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An 11-year-old’s mission to save Butts County police K-9s, one vest at a time

Joe Reisigl
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An 11-year-old’s mission to save Butts County police K-9s, one vest at a time

Jackson Police Department

Jackson Police Department | Jackson | 53 miles southeast of Atlanta
On a cold January night outside Jackson’s 10-person and one-dog police department, 11-year-old Cameron Tuggle’s face lights up when he spots Ric, a six-year-old K-9 officer. “He gave me a wet one!” Cameron exclaims. It’s a fittingly warm welcome for the fifth grader, who had recently outfitted not just Ric, a Belgian Malinois, but all the police dogs in Butts County with protective bulletproof vests. Cameron has always loved dogs—doting on pets ranging from pit bulls to Chihuahuas—and his family has a long history in law enforcement. So he was troubled by news of any police officer’s death, even a four-legged one. In March 2016, after he learned that police dogs in his home county were unprotected while on duty, Cameron launched a GoFundMe page to buy four K-9 vests, which can cost more than $1,000 each. He promoted the fundraiser online, catching the attention of the Eastern and Midwest Chapter of Vesting America’s Police K-9s, a Michigan-based nonprofit that helped spread the word about Cameron’s project. Donations poured in from around the world (an Australian woman sent $250). “We were checking the page 200 times a day,” says Cameron’s father, Dusty Tuggle. Within four months Cameron had enough cash to purchase vests for all three K-9 officers at the Butts County Sheriff’s Office, and by fall he had raised nearly $4,000. In December the Jackson City Council proclaimed the first Friday of 2017 “Cameron Tuggle Day.” The last of the money went toward purchasing a vest for the city’s most versatile K-9 cop, Ric, a four-year veteran of the force with a knack for sniffing out drugs and tracking down fleeing suspects. With the fundraiser finished, Police Chief James Morgan invited Cameron to meet Ric. With Ric and his handler Sergeant Corey Biles, Cameron lists the life-saving benefits of Ric’s new vest: “It can stop up to a .357 Magnum, and hollow-points, a four-inch blade knife . . . and it’s fireproof.” Chief Morgan stands back in the streetlight glow, watching. “Those vests are pretty expensive, and there’s just so much money you have to go around,” he says. “To me, this is above and beyond.”

Commemorative Air Force Dixie Wing brings warbirds back to life

Joe Reisigl
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Commemorative Air Force Dixie Wing brings warbirds back to life

Commemorative Air Force Dixie Wing

Commemorative Air Force Dixie Wing | Peachtree City | 36 miles southwest of Atlanta
An airplane fanatic since he was six, Willard Womack climbs onto the wing of a Bell P-63 Kingcobra and beholds it like some immense phoenix brought back to life. In four days, after a 25-year restoration, the P-63 will fly again or for the first time since 1974. As with every WWII relic at the Commemorative Air Force Dixie Wing—a large, loud “flying museum” in an Atlanta Regional Airport hangar—Womack knows the warplane’s history. It’s his job. The 80-year-old retired commercial pilot leads tours for Boy Scout troops, grade school classes, gearheads of all ages, and seniors from nearby nursing homes, instilling an appreciation for warbirds of a bygone era. “If it’s a veteran who flew in this airplane, we’ll lift them into the seat like a baby,” Womack says. “And you can just watch their face; they’re young men again.” Nationally, the CAF was founded in 1957 to preserve aircraft so devalued they were being sold for scrap, buried as junk, or pushed into oceans. Now the nonprofit has chapters across the country. Atlanta’s is the third largest, in terms of paying members (300 strong) and number of restored planes (eight). The collection includes a famous bent-wing FG-1D Corsair, a Japanese replica plane used in the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, and the gold standard for WWII fighter plane buffs—a North American P-51 Mustang, valued at $3.5 million. Mustang rides for nonmembers cost about $1,600—for 20 minutes—and they’re so popular that slots frequently sell out at events and air shows. The whole operation is put on by volunteers, including wing leader Jay Bess, who commutes 50 miles from Buckhead several times a week to spearhead the museum’s renovation and diversify the membership base. “We’re committed to preserving this history for the next generation, and we’re slowly morphing from the old boys flying club,” says Bess, 50. Back in the hangar, Womack recalls a powerful moment several years ago, when a 95-year-old veteran beelined for the wing’s B-24 bomber gun turret. “He shot down five German airplanes in one of those and almost got killed in it himself,” says Womack. “He touched it like it was a holy relic.”

