dateline

Dade County, Georgia

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Dade County Board of Education

Morgan Bradford (left) is honored for her participation in the school system's mentoring program.  Presiding is Cherie Swader (right), interim superintendent. 
Board of Ed Invites All To Take Superintendent Search Survey; But Good Luck With That
By Robin Ford Wallace
Monday’s Dade County Board of Education meeting was short and routine, but the board did adopt the 171-day school calendar presented at a work session last week by acting Schools Superintendent Cherie Swader. 
That means three instructional days will be added back into the 2014-15 scholastic year, a step toward restoring the full 180 Dade students enjoyed – or not, according to individual temperament – before the state began the series of funding cuts that have put local public schools over the financial barrel.
Board Chairwoman Carolyn Bradford reported that brochures had been sent out and advertisements posted online in the system’s search for a new superintendent.  Ms. Swader is interim head of the system as a permanent replacement is sought for Shawn Tobin, whom the board showed the door rather abruptly in February.   
Ms. Bradford also said the board had posted a “Superintendent Search Survey,” in which all are invited to furnish their input, at the B of E’s website, www.dadecountyschools.org.
“That’s basically where we’re at right now,” said Ms. Bradford.
The school system's website says the survey is open until March 21, but The Planet made two stabs at accessing it and found that earlier, it was described as currently unavailable, while today it was listed as closed as of March 18.  
Acting Superintendent Swader said the system’s numbers guru, Doug Eza, will be in town this week to work on a system budget for the upcoming year.  He will appear at the board’s regular meeting at 6 p.m. on April 14 to go over the budget.
Also scheduled to appear at a 5 p.m. work session before the April 14 meeting is Tony Cook, facilities director at the state B of E offices.  Cook is to advise the Dade system on obtaining funds to replace its ailing heating and air conditioning system.
Ms. Swader conducted ceremonies honoring student speech award winners and participants in the school system’s mentoring program.
After an unusually brief executive, or closed-door session, the board approved the hiring of one teacher and several substitute teachers.
Ms. Swader as previously requested by at-large member David Powell, provided resale or so-called “blue book” value for a school car she wishes to replace:  $4,796 resale, $3431 trade-in.
The car and one other, now used for staff travel, were originally bought for driver’s education, a program the school system later decided it could not afford.

robinfordwallace@tvn.net

Trenton City Election

Lowery Wins City Election

     Turnout at special elections is generally nothing to write home about but Trenton's election Tuesday for a replacement city streets commissioner may have set a new low.  Even with several days of advance voting, only 109 Trentonians drifted in to participate in democracy.
     The city's Cindy Robertson confirmed today that the final vote was Tommy Lowery, 41; Don Taylor, 35; and David Moore, 33.
     Tommy Lowery, a veteran commissioner of the Dade County government, will take his seat at the next Trenton City Commission meeting on April 14.  He will serve out the unexpired term of Greg Houts, who resigned in August.  
      David Raines was originally slated to replace Houts, running unopposed in an earlier special election appended to the regular Trenton elections in November; but he died three days before that election. 
robin ford wallace
Artist’s Books To Remain on Display at Dade County Library
by Robin Ford Wallace

At his March 14 lecture on artist’s books at the Dade County Library, artist Bob Dombrowski exhibited a suitcase that appeared on his Manhattan doorstep a day or two after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 
There’s a story behind that Samsonite. The artist’s loft where he lived with his partner, Mary, was quite near the fallen towers, paranoia was rife, and Mary feared that the suitcase might contain a bomb.  Out in the street with it, she urged. 
Dombrowski himself was thinking, free luggage; and besides, the cops were pretty twitchy these days.  What would they do to a man who ran out into the street and dumped a suitcase?
Two guests were trapped with them in the tiny loft by the city’s lockdown, and they had their own takes on the suitcase as well as on the effect the attacks of that fateful September day would have on the current of history. 
Six months later, Dombrowski had the idea of asking each participant in the suitcase saga to write an account of it.  These four short narratives he compiled and bound into one of the small artist’s books he has been making for decades.

