Posted on 06/04/2012 6:02:54 AM PDT by TomServo
I think the passing of Neal’s producer about twelve to eighteen months ago...probably had an effect on the show. It would be interesting to have both Neal and Herman on for an hour a day....getting a broad prospective from both.
Hey, this is really turning into a talk radio seminar. I’ve always liked Dennis Prager. He is just not on the air in these parts. Have been thinking of subscribing to his podcasts.
I also like Joe Paggs (subs for Beck) and Mike McConell (moderate/conservative in Chicago) and Roger Hedgecock (San Diego - used to sub for Rush) just because they are characters with a kind of bent to them and smart guys. If their personality is interesting and a bit quirky, they’ve got me as a listener.
I think Monica Crowley has a talk radio show, but I’ve never heard it. I like her analytical skills when she is on TV, but they waste her talents by always pairing her with the juvenile Alan Colmes. I could listen to Mark Steyn all day long if he had a radio talk show.
Hannity is just too monotonous for me. The same cliches every day. I don’t think he does a lot of research and prep for his show. He talks over his guests because he can’t engage them for long on an intellectual basis. Hannity is just a twittering socialite. No depth to him.
So back to you Smyrna boy. You did say you lived in Smyrna for a while right?
No connections there now, though -- my older woman friend died six years ago, she was the last person I knew from there who was still living in Georgia when she passed. Still know some other friends in Atlanta.
Well, if you've been reading Mike ("Mish") Shedlock's articles discussed on this site (he has his own FA business and his own website, plus he writes for Minyanville.com), then you know why. Morgan, Stanley is on its last legs, apparently, and it's starting to look like all the big, broke, investment- money-center banks are deader than St. Peter's yingyang and just being propped up for the nonce with the help of the American People's American Express Black Card; and the market is marching through them one by one and "discovering" (as Mike and other like to say) the real value of these firms' outstanding shares. Which ought to be impressively large -- and written in red ink.
Funny that you mentioned Julia Roberts. She went to my high school, just a few, well maybe more than a few years after I matriculated lol.
Did you know her first onstage role was in a high school mock election in which she played Elizabeth Dole ?
By the way, I lived off Old Atlanta Hwy down Concord Rd.
Last time I was back was about 5 years ago. Lot of changes.
One of my favorite Boortz moments.
In the late 90s, before he was nationally syndicated, he used to have his email up on his web page. It was something like boortz@mindspring.com, and I'm sure I was still on a dial up (this just before I got some of BellSouth’s first DSL). He later dropped listing an email and just had a cgi form, but I had saved the email.
At about the same time, I was starting to lurk on FR, and I'd find stuff here late in the evening and email it to Neal. He'd get up at O-dark-thirty to do his show prep, and right before the show went on, he'd put his program notes on his web page as he does. While I never got any acknowledgment, fairly often there would be some obscure item I'd found on FR and sent him in the notes and on the show that day. While I was never 100% sure, I was 95+% sure he was getting a lot of that stuff from us/me.
Come to think of it, didn't Concord Road run across the Perimeter west of the Mall? If it's the road I'm thinking of, I sometimes went that way, "the back way", to work: it ran past a C&S Bank branch that was built in 1972 to resemble one of Adolf Hitler's "Atlantic Wall" artillery emplacements adjacent to the jewelry store next door, on top of the hill next to "new" Hiway 41 which ran past the mall on the east side. The Mall's parking lot was immense, back before they "redeveloped" (ram-and-jam-packed) it, but right across the side road, whatever it was called ... we used to walk to the Mall for lunch, and one of my colleagues would drop into the tobacconist's shop on the second level overlooking the main concourse, and horrify me by buying and actually lighting up a Turkish pirote, I think they were called, evil little black cigarillos sold in nasty-looking twists of three that looked like witches' fingers. Smelled like a rubber plant on fire when he lit up. Cat was an old fat boy named Mike, ex-Air Force, who had grown to like them during his years stationed at Incirlik in Turkey doing COMINT spook stuff for our side.
Yeah, I remember some things.
Guess I lived a sheltered life compared to your side of “Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.” Must have been those pantaloons my dear departed mother dressed me in - lol.
Looking on the map, I lived about 2 to 3 miles south of Pat Mell. I went to Brown Elementary School which was near my neighborhood. Concord Rd SE is one long road taking you all the way to Mableton heading south and to Smyrna center heading north.
In Smyrna, Concord Rd became Spring Rd which took you to Cumberland and Windy Hill area.
Head south from Smyrna on Concord Rd till you cross S.Cobb Dr. - Old 41 - drive about another mile south and you will get to Sherwood Rd - and that’s my road. It was a pretty tame area back then. There were only 4 or 5 houses on the road. Now it is full of apartments. There was a small shopping center with a Kroger store at the intersection of Concord Rd and S. Cobb. Now there is a new shopping development there called Crossings Shopping Ctr.
Sure weren’t any Turkish tobacco shops in my little corner.
Just kept hanging around Campbell H.S. waiting for Julia Roberts to show up - lol - yeah right. USN shipped me to Hawaii long before that happened.
How far removed from Smyrna are you these days?
