• Atlanta

    A Blast of a Summer

    July 1, 2000

    Thirty years ago this summer, thousands of American soldiers were fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. Across this country, students protesting the continued war in Vietnam had closed down dozens of universities. In Atlanta’s Piedmont Park and Midtown, hundreds of hippies were roaming around pushing drugs, counterculture posters and alternative lifestyles.

    As a contrast, my life was rather simple. I had just graduated from eighth grade and was sporting a plaster cast on my broken left arm. I was looking forward to a summer of sleeping late and watching television.
    My brother Michael, who had recently returned from protests at his college, suggested I volunteer in the congressional political campaign of a man who two years before had been standing on a Memphis balcony next to Martin Luther King Jr. when he was killed by an assassin’s bullet. His name was Andrew Young.

    Andrew_young

    So one morning, I walked four blocks down Peachtree just past Peachtree Creek to the newly opened “Northside” branch office. I sauntered in to the storefront space and was amazed by the level of activity inside. Phones were ringing, radios were blaring, people of various ages, color, religions and geographic background were running around shouting directions to each other, stuffing envelopes, answering phones and generally ignoring me – a preppy little teenager with a cast.

    I wandered to the back of the room where one guy was juggling several phone calls. “I’d like to volunteer to help,” I said. He looked me up and down and pointed to a group to his right. “Can you stuff envelopes?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. “Well they could use your help.”

    The next two months, I did a little bit of everything: stuffing envelopes, answering phones, buying coffee, making copies, attending poolside political parties and even going door-to-door in countless suburban apartment complexes, canvassing curious residents about their political leanings, voting habits and interest in supporting the controversial concept of an African-American minister representing us in Washington.

    I dug up old photographs in filing cabinets and adorned the bare office walls with posters, exhibits and a collection of “Think Young” bumper stickers. I even organized a few friends on a midnight jaunt to plaster my neighborhood speed limit and stop signs with bumper stickers. The next day people were calling in to complain about the illegal use of campaign materials.

    One morning, I awoke to a radio news report that our office had been bombed the night before. I was stunned. I hurried down to see the open gap in the building where the hair salon next door had been. Our campaign office windows were blasted out and the walls were cracked and much of the roof had fallen inside. The fire department had pretty much drowned everything else.

    I helped put up a sandwich board on the street with a sign that said, “We’re Still in Business.” The sign appeared in the newspaper the next day. Then I grabbed a broom and began sweeping the sidewalk.

    Suddenly, Andrew Young walked up and two television stations began filming his reaction. Several cameras were trained on me as I swept. I felt like a media star. I found reasons to edge in behind Andy as he was filmed, talking about the “lunatic fringe” that might have been responsible for the senseless bombing.

    Months later, I was surprised to find out the bomb had been arranged in an insurance scam by the salon next door. And I was greatly saddened by the loss of my candidate in the general election.
    I never made any money that summer, but I had a maturing peek into the fascinating world of politics and the media at a time of great change in our city.

    Photo: Congressman Andrew Young in 1970s

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  • Atlanta,  Life Stories

    The Doctor Was In

    June 1, 2000

    Starting a newspaper can be an exciting enterprise. It’s even possible for the whole process to go to your head. Fortunately for me, since I spent my youth here, I get lots of chances to maintain my humility.

    A couple of years ago, my mother was hosting a Fourth of July barbecue for some old family acquaintances. She asked me to stop by, say hello to her friends and maybe help out in the kitchen. When I walked out on her deck, a number of folks asked about the paper. Some were going on and on about how they love the stories about restaurants or who their favorite columnist was, etc. I, of course, was taking it all in, enjoying all of the praise and being of very little help in the kitchen.

    Then one nice old gent I did not recognize chimed in. “I remember you from when you were a little boy,” he began. “We lived next to each other in the Palais Apartments.”

    The Palais Apartments used to be perched on the hill on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta between WSB-TV and The Temple, overlooking the intersection of Spring Street. With the current craze in moving back to Midtown, these old Tudor architecture, two-story residences would be a gem – had they survived. Alas, they were torn down more than 10 years ago and the vacant hill was just recently graced with yet another glass office building.

