that represents a continent, and that exposes us to a completely different type of art, as opposed to Western art. This exhibit lends itself to repeat visits. You can come just to see the masks or the animals. This is a very dense exhibit.”
And atypical.
Most exhibits at the arts center are comprised of pieces that hang on the wall. This particular display has artwork on the wall, free-standing, everywhere. Placement of some artifacts reflects the region’s practices and culture. Take the queen’s chamber and the king’s chamber. Animals guard the king’s chamber, with a crocodile strategically placed near the throne.
“It was predetermined where some things had to go,” Osborn told me. “Many exhibits tell stories, but this one had to be grouped so things made sense - masks grouped together. Jewelry grouped together.”
Speaking of masks, they were Kaelen Casseus’ favorite objects of the entire collection. “I liked the masks the best because there was a lot of different stuff on them,” the 8-year-old told me.
After the Crecelius-led tour, the kids got to make their own masks. They decorated them with beads, feathers and yarn. The exhibit is playing a role in all aspects of the center’s children’s program. A camp called “African Safari” will be held at the Duluth complex next week.
“We’ve incorporated it in all the elements we have at the center,” Osborn said. “It has that kind of value.”
“Gifts From Africa: Bronzes, Art and Artifacts,” runs through Dec. 31 at the Hudgens Center for the Arts, 6400 Sugarloaf Parkway, building No. 300, Duluth. Details: 770-623-6002; online at www.artsgwinnett.org.
Rick Badie’s columns appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Midwest floods are no Katrina
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He grew up in a small Iowa town.
It’s a place where practically everybody knew everybody. No road rage here. Motorists would wave, Jamie Horner recalled, as they drove by. People looked out for each other. Cared.
“All in all, Oskaloosa was a place with a good feeling,” said Horner, 36, of Norcross.
Before Oskaloosa, home had been Clinton, Iowa, a town on the west banks of the Mississippi River. Horner remembers the river flooding, but nothing along the scale of last month, when water swelled over the banks of more than 20 levees that stretched between Dubuqe, Iowa, and St. Louis.
The Horners moved to Oskaloosa when Jamie was 12. They’d barely settled into their new home when a neighbor — who later became a high school friend — knocked on the door. He told them a bad storm was in the area, to be careful and to monitor the weather reports.
“It was like that,” Horner told me. “Everybody looked out for each other. We played night games at night. It was safe to let your kids run rampant. Something goes wrong, we’re going to help our neighbors.”
Those sentiments flooded Horner’s mind when Mother Nature ravaged the Midwest. Corn crops were washed away. Houses and businesses in towns like Cedar Rapids were severely damaged or rendered uninhabitable. Lives were lost. Eighty-three of the 99 Iowa counties have received state disaster declarations.
Some pundits have pegged the flooding the “Katrina of the Midwest.” It’s a headline-grabbing title, but its hard to compare the two. Many try. Why, just the other day, I received an e-mail titled, “Just Wondering.” It’s a collage of photos of the ravaged Midwest, with captions that compare it to Katrina and pose questions:
Why aren’t the celebrities and the media focused on the region like they were on New Orleans? Where are all the media asking where the FEMA trucks are? Where are all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big-screen television sets?
The e-mail links two tragedies together then cleverly cherry-picks what they consider egregious events from New Orleans to compare and contrast, to make one community’s reaction (the Midwest) appear more noble than the other’s (New Orleans). OK. It is. But not for the reasons the author of the photo essay intends.
Consider: Infrastructure in New Orleans experienced a one-two punch - first by the hurricane, then by levee breaks. All it did was flood in the Midwest. Bureaucratic fumbles didn’t plague Iowa and elsewhere as they did relief efforts in the Crescent City. FEMA was already in place to aid Midwest victims. And no Midwesterner spent three days on top of a roof in 90-degree heat.
Yes, some blacks and whites (wrongly) looted in New Orleans, a city that’s majority black and very poor. No excuse for it. But consider also that one person’s looting got reported as another’s survival instincts. I distinctly remember a photo of two people leaving a New Orleans store with items. The caption of the black man with a grocery cart said he was looting. The caption of the white female said she was finding food.
Bottom line is, it’s shameful to take two natural disasters and selectively view them through a prism meant to divide, that pits inner city against farm community. Like it’s a competition.
The flood-stricken Midwest deserves kudos for weathering the storm. But this was no Katrina II. Not even close in scope.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be like Horner - proud of the Midwest’s self-reliance, strength.
