Tag: WABE

Christiane Lauterbach encouraged me to think about restaurants owned by immigrants as essential to the modern Southern story. They were, she believed, inheritors of the restaurants that fed migrants in the years after World War II. In time, that insight became my angle of approach. A world bloomed into view.

Cinema Social, a monthly screening series from NPR-affiliate station WABE, tries to capture the community movie-watching experience again. The event, launched in February, is an expansion of one Lois Reitzes used to host for the station’s arts and culture program City Lights.

One of the most gratifying aspects of my years at WABE was connecting listeners to our city’s cultural events. A vibrant arts community can uplift and enrich the lives of Atlantans. The challenge today is to help these organizations thrive: Funding is essential from various sources. With money allocated to the arts, we can all take pride in a city made greater by its cultural organizations.

The “Atlanta Way”—as city leaders liked to call their pro-business, pro-racial harmony approach—proved good for the city. Today, Atlanta has become the urban metropolis it was still striving to be in the 1960s. City leaders—Black and White alike—continue to work together to ensure it is one of the nation’s most appealing cities for business. But the city is faced with a troubling problem as vexing as any during the civil rights era: By most measures, we have one of the largest income gaps of any city in the country.

For 45 years, Lois Reitzes has dedicated her career to public radio and coverage of the Atlanta arts community. On June 25, the veteran voice of Atlanta’s airwaves will depart her daily hosting duties on WABE (the station has extended an open invitation for Reitzes to do guest interviews). As she prepares for her new off-air role as a full-time arts patron, we asked Reitzes to reflect on her legendary career.

My monthly ritual in college was a drive into Atlanta to make the rounds of the rich array of record stores across the city. My favorite haunt was Peaches, a warehouse-sized store that prided itself on having the back catalog of just about every music artist imaginable. This was long before iTunes and Spotify.

If Friday or Saturday night finds you near a radio, do yourself a favor and turn the dial to 90.1. There you’ll hear the voice of H. Johnson, warm and gravelly, as he queues up tracks and opines on the meaning of music during his two long-running shows on WABE, Blues Classics (Fridays, 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.) and Jazz Classics (Saturdays, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.).

If there’s an Atlantan with something interesting to say, there’s a good chance they’ve said it to Rose Scott. Her radio program, Closer Look, which airs live every weekday afternoon on local NPR member station WABE, hosts a vibrant cross-section of the city’s movers and shakers, interviewed by Scott herself. “I always say we’re a curator of conversations,” she told me. “Community conversations.”

From sports to comedy, politics to music, the Atlanta podcast scene is booming. Here’s what happening in the local podcast scene, including new productions and the latest on recurring favorites.

Bill Nigut is the highly regarded former host of Georgia Public Broadcast (GPB) political talk show Political Rewind, and the new role comes at an interesting time. In June, GPB announced Political Rewind was set to sunset at the end of June, disappointing longtime listeners. This fall, he returns to airwaves to co-host the Politically Georgia podcast alongside the AJC’s award-winning reporters, Greg Bluestein, Patricia Murphy, and Tia Mitchell.