    The former neighbor was continuing his story, with others beginning to listen in.

    “I’ll never forget the time I was reading the paper one Sunday afternoon, sitting in our living room next to an open window. Right below the window were some bushes and, apparently, you and a little girl were hiding in there. You were about three years old and I think she was four or five. Anyway, she was telling you to pull down your pants and then she would pull down hers. You were not going along with her.”

    As he’s telling this story, I’m wondering where in the world this was going. I had no recollection of this early visit to “the doctor’s office” and here I was quickly becoming the focus of this late afternoon picnic. I was also wondering, why was he sitting there listening to all of this and not doing anything about it, but I was too shocked to say anything.

    “So you must have pulled down your pants, because then she said she was going to pull hers down for you to see. Then next thing I heard was you protesting that you didn’t see anything and for her to pull her pants down again. Then I heard you say, ‘Hey, tThat’s not fair, you don’t have anything to show.’”

    Everyone on the deck was having a nice laugh at my expense. I vaguely remember making mud pancakes with this older chick, but I didn’t recall this early medical research. I was beginning to turn several shades of red – all for an incident for which I have no recall. My mother, upon hearing the story, remembered the girl as being the granddaughter of a nearby neighbor.

    “I thought it was inappropriate for them to let that child to play with you. She was much too aggressive for you!” my mom concluded.

    I’ve always tried to keep my dating life private and now my very first interaction with the opposite sex was the subject of late-afternoon gossip. Soon others came out to the porch and wanted to know what was so funny. I figured that was the perfect time for me to go help out in the kitchen.

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  • Atlanta,  Media

    Going Back to Greenville, Mississippi

    May 4, 2000

    I got a late start one recent Saturday morning and was quietly enjoying my second cup of coffee. It was 10:15 when I turned to the obituary page. There it was: a news announcing the death two days earlier of Betty Carter.

    I drew a deep breath and read the familiar recounting of her years of fighting Huey Long in Louisiana and then moving with her more famous husband, Hodding Carter, to Greenville, Miss., to start a newspaper and battle, among others, the Ku Klux Klan.

    Chris_in_greenville

    Suddenly, I was transported back 22 years to the time I first walked into the newsroom of this famous little newspaper, Delta Democrat-Times of which she was then publisher. It was there this queen of a woman of such elegance and old New Orleans charm had edited or co-wrote her husband’s editorials on racial tolerance, for which they won a Pulitzer. It was under her tutelage that I hammered out my first editorial.

    I remembered how she and her husband came to Greenville at the invitation of poet and planter William Alexander Percy, around whom an unusual renaissance of writers gathered in an isolated river town of 50,000. It was William’s nephew, novelist Walker Percy, whom I met standing in line at the Atlanta funeral of the woman through whom we were slightly related. I thought about how I had been back to visit all my other stops on my Southern tour of newspapers, but had never been “back to Greenville,” a phrase recently hammered into my psyche by a Lucinda Williams CD that played in my car for weeks.

    I went online and tried to find the funeral arrangements, but had no luck. I called the newsroom at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and reached a woman in circulation, no doubt mired in a Mardi Gras glaze, whom I begged to read me yesterday’s paper. “The funeral,” she read, “will be Saturday at 3:30 p.m. in Greenville, Mississippi.”

    I called Delta Air Lines: a flight was leaving in 50 minutes. I made it, sweating, five minutes before departure. I rented a car in Memphis and raced down Highway 61, arriving at the church with 10 minutes to spare. I took a breath, looked around and recognized faces I had not seen in 21 years: the features editor, a photographer, a fellow reporter, several Percy “cousins,” Betty’s sons, Hodding Jr. and Philip. At the cemetery, I had a few minutes to chat with a few. Others got away before I could reminisce.

    I drove around the courthouse and police station and jail, where all the characters had once seemed larger than life because it was after all, Mississippi, and it was my first job. I visited the newspaper, which hadn’t changed. Sallie, the managing editor, was there and still on the news desk.

