Photograph by Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library
My father-in-law, Larry Entrekin, grew up on 10th Street. As a boy, he liked to swim in the lake at Piedmont Park on sunny summer days. When he and his brother, Ivan, were teenagers, they would steal stray golf balls from the park’s public nine-hole golf course and sell them; the manager told them that if they’d stop and help him guard the course from other would-be invaders, they could golf for free. They took him up on his offer.
Larry graduated in the class of 1962 from what was then called Grady High School and attended Georgia Tech on a baseball scholarship. After Tech, he began his career in commercial real estate in Atlanta and never left. Larry was a lifer, a man who knew the city in his bones. The idea of consulting a map or GPS offended him; he knew all the back roads.
Larry always remarked how much the city had grown since he was a kid. “I remember when that was a swimming hole,” he’d say as we drove past Lindbergh Plaza. He was a fan of some of the changes, like Midtown’s new high-rise offices in the late ’80s, which he believed brought continuity to the city’s growth. Others he railed against. “When they closed Rich’s downtown, it also ended the Lighting of the Great Tree and the Pink Pig ride there,” he would lament on many a Thanksgiving. “They broke an Atlanta tradition that can never be replaced.”
Larry passed away in October, before I began serving as editor in chief of this magazine. In the quarter century I knew him, he had always been a subscriber. He and his wife, Kaye, would dog-ear the pages where my stories appeared.
As I helped edit our series of essays on the city’s evolution since 1961 (the year our magazine was born), I felt—once again, and all at once—the loss of Larry. He would have been my secret weapon on a feature like this, a man who had lived through it all and could instantly recall a name or explain how certain people were connected.
He would have gotten on my nerves, of course (Larry’s “suggestions” were always more like proclamations), but his assistance would have been invaluable. There aren’t many Larrys out there anymore—people who were born and raised here and have seen the city through the decades of its most rapid growth.
Although I’m sure Larry’s guidance would have made this issue stronger, I do think he would be proud of the essays we’ve assembled and the contributions we’ve received from Atlanta icons such as Andrew Young. He’d be happy that his hometown magazine is still printing away after 65 years. Most of all, he would say he’s glad he spent his life in Atlanta, a city that grew up right alongside him but always managed to feel like home.
This article appears in our May 2026 issue.