This article originally appeared in our April 2017 issue.

Meet Mr. Yogi, the “resident historian” of the Porterdale Mill Lofts

Myrydd Wells Walljasper
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Meet Mr. Yogi, the “resident historian” of the Porterdale Mill Lofts

Porterdale Mill Lofts | Porterdale | 35 miles Southeast of Atlanta
Nobody calls him Gary Wilkerson. This is Mr. Yogi, or simply Yogi. He’s the proudest “river rat” that the rich soil of Porterdale’s Yellow River has ever produced, a hulking 67-year-old who briefly attended the University of Tennessee on a football scholarship but was quickly lured back by homesickness. Yogi grew up hunting rabbits in these bottomlands, gulping lemon sours at the local pharmacy, and playing baseball under the tutelage of B.C. Crowell—a former New York Yankees prospect who thought the young catcher resembled his pal Yogi Berra and bestowed a nickname that stuck like pine tar. “Mom called me that until she went into the grave,” says Yogi. After a career in industrial maintenance, seven grandkids, and two hip replacements, Yogi has found himself back on the banks of the Yellow River, where he rents an industrial-chic, two-bedroom unit in the Porterdale Mill Lofts and presides as resident historian. Originally opened in 1899, this thick-walled mill was once the world’s largest producer of twine, and its closure in the 1970s crippled tiny Porterdale. In the late 1990s—before “mixed-use” and “adaptive-reuse” were millennial-bait buzzwords—Atlanta architect and developer Walter Davis saw the blighted property’s potential and began a $25 million renovation that left the original brickwork, heart-of-pine floors, and elevator doors. Now, beyond the 154 apartments, the property is basically a miniature town, with restaurants, a bakery, a musical instrument retailer, a tax service provider, and a children’s dance studio. All of this, in conjunction with a booming bioscience industry, has reinvigorated Porterdale. Near the end of the mill’s renovation in 2006, Yogi said to his wife, “That’s where we’re going,” and for the past few years he’s enjoyed a two-minute morning commute to the back deck, where he sips coffee; casts a line into the river; listens to the hiss of a dam; and watches osprey, blue heron, and river otters frolic where he once did.

This article originally appeared in our March 2017 issue.

For locals, the eclectic Madison Drug Co. is an old-school gem

Myrydd Wells Walljasper
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For locals, the eclectic Madison Drug Co. is an old-school gem

Madison Drug Co.

Madison Drug Co. | Madison | 59 miles east of Atlanta
For the past quarter century, Ricky Harris has helped man the chicken fryer at Madison Drug Co., but his specialty is sneaking up on people—fellow employees, town dignitaries, and everyday customers alike—and scaring the bejesus out of them. Harris’s left arm was damaged so badly in a bicycle accident he can’t use it. His boss calls him “precious,” the mayor calls him by name, and he’s become something of an icon at Madison’s most old-school restaurant, situated a block from the historic square in this antebellum jewel that legend has it Sherman deemed too pretty to burn. The people of Madison have come to rely on this eclectic business, which is celebrating its centennial anniversary in 2017, for a bit of everything: a pharmacy that’s on-call 24/7, chocolate shakes, the alleged “best hamburgers in the Southeast,” Christian books, cathartic powwows about county government, and Wednesday night Bible study. The pharmacy provides the financial oxygen, but the grill is the daily heartbeat. The tide of after-school regulars changes seasonally with the practice schedules of local sports teams. The decor of checkerboard floor tile, retro clocks, and sparkly dining booths patterned after 1957 Chevys suggests the Fonz could walk in. It’s so throwback, in fact, they use a system of charge tickets, allowing teen regulars to rack up tabs that mom and dad pay later. “Parents will say, ‘Don’t let Billy Bob feed the whole neighborhood,’” says Luanne Whetzel, who took full ownership with her pharmacist husband, Gary, two years ago. “It’s a very generational business, in that grandparents were served, parents served, and now children are being served.” Whetzel is a Madison native, and though her octogenarian mother once served malts over that same marble countertop as a teenager, she never had ambitions of running the drug store. Then back problems persuaded her husband to leave commercial piloting for pharmacy school, which eventually led them here. “When you own a pharmacy and a food establishment,” Whetzel explains, “you [serve] every spectrum of the population, and it’s a good feeling to know that they feel welcome, and they’re comfortable. It just becomes your heart.”

This article originally appeared in our February 2017 issue.

