Guenter Seeger
I met Guenter Seeger in 1985, shortly after he was hired to take over the then unremarkable Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead. Seeger had previously owned a restaurant in Pforzheim, near Baden-Baden in southwest Germany, and his tenure there earned him a rare Michelin star. Recruited by an American company to become the chef in a Washington, D.C., hotel that never took off, Seeger was lured to Atlanta by fellow German Horst Schulze, then the Ritz’s general manager. When I asked him recently if he remembered his first impression of our city, he said, “Ja, Christiane, it wasn’t the center of the world—but Pforzheim wasn’t either.”
Herman Talmadge
“I don’t need money. People give me things because they believe in me.” So said Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, and so, pretty much, said Talmadge. Ethics investigators found the U.S. senator from Georgia accepted loads of undisclosed gifts: airfare, clothing, fruit of the month packages, a trampoline, and wads of cash that he stuffed in a pocket.
Hank Aaron
Thirty-five years after retiring from baseball, the man many still consider the once and forever home run king keeps his hands in the sport he transformed.
Ralph McGill
McGill won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing after he denounced the 1958 bombing of the Temple on Peachtree Street. The lionhearted journalist, who had covered the rise of Hitler, linked the bombing to the racial hatred of the South’s white leaders.
Tyler Perry
Whether you flock to Fandango to purchase advance tickets for the latest Madea movie or chortled along with last year’s lacerating parody on Adult Swim’s The Boondocks, one thing is certain: Atlanta filmmaker Perry is the only major Hollywood player dedicated to cranking out hits from his adopted hometown. Only five years after shooting his first film (for one scene, he took a chain saw to a couch inside his own house), he was directing Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg and Grammy winner Janet Jackson in last year’s film adaptation of playwright Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf—partially shot at his sprawling thirty-acre Tyler Perry Studios in southwest Atlanta. At the TPS grand-opening party in 2008, Perry surprised mentors Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Cicely Tyson by dedicating soundstages in their honor as Will Smith beamed and Oprah Winfrey cried her eyelashes off. An awed Tyson said, “I never dreamed I would witness this in my lifetime. What I’ve achieved in my career is minuscule in comparison to this.”
Bernie Marcus
Born at the beginning of the Great Depression to Russian immigrant parents recently arrived in New Jersey, Bernard Marcus started out with nothing—and if he gets his way, the self-made billionaire will go out like that, too. Fired in 1978 at age forty-nine from his job running a hardware store chain, Marcus—along with partner Arthur Blank—rebounded by changing the way America shops. The Home Depot is now the nation’s second-largest retailer, but its founders are equally proud of creating the culture of corporate integrity and employee loyalty that earned it recognition as the country’s most admired retail chain.Helen Bullard
Helen Bullard was the consummate Atlanta political insider. While her name is largely unknown today, her influence was wide-reaching.
Earl Paulk
Over the next half century, the founder of one of Atlanta’s first megachurches popped up in one sex scandal after another.
50 Most Influential Atlantans: John Portman
With futuristic vision and unfettered ambition, John Portman shaped the Downtown Atlanta skyline. The Georgia Tech architecture grad dreamed up the second-tallest hotel in the western hemisphere, the cylindrical Westin Peachtree Plaza.
Carl Patton
When Patton took over as president of Georgia State University nineteen years ago, the campus was blighted with boarded buildings and classrooms full of students commuting into town for the day. Through his vision—and his ability to raise more than $1.5 billion for campus expansion, including a science center, a 2,000-bed University Commons dorm, fraternities, and sororities—he transformed Georgia State from a place where students went out of necessity into a genuine draw for the state’s best scholars. The Carnegie Foundation gave the school the prestigious ranking of research university. With three years left in his reign, Patton endorsed something he never thought would happen in his lifetime: fielding a football team.
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