The Suitcase, with its four entirely different but entirely compelling accounts of that day in Manhattan, has the distinction of being among the more readable artist’s books Dombrowski had produced or collected.  He explained that artists traditionally pushed the envelope with the small, self-produced volumes.  One contained only punctuation marks, and another had a rock for a front cover.
A sampling of artist’s books will remain on display at the Dade County Library, which partnered with the Trenton Arts Council to sponsor the lecture and a workshop on making artist’s books the next day.   Both were well attended. 
TAC and the library produced the event with the help of a grant from Georgia Council for the Arts.
     robinfordwallace@tvn.net

  

Monday, March 17, 2014

Depot Diner Opens Under New Management

Owner Brenda Boggs at the new Diner
The Little Diner That Could:  Depot Diner Opens Under New Management
By Robin Ford Wallace
The Depot Diner, located right at the heart of Rising Fawn, the recognized center of the known universe [see writer’s column below], no doubt broke a few hearts when it closed in December.  Besides franchise food at the truck stop on the I-59 exit, there was no other restaurant in town.
But those in Rising Fawn who hunger may now once again be fed.  The Diner has reopened under new management, and unless you absolutely cannot get by without having your table bused by someone in spurs with loaded six-shooters strapped to both thighs, you might even think it’s better now than ever.
“The only problem I’ve had is keeping up with the ordering,” says Brenda Boggs, who bought the Diner lock, stock and barrel from the McBryar family – Eddie AKA “Cowboy,” Charlotte and Treva – and has spent the last couple of months cleaning and refurbishing it.
Ms. Boggs, looking perky in her new hot-pink Depot Diner T-shirt – the back depicts a “Little-Engine-That-Could”-style steam locomotive – opened on March 8 in what she planned as a “soft opening.”  There was nothing soft about it.
“I wanted my people to get into the groove,” said Ms. Boggs.  “That didn’t work out well because they slammed us right out of here that Friday night.  People just kept coming.”
Ms. Boggs shows off the back of the Depot Diner T, which features a Little Engine That Could motif.

Ms. Boggs didn’t try to change the Depot Diner’s name – “It’s on the roof,” she points out – but she made some menu changes.  Most noticeably, patrons can now have breakfast at any time – no cracks about “scrambled eggs in the Renaissance,” please – but short orders are the order of the day Tuesday through Saturday for lunch and supper.  Short orders include big, generous burgers and other sandwiches available with sides including hand-cut french fries and deep-fried green beans Ms. Boggs says the crowds are going wild for.
On Sunday and Monday, Ms. Boggs serves meat-and-three-style plate lunches.  “Bama Side, Larry’s and Geneva’s are all closed on Mondays,” said Ms. Boggs.  “I want to drive them down this way.”
She advises diners to come early on plate-lunch days because so far the chow has run out before the doors have stopped swinging every time.
The Depot Diner opens at 6 a.m. Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. on Saturday and 8 a.m. Sunday.  It closes at 7 p.m. every day but Wednesday, when everything in Rising Fawn including the post office and the hardware source (both, incidentally, important local hubs for the free and unfettered flow of information) closes at noon and Ms. Boggs realized in short order she might as well, too. 
“I found out in a heartbeat Wednesday wasn’t a good day,” she said.  Two Rising Fawn churches host Wednesday night suppers, she said.  She didn’t want to interfere with that and in any case figured it was the universe’s way of telling her to take a load off.  “Wednesday is going to be a me-day,” she said.
Ms. Boggs has never run a restaurant before but says she grew up in the environment:  “My mother was a restaurant manager as far back as I can remember.”  She employs a staff of six – “Three cooks, two waitresses and Amanda.”
Amanda, Ms. Boggs’ general factotum and Jackie of all trades, worked with her at Memorial Hospital, where Ms. Boggs was formerly a licensed phlebotomist.
Ms. Boggs invites all to come in and check out the new Depot Diner seven days a week. 
The Planet can recommend the cheeseburger.
robinfordwallace@tvn.net      
 

Dade County Board of Education Meets Tonight at 6 p.m.

The Dade County Board of Education holds its regular March meeting this evening at 6 p.m.  Like other governmental entities that are financed by tax dollars – in Dade, 75 cents of each property tax dollar goes to the school system – the B of E is required to operate transparently and its meetings are thus open to the public.  As a matter of practicality, though, the meetings are long, agendas are packed, and the public rarely takes the board up on the invite.  And on such occasions as the public does, the board has invoked internal guidelines decreeing that it will listen but not respond to public input. 

Nevertheless, the regular March meeting of the Dade County Board of Education is at 6 p.m. tonight in the board building in front of the high school on Highway 136 East.  Readers may reach the B of E at (706) 657-4361.


Fire on Fox Mountain

Sunday’s showers might have put the kibosh on a few wildflower hikes but for the Georgia Forestry Commission it was a case of gentle drops from heaven.  With a fire on Lookout Mountain barely controlled that day, the GFC reported to Rising Fawn on Friday evening as a landowner’s burning of timbering debris on Fox Mountain raged out of control into a full-scale forest fire.  The boys in khaki were still at it on Saturday afternoon when these pictures were taken.  “It was a pretty rough night,” said one.