I'd forgotten that my "normal" way to work was actually a back way ...... I never went all the way to where Spring Road/St. intersects Hiway 41/Cobb Parkway (it didn't have that name back then; it was the extension of Atlanta's Northside Parkway which ran from Buckhead to Marietta, back before people started moving state route designations around and changing names in the '80's).
My usual route was to bail out of Spring Street at a side road safety-valve called Hargrove, which jumped across 285 to hook up with the mall parking-lot perimeter road, and follow that around past the "bunker" to the jewelry store.
The "back road" was to follow Atlanta Road down to where it intersected West Paces Ferry (south of where it met Concord Road: back then, Concord stopped at Atlanta Highway, and you turned left for a block or so, to get onto Spring St./Rd.), then jump across 285 on West Paces Ferry to catch Stillhouse Road, which climbed northerly-ish (like all Atlanta streets) over the shoulder of Vinings Mountain to get to the Mall, and hooked up with the Mall perimeter road very close to the "bunker". That's how it worked .
I confused myself when I looked at a new map, because Vinings Mountain has been covered with condos and California-style twisty little hillclimber streetlets. The mountain used to have an old, unkempt graveyard on top of it, and next to it the foundation and slab of a burnt house that had once had linoleum tile and parquet floors, that was either the caretaker's or that of someone else who got burned out, and was otherwise covered in second-growth forest. But you could look down on the Mall in one direction, and over to Stone Mountain and downtown Atlanta in the other. I used to go up there with wine and a book and read and watch the construction cranes working on the skyline of Atlanta, miles to the south -- I counted six of them working one day. That was back in 1974 and 1975.
Now, about the street-designation prestidigitation, Old Atlanta Highway that ran right next to the L&N RR tracks in the 60's and 70's was Georgia State Hiway 3, and my old gas-station Rand McNally Georgia Map from 1973 shows that on its Atlanta inset map. That was the original "Old (US) Hiway 41".
What they did was move the US 41 route over to Northside Parkway when they built that for the Buckhead swells to drive up to Marietta and their Blue Ridge getaways (no doubt): Northside Parkway was originally a three- or four-lane express commuter route for the aforesaid swells driving down to the state capitol and downtown, and then the PTB extended it up past Cumberland Mall (no influence there, I'm sure) to Marietta.
At some point later on (it wasn't called that back then) the four-lane US 41 was renamed "Cobb Parkway" (offering instant confusion to visitors, with the long-extant South Cobb Drive) and redesignated "US 41/Georgia 3E", a co-designation which left Atlanta Road as "Georgia State Hiway 3" (more confusion). Eventually they co-designated the new, five- or six-lane US 41 Georgia as the (new) Georgia State Hiway 3 instead, and redesignated the old Georgia 3/Old US 41/Atlanta Street/Road as "Georgia State Hiway 755" to complete the mass confusion I experienced when I picked up my 1991 AAA/H.M. Gousha Atlanta street map. At least Gousha continued, on their map, to call Atlanta St./Rd. "Old Hiway 41", which follows the old route down to where it becomes Marietta Road in Atlanta, and goes on down to the Five Points.
I haven't even looked at my 1997 or 2006/7/8 (whatever they are) Atlanta maps -- they'd be unhelpful, anyway, in elucidating what we remembered about Smyrna and Cumberland Mall in the 70's.
I only remember one high school in Smyrna (dimly); they were down by Concord Road somewhere, in between Atlanta Road and South Cobb Drive I think, and their team name iirc was Cardinals, and they wore red and white or red and silver. I saw a couple of their games and wondered at the small teams and modest suburban Georgia high-school sizes that must back them up, compared with my experience of Baby Boom high schools in Louisiana and Texas in the 60's, when even small-city (40-60,000 people) schools had 1100-1500 kids in Louisiana and dressed 45 or 55 varsity players; and in Texas, the biggest schools were over 2000 kids and fielded 70 or so players who all looked like Bill Cosby's "Hofstra" players ("Back, Igor, back I say!!" [CRACKK!!]).
By 1991/2, that had all changed, and even the big-enrollment Houston high schools were only dressing 35 or 40 kids -- on academic limitations and general bad attitude in the student bodies and PTA's. Attempts to get arms around the terrible high-school situation in Texas really knocked down Texas schoolboy football; so many kids disqualify themselves regularly and don't care.
Side note: The old Laurasian-Gondwanaland suture that made them into mighty Pangaea, the ancient Permo-Triassic supercontinent, runs right down the Chattahoochee where it runs parallel to the Blue Ridge 50-60 miles away; the river is excavating the mylonites and crushrock in the actual suture/fault zone (called by regional geologists the Brevard Fault Zone, after its expression in Brevard, NC). That is right at the foot of Vinings Mountain, underneath the little community of Vinings at the bottom of the mountain next to the river, where Mr. Pace had his ferry. I noticed around the old burnt house atop the hill that the surface exposures were of rotten, oxidized schist with lots of muscovite in it: its bedding was vertical. I found out later that that is the expression of the suture, where the old marine clays were crushed, then deformed until they were vertical, compressed by unimaginable, planetary-scale forces and metamorphosed in-situ, in a massive event that still produces warm water (as in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Presidents and future presidents have liked to play) from the residual heat flows from 200 million years ago.
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