    I drove past the old carriage house where I first lived as a single man right out of college. A little more than a year later, I drove out in a U-Haul truck with a dog, a cat and a wife. The carriage house was still shadowed by the same bamboo, oak and magnolia trees that had cooled the hot summer days of our first few weeks of marriage in 1979. As I again drove out east on Highway 82, I was struck by how I now live single again in Atlanta, where everything is about hectic change and rapid growth. I felt comforted to go back to Greenville, where hardly anything or anyone had changed and yet these erudite gentle folks who once were so much a part of my life still move through life at their own rhythm at a pace we in Atlanta can only remember.
    Photo of Chris Schroder, staking out Greenville, Mississippi, police station.

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  • Atlanta,  Life Stories

    A City Boy in Full

    April 1, 2000

    The call came through one Wednesday afternoon. If I was interested, the man was saying, I could jump on a private plane Saturday afternoon and join other media types flying to Albany, Ga., to stay in a storied old plantation and go “hunt’n.”

    Gillionville3

    “Did you ever read ‘A Man in Full’ by Tom Wolfe?” he asked.

    “Well, sure,” I told him. “In fact, I read it while traveling in Cuba.”

    “I hear there’s some real fine fish’n down there.”

    “Oh, yeah,” I said. I had spent a week in Cuba and never once thought about a fish, except for those that showed up broiled on a plate next to some black beans and rice.

    “Well,” he continued, “this is gonna be ‘A Man in Full’ weekend – horses, wagons, dogs, the whole thing. Got yourself a gun?”

    Well, I did inherit my dad’s shotgun, the very shotgun he had taken on hunting trips when I was a child. I had waited for him to take me with him, but those exotic occasions seemed reserved for his college buddies. I had read all of Faulkner’s hunting stories, preparing myself for the moment I would have to look down the sights of a two-barrel at a wild animal and I wondered if I could really ever pull the trigger. I’d never had the opportunity to find out, especially since I’d once been married to a life-long vegetarian who wasn’t sure she’d stay married to me if I did.

    Gillionville

    Once at Gillionville, one of the most famous of the now-famous quail plantations, we were led out to a field, given a gun and began blasting away at some clay pigeons shot from an automatic skeet launcher.
    The gun felt good under my arm. I loved the sound when I pulled the trigger and the gun exploded, followed by the obliteration of the plastic projectile. Then, there followed that primordial sound that magically transforms a city boy into a real man: the guttural sounds of other hunters congratulating me on my good aim. I breathed deeply and stood tall. I confidently cracked open the gun and ejected those shells and inhaled that intoxicating combination of metal, oil and gunpowder.

    That night, after a grand dinner, all us manly men retired to the fireplace and drank glasses of port and smoked cigars. Then, it began. The stories. Hunt’n stories from Montana, fish’n stories from Alaska – each one grander than the last. “Ohmygod,” I thought. “I forgot to pack any stories.”

    Gillionville2

    I drank heavily from the port, trying to summon some suitable tale. When I was a child I found some crawdads in our creek, one block west of Peachtree. My brothers and I once unsuccessfully shot a pellet gun at squirrels in tall pine trees because they threw pine cones at us while we threw the football.

    I began to shift uncomfortably in my chair, fearing my city-boy nature would be unmasked. I could feel the sweat popping out on my forehead. Finally, the plantation manager said he had to get up early to wake the dogs, so he’d better mosey off for some shuteye. Others followed and I was saved.

    The next morning we rose early, had a huge hunt-country breakfast and I rode a horse for three hours, carefully absorbing each and every detail of my successful hunt so next time I could lean back by the fire, take a pull on my cigar and tell the story of the time I went to Gillionville …