One Square Mile: Hooping to the beat

Myrydd Wells Walljasper
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One Square Mile: Hooping to the beat

Hula HoopNine women in workout attire take their places inside a fitness studio, wielding Hula-Hoops of various sizes and sparkle. As “Moves Like Jagger” pumps through the Peavey speakers, the biggest smile of the bunch belongs to 73-year-old Joyce Walters. By day she handles finances for a Buford church, and though her preacher has ribbed her for it, Walters never misses Hooplovers Hula Sculpt on Tuesdays. She high-steps tonight in red pants and joins classmates in low-impact, luau-meets-chicken-strut movements that make her feel like the kid she was in the 1950s, when the Hula-Hoop craze swept America. “I was getting weak in the legs,” Walters says, “and since I’ve been doing this, my legs are stronger; my hips are stronger.” Michelle Obama and the Mayo Clinic endorse hooping, Kelly Osbourne calls it a surefire belly-flab blaster, and Cosmopolitan says the constant hip and stomach “pulsing” required to keep hoops in orbit is a fast-track to “Beyoncé abs.” The average exerciser burns 400 calories per hour by waist-hooping alone, but the count is much higher with the mélange of movements in this class (lunges, triceps extensions, twirls with neck and arms). Hooping also loosens cranky back muscles, straightens posture, and improves core strength and mobility, says class instructor Michelle Hamilton, a bubbly, pony-tailed former preschool teacher who completed three months of online courses to become a certified Hoop Love Coach. Hamilton credits hooping with changing her life in 2015, after a knee injury had sidelined her running routine and she spotted a girl gleefully hoopdancing at an Atlanta music festival. A year later her four weekly classes (and hoop-making business, Pachy Hoops) had become a legitimate job. Hoopers say there’s something in these plastic tubes that rekindles youth and fosters a community. “You grow up and forget how to play, basically,” Hamilton says. “In here, it doesn’t matter what your skill level is, your age, your demographic, or anything; I want this to be your tribe.”

This article originally appeared in our December 2016 issue.

One Square Mile: What it’s like to wash the windows of Atlanta’s tallest buildings

Myrydd Wells Walljasper
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One Square Mile: What it’s like to wash the windows of Atlanta’s tallest buildings

Window washingWindow Washing | Buckhead | 6 miles north of downtown
Ed Torres was installing hardwood floors in an Atlanta high-rise when he saw a window cleaner drop into view and said, “Oh, I want to do that.” Ed (pictured above) had always loved heights, but he was petrified for the first three months on the job, knowing he’d be tying ropes to the city’s tallest towers, clipping himself to a small seat, dropping over the edge, and hanging for hours. Now, 28 years later, Ed has lost two friends in the industry to falls, and each morning his wife still begs, “Be careful.” But he enjoys the flexible hours and pay—about $40 per hour, the higher the job the bigger the rate—so much that he enlisted his younger brother, Daniel, into Atlanta’s oldest high-rise window-washing company. Nationwide Window Cleaning branched out of Baltimore in 1968 specifically to clean the rotating Polaris restaurant atop the Hyatt Regency, and the company grew alongside Atlanta’s skyline, as motorized swing stages (multiperson platforms) were swapped out for more economical boatswain chairs, which require workers to rappel. “We’ve been on every building in this city,” says third-generation owner Jeff Boyar, who describes the truly monumental jobs—imagine the Westin Peachtree Plaza—as occupational adventures, sort of mountain climbs in reverse. Beyond the obvious, hazards can include swarms of bees, tricky geometry that requires swinging and then suction-cupping yourself to windows, enraged raptors (a hawk once ripped off Ed’s hat), lightning, and winds over 15 miles an hour, which can whip workers around buildings like tetherballs. And Atlanta is apparently full of high-rise exhibitionists. “You get to see a lot,” says Daniel Torres. “They don’t care.” Unlike his brother, Daniel keeps his job a secret from his children, and his wife never asks how his day went, or how far he dropped. Thinking too much about upcoming jobs can still cost him sleep, but on a breezy day atop Cathedral Towers in Buckhead, Daniel quadruple-tied off to a staircase and steel beam; loaded up his squeegee, mops, cleaning solution, descent device, and suction cups; gazed out upon the rumpled topography; and proudly listed the towers he’d conquered, from Cobb Galleria to Midtown. Then he leaned straight back, 14 stories over sidewalk and asphalt, saying, “You only live once.”

This article originally appeared in our November 2016 issue.

