For those who like making continuous left-hand turns, it’s the place to be. One of the oldest stops on the NASCAR circuit, the Atlanta Motor Speedway, held its first race on this day in 1960. A crowd of 25,000 watched Glenn “Fireball” Roberts ride to victory lane. The racetrack was built in the wake of […]
For Atlanta Braves fans, the phrase “Braves win” will always belong to one voice—Skip Caray. Caray was born in 1939 in St. Louis, and grew up in baseball as the son of legendary announcer Harry Caray. After graduating from the University of Missouri, he began his broadcasting career calling St. Louis Hawks basketball and moved […]
John Smoltz was a major part of the Atlanta Braves championship teams of the 1990s. Smoltz was born in Michigan in 1967. His favorite team, the Detroit Tigers, drafted him in 1985 but traded him to the Braves two years later, a move they’d regret many times. For 21 seasons, he was one of the […]
The Butler did it: a familiar phrase when Kevin Butler was kicking footballs. Butler was born in Savannah in 1962 and attended Redan High School in Stone Mountain, where he was a four-year letterman in both football and soccer. As a two-time football All American at the University of Georgia, Butler kicked the Dawgs to […]
Baseball fans, how about this for an outfield trio? Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Willie Stargell. That’s who started for the National League in the first All-Star Game ever played in Atlanta at the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium on this day in 1972. Although the Braves had hosted the mid-summer classic two times before- once […]
The greatest marketing blunder ever? Or one of the most ingenious ploys in history to boost sales? In the 1980s, things were not going better for Atlanta-based Coca-Cola. Losing market share to rival Pepsi, Coke executives decided to overhaul their flagship drink: make it even sweeter to win back younger soft-drink consumers who favored Pepsi. […]
Cold Sassy Tree, a coming of age tale set in turn of the century Georgia, was inspired by some bad news. Olive Ann Burns was a writer for the Atlanta Constitution in 1975 when she was diagnosed with cancer. She walked out of the doctor’s office determined to write a novel. Born in Banks County […]
It’s big now, but not to begin with. In 1970, 110 runners lined up for the Atlanta Track Club’s first Peachtree Road Race. The starting line was at the old Sears building at Peachtree and Roswell Road. The finish was 6.2 miles away at Central City Park, now Woodruff Park. Carling Brewery sponsored the first […]
Woodstock may have gotten the headlines but Atlanta was rockin’ a whole month earlier. The Atlanta International Pop Festival of 1969 was a two-day music festival at the Atlanta International Raceway over the Fourth of July weekend. The brainchild of promoter Alex Cooley, tickets cost only $12.50 & $16, and a crowd of 120,000 drank, […]
It was easy to get Charles McCartney’s goat. Born in Iowa in 1901, McCartney got hurt working for the New Deal WPA in 1935. A religious awakening led him to hitch a team of goats to a wagon and travel the country with his wife and son, dressed in goatskins, preaching the Gospel. Thus was […]
