Jimmy Baron, an Atlanta real estate agent and former radio host primarily on Atlanta rock station 99X, had an unlikely encounter with a prominent Georgia politician.
Flying up to Chicago for a wedding on Tuesday, he kept his suit jacket in hand to keep it from getting to wrinkled and placed it in the overhead compartment of his United flight. After he landed, he took what he thought was his jacket, deplaned, grabbed his luggage and awaited his sister to pick him up outside. But then he looked down at the jacket and quickly realized it wasn’t his.
Baron’s wife Kira suggested he look for the man’s name on the suit. Baron scoffed. “Adult men don’t put their names on their clothing!” he said. But he was wrong. What Baron described as a fancy Italian suit had a tag with the name Geoff Duncan, former Georgia lieutenant governor. So Baron went to baggage claim to ask if this man was looking for his jacket. Indeed, he was and they met up to exchange jackets.
Baron didn’t recognize his name or who he was until Duncan told him he needed the jacket because he was speaking the next day at the Democratic National Convention. That’s when Baron realized who Duncan was.
“He was very nice and gracious,” Baron said. “I saw him later that day on CNN and said, ‘That’s the coat!’”
As for Duncan, the mixup was a less than auspicious beginning to his trip. “My first experience in Chicago was sticking my hand in the bin above me on the plane and realizing my jacket wasn’t there. And there was somebody else’s jacket there. It’s like a deer in headlights. Like what do you do?” he said.
And that “fancy Italian jacket”? It wasn’t.
“That’s a really good compliment to Jos. A. Bank because that’s where I shop at and that’s what the suit was,” Duncan said. “I think there was like a laundry tag that was in there with my name in it. We were able to swap it up and thank goodness I was able to have a suit jacket that matched my pants.”
Now Duncan, a Republican who has disavowed Donald Trump, will be properly attired when he speaks at the DNC tonight. “He has a lot of character,” Baron said. “I really admire this guy.”
The AJC’s Eli Goodstein contributed to this story
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