Emily Calhoun, archivist and activist, dead at 84
Emily Calhoun, born and reared in Atlanta, was not your typical Southerner.
Oh, she loved the South all right -- its distinctive flavors in literature, music, manners, the decorative arts and the spoken word.
Just as passionately, she abhorred what she considered to be conservative dominance over the South's politics, its reluctant acceptance of integration, and the steamrolling of small communities here by predatory businesses and governmental bodies.
She acted on her beliefs. She joined protests at the Georgia Statehouse. She became a devoted tree-hugger. She wrote liberal-leaning letters to the Atlanta newspapers and, after she retired to the mountains, she sent them to the Northeast Georgian newspaper in Cornelia. She adorned her car with similarly provocative bumper stickers.
"Emily was a kind and loyal friend. She also was opinionated, feisty and outspoken. One thing that she never could be was boring," said Martha Ann Stegar, of Stone Mountain.
Adele Kushner of Alto met Ms. Calhoun during the early1980s when the two of them got involved in opposing the building of the Stone Mountain Freeway through Atlanta's east side.
"Emily had a photo of her published in the Atlanta paper showing her carrying a parasol and walking her little dog Ziggy, who had a sign on him that said something like ‘Stop the road!' That picture tickled her no end," Mrs. Kushner said.
In the mid-1990s, Ms. Calhoun moved to an eco-friendly cabin in north Georgia and joined Mrs. Kushner in successful protests there against building a large incinerator to burn trash from Atlanta and locating an asphalt plant next to a school.
Emily Bealer Calhoun, 84, of Atlanta, died Oct. 1 of congestive heart failure at Emory University Hospital. Her memorial service is at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Pavilion at King's Bridge Retirement Center at 3055 Briarcliff Road in Atlanta, where she resided the last year of her life. Goolsby Mortuary is handling arrangements. In lieu of flowers, her family requests donations in her memory be made to your local public library.
Equipped with master's degrees from the University of Georgia in political science and from Emory University in library science, Ms. Calhoun worked for many years for the state of Georgia's Department of Archives and History.
A former colleague, Dale Couch of Athens, found her fascinating.
"Emily had a deep appreciation for the history, literature and music of the South, but she saw the region in a broader context than the traditional viewpoint. Her idea of Southern identity qualified those of us who live here as citizens of a wider world, a variety of people who show strong influences from Europe, Africa, the northeastern United States, even Latin America," he said.
Ms. Calhoun enriched the story of Georgia politics, he said, by supplementing the state's official records with a wealth of supporting historical material -- dissertations and journal articles she carefully selected.
"Emily's ecological activism was a seamless extension of her love for the land in the South," Couch said.
The Rev. Ken Franklin, pastor of the Tallulah Falls Baptist Church, said Ms. Calhoun had wide-ranging tastes in religion. She was a regular at his church, he said, but she also liked visiting an African-American church in Cornelia and a Laotian Buddhist temple in Baldwin.
"I'm more a teacher than a sermonizer, and I use a blackboard to highlight the points I'm making," he said. "Well, Miss Emily started calling attention to my misspellings on the board, and the congregation got to enjoying that so much that we sort of made that a regular part of the service."
Survivors include a daughter, Jeannette Wiedenmann of Athens, and three grandchildren.