“It would be hard to move back because of this stage in my life,” he told me. “But it’s the greatest place in the world to raise a family.
“Absolutely.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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A Legacy for Twin Angels
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Corynne, one of the twin girls, has already gone home.
She and her sister, Cathyrn Bouchard, were born on Sept. 7, 2006, with Niemann-Pick Type C Disease (NPC), a genetic neurodegenerative disease that’s ultimately fatal. Life expectancy is hard to predict.
Corynne died on May 4, 2008. She was 19 months old.
The girls are the daughters of Justin and Kristen (Kumin) Bouchard. They live in Frisco, Texas, now, but they are one of us. Lilburn residents. Brookwood High grads. Justin, 32, earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Georgia State University; Kristen, 29, holds an engineering degree from Georgia Tech.
“Georgia is still ‘home,’ and our lives there shaped us into the people we are today,” wrote Kristen in an e-mail.
About five years ago, Atlantic Southeast Airlines transferred Justin, a captain, to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He now works for the Federal Aviation Administration. Besides Cathryn, they have two sons, Caleb, 8 and Colin, 3.
The twin girls were diagnosed with NPC shortly after their first birthday. They had enlarged livers and spleens due to a build-up of harmful fatty substances. Kristen tried to learn as much as she could about the disorder. Though advancements have been made in the past 15 years or so, effective treatments and a cure don’t exist.
“This is an incredibly complex disease,” she wrote, “and it will require a lot of research to find a cure. Research takes money - a lot of money.”
Ara Parseghian, legendary football coach of Notre Dame, is perhaps the most famous person associated with NPC. Three of his grand kids were diagnosed with it. That led him to found, in 1994, the Ara Parseghian Medical Research Foundation, a Tucson-based nonprofit which to date has raised $32 million to aid research. Progress has been made.
“We have one drug in trial, and we have five or six candidates that are in the pipeline and we hope to get those to clinical trial as well,” said Glen Shepherd, the foundation’s executive director. “NPC is a very variable disease. Quite a force. We are moving along.”
But like Kristen said, research takes money. A million sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not that much cheese. Consider this. If 100,000 Gwinnettians each ponied up $10, you’d have $1 million. Kristen made a similar point in a June 12 article that appeared in the Dallas Morning News. The story was about the twins, their disease, the loss of Corynne and, ultimately, the Bouchard’s legacy mission.
They’ve started a campaign to raise $1 million for NPC research, teaming up with the Parseghian foundation. Fund-raisers are being held in their hometown; plans are being made for a 5K run. They’d like to hit the magic number by the end of the year, but if not, they plan to persevere.
“This is a battle we will be fighting our entire lives,” Kristen said. “It is definitely not the only million we intend to raise, just the first.”
Online: www.angeltwins.org, the story of Cathryn and Corynne Bouchard; www.parseghian.org., website for the Ara Parseghian Medical Foundation. Donations may be made at both sites. Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Show some love: adopt a pet
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He’d just been brought in that morning by an animal control officer. A little mixed terrier.
He’d been locked inside a vacant, abandoned house in a subdivision right next to the Gwinnett Animal Welfare and Enforcement Center. Jason Cannon, a supervisor at the shelter, said the pet had been in the house several days before someone contacted authorities.
“He’s skin and bones,” he said. “We’ve got vet work to do on him. Get its weight up. He’ll be needing a home.”
Cannon doesn’t know for sure, but surmises the occupants probably left the dwelling -and the dog - because of foreclosure. This shelter, like many in metro Atlanta and nationwide, is taking in pets for adoption because owners can no longer provide for them. Quite a few cite foreclosure when they give the animals up, said Chris Hughes, rescue coordinator.
“It’s hard on the people,” she said. “And hard on the animals.”
So if you hanker for a new pet, head over to the animal shelter in Lawrenceville. The Badie Tour stopped by Wednesday. My kids wanted to come to work with me after I told them where I was going. Good thing they didn’t. I’m pretty sure we would have left with an animal. Even without them, a jet-black cat with green eyes and a tan chow puppy almost had a home.
Almost.
Cannon gave me a tour of the $7.5 million facility, which opened in September 2007. It’s not even fair to compare the new digs to the old county shelter off Hi-Hope Road. Gone are the metal cages in the adoption area. Here, animals are kept in see-through pens (don’t tap the glass, a sign states) that have individual air filtration systems. That way, diseases can’t spread among the canines and felines. Gone is that putrid smell that practically took your breath away when you walked into the kennel area of the old shelter.