One Square Mile: The volunteer firefighters of Meriwether County

Myrydd Wells Walljasper
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One Square Mile: The volunteer firefighters of Meriwether County
Merriwether County Firefighters
Photograph by Mike Colletta

Meriwether County Fire Rescue Department | Greenville | 62 miles southwest of Atlanta
Along a red dirt road, where smoke is creeping like fog through the nearby pines, 32-year-old Dustin Owens waves a fire hose to tamp down a one-acre brush fire. He quickly determines the probable cause, pointing to bark-free veins atop a tall tree: lightning. With its rolling loblolly forests, cattle pastures, and towns chock-full of Victorian homes, Meriwether County is a picturesque—and substantial—piece of metro Atlanta’s southern fringe, bigger than Cobb and Clayton counties combined. When hell breaks loose anywhere across this vast jurisdiction—a fire, tornado, flood, body in a lake, plane crash, stranded cat in a tree—the volunteers of Meriwether County Fire Rescue Department are tasked with making it right. Here, volunteer firefighting is less an unpaid job than a time-honored exercise in selflessness. Numbering roughly 150 and divided among 13 districts, the volunteers range in age from 18 to almost 80. Emergency messages delivered via smartphone apps or squawking handheld radios pull them away from golf outings, Harley rides, landscaping jobs, anniversary dinners, even Christmas mornings. “My wife complains I have a radio in the bathroom, one in the hall, [another] in the den because I don’t want to miss anything,” says John Weiher, an ice cream distributor by day. With not a minute to spare, they’ll clamber into their gear wearing swim trunks or their Sunday best. Not all stick with it, as county chief Alfons Pynenburg explains: “To get up at 2 a.m. and go to a structure fire, come home at 5, and then go to work—it’s a sacrifice.” On some calls the true cost is invisible. Like the ones involving family and friends, or the crashed truck driver who was chatty one minute and bled of life the next. That’s when volunteer teams are forged into families. With a stogie bouncing on his lips, Lee Todd—a 62-year-old attorney and judge who’s been fighting Meriwether fires since his mother had to drop him off at them—acknowledges it’s “getting harder to get people to do civic-minded things.” But then he mentions his 11-year-old grandson, a sponge of a kid who loves responding to calls, watching from a safe distance as Grandpa does what needs to be done.

This article originally appeared in our October 2016 issue.

One Square Mile: Baker’s Emu Nest

Myrydd Wells Walljasper
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One Square Mile: Baker’s Emu Nest

Baker's Emu NestBaker’s Emu Nest | Griffin | 32 miles south of Atlanta
The affectionate female, Lilly, had eyes for an emu stud named Leo. But so did a larger gal named Lola. So in an episode that made high school catfights look tame, Lilly chased Lola until she crashed into the chain-link fence of their backyard pen, and Lola was removed. Now Lilly and Leo are a thing—mates for lives that could span 60 years. In the early 1990s, Jim Baker’s parents invested in a herd of six emus, the world’s second-largest bird (about six feet, full grown) and a ratite cousin of the ostrich. Three miles from Atlanta Motor Speedway, the 11-acre farm soon swarmed with more than 230 birds (one female produces about 50 eggs a season) and spawned several copycat operations—until everyone retired from the labor-and-cost-intensive emu game in the span of a few years. Then came the recession. When Baker lost his job working with sheet metal, he and his wife, Deb, thought they might try making personal care products from the large supplies of emu oil still frozen (to this day) in storage at his parents’ farm. Thus was born Baker’s Emu Nest, which didn’t stay mom-and-pop for long. Almost every bit of a processed emu is usable, including their supple hides and lean meat, long, soft feathers, onyx-like talons, and the liquid gold that is emu oil. Extracted from the layer of fat on the birds’ backs, the antibacterial oil helps relieve everything from eczema, arthritis, and gout to razor burn and yellow jacket stings. With their inventory of pure oils, shampoos, body butters, lotions, soaps, lip balms, and more, the couple now have distributors across the country. Demand is so high for Lilly and Leo’s chicks that most are sold (at $250 a head) within five days of hatching. That doesn’t mean letting go is easy. Lilly starts laying mini-football-sized eggs each October, and Baker incubates them in his garage, carefully turning and weighing—and whistling to—the eggs each day so that newborns recognize his voice and promptly feel at ease. “These are our pets, our babies,” he explains. But Lilly is on another level. As Baker enters her pen, she’ll often drape her long neck across his shoulder, gazing up with wide-set amber eyes like an adoring daughter.

