It doesn’t get around much anymore, but the Liberty Bell came to Atlanta on this date in 1895 for the Cotton States Exposition. It almost didn’t. The famously-cracked, 2,000-pound peeler left Philadelphia on seven trips between 1885 and 1915. Each time, it came home with more cracks. Turns out, the men hired to guard the […]
He won the first Heisman Trophy ever awarded to a southern college football player. But Frank Sinkwich might never have played at the University of Georgia if a recruiter hadn’t stopped for gas. Sinkwich was born in 1920 in Croatia and grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. UGA Assistant Coach Bill Hartman was recruiting another player […]
Tiger Woods hasn’t done it. Jack Nicklaus didn’t do it. But Atlanta’s Bobby Jones did. On this date in 1930, Jones became the first and only golfer to win the Grand Slam: the U.S. Amateur, the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the British Amateur. Born in 1902, Jones learned to play golf at the […]
The rock of tradition versus the hard place of progress is an old southern dilemma. John Donald Wade, born in Marshallville, knew it well. Wade’s deep Georgia roots ran back to his great grandfather, John Adam Treutlen, Georgia’s first governor. Teaching at Vanderbilt in the 1920s, Wade helped create one of the seminal books in […]
Long before Plymouth, or Jamestown, or even St. Augustine, there was another settlement in North America: the very first European attempt to establish a permanent colony on the mainland since the Vikings 500 years earlier. Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon and 600 Spanish colonists landed on Georgia’s coast on this day in 1526, over 200 years […]
He was a high school dropout who would be governor. Born in Atlanta, Lester Maddox worked at the Bell Bomber factory in Marietta during World War II. He opened the Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta in 1947. It became the focal point of his fierce opposition to integration and civil rights. He famously chased Black patrons […]
His writing still evokes the spirit of the north Georgia mountains. Novelist and poet Byron Herbert Reece was born in Union County near Blood Mountain. Nicknamed “Hub,” he grew up on the family farm. That life and his mountain heritage would be recurring themes in his writing. He attended Young Harris College and published his […]
Macon usually gets top billing when it comes to Georgia’s musical heritage, but Columbus has a trump card – “Ma” Rainey, the “Mother of the Blues,” who was honored on this day in 1994 by the U.S. Postal Service. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey was born in 1886 in Columbus, where she first started performing in vaudeville […]
Lamar Dodd’s paintings evoked “Georgia, Georgia, Georgia,” according to one New York art critic. Born in Fairburn and raised in LaGrange, Dodd studied briefly at LaGrange College and Georgia Tech before attending the Arts Students League in New York City. He studied under Boardman Robinson, American Scene artist Thomas Hart Benton, and George Luks of […]
What Georgian doesn’t feel a tinge of pride every time we hear Ray Charles sing “Georgia on my Mind?” It is Georgia’s official state song, and maybe the reason it sounds especially soulful is that Charles was singing about home. Born in Albany, Ray Charles Robinson later changed his name to avoid confusion with boxer […]
