Adored like a dad

Off in a Sunday school classroom, 14-year-old Sandra Smith hears the Resurrection story, but her thoughts linger on her father, Ernest. He has leukemia and hasn’t risen from his bed at Emory University Hospital in days. Sandra’s mother, Dot, hasn’t left his side.

In his office, the Rev. James Thomas Ford skims the last draft of his sermon, the most important of the year for the fledgling church. He is its first full-time pastor. As the pews fill, the pressure builds on Ford to deliver. Of course he will speak of salvation. But Atlanta is a small town and attending the right church carries enormous social currency. It takes laser focus to build that kind of church.

The phone rings in the bustling pastor’s office. Dot asks that Sandra and her older sister, Ann, be sent to the hospital immediately.

In that moment Ford decides what kind of pastor he will be. Rather than send an assistant, he finds the girls himself.

“If it wasn’t for Dr. Ford taking time when he was really busy we wouldn’t have made it,” Smith said. “Seeing my Daddy before he died, that is a gift I could never repay.”

From then on Ford and his wife, Mary Helen, played a greater role in Sandra’s life. She sat with their three sons during services. The elder Fords listened when she needed advice. Years later, Ford moved on to become head pastor at First Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va. When a job transfer brought Smith and her husband, Mike, to the D.C. area, there was no question which church they would join.

Now Smith and the Fords are back in Atlanta. She’s 66. He is 91. Smith sometimes ferries her mentor to and from doctors’ appointments or runs his errands. For Ford’s birthday in May, she orchestrated a party packed with extended family and more balloons than they could count.

Eight years ago, the Fords lost one of their sons, Warren. Then last year they lost another, Morris. As a former officer in the U.S. Navy, Morris was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

When the Fords took that anguished flight from Atlanta to Arlington, it was Smith who drove them to the airport. And when they returned she was standing there waiting with open arms.

“There are a lot of pastors out there whom people can look up to but not feel close to,” Ford said. “To hear her say that she looked up to me and felt like she could call on me ...”

Ford paused, willing himself not to cry.

An accident tightens an already strong bond

He watched the nurses ease her body into what looked like a harness for hoisting livestock. Or something heavy and lifeless.

Lindsey was breathing on her own now, weeks after the accident. For that Chris Bush and his wife, Lori, were grateful. Their 15-year-old surprised everyone at Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital, doctors included, when she emerged from the coma. But it wasn’t like in the movies, where the young girl’s eyes flutter and she glances around and whispers, “What happened?”

Trauma as severe as Lindsey’s leaves a girl with a bruised and swollen brain. Tubes snaking out of her chest and throat to help her breathe and eat. Eyes that see, but a mind that seems to register no image.

Lindsey was lowered into a chair. Chris watched with fairy tale hope. The girl he’d taught to tie her shoes and scorch home plate with a softball slumped, her mouth ajar, and drooled.

She was a baby when he met her mother, Lori, in Maine. Chris, then a Navy pilot, asked Lori out but she refused because she was in the middle of a divorce. But Chris was persistent. Three years later, they married.

He eventually became a pilot for Delta Airlines and the family — which by then included Chris and Lori’s daughter, Brianna — moved to Newnan.

Yet Lindsey kept her birth father’s last name, Smith, even though they were not close. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her stepdad. Chris was in the stands at her ball games, was chest-thumping proud when she made the varsity cheerleading squad. It’s just that ties, however fragile, can be hard to sever.

In late summer 2001, the day before she was to begin her junior year in high school, Lindsey and a friend helped one of their teachers move into a new classroom. On the way home, her friend made a left turn against traffic.

The truck driver who broadsided them told Chris that as the sirens grew louder he prayed over Lindsey in case paramedics were too late.

During her recovery, her birth father showed up for a week. Chris winced every time he heard the man say, “It’s OK, Dad’s here for you.”

Lindsey has endured multiple surgeries and rehab sessions. Chris and Lori taught her to eat again, to tie her shoes, to write her name.

“Her mother and I would wonder, ‘What will become of this child?’” Chris said.

Here’s what has become of Lindsey: She is 25. She can drive, but has some double vision, hand tremors and little short-term memory. Though it was a struggle, she graduated from the University of West Georgia with a degree in education. This summer she will be working for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. She is beautiful and laughs often. And she can’t wait to move out of her parents’ house though they’ve told her she never has to leave.

“My dad believes in me, he loves me and he didn’t give up on me, so I didn’t give up,” Lindsey said of Chris.

And she now signs her last name, “Bush.”

Game days are long gone, but the lessons remain

“For the life of me, I just do not understand why, the longer you run, the slower you get.”

If you played football for Campbell High School near Fairburn from the mid 1950s to the early 1970s, odds are you heard a steel-built man yell those words at the precise moment your legs began to buckle. It would be at the end of practice, while you were doing laps, sweating buckets and wondering what more coach Jack Hanson could want of you. Blood? Tears?