This article originally appeared in our September 2016 issue.

One Square Mile: Robinson & Sons is a lottery beacon that never closes

Nick Seymour
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One Square Mile: Robinson & Sons is a lottery beacon that never closes
One square mile Tallapoosa
Photograph by Kevin D. Liles

Yvonne Alexander doesn’t want a Maserati. And a Lamborghini, she says, would make a mockery of her otherwise simple style. At 55, beset with gout, this gregarious, retired Birminghamian hopes the Georgia Lottery will bless her with three bedrooms and no stairs—a nice, flat house—and enough dough to really uplift a charity. So, like up to 1,000 of her Alabama brethren per day, Alexander drives east on Interstate 20 (like five other states, Alabama forbids the lottery) and takes the first Georgia exit to tiny Tallapoosa, where they famously drop a live possum on New Year’s Eve and where a double-decker billboard declares: “ROBINSON #1 Georgia Lottery Seller.” It’s here, at Robinson & Sons, that Alexander sips a Pepsi Max and plays the Powerball and Mega Millions, always using the dates her mother was born and died. This fill-up station is more than a quintessential American interstate pit stop; it’s a beacon that never closes, a community of hopeful allies. Nearly half the retail floor space is consumed by tables for scratching tickets and penciling in superstitions; this area can be library-quiet or lively as a tavern. “There’s so many people that like to just stay and play lottery for hours,” says Cody Robinson, who co-owns the place with his brother, Ty. “It’s typical for us to sell 10 or 20 $500 winners each day—that’s a good day for someone, you know.” Elsewhere at the tables, Debbie Minton has made her weekly sojourn from Oxford, Alabama, with her father, Ed Ledbetter, who began playing at age 85, after his antigambling wife passed. Minton knows the cashiers and lottery regulars by name and says the place can be a little like church, especially the time her brother’s grandson was doing the scratch-off honors and said, suddenly, “Papa, you’ve won the $300,000!” And then, beside the bags of Funyuns and Tom’s Hot Fries, with a cardboard likeness of the Most Interesting Man in the World watching, strangers at two tables began to rise, slowly lifting their arms, saying, “Praise the Lord” and “Thank you, Jesus” for the boy’s family, until a few more scratches revealed the ticket was a dud.

This article originally appeared in our August 2016 issue.

One Square Mile: First Baptist Church of Duluth is a multicultural sanctuary

Tony Rehagen
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One Square Mile: First Baptist Church of Duluth is a multicultural sanctuary
First Baptist Duluth
Jeremiah Buziba (far right) steals the show as the children sing and perform choreography at the First Baptist Church of Duluth.

First Baptist | Duluth | 29 miles northeast of Atlanta
Jeremiah Buziba is five years old. He stands at the end of a line of 11 kids he met less than a month ago, in front of a classroom full of adults he doesn’t know. He doesn’t appear to be overly familiar with the song he’s supposed to be singing, “God Is with You Always.” And yet he’s stealing the show. He jumps up and down, in and out of line, kicks up his legs and spins while peeking around his glasses at the teacher. He was born in Uganda just before his parents, a machinist and a hairdresser, immigrated to Duluth in search of a better life, which they found immediately. What took longer was finding the right Christian church. After five years and five or six churches, they came here to First Baptist Church of Duluth, where Pastor Mark Hearn has made acceptance his mission. In 2010, 92 percent of Hearn’s incoming church members were white, while all around him Duluth was rapidly diversifying. At Duluth High School, he learned, students spoke a total of 57 different languages. Hearn saw that his own neighbors were Vietnamese, Indian, Korean, and Zimbabwean. So he set about hiring nonwhite staff, promoting nonwhite deacons, establishing an ESL program and Bible study for adults. “It was not about acclimation to our ways,” he says. “It’s about accommodation for theirs.” Today service is translated live through headsets into Spanish, Korean, and soon Mandarin, and the flags of 37 countries hang in the sanctuary, including that of the Buzibas’ Uganda. Meanwhile Jeremiah has stopped looking to his teacher and now turns to four-year-old classmate Eugene Son for guidance through the routine. Eugene’s parents came from Seoul. After years at a Korean Baptist church, they started attending service here a few weeks ago. They want Eugene and his brother and sister to learn more about American ways and manners. Tonight Eugene and Jeremiah will find their way through this performance together.

This article originally appeared in our July 2016 issue.

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