Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Documents on the new pool proposed for Lake Herrick do not mention the public using it.
UGA officials are proposing that a new swimming pool at Lake Herrick serve as a replacement for historic Legion Pool on Lumpkin Street. The new pool, the university says, will be smaller than 12,000-square-foot Legion Pool, but it will have many of the same things: a shade pavilion, a picnic area, a concession stand and lap lanes. The one thing it won't have is swimmers from the Athens community, or their relatives, not directly attending or employed by the UGA. Supporting documents were sent to Elizabeth Shirk, Environmental Review Coordinator for the Historic Preservation Commission of the Department of Natural Resources along with a letter, asking for permission to demolish Legion Pool. Number 11 of the narrative included with a letter…
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
A locally made movie about a flying circus delights and dazzles.
After a few seconds of watching the documentary “The World’s Smallest Airport,” you realize one thing: the Thrasher brothers were nuts. Some people might call them reckless, fearless or even brave. But to fly airplanes in such a haphazard way, to grab a ladder or a plane’s struts and dangle in the air as the plane flies around an airfield while spectators watch, slack jawed, don’t you have to be sort of nuts? You decide. Go see “The World’s Smallest Airport” this week at Cine and get back to me. Produced by Grady Thrasher, III, and his wife, Kathy Prescott, the project started last year as an essay in Slackpole, Flagpole’s spoof publication. Grady, who has written children’s books since he retired from being an attorney, wrote about …
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Grady Thrasher joins the Nature Writing Group today at the Athens Land Trust
Even when he was writing stilted briefs about securities transactions, Grady Thrasher wrote poetry. Nothing serious, no J. Alfred Prufrock, just light verse, with rhythm and rhyme suitable for children. Just something that let him imagine he was back at his grandmother’s house on Hancock Avenue, turning dirt in the vegetable garden. After 40 years of working in corporate finance—including a stint with the SEC in Washington—he retired from his law firm. He said good-bye to the stop-and-go-and-stop-stop-stop traffic of metro Atlanta, and in 2001 he moved to a small farm he had brought years before in Oconee County. It was close to where his people had lived in the 19th century, when Clarke included all of Oconee County. A longtime friend, …
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Our Garden Bones guest columnist explains his truck.
Sunflowers have fascinated me since I was a small child. Large sunbursts with brown centers towered over me on strong stalks in my grandmother’s Hancock Avenue garden in Athens in the 1940s. I would sometimes climb up a stepladder to view and count the seeds as they matured on blossoms as big as my face. I kept those memories tucked away in my mind for decades while I raised my own family and pursued a typical traffic-challenged, time-stressed urban career in a sprawling metropolis about 60 miles west of Athens. As I approached retirement, I moved to a small cottage with some acreage near Athens and Watkinsville and embraced those memories. I was thrilled to again become part of the unique quality of life Athens offers, and I finally had …
Rebecca McCarthy
8:52 am on Wednesday, July 25, 2012
I think it's not the pool that's a problem. It's where it is that's a problem for the university, because they want to build something on that land or around the land. One person said they are on a quest to "Disneyland-ize" the university campus with the buildings all being the same. Legion, like Rutherford, dates from the 1930s. Ain't no buildings in Disneyland from the '30s, is they? more ›