No, your best. So you gritted through until Hanson said, “Stop.”

Jimmy Cochran was middle tackle, Class of ’69, along with offensive center Phillip Kearns. Tony Cook was quarterback, Class of ’67. Wayne Seabolt was quarterback, Class of ’61. Not long ago these men gathered at an Italian restaurant in Peachtree City and relived those moments. Hanson, now 84, was there too, looking every bit as fit, if not more so, than his former students.

“He looks like a young Ronald Reagan, doesn’t he?” Kearns said.

Hanson reared back, pleased.

He coached high school sports for more than three decades. The way he saw it, if you instill fear in a kid, yell at him when he screws up and dwell on his mistakes, the resentment it builds in him might make him ferocious on the field. It could also make him a bully and tyrant. Be firm with a kid. Treat him with respect, not threats. Use patience when you show him how to correct his mistakes and you might make him a solid player. You’ll also make him a decent man.

So when his players fumbled a ball, he didn’t curse them. He didn’t get in their faces or push them around.

“Not my style,” Hanson said.

“If I missed a tackle or a block, he didn’t say, ‘What’s wrong with you acting like a big chicken out there? You afraid of getting hit,’ ” Cochran said. “Instead he’d say, ‘You know you’re capable of better than that and I know it, because I’ve seen it.’”

If that didn’t work, bear crawls, wind sprints and laps without end would.

There were times when — much to the anger of some fathers — Hanson wouldn’t put the best player in the game but the one who had heart. On-the-field effort was as valuable as talent, Kearns said.

For a kid like Seabolt, who grew up without his father, he learned that Hanson’s philosophy extended to the classroom. When Seabolt was being whipped by ninth-grade algebra, Hanson tutored him for weeks in his office. But slacking had its price, as Seabolt discovered when he was about to flunk typing. Hanson let him know in no uncertain terms that he’d be replaced in a heartbeat should that happen.

“He’s why I can type to this day,” Seabolt said.

Aging, however, has been its own endurance test for Hanson. Heart trouble, essential tremors that cause his hands to shake in the manner of Parkinson’s disease. Still, he fights back with workouts, light meals and the same tenacity he tried to instill in his players.

The lessons he taught them on the field have not diminished, Cook said. “Find out what a person’s strengths are and build on that rather than focusing on what they can’t do.”

Tough love cracks a hardened shell

In a Brooklyn, N.Y., living room, a 4-year-old boy cowers.

His father is killing the boy’s mother in the next room.

When it is all over, and the father arrested and the mother buried, the child and his three siblings pack their belongings and nightmares and go live with the mother’s family in South Carolina.

There, the child, Fahamu Pecou, takes crayons to paper, paint to board and escapes into the images he creates. He learns to sing and play trombone. The music frees him, seems to heal him.

Pecou decides he will be an artist. His family worries that art is more suited to a pastime rather than a career. He doesn’t listen. He earns a scholarship to the Atlanta College of Art.

But past wounds are deep and Pecou begins to talk back to his professors, skip classes. He is put on academic probation. How could any of these people understand him and who he was as a young black man? In truth, Pecou doesn’t have answers to those questions either. So he tries to get by with bluster — until he meets Arturo Lindsay.

Pecou thinks taking a few classes at a historically black college might be the answer.

It turns out Spelman College has the classes he needs. The first day he walks into Lindsay’s office, Pecou puffs up his chest and tells Lindsay that no white teacher could possibly comprehend the work he’s creating. So good thing Lindsay’s black.

“Boy, you better get out of my office,” Lindsay tells him. “Come to me because I’m good, not because I’m black.”

From that moment on Lindsay rides him. He sees tremendous talent in Pecou, but also a ruinous attitude. So he makes Pecou do extra work if he’s late for class. Has him build his own canvases from scratch and measures the corners to make sure each is 90 degrees.

The kid keeps coming back.

One day Lindsay takes Pecou to a room used as a campus storage closet and tells him to clean it out. Lindsay turns it into Pecou’s first studio. There’s no such thing as luck, Lindsay tells him. When opportunity comes you have to be ready. Prepare yourself.

Pecou is now 35. He has been the subject of glowing articles in Harper’s and Art in America magazines. His work has been part of exhibitions in South Africa, Switzerland, Spain and across the United States. It explores the ways young black men define themselves through popular culture and violence. A couple of months ago, Pecou had his first Paris solo exhibition. Lindsay was there.

Because they both have Panamanian roots, Pecou calls him “Papi.” Lindsay was present for the birth of the first of Pecou’s two children, who are now 8 years old and 2 years old. They call the 64-year-old Lindsay “abuelito,” little grandfather.

“I love that dude,” Pecou said.

“I call him my godchild,” Lindsay said. “He is a child God brought me later in life.”