And gone are those gray, dull colors; the new facility is warm, cheery, welcoming. It has a spay/neuter clinic, a barn for livestock, and isolation areas such as a sick bay.
The county’s animal control officers are based there. So is the Gwinnett County Police Department’s K-9 unit.
Cannon admitted the drab conditions at the old shelter fueled a perception that the county, and the shelter staff, couldn’t care less about the animals. Of course, that was the furthest thing from the truth, he said, yet some people believed it. Now the county has a facility to bark proudly about.
“Our image wasn’t good, Cannon said, “though we tried and did the best we could with that building.”
The shelter can house 168 animals and takes in about 20 to 25 animals a day that have strayed, been abandoned or neglected, or turned in for adoption. You can find most any size, shape and breed of dog you want.
And if you’re interested in that mixed terrier who was left all alone, ask to see the dog in pen No. 178.
The Animal Welfare and Enforcement Center, 884 Winder Highway. Adoption and reclaim hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday; 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Online: www.gwinnettanimalcontrol.com. Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Wanted: More poll workers, please
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dawnya Fisher Lindsey cast an early ballot about the same time I did Monday morning.
Frankly, there was no need for me to vote early for the July 15 primary, but since I was at the “advance voting site,” trying to flush out a column topic, I seized the opportunity.
Lindsey, on the other hand, had no choice. She voted because she’ll be working the day of the July 15 general primary. As a poll manager, no less.
Speaking of poll workers, the county could use some more to ensure a smooth voting process. Gwinnett has 163 polling sites; each location needs anywhere from eight to 10 poll workers, said Julie Moore, manager of the polling site in the activities building off Singleton Road. She gave me a pamphlet about becoming a poll official, and asked me to make an appeal to the public to help fill the gap.
First, you have to be a U.S. citizen and Gwinnett resident, 18 or older, who can read, write and speak English. You are required to take a (paid) online training course and complete an application. If you’re hired, be prepared for a long day.
Poll officials must report to their assigned location at 6 a.m. on election day. They stay put until the polls close at 7 p.m. and the poll manager releases them.
I’m sure people don’t do it for the paycheck, but money is involved. It’s minuscule. A poll manager pockets $225; assistant managers earn $140, and clerks get $95.
“This appeals to people’s sense of citizenship,” Moore told me. “And we need workers. Please.”
This is Lindsey’s first stint as a poll worker. She’ll oversee precinct No. 34 - Lilburn Christian Church off Arcado Road - and needs to recruit at least one more poll worker, if you’re interested.
“I wanted to really see how an election works and to understand the process,” she told me while we chatted outside the polling station. “I saw something where [county elections supervisor Lynn Ledford] was requesting workers, so I said, ‘OK, I’ll do that.’ It’s interesting to see people come and vote, their concept of it.”
Poll work comes naturally for Lindsey. She grew up on military bases across the country. Her father spent 20 years in the Air Force. The family lived all over the world, among all types of nationalities. The responsibility of serving one’s country, either at the ballot box or as an overseer in the election process, has been ingrained in her. It’s her civic duty.
“There’s really no excuse for not voting,” she said. “Some of it is pure laziness.”
When I voted Monday morning, I was pleasantly surprised by the steady stream of people who arrived to vote early. Moore, the site manager, was, too. She told me she didn’t expect this week’s turnout to be earth-shaking, though, just a tuneup for the early voting before the Nov. 4 general election.
“We aren’t expecting a big turnout, but we’re ready for it,” she said. “If we do 1,000, we’ll be doing pretty good. But we expect to be slammed in November.”
Gwinnett County voters can vote early all week at the county elections office (455 Grayson Highway, Suite 200, Lawrenceville) or these locations: Centerville Community Center, 3025 Bethany Church Road, Snellville; the Dacula Activity Building, 2735 Old Auburn Road, Dacula; the George Pierce Community Center, 55 Buford Highway, Suwanee; and the Singleton Road Activity Building, 5220 Singleton Road, Norcross. All locations open at 9 a.m. daily; the satellite locations stay open till 7 p.m.
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Soil yields life and lessons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He digs his hands into the soil and pulls out a handful of dirt. Tells me to do the same.
The deeper my hand sinks, the cooler the earth becomes. I pull out a handful of the rich, black dirt, too.
About three years ago, Johnny Carter got the idea to add mulch to some of the Georgia red clay in his garden. Today, you can see the difference in the color, size and yield of the vegetables he grows in the doctored land when compared with those in the plain ol’ Georgia dirt.
