Showing 31 - 40 of 96 posts found matching keyword: newnan
Sunday 18 March 2018
Walking through Oak Hill Cemetery last week with Mom and the girls, we passed the burial plot for J.W.A. and Zippora Rowland. As you can see, only one of them was buried there.
You'll note that there is no death date for Zippora, though the engraver presumed it would happen sometime in the 20th century. That marker visible on the bottom right isn't for her, it's J.W.A.'s. Why is his body on Zippora's side of the bed? That's just the tip of the iceberg of what I don't know about Zippora. Who was she, and why isn't she buried along with her name? Of course this made me curious, so I did a little Googling.
It seems J.W.A. Rowland lived most of his life not in Newnan but in Bowdon in neighboring Carroll County. I don't know what he did for a living, but the Carroll Free Press of the late 19th century reports that he was the initial vice president of the Carroll County Chorus Choir Association. (That meeting appears to have been in the Shiloh UMC building which still stands halfway between Carrollton and Bowdon.) Still in Bowdon in 1892, he was witness on a U.S. Patent application for Ocran D. Bunt's plow fender (patent #467853). "James W.A. Rowland" appears as a 72 year old man living in Newnan, GA by the time of the 1920 census. Nearer his death, he was a co-plaintiff in a 1921 lawsuit against the Central of Georgia Railway Company in which he won $250. (They were riding in a buggy "when the mule drawing it ran away and threw them out," causing injuries. It's not clear what role the railroad played, but the court said they were guilty.)
None of those references mention Zippora.
Zippora Rowland does show up in the 1930 census as a 62-year-old woman living in Newnan, GA. "Zippora" was never a popular name, but I don't find any reference to her in the local papers of the era.
So whatever happened to Zippora? Did she remarry? Did she die somewhere else, and no one knew to bring her back to Newnan where her marker was waiting for her? I like to think she's still alive somewhere, enjoying the good life on her sesquicentennial birthday. Here's to you, Zippora!
Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Tags: carrollton cemetery death family history mom newnan research trivia zippora
Friday 16 February 2018
Earlier this week, the Newnan City Council agreed to give away a city street to the downtown Central Baptist Church in exchange for 18 parking places. (Central offered to build a parking lot with 40 spaces, but to do so they first have to take away 12 existing places, and they're keeping another 10 for themselves.) The entire affair was resolved in typical Newnan fashion: the citizens only being told that the city would be giving away their property a week before it was a done deal.
Personally, I don't care what happens to Brown Street. If the church wants it and the city doesn't, that's their call. I can't even say that I have a problem with the underhanded way the church and the city negotiated this in a back room without public input. As I said, Newnan subscribes to the Boss Hogg school of democracy ("What's yours is mine!"). What I do have a problem with is the hypocrisy of the city councilman who was insulted that the citizens who opposed this underhanded horse trade would dare impugn his integrity.
The Newnan Times-Herald quotes Councilman Ray DuBose:
"Yes, I am a member of Central and I have been elected to serve as a Deacon on the board, which I serve with pleasure, and there is no conflict of interest in my voting for this. Furthermore, in my oath that I took as councilman, I promised to serve the community as a whole and certainly the church is a part of that whole as much as the other neighborhoods. I do my very best every time time I sit up here and find it an insult that people would call me unfair."
Well, bless his heart. As he's such a good Christian, I'll give poor, put upon Mr. DuBose the benefit of the doubt. Maybe no one ever explained to him what a "conflict of interest" is. Since he's a jeweler by trade, let me try it this way:
Imagine a jeweler who has agreed to keep a ring in his safe for a customer. The jeweler's wife sees the ring and wants it for herself. In exchange for the ring, she offers to trade the jeweler a necklace he could resell for big bucks. Ask yourself, is it ethical for the jeweler to make this trade without the consent of the owner of the ring? What would Jesus do? (Hint: He wouldn't trade away something that wasn't his.)
No matter how much that jeweler might want to keep his wife happy, no matter how much he wants to resell that necklace, his personal and professional desires present a conflict with the interest of the ring's owner who he also represents. Hence, he shouldn't be the one to make the decision whether the ring gets traded for the necklace. See? It's simple!
To put it more bluntly, if there's even a question of whether a councilman has a conflict of interest in a particular bit of city business, it's always most appropriate ethically for him to recuse himself from participating in making that decision. In this case, if Mr. DuBose had done the morally right thing and admitted that he valued the needs of his church so highly that he couldn't be bothered listening to the opinions of the general population, he still would have gotten his parking lot as the rest of the council voted 4-2 in favor of his little deal. And he wouldn't have had to hear the dirty bums who pay his salary call him such nasty names!
As I said, I don't care about the outcome. I only drive down Brown Street, like, 3 times a year, and I certainly never set foot inside Central Baptist Church. While I'm sorry that Mr. DuBose's delicate sensibilities were offended by a bunch of people who would rather drive through his filthy little town than park in it, I can't say that I much blame them.
Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Tags: georgia newnan news rant
Thursday 18 January 2018
While most of Georgia spent the past 24 hours stuck indoors looking at snow — not that they have a choice here in Coweta County as Newnan has declared a mandatory curfew — I've been stuck indoors in a bed. For the third time in 10 months, I'm sick.