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  • Fatherhood

    Building a New Structure

    March 1, 2000

    When my kids were 9 and 7, life was kind of crazy. Our family was adjusting to a divorce, each parent was settling into a new household and my daughter and son were making friends at a new school. That’s a good amount of change for one calendar year.
    Yet, eight years later, I am amazed to report my children seem remarkably well-adjusted. They haven’t finished the rocky voyage through the teenage years, but solid ground is beginning to appear on the horizon.
    Last fall, I rented a van in Charlotte, where they have lived for five years, picked them up and four of my daughter’s friends and headed back to Georgia. We toured the mountains, several outlets, the Mall of Georgia, Lenox, Phipps and other points of interest to teenagers. For a few hours, my son and I had time to toss a football and talk about life. I asked him why he and his sister seemed to have done so well despite all the turmoil. “Well,” he said, “most kids my age have been through the same thing.”
    I’m not a proponent of divorce. Far from it. I think it should be the very last resort. I write about it because time provides perspective and one thing that is most elusive when you are in the middle of a break-up is perspective.
    The top two pieces of advice I give to parents starting down this road are: 1) show and tell the kids you love them at every opportunity and 2) don’t let them hear you criticize your ex-spouse. Simple as they sound, this can be difficult for parents nursing their own wounds.
    I also suggest providing a strong sense of structure amidst all the chaos. I love spontaneity, and somehow stumbled into this strategy by default. I had just joined the Second Ponce de Leon Family Life Center. So every Wednesday night from 6-9 p.m. we would eat at the same restaurant, be served by the same waiter, go swimming and play basketball and then dash by for a quick visit with my parents. On Friday nights, we would go roller skating and on Saturday mornings we took a ceramics class. On Sunday mornings, we visited church or Sunday school. This rhythm carried us through that tough first year.
    When they moved to Charlotte, their mother and I stuck to a rigid every-other weekend visitation policy. Even though it involved lots of driving, we all adjusted.
    Now the “kids” are 17 and 15. They have other interests: Friends, school activities, games and more recently, jobs. Weekends are not so open anymore. In years past, I would have mourned their absence, but now we all have a sense of peace that we are very much engaged, even if the opportunity has shrunk to e-mails and phone calls.
    A few days ago, my son Thomas called and asked when we could get together again. I told him it depended on when they could get free from work. “Well this weekend I have two spend-the-night parties and work on Saturday. But how about you and I do something the next weekend and then you can take Sally on that college visit you were talking about the next weekend.”
    A perfect plan, for many reasons. If we do have less time together, this will ensure it is fully focused on one at a time.
    I’m always amazed that I can go years without seeing best buddies from high school or college, but within seconds of being together, we are laughing as if our paths never diverged.
    It’s much the same now as the children get older. Our bonds were forged with steady time together and though we now find the moments more fleeting, they are always strong. I’m convinced it is because we instilled a rhythm in the early years, even if at the time, life seemed totally out of control.

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  • Media

    Communication Breakdown

    February 4, 2000

    A few years ago, a salesman (who was also a cousin) from one of those new telephone companies talked our newspaper into switching our local and long distance service to them. Promising huge percentage reductions in our phone bill sounded great, but whenever we needed work done on our lines (which in our growth stage was frequent), they had to call our old service provider (you know, those Big Guys that used to be our only choice).

    Weeks later, one of the Big Guys would show, pull out a piece of paper and say, “Oops, looks like your provider ordered the wrong phone line to be worked on. They’ll have to call back and send another order through and then we can come back and work on it.”

    “Hey,” I said to this same technician who had serviced us when we were with his company. “You used to show up the next day and if we had to add or change our order, you’d do it on the spot. Now it takes weeks of bureaucratic requests to get anything done.”

    He then gave me a wry smile, leaned back and whispered to me: “You’d get that kind of service again if you would switch back to us.”

    So, after a year of hassles, we finally switched back to the Big Guys and all was well again. Except the other company kept billing us for service we no longer had. The bill got up towards $40,000 with fees, interest, penalties, etc. I kept slipping the bills under the windshield wiper on my cousin’s car, who parks in the same lot as I do. He said they had a new billing computer and they were having trouble communicating with it.

    Last summer, another new phone company wired our building and promised even better rates. Always willing to support the little guys (as we are), we signed up. But they had a miscommunication between their sales and production departments, resulting in our office having no phone service for a week. Talk about stress: I spent each day on my cell phone, working my way up the management chain of this new phone company, begging for help. Finally, I got the cell phone number of the company’s vice-president, who was in a convention in New Orleans. Soon, service was restored and my employees could once again talk to our customers.