The rangers said local volunteer fire departments including the Rising Fawn squad had assisted.  Over 100 acres were affected.  The helicopter below, which belongs to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, was deployed to drop flame-retardant chemicals on the flames.
    
Photograph by Jerry Wallace

Writer's Column: Welcome to the Center of the Universe


Writer's Column
_____________________________________________________________________

Welcome to the Center of the Universe!

By Robin Ford Wallace

My college friend Vivian O’Dell and I reconnected recently via the miracle of Facebook.  We hadn’t seen each other since 1980 but she sent me a friend request, I responded, and by July 2012 we were sitting on my front porch catching up. 
Viv had dropped in for a visit since she was back in the States anyway for various events connected to her work at CERN, the nuclear research facility in Switzerland.  You may recall it was that month that CERN and associated facility Fermilab announced they had isolated the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” which allows for the existence of the universe.
I’m not kidding.  I’m still not precisely (OK, not even vaguely!) sure what the hell the Higgs boson is, but my old pal Viv – Dr. O’Dell now – really was one of the physicists who tracked it down, and now she was sitting in the porch swing at my house on a dirt road in the Rising Fawn metro area, telling me all about it.
Vivian said she divided her working life between Fermilab, the American particle research laboratory near Chicago, and Geneva, where CERN had installed the Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built.  Viv and the other physicists had used the collider to isolate the God particle, but it hadn’t all been smooth sailing:  Protestors had filed a lawsuit in Hawaii to stop them before they and the Hadron destroyed the universe.
“They claimed we were going to make black holes that were going to suck up the world,” explained Vivian. 
Viv & crew were doing nothing of the kind, she sniffed; the protestors were crackpots, and the only reason the scientists took any notice is they worried the negative publicity might endanger their funding.  And in the end, the case had gone quietly away.  The judge threw it out because he had no jurisdiction over Geneva, much less the outer edges of infinity. 
Still, I was awed.  I’d never known anybody before who had even been accused of tearing holes in the fabric of reality.
And really, if you had known Vivian back in the day, you wouldn’t have thought she was the type, either.  We met at the University of Georgia in 1970-something, when we were teenaged hippies majoring in English.  She had long blond hair, I had long brown hair, and between us we knew every song Bob Dylan ever wrote.
During those years, Viv and I took one of those epic summer trans-America road trips young people used to make routinely as a rite of passage, the way the kids now upgrade their smart phones.  It involved waitress jobs in New Mexico, a lot of camping, and a beat-up VW van we named – of course we did! – Dylan.  Here is (some of) a song we wrote about Dylan the van, to the tune of “A Four-Leaf Clover.”
“His horn sounds at sunset
And sometimes at dawn;
His lights work to show us
The road that we’re on.”
We also wrote a long, mournful road song to the tune of “500 Miles” when we were reading Hemingway’s Islands in the Streams:
“All the hero’s sons are dead
And he’s had three chicks in bed.
It’s got fi-ive-hundred pages, all in all.”
Once, stuck in El Paso waiting for some mechanical work to be done on Dylan, we wandered through the parking lots – El Paso was mostly parking lots – looking for something to eat.  We saw what we thought was a signboard for a fast-food place and paused in front of it, reading the menu.
Back then, drive-through windows, though already rife in Texas, had not made their way to the Southeast, so when the “signboard” suddenly spoke up, asking to take our order, we were both astonished.  “What manner of being are you?” we asked it.  And:  “Do you come in peace?”
We were just a couple of goofy liberal arts types!  There was no absolutely no indication Viv was any more scientific than I was.  But after I graduated, apparently, she found her true calling, changed her major to physics and basically never left academia.  When she finished her undergraduate degree, she kept studying and eventually earned a Ph.D.  After that, she didn’t go into teaching, just kept pursuing her research, and she must have been pretty good at it because she ended up on one of the two Higgs boson teams in Geneva.
So!  That’s the story Vivian had to tell me after 30-odd years:  She’d figured out how the universe worked and stuff.  What I told her in return was:  “I, er, write for a small weekly newspaper in Dade County, Georgia.”
Well, what else could I do?  There was no point pretending to be dead; I’d already set out canapés.


Vivian (with motorcyle) and me (on porch swing) in Athens in 1976, and reunited on my porch here in summer 2012.  The old pics are from my sister Laura's treasure troves.