“The Georgia red clay is good, but it is not [as good] as this,” says Carter, 78, holding a pile of dirt in each hand. “It’s amazing what the mulch does to the soil. Just plow it in and let it rot.”
We’re standing in the middle of a garden filled with tomatoes, peas, squash, red peppers, banana peppers and hot peppers. And that’s just the rear of Carter’s house in Lawrenceville. Corn and rows of late peas and tomatoes grow in a tract on another side of the house. The gardens take up just over a quarter-acre. Hundreds of plants. Carter’s babies.
The roots of Carter’s story run deeper than the seemingly endless rows of peas and squash. They are stronger than the sturdiest tomato vines or silkiest stalks of corn. His is a tale about family, responsibility, resilience, getting the job done, making the most of what you’ve been handed sans the complaining. And though I hesitate to even use the word given the way it’s been maligned by politicians, it centers on values.
My late father tended a vegetable garden till he couldn’t do it anymore. It got to the point my siblings in South Georgia feared they’d drive up to his house one day and find him out among the rows of butter beans and peas, stricken.
As a kid, I couldn’t care less about gardening. Growing peas, tomatoes, cucumbers and okra wasn’t my thing. Too country. Man, what ignorance. Like so many things my - and most - parents do and say, their significance doesn’t resonate till years, often decades, later.
“I tell my son and nephews that one day they will think their parents are the smartest people in the world,” says Mike Carter, the elder Carter’s only child. Mike lives next door to his father. “My father believes that a garden will make a man and teach him a lot about life. That a hard day’s work won’t kill a man. But I never truly understood this till the last few years, and I’m 51 now.”
The elder Carter grew up poor in Barrow County. His mother died when he was 18 months old, leaving his father, a farmer, to provide for four kids. Carter made it to sixth grade but quit to help with crops.
“We didn’t have nothing,” he tells me. “Had a hard life.”
At 18, he joined the Army and became a Ranger. He’s a Korean War veteran. He worked at General Motors for 32 years in the body shop. He’d work his shift at GM, then return home to work in a body shop he owned. He retired from GM in 1985 and leased out the shop. He’d always kept a garden, but that’s when he kicked it up a notch.
Carter, like my father, plants according to the signs. The drought hasn’t been an issue. Several years ago, he had a well dug on the property. He let me try a gourd filled with its water.
“I sent a sample to UGA and had them analyze it,” says Carter, who rises every morning around 4:30 to work the crops. “They wrote me a letter back saying that it was 98.9 percent pure.”
Pure water, plus rich soil, plus caring hands yield a bounty of produce. Carter gives away as much as he sells, and most of what he sells is by word of mouth. He has a canopy with baskets of vegetables and plastic bags set up in his backyard to serve customers. People started asking for his tomatoes weeks ago, particularly during the salmonella scare.
“I told them around July 4,” he says. “They are starting to come out now. Hard to have tomatoes ready much earlier than that.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Parent textbook reviewers scarce
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There I sat, listening to the AC hum, surrounded by about 1,000 textbooks and other educational materials.
I was in the technical building at Grayson High School. Alone. Me, myself and I. AJC Gwinnett News photographer Kim Smith has already left because, frankly, there was little to capture on film. She arrived on campus about 40 minutes earlier, so she’d greeted me at the entrance.
“Where’s the party?” I asked, noticing that there were only two cars in the massive parking lot.
“We are the party,” she answered as she pointed to the lecture hall set up as a textbook review room.
Grayson High is one of 13 sites statewide where parents can review language arts textbooks and curriculum resource materials under consideration for grades k-5 statewide. The review at Grayson High, overseen by the Georgia Department of Education as are the others, is open 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays through July 18.
The Badie Tour decided to stop by on day No. 2 of the public viewing. I stayed for an hour and a half Wednesday morning, then cruised back through around 2:55 p.m. I wanted to see if anyone had plowed through any of the 51 tables to review material pertinent to their kids’ grade levels. If so, they were supposed to rate the materials’ strengths and weaknesses on an evaluation form, and say whether they should be recommended for use in Georgia public schools.
Maybe someone had picked up the completed forms; none were in the designated folder.
“Oh no,” said Matt Cardoza, a DOE spokesman. “Sometimes that’s the difficulty in putting [the materials] out there, and getting people to come. We’re not sure of the input we’ll get.”