    A few months ago I went home and found that line not working. Thus began a four-week odyssey of calls to customer service reps and conversations with technical people who came to my house.

    For two days, I did have service, but I started getting calls for some woman I did not know. Then, when I called my daughter, she looked at her Caller ID and asked if I was dating this same woman. I assured her I wasn’t. My next call was from the mystery woman herself, who told me she too had been without service for two weeks and I somehow ended up with her line.

    My line went silent the next day and stayed that way until one of the techs who reappeared at my house asked what business I was in.

    “Newspapers,” I said.

    “I didn’t say this,” he said. “But if you wrote a story about this, you’d get service real quick.”

    That afternoon, I called the media relations department and explained to a nice woman I was writing a story about several households – including mine – being without service for weeks at a time. The woman didn’t believe I had been without service for a month. “Let me check into is and I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said.
    The next day she called and said her boss had verified my story, dispatched three trucks to my street and told them not to go home until I had service restored.

    That night, I picked up my phone and called my daughter. She was happy to hear I had moved back home. Now that I have phone service, I think I’ll stay.

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  • Atlanta

    The Southern Club

    February 1, 2000

    I would be a terrible restaurant critic despite the fact that one of my favorite activities is eating. I’m pretty good at it, too, but the problem is that I have yet to meet a piece of food that I didn’t like. Even when I had to eat chitlins, I just smothered them in ketchup and grinned my way through a plate. Probably the only time
    I’d ever give a restaurant a bad review would be if I walked away hungry.

    With that criteria, one restaurant that never got a bad review from the sophisticated palates of my hungry friends back when we were in college was called The Southern Club. This was in the days when Atlanta still had boarding houses. Located on 11th Street in Midtown, The Southern Club was probably one of our city’s last official boarding houses. Boarders could rent a room for a night or forever and enjoy the other amenities of the place, including perhaps a library, a living room and, of course, a dining room. Kind of like today’s bed-and-breakfasts, except that boarding houses served a whole lot more than breakfast. It just so happened that at this boarding house, the dining room was open to the public and for those in the know, it was a great secret indeed.

    During the summers back then, my friends Charles Driebe and Mike Egan and I formed a company called the Buckhead Bricklayers (with our famous motto “We Lay for Less”). On days when we visited the club, we would warn our clients that we had some supplies to pick up during lunch and we might be gone for two or three hours.

    We’d walk into the Club, pay $2.00, pick up a glass of sweet iced tea, grab a plate and help ourselves to an all-we-could-possibly-eat buffet. On Monday through Thursday, meats included wonderfully cooked fried chicken or pork chops or ham. But Fridays were special because for $2.50 we could eat all the roast beef we wanted. Vegetables were all our southern favorites: mashed potatoes and gravy, creamed corn, collard greens, green beans, lima beans, pole beans – about every kind of bean.

    Before, during and especially after every meal we helped ourselves to the club’s signature item: hot, flaky, homemade biscuits. I had experienced good biscuits before, but never quite like the ones they served at the Club. They were huge and steaming hot. And while I had experienced the joy of slathering butter across a hot biscuit before, it was at the Club that I was introduced to one of God’s gifts to biscuits: honey. The Club placed big jars of honey on every table. We’d pour it on top of the melting butter and lower the top of the biscuit so the honey would have dripped out except for the fact that we knew to eat them before the honey hit the table. We would eat these biscuits all during the meal, but after our plates had been cleared away, we’d focus solely on the biscuits and butter and honey.

    After a long morning of laying brick and an hour at the Club, we would then drive to a park, lie in the midday sun, make occasional grunting sounds as we snoozed away another hour, dreaming about our next trip to our favorite little five-star restaurant that exists today only in our memories.

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  • Life Stories,  Spirituality

    A World of Difference

    November 4, 1999

    Two Decembers ago, I stepped off a plane in Vienna, Austria, on what turned out to be St. Nicholas Day. Last December I arrived in Santiago, Cuba, in time for the Festival of San Lazaro. Two higher-contrast examples of how we humans celebrate the holidays might be difficult to find on this earth. Yet in some ways they were so similar.

