Tag: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Celebrating Celestine Sibley’s centennial
“Child, what are you up to?” Instantly recognizing the voice behind me, I froze midway into shoving the crumpled dollar bill into the brown interoffice memo envelope. It was the morning of October 3, 1995. In Los Angeles, the verdict was about to be read in the O.J. Simpson trial. And on the eighth floor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Features Department, I was collecting up the office pool. As the department’s unofficial class clown/kid brother and a writer for the paper’s Peach Buzz column (the copy desk lovingly referred to me as Buzz Boy), this was in my job description. The voice behind me belonged to Celestine Sibley, a newspapering icon and state treasure. Red-faced, I explained to “ma’am” what in the hell I was doing (I never, ever called her Celestine. I had grown up reading her, after all). She toddled off and I assumed she was on her way upstairs to demand that the publisher fire me and then tie me to printing presses in the basement and use my blood to pump out the afternoon’s Extra edition. A minute later, Celestine handed me a dollar and said, “Put me down for a guilty.”
Anne Cox Chambers
Even though Anne (with an e, please) Cox Chambers reigns as the richest person in Atlanta—her estimated $13.4 billion almost ten times what Arthur Blank could cough up—you wouldn’t necessarily know it after a visit with the Cox Enterprises doyenne.
Requiem for a Reporter: Kathy Scruggs
In her heyday, Kathy Scruggs was a hard-drinking, tough-talking police reporter who wasn't afraid of anything. Her raucous sense of humor was what I loved most about her.
