7/19 Peach Buzz: At Atlanta gala, the past was very much alive

“A hundred years ago,” President Abraham Lincoln said as we sat down to dinner, “I wouldn’t have been too welcome in Atlanta.” But the 16th president, resplendent in frock coat and top hat, was a hit at Friday night’s B-ATL Gala. The event, held at East Lake Golf Club, was part of a weekend of events commemorating the 147th anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta. “Many of us in this room live on a battlefield,” said B-ATL chair Henry Bryant. “It doesn’t have to be something we can’t talk about. Denying history is not a good idea. We might be doomed to repeat it.” Echoed Atlanta City Councilwoman Natalyn Archibong, the event’s honorary chair, “We want to have enlightened people who know what happened.” Enjoying the evening were longtime B-ATL supporters Charles and Sylvia Harrison, former Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond and Bunnie Jackson-Ransom, president and CEO of FirstClass, a public relations firm. During the cocktail hour, she and Leonard Hayes talked with the evening’s celebrity guest. “Lincoln became a hero of mine in 1968,” said Hayes, who won a Dale Carnegie perseverance award that year. “He stood for something. It’s so easy to bend with the wind.” During dinner, we learned Lincoln’s other identity. Dennis Boggs took office 12 years ago, after a stint in community theater. He’d landed a role as a circus bear, but the director saw greater potential. Shave your mustache and color your whiskers, he commanded. Boggs, who had worked in middle management for grocery store chains, became Lincoln. “I grew up in middle Tennessee and northern Alabama,” said Boggs, who lives in Nashville. “Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee were my heroes.” He never went to college and received his high school diploma at age 39, but Boggs became a self-taught Lincoln scholar. Today he appears in character more than 250 times a year, mostly in front of students. “For someone with no education, I spend a lot of time in schools,” said Boggs, who appears mostly before Southern audiences. “Some people think the South is still fighting the Civil War. Nothing could be further than the truth.” Not everyone has surrendered. A man at one of his appearances once cracked, “You know the South is going to rise again.” Honest Abe replied with disarming courtesy, “It already has. Have you been to Atlanta lately?”

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