No doubt, it’s early in the process. The public has till mid-July to review the materials at host sites in 13 congressional districts. Maybe there’ll be a rush at Grayson as the review period cranks down. Right now, though, at least on Wednesday, turnout was pitiful.
Much works against a summer textbook review. First of all, it’s summer. School’s out. Many families are out of (school) sync, so to speak. Probably out of town, too. Add to that the fact that this is a holiday week, and chances of even a marginal parent turnout run slim.
“I hope it picks up,” said Alicia Trager, president of the Area II Gwinnett Council PTA, who plans to review the materials before the opportunity passes. “It’s unfortunate because it is summer, and so many people are out of school. It’s hard to get the word out. Back in the fall, some books were available at the [instructional support center] and there was a pretty good turnout.”
Which brings to mind a question: Why not just hold statewide reviews in the fall, when school is in and education is on everybody’s mind?
“We have time frames we are looking at to get resources to the state board of education,” Cardoza told me. “You try your best to hold them at a time that’s convenient to everyone. Vacation weeks are always difficult.”
Like Trager, Cardoza said that when textbook reviews are held locally - when individual school systems consider state-approved materials - turnout ratchets up. The more grass-roots, the more the participation.
“People tune into their own community,” he said. “Their own child.”
If you didn’t know about the textbook review under way, now you do. Give the materials a look-see.
Information collected at the current reviews is to be shared with a committee that makes recommendations about textbook selections to the state Board of Education. For more information about the process, contact the Georgia Department of Education’s Office of Policy and External Affairs at 404-463-1487. Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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Thanks to teacher, boy saved a life
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Maybe you read about Michael Bosworth.
He’s the 12-year-old Snellville kid who saved his mother’s life by performing the Heimlich maneuver. Michael helped her cough up a chip that had lodged in her throat during a lunch while they were on vacation in Mexico.
In that story, Michael and his mom sang the praises of Jimmy Moore, 58. He teaches physical education for kindergarten through fifth grade at Britt Elementary. It’s Moore who taught Michael the Heimlich maneuver, more commonly called the “stomach thrust.” Michael, a rising seventh-grader, considers Moore one of his favorite teachers.
On Sunday, I got to talk to Moore. He’d forewarned that reception on his cellphone might be spotty because he’d probably be in the mountains for Boy Scouts summer camp.
Moore is a retired scoutmaster but still in the thick of it, even though his boys, Joe and Jay, are now men. He has been a leader in the Boy Scouts for nearly two decades. See, Moore invests his time, professionally and socially, in one of the biggest investments any of us could ever make. One whose dividends are immeasurable, and the payoffs, it is hoped, the antithesis of the extremes we read about in print and see on TV.
Kids.
“There’s good in kids, in everybody,” Moore told me, noting that comparisons of today’s youth to those of yesterday are an exercise in futility. “Sometimes you have to look deep down for it, but it’s there. If you show kids you care about them, they will care about you. A lot of people see nothing but the negative in young people. I’d like to see more of the positive.”
Amen.
It’s easy to pontificate about the ills of teens or most any element of society. I do it. Too easy. Plenty of columnists (and readers) are pros at it. We all could benefit from a better mix, though. So I cherry-pick young people to write about, to give attaboys. Kids such as Michael. Without fail they always recall a parent, teacher or coach who inspired.
In Michael’s case, one of them is Moore of Lilburn.
He’s been a teacher 28 years, the past 15 at Britt Elementary. He graduated from the Citadel in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education and health. He became a teacher and wrestling coach for a while, but decided to try a different profession. He became an agent with Equitable Life, which transferred him to Atlanta. His career in insurance was short-lived.
“Five years later I got back into education,” he told me. “I’ve been in it every since.”
Moore remembers the Bosworth twins - Michael and Zachary - well. Their mother’s description of them as “sports nuts,” he told me, was on the money. In his words, they were a P.E. teacher’s dream.
“They liked the activity, the energy,” he said. “We have a saying in class: ‘If you had fun, you won.’ P.E. teachers [and health teachers] try to teach kids what to eat, how to eat, the importance of play. In every class, they hit the floor running and they leave sweaty, but with a smile on their faces.”
Moore was more humbled than flattered that, two years later, the steps of the Heimlich had stuck with Michael, as well as a memory of the teacher who provided the instruction.
“I do not like to toot my own horn,” Moore said. “I am just thankful Michael was prepared, not just to save a life, but to save his mom’s life.”
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail: rbadie@ajc.com.
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