On August 30, 1979, some bad news broke for President Jimmy Carter. It involved Carter’s fending off a rabbit on a fishing trip in southwest Georgia back in April. What appeared to be an amusing story in an outdoorsman’s life came to symbolize a perception by some of an ineffective Carter presidency. Carter was alone […]
A hurricane with the same destructive force as Katrina hit the Georgia coast on this day in 1893. Known as the “Sea Island Storm,” it killed nearly 2,000 people. The hurricane first hit the coast, passing over Georgia’s Sea Islands, before churning its way north 100 miles with a 16–foot storm surge. The hurricane made […]
On August 18, 1965, the Beatles made their only Georgia appearance at a concert in Atlanta Stadium. Beatlemania was in full swing that summer and Atlanta’s anticipation was high. The Atlanta Journal had a story about how to give a Beatle haircut. At a pre–concert press conference Mayor Ivan Allen gave the Beatles the keys […]
Missouri has Mark Twain. Georgia has Bill Arp, the pen name for Charles Henry Smith. Born in Lawrenceville in 1826, Smith moved to Rome in 1851 to practice law. After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Smith wrote a letter under the pen name “Bill Arp” to President Lincoln in the humorous dialect favored by […]
He combined the two great loves of his life into a comic strip that taught an entire generation about the great outdoors. Ed Dodd was born in Lafayette in 1902. A true outdoorsman, Dodd worked at a Pennsylvania boys’ camp, as a Gainesville scoutmaster and physical education teacher, at a Wyoming dude ranch, as a […]
She was a Southern icon whose byline appeared in the Atlanta Constitution for 58 years. Celestine Sibley was born in Florida in 1914. She got her first job at the Mobile Press Register before moving to Atlanta and going to work at the Constitution in 1941. The manpower shortage caused by World War II provided […]
It was a comeback tour for the man who had been Confederate president. Jefferson Davis lived quietly at his Mississippi home in the decades after the Civil War. But in 1886, he laid the cornerstone for a Confederate memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Henry Grady, the enterprising editor of the Atlanta Constitution, invited Davis to Atlanta […]
A Louisville, Georgia native would become president of the Republic of Texas. Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was born in 1798 and led a colorful life, to put it mildly. Lamar opened a store in Alabama; it failed, so he moved back and became secretary to Governor George Troup. He married, started a family, then moved to […]
Peyton Anderson was born in 1907 in Macon with newspaper ink in his veins. His uncle edited and published the Macon Telegraph and later the Macon News; his father was vice president of the company; another uncle was a columnist. Anderson began working at the paper at age 9 sweeping floors. After earning a Bronze […]
It was Atlanta’s most popular newspaper for almost 100 years. The Atlanta Journal published its first edition in 1883 and the afternoon paper quickly challenged the Constitution, its more established morning rival. E.F. Hoge founded the Journal, then sold it in 1887 to a young lawyer named Hoke Smith for $10,000. President Grover Cleveland appointed […]