    Vienna is all old-world charm. Nestled next to the Alps, its winters are all gray skies and snow. The people are an odd blend of Germanic rigidity and Eastern European culture. Beautiful cathedrals and palaces and family-run goulash houses. Coffeehouses where locals linger for three hours in deep conversation.

    There may not be another city of this size that takes Christmas so seriously. The downtown has many streets closed to cars and in their place are hundreds of trees, wreaths and crèches. Stores seemed to compete for festive decor. Long after the stores were closed, the downtown pedestrian-only streets were crowded with neighbors walking and socializing. Neighborhood squares around town had individual fairs, with children performing in costume and artists displaying their work. And throughout the city, the most popular stops were countless booths serving a warm wine concoction called gluvine. Family members of all ages drank the traditional potion from festive ceramic mugs as they tried to stay warm in the evening wind. The alcohol ignited a minor buzz that seemed to tie the entire city together into one large family with a collective electric current.

    Crossing the island of Cuba in December was a sub-tropical contrast. Thirty years of isolation and a government ban on religion have tried to smother what was once an island of deeply Catholic people into a spiritual desert. There are no nativity scenes, Santas, or reindeer and the only Christmas trees are strangely tucked into the corner of lobbies of hotels into which only foreign tourists are allowed. Until the pope visited in 1997, any recognition of Christmas was outlawed.

    But on the Festival of San Lazaro, even Castro and his guards couldn’t stamp out a spiritual expression that is as basic to mankind’s needs as food and water and companionship. Groups gather in selected homes for a 24-hour spiritual holiday called a bembe, disguised as a family party. The collective theme is Santeria, a cleverly hidden hybrid of Christianity, African Yoruban icons and voodoo.

    These people who have so little material goods are quick to invite even American tourists off the street to share in their chanting, dancing, drinking and worship around an altar of food, holy water and artifacts. Percussionists or even old tape players keep the beat going around the clock.

    One man who was the local butcher invited us back that evening for a family feast for which he was cooking a cabrito, or goat. When we arrived, he led us into a small living room totally encircled with people of a variety of ages and colors. “This,” he said to us in Spanish with his arms outstretched toward the whole circle, “– this is all my family. You are my family, too!” After he had ensured all had plenty to eat and drink, he and his wife took plates full of food to neighbors unable to leave their homes.

    Although these two cultures were outwardly worlds apart, they shared the same sense of family and desire to celebrate the season. I like to think as I celebrate the holidays this year with my own family, I can incorporate both the pageantry of Vienna and the passion of Cuba.

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  • Fatherhood

    Letting Go is Hard to Do

    November 3, 1999

    When the phone rings at 6:15 in the morning, you know trouble’s brewing.

    It was my daughter Sally, locked in yet another battle with her mother. I’ve been privy to many of their fights in the past few years. Though they are two states away, the marvel of modern technology transports me right into their midst. I don’t need a Web cam to see what’s going on. Just the audio is enough for me to set the scene.

    There have been times when they were each on their separate phone lines, sitting in their separate bedrooms – adjacent to each other, yet with their doors slammed shut and each on the phone with me. I would toggle back and forth between the two calls, hearing this, explaining that, but usually just listening and searching for a peaceful portal between the passion.

    I could tell instantly that this particular skirmish was the pivotal one. Though the issues were familiar, the fighting was at a fevered pitch and neither was leaving the other an escape from this day’s chosen field of battle.

    I knew that if I allowed myself to be carried away by the smaller events that triggered the current conflict, I would lose sight of the larger struggle that underlies this and every other great war in the history of man: the attempt of one to control the other.

    My daughter’s call was about whether she had the right to stay home sick from school (again). A larger context was whether she had the right to switch high schools (again). But the primary issue was that Sally was nearly 17 and Callender, her mother, wanted to protect her from making a series of decisions that, from a parent’s perspective, would lead to certain failure.