Why does my phone come with the ability to take this photo pre-installed? Who needs this?
I haven't seen a doctor, but my symptoms are consistent with the flu. You know, that thing that's been killing people this year. Which is not to say that I think I'm going to die. I won't. (At least not right now. Not from this.)
I can't remember being sick three times in a year since my senior year in high school. In that case, I wasn't even sick, just using new excuses to play hooky. I spent "Senior Skip Day" as the only person in most of my classes because I'd already missed 30 days on the year. Poor Mr. Smith didn't know what to do with me, so we just talked about Hamlet.
I've got to figure out what I'm doing wrong these days. Is my diet deficient? Am I too reclusive? Am I just a filthy pig? Whatever the cause, I'm making it a priority to get it fixed in 2018.
Comments (3)
| Leave a Comment | Tags: dear diary georgia illness newnan news walter weather
Tuesday 18 July 2017
Puddles from the previous hour's rainfall weren't the only things littering the super-sized parking lot. It was nearly impossible to find a parking space because of all the abandoned carts scattered willy-nilly! I'm talking twenty or more. Obviously, the only possible reason for the many, many scattered carts is that the previous shoppers were all witches melted by the unexpected summer shower. I mean, that's science.
But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to show you the sight that greeted me when I left the store with my milk and ice cream. Behold:
Sunsets like that are worth any number of witches. Comments (1)
Thursday 9 March 2017
I make fun of newspapers a lot, but they're not always the problem. For example, today I read this Newnan Times-Herald lede:
"Coweta County Crooner Richard Hawk is now officially a member of the Georgia Child Fatality Review Panel."
Yes, I thought it was odd that a singer would be appointed to such an important sounding government position, but this is 2017. We have a brain surgeon running government housing, a movie producer directing the treasury, an anti-science lawyer scuttling the EPA, a bespectacled idiot in charge of a department he can't remember the name of, and a game show host in the White House (on weekdays — on weekends he pretends to be an amateur golfer in Florida). In that light, a singer taking a state government position doesn't seem so strange.
But that's not what the paper really said. After I had my breakfast and was thinking more clearly, I realized that the man wasn't a "crooner" but a "coroner." Appointing a professional coroner makes way more sense for a Fatality Review Panel.
If only the federal government was so rational.
Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Tags: georgia newnan news politics trumps america walter
Wednesday 5 October 2016
I have been watching, with some amusement, the current wave of clown hysteria that is sweeping the country. The news is overflowing with examples of clown-inspired chaos in Georgia alone. An 11-year-old Athens girl took a knife to school for self-defense in case of a clown outbreak. Troup County had to close schools after kids reported clowns abducting people in unmarked vans. Here in Newnan, a traveling carnival worker was arrested for scaring people in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Things have gotten so out of hand that the White House had to address the matter in a press briefing.
Apparently, waves of "creepy clown" sightings have washed across America off and on for the past 30 years, but they have historically been written off as hoaxes. However, things are changing in the Internet Age. In social media, fear spreads faster than reason.
[EDIT: Check out AtlasObscura.com's interactive map of "creepy clown" news items in America.]
This is all mass insanity. Killer Clowns From Outer Space isn't a real thing. Why are we wasting time clowning around when a much bigger threat is on the loose? No, I'm not talking about Donald Trump. (He's a different kind of clown.) What I am talking about is deer.
The Great Deer Uprising continues unabated. The United States National Park Service says that the deer have amassed armies "more than 10 times greater" than common around the battlefields of Monocacy, Manassas, and Antietam. Once again, the fate of the Union hangs in the balance. Rather than wait for the deer armies to make the next move, the NPS is deploying sharpshooters. The bloodiest battleground in American History is set to run red again.
Once the deer are back in their proper place, then we can worry about clowns or whatever else you've got. In the meantime, humanity has a war to win.
Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Tags: adventures in photoshop athens georgia great deer uprising of 2010 newnan news
Friday 16 September 2016
Monday 15 August 2016
There's a pothole in my neighborhood that's shaped like the state of Georgia.
It's hard to be too disgruntled about the quality of the road when the potholes are so patriotic.
Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Tags: newnan
Saturday 11 June 2016
I often complain that the local newspaper has too little content to justify its 5-day publishing schedule. This fact was evidenced on Thursday when they ran the same Associated Press article on pages 7A and 9A.
But it was the paper's back page (10A) where things are really noteworthy. The page was headlined by an article about how many awards the Times-Herald has won for advertising in the annual Georgia Press Association's advertising content. (They won 12 first or second place awards from among 19 categories.) The Georgia Press Association is the trade association for Georgia newspapers. Their job is to promote newspapers. This article isn't news; it's salesmanship.
However, even the appearance of advertisements disguised as articles in the newspaper isn't what brings me to the keyboard today. No, that would be this passage in the restaurant inspections further down the same page:
Olive Garden #1658 — was inspected on May 24 and received a score of 99-A. The deduction came from the ladies being stored too closely to the hand wash sink to prevent contamination.
Contamination is bad. That's why I prefer to store my ladies in the freezer.
Keep up the good work, Times-Herald!
Comments (0) | Leave a Comment | Tags: food misogyny newnan news rant
Thursday 7 April 2016