It was all fairly humbling, but when I told the story to one of my neighbors, he said, “Well, if the two of you walked into the local Ingle’s, who’s the one everybody would recognize?”
He probably said it to make me feel less like a subatomic particle my own self but it gave me some comfort.  Viv might have sussed out quantum physics while I was still puzzled by instant pudding, but I know where most of the black holes are in Dade County.  As the local reporter, I know more about it than I do about any other place, more than I imagine is strictly healthy sometimes; yet I’m always discovering something new.
Anyway, this is my little acre of the universe.  I like it here.  It’s my place and I maintain it’s about as good as any other.
I’ve noticed people tend to think where they live is somehow less important, even less real somehow, than other places.  Businesses in Chattanooga say, “Of course we’ll bring in someone from Atlanta for the work, so you know it’ll be professional”; whereas when I lived in Atlanta they would fill in the same blank with “New York” or “Los Angeles.”  When lots of times, someone local would clearly make a better job of it.  I see that happen in Dade all the time!
This geographical inferiority complex is probably to some extent due to simple humility:  People, modest about their own place in the universe, naturally think the important events of history must be happening elsewhere – that “where it’s at” is not where they’re at.
  But where people think it is, in fact, “at” is not at all clear.  Someplace bigger, maybe, somewhere far away, and especially –this is weird – someplace on television.
When I was a kid, I myself had the idea that what I saw on the flickering tube was more real, more correct, than what went on at my house.  The perfect families in their perfect clothes who always worked out their problems by the end of the half-hour episode were the normal ones, the ones doing reality right, while we clumsy Fords, with our smells, our noises and our squabbles, were freakish and disappointing. 
            In fact, just about everything on television is glaringly fake!  Not just the talking horses, secret witches and extraterrestrial uncles I watched then, now called “classic” TV, and not just the preternaturally wise parents and perfect children of the old family shows that made us all feel like slobbering inbreeds; but the skylines behind newscasters, the laughter after one-liners, the food in restaurant commercials – practically everything and everybody that goes before the television camera gets replaced, revamped or slimed up with goo to make them shine.  Who would think they could get lipstick on our good-ole-boy Southern pols?  But it happens.
Still, I’m always reading articles about the excitement generated when some soap opera actress from 20 years ago (“Who?”) agrees to come to Chattanooga to address a women’s group, or some local guy manages to propose to his girlfriend on a televised talk show (“Ack!”).  It’s the same attitude:  What we see in TVland counts, what happens in our neighborhood doesn’t. 
Even my brilliant physicist friend did this a little.  Vivian didn’t boast about unraveling the secrets of the universe, or say a word about her team being nominated for the Nobel Prize; but she did let fall that her CERN colleague, Dr. Richard Field, was the brother of the actress Sally Field. 
On NPR once there was a jokey sequence where the commentator explored the saying, “Well, it ain’t brain surgery,” by asking brain surgeons if they felt any smarter than the rest of us.  They said no, that what they said among themselves was: “Well, it ain’t rocket science.”  So the commentator asked a NASA scientist and he said no, rocket scientists didn’t feel all that special, they had kind of a complex about not being as bright as theoretical physicists.   
If that’s the scientific hierarchy, then there Viv is at the pointy tiptop of the food chain; and what impresses her is hanging out with the Flying Nun’s brother?  Go figure!
Anyway, my point here is that living in the middle of nowhere doesn’t mean we live in the middle of nowhere.  This is reality!  No place – not New York, not LA, not whatever the fake skyline behind the newscaster is supposed to represent – is realer or more important than here, where we live. 
This is it.  This is real.  This is where it happens.  This is where it counts.  This is – because we don’t mind ending sentences with prepositions in Dade County; in fact it’s practically mandatory – where it’s at.
You could say that about anywhere you live, I expect; but I also maintain in Dade it’s a bit more true.  Ever since I’ve been here myself I’ve noticed it has an odd black-holey way of sucking in people you wouldn’t expect.  I have a theory if I sit here long enough, anyone I want to see will eventually turn up.  If you need further proof, did I mention that the Higgs boson physicist, Vivian O’Dell, got sucked onto my porch in the Rising Fawn metro area?
All this has been in aid of explaining why anyone should read an online newspaper written from, and about, Dade County, Georgia.  I’ll tell you the answer, and I think it also in its humble way says something about the fabric of reality, though I’ll tell you for free I don’t know a Higgs from a handsaw when the wind is southerly:
This is the throbbing heart of the living universe.
robinfordwallace@tvn.net