    Any peacemaker worth his salt instinctively follows the same steps during recognizable crisis points such as this: negotiate an immediate truce, draw a demilitarized zone, send each general back to his or her respective headquarters for a short cooling-off period and then quickly begin a round of shuttle diplomacy.
    Timing is everything. A short time after the early phone call, Callender called me. She was at her wit’s end. And for the first time in I don’t know how long, she signaled that she was open to advice – from me of all people.

    I painted a picture of our daughter during her first month in college, only two years from now. “Will she still be living with you and your husband?” I asked. “Hell, no,” Callender answered. “Then do you want her calling you every night from the dorm and fighting about every decision she is about to make?” “No,” she said.

    “Then as sad and scary as this seems, your job right now is not to protect her, but to allow her to make decisions that might lead to failure, but they will be Sally’s failures and from those she will learn lessons that will aid her in future decisions she must make, when you and I are not around.”

    It was easy for me to say this. I have had to learn to let go, earlier than I wanted to. Now Callender was facing the same frightening moment. The next day she told Sally she was giving her the right – and responsibility – of deciding where to go to school. The consequences would be hers to experience.

    The very next day a federal judge ruled in a landmark 20-year-old busing case that Charlotte could no longer bus kids around to achieve racial diversity. The consequence of this was that it froze Sally in her school while all is sorted out. Tell me there isn’t a God up there.

    But the fact that Callender gave Sally responsibility to make the decision changed everything. Mother and daughter report peace has returned to the land. And my phone hasn’t rung in weeks.

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  • Atlanta,  Life Stories,  Media

    Glenda the Mailwoman

    September 4, 1999

    Last month I prepared for my annual two-week vacation with my kids. As always, I wrote a note to my friend Glenda and left it in my mailbox. Glenda is my postal delivery person. The day I left, I opened my mailbox and pulled out a nice note from Glenda. She confirmed the dates she would re-deliver the mail and told me to have a great vacation, and punctuated it with her trademark signature and happy face.

    These days I love the post office, but it wasn’t always that way.

    When I first met the previous owners of my house seven years ago, they walked me around the yard explaining all the quirky things about the place. One of the more endearing aspects was their relationship with their mailman. There was no mailbox at the house, so most days, he would walk up the 39 steps of the driveway and leave the mail on top of an old milk jug, carefully placing a sea shell on top of it so it wouldn’t blow away. If it looked like rain, he would continue up the remaining 13 steps and slip the mail inside the screen porch.

    I moved in the house on a Monday and happily walked up my driveway and stopped at the milk jug: no mail. I continued up to the screen porch and discovered a letter from my postman hanging from my door knob. It said he was invoking a post office regulation requiring the installation of a street-side mailbox.

    Figuring I had a grace period, I came home the next day expecting to see a pile of mail. There was none. I called the post office, but they offered no help. After 10 days of no mail, I gave in and erected a mailbox. There was still no mail. I was furious. I had to sign a form to release all the mail.

    To get back at my postman, I often parked directly in front of my mailbox so he would have to get out of his truck to drop the mail in. Pay backs are hell.

    A couple of years later, I started this company. I keep close tabs on the delivery of our newspapers. I’ve monitored when my papers arrive at the local post office and then called a network of neighbors to track the wave of delivery. I’ve driven around the neighborhood, flagged down a postman and asked why he hadn’t delivered my papers yet when his associates had done so days earlier.

    Then the post office assigned Glenda to my route. I detected the difference immediately. She delivered my paper early and wrote a note alerting me that she was delivering my papers to her route that day and including a schedule of when her associates would finish delivering theirs. Some days, I might only get one magazine or an advertising flier in my mailbox. But Glenda will spruce it up, writing “No bills today!” on my label. She always includes a happy face.

    Sometimes when our printing schedule results in a late delivery to the post office, I would take boxes of doughnuts to the local distribution facility for the postal workers’ 9 a.m. break. (No, it wasn’t a bribe – there is a postal regulation against that.) I would include a letter thanking the nice delivery people for their outstanding work. Glenda will write a thank-you note the next day.

    I always wave when I see Glenda making the rounds in the neighborhood. She has a wonderful smile and a happy thought to share. She says she enjoys reading our newspaper. I hope she reads this page. Thanks, Glenda (and all your fellow postal professionals), for all you do.

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