People

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.

“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.

The greatest orator of the twentieth century inspired seismic changes at home that reverberated around the world.

The face—knitted brow, scrunched nose, curled lip, eye roll at the ready—is familiar to anyone who’s ever been, or been in the orbit of, a teenager. With elegant simplicity, it says one thing: You suck. Morgan Saylor is a pro at making the face.

If you took a map of Atlanta and placed dots on every spot where Woodruff—during his time the most admired, most influential, and richest man in Atlanta—left a mark, the terrain would be covered.

If there is such a thing as an intentional life, Wes Gordon—the most interesting fashion designer Atlanta has ever produced—is living it. By preschool, he was selecting his mother’s daily outfits for her job at an advertising agency. For his fourth birthday, all he wanted was a suit and a ticket to Phantom of the Opera, and a year later he refused to go to kindergarten without his red suspenders and blue suede bucks.

Arthur Blank turned sixty-five last September, in the middle of the worst year of his professional life. Just weeks before, Michael Vick, the marquee Falcons quarterback around whom Blank had built the team, had pleaded guilty to running a dog-fighting ring out of his home in Virginia.

Maloof was the blustery barkeep who established a beer-soaked bunker for Atlanta’s Democratic establishment while he carved out his own political career governing the formerly Republican enclave of DeKalb County.