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Monday, November 6, 2006
Book a loving look at South that’s gone
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a world that bulldozes its history and has an attention span that likely could be measured in milliseconds, a most remarkable reminder that the pleasures of time and place are to be savored has just come to life in an ambitious book called “The Paper Boy.”
Its author is Smyrna native and City Councilman Pete Wood, who with Lillie, his wife of 46 years, has undertaken a project so ambitious and unique that it’s a wonder anybody ever had the time or discipline to take it on.
The book’s appeal is, in the larger sense, limited to families whose roots are in a city where, as a young boy, he delivered The Atlanta Constitution, starting during World War II.
What Wood’s done in “The Paper Boy” is mentally walk the streets he traveled as a boy and talk about the lives of the people who occupied the houses he passed. As he talks, reflecting first on a boy’s memories and then on the lives and the directions he came to know over the next six decades, we are introduced to the mosaic of lives and relationships that gives meaning to time and place.
The result is a book that is of historical and genealogical interest first. But in the detail, and in the interconnection of lives, Wood presents a different and fuller picture of a Georgia that was one that I suspect Atlantans and even Southerners of this generation will never know.
It is so rare in metro Atlanta, or increasingly anywhere in the South, that people stay put in one place long enough to know their neighbors well, much less to know the lives of their parents and children, that it simply boggles the mind to imagine that somebody could do this for a whole town.
Wood focuses primarily on families who lived in Smyrna between 1938, his earliest memory of people and place, and 1951, when he graduated from high school. The 1940 census put its population at 1,440, about the current size of the farming communities of Rochelle, Broxton or Tennile, and half the size of the city of Adairsville. Smyrna’s 2005 population was 45,755.
Researchers at the Atlanta Regional Commission have gathered data from census reports that provide a glimpse of our mobility. Among a 2000 population of 38,266 in Smyrna, 24,850 had lived in a different house five years earlier — 13,960 in a different county in Georgia and 8,565 in a different state. It’s the same throughout metro Atlanta.
As the region changes, the center moves and so does our orientation, so that we come to think of place as teams and brands. Mobility engenders rootlessness, family lives as snapshots with no beginning or end.
That is a real change for the South, a region where families were attached to land and neighbors were each other’s family historians because their lives and families were woven together over generations. It was nothing, therefore, to talk of the living and the dead as part of the same story, and to fix the events in their lives to houses, seasons, work or to the landscape, creeks, rivers or other distinguishing landmarks.
That world is mostly gone everywhere. Atlanta, and the small communities around it, were once such a place. Now, however, most of the reference-point places, like the one-room schoolhouses in rural Georgia that have gone back to nature, are given over to change, to skyscrapers and condos and Wal-Marts. The paperboys, too, see homes but not people — and when they see people, they make no connections to families or place.
Every community and every passing generation should have the opportunity to see itself, as Wood saw and writes about, one tiny sliver of metro Atlanta. He saw it as a paperboy learning people and the skills necessary to succeed in life.
Over the decades, as a banker, as a founding trustee of the hospital authority that built Cobb General and as a founding trustee of what is now WellStar Health Systems, and as a city councilman and member of First Baptist Church of Smyrna for more than 70 years, he saw the same families through joys and hardships, through wars and good times. From those vantage points, paperboy to community leader, he saw the richness and the detail of a people and place that one day will exist as high-rises and mini-mansions, with the new designed to look old.
The old place has gone, but Wood has kept their stories.
The first house on the north side of Bank Street? Oh, that was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Talmadge Pharr Westbrook. Let me tell you where they came from, what happened in their lives and what happened to their children. The paperboy knows.
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Hunting, stem cell research and preferences
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Around the country on Tuesday voters will be choosing among the usual assortment of candidates. But they’ll also be amending state constitutions and implementing laws. Here are some of the ballot questions. Good ideas or not? You decide:
Eight states propose to define marriage as one man, one woman. Colorodo asks two questions: Whether to define marriage as one man, one woman, but also whether to permit domestic partnerships with the benefits of marriage.
Georgia offers a constitutional amendment to protect hunting and fishing. State Sen. Eric Johnson, the president pro tem of the State Senate, explains: “For years, animal rights extremists have been systematically campaigning against hunting and fishing throughout the country. It is only a matter of time before they set their sights on Georgia. For those who do not think our right to hunt and fish is under serious threat, they need to know that extremist organizations like PETA are lurking in the background. PETA supporters testified against this amendment in Committee…. The main purpose of Amendment 2 is to assure that all Georgians, urban and rural, will have the opportunity to share family traditions with their children and grandchildren.”
Arizona proposes to require that pigs during pregnancy and callves raised for veal be given enough space to turn around, lie down and fully extend when tethered.
California proposes a $4 billion tax on oil to be given for research on alternative energy sources, and prohibits them from passing the tax on to consumers.
Michigan proposes to ban race, gender and other preferences in public employment, contracting or school admissions.
Arizona would ban in-state student status at colleges for illegal immigrants.
Missouri has an amendment that one side says would protect and promote embryonic stem-cell research and the other says would permit cloning.
