GwinnettForum | Number 20.28 | April, 28, 2020
LET’S GO BACK TO 1982: The Mystery Photo caused Lee Thompson of Lawrenceville to send this photo of the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville. He recently found them on an old phone. The first photo is from the top of the Sunsphere in Knoxville looking down on World’s Fair Park. If you look closely at the pond, you can see a reflection of the words “1982 World’s Fair” in the window. The University of Tennessee campus is in the background. Neyland Stadium is just visible in the upper left hand corner. The last Mystery Photo, identified below, was from Knoxville.
TODAY’S FOCUS: Creative Suggestions for Alleviating the COVID-19 Effects
EEB PERSPECTIVE: Did You Ever Go Looking for the Town of Sugarloaf in Gwinnett?
ANOTHER VIEW: Here’s One Person Letting Go and Just Having a Good Rant
SPOTLIGHT: Precision Planning Inc.
FEEDBACK: Kidding Around During a Pandemic Is Unacceptable
UPCOMING: Peachtree Corners Rotary Seeking Food for Cooperative Ministry
NOTABLE: Kaczmarczyk Becomes PCOM Interim Chief Academic Officer
RECOMMENDED: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
GEORGIA TIDBIT: Lawrenceville Native Bill Arp Becomes Well Known Columnist
MYSTERY PHOTO: Pretty Soon, We’re Gonna Exhaust Photos of American Lighthouses
Creative suggestions for alleviating the COVID-19 effects
By George Wilson, contributing columnist
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. | Here are some suggestions for alleviating the effects of the coronavirus in Georgia.
Some major corporations should volunteer to pay back some of the huge tax breaks and grants they’ve received as “economic development incentives.” They also should agree to forgo future subsidies by canceling incentive deals. This will help the governments responding to the virus grants.
Here are the numbers for the state of Georgia:
- Subsidy Total: $1,935,897,71. (That’s billions!)
- Total number of Awards: 930
- Time Period: Earliest year of data: 1995. Availability of data for earlier years varies greatly from program to program. The majority of the listings for Georgia are for the period since 2011.
Testing locations should be established at polling locations on June 9 to ensure that more people are tested. This can catch the people who have the virus. If the test becomes available, we will be able to see who has had the virus and subsequently the antibodies. For those that have had the virus and test for antibodies, the Health Departments would issue a document certifying a safe return to the workforce. This also created a synergism as people who would stop by to be tested and, if not a registered voter, also could be registered to vote in the November election.
A new analysis from the consulting firm Health Management Associates gives estimates for Georgia that if unemployment were to reach 10 percent by midyear, about 100,000 more people in Georgia would be uninsured. And 265,000 new enrollees would join Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor and disabled.
Consequently, Medicaid should be expanded to all Georgians and funded by an increase in the cigarette tax and a state tax on sugary drinks. Both would aid in reducing health costs and improve the health and weight of all Georgians. COVID-19 hits people with hypertension, obesity and diabetes .Also, this will prevent deaths that were already occurring because of the lack of health care insurance. Furthermore, this would aid rural hospitals to stay open.
In addition, at the national level the enrollment period for Affordable Health Act care should change to allow people who have lost their insurance because they were laid off to get into the system even better, add a public option to the plan.
Finally, this all requires creative leadership and an abandonment of the ideology that grips the Republican legislature. It is always important to look closely at what should be happening in our state. By being creative during an election year, perhaps the elections can help solve some of this problem.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
Did you ever go looking for the town of Sugarloaf?
Phase two of the parkway is in yellow; Phase three is in blue.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
APRIL 28, 2020 | A reader wrote in: “My husband and I have traveled Sugarloaf Parkway twice thinking it leads to a town with the same name. Is there a Sugarloaf town? If not, then why is it called Sugarloaf?”
The short answer is: there is no town of Sugarloaf in Gwinnett.
Somehow, we had never questioned this. Best answer is that the county came up with the name in the late 1990s. This parkway now runs from Peachtree Industrial Boulevard on the west, eastward and curving around all the way to Georgia Highway 316 east of Lawrenceville. The name comes from the Sugarloaf Country Club. Eventually, where the road now ends near Dacula will then connect with Interstate 85 north of Buford. Long range plans are in the engineering stage to have the road then curve past Buford and Sugar Hill to end again….several miles north of where it begins on Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, south of Sugar Hill. It will be built as funding is available. That entire loop road was first envisioned in the 1988-89 Thoroughfare Plan.
Where the current Sugarloaf Parkway crosses Georgia Highway 316 the first time, near Gwinnett Tech, was once known as Atkinson Road. When the county decided to construct a four-lane highway across the middle of Gwinnett, part of the alignment was the former Atkinson Road and the name was changed in late 1990.
The western portion of Sugarloaf Parkway from Interstate 85 to Peachtree Industrial Boulevard was dedicated in late 2003. When the present day Infinite Energy Center had its groundbreaking, in 1992, then known as the Gwinnett Civic Center, there was no Sugarloaf Parkway near the Center. Attendees took Satellite Boulevard, then itself a relatively new road, to the project.
The land where the Sugarloaf Country Club is located was once known as the vast Rollins Farm. Later it was owned for many years as an investment of the Eastern Airline Pilot’s Pension Plan, who then sold it to Crescent Properties (an off-shoot of Duke Power), who in turn developed the Sugarloaf Country Club and golf course. Crescent Properties gave 90 acres to the county where the Infinite Energy Center is now. And the main road leading to that club eventually was named Sugarloaf Parkway. Whew! Long answer to a short question.
From Jim Savadelis in Duluth: “Seeing your picture with a mask on made me think. I bet this is the only time anyone could walk into a bank with a mask on and not get arrested.”
Giselbach
We mourn in the passing of a hard-charging resident of Buford last week. We’re speaking of Bob Giselbach, 88. He was a quiet leader who knew how to get things done.
A native of Tipton, Indiana, Bob retired from the Army Artillery as a staff sergeant after serving over 20 years, including combat tours of duty in Korea, and twice to Vietnam. He was awarded the Purple Heart. Then Bob put in 20 years with the U.S. Postal Police. While living in Gwinnett, he was a volunteer with the Parks and Recreation Department and founded the Gwinnett Senior Golden Games in 1999.
We first met him when he began running the Garden Railway at Vines Botanical Garden. He was always a happy and outgoing fellow, and enjoyed this big-gauge railroad operation, to the delight of many children.
He didn’t limit himself in retirement to Gwinnett. He and his wife, Eileen, traveled the country participating in the National Senior Olympics, winning medals. Among his honors were the Shining light Award for volunteerism and the president’s Award.
Robert Giselbach, (1931-2020), May you rest in peace.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
Here’s one person letting go and just having a good rant
(Editor’s Note: This came from Howard Hoffman of Berkeley Lake, from a friend of his daughter in California. Sometimes it’s good just to let go and rant. Read on. –eeb)
By Susie Decker
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. | Ugly rant coming. To all of those leaving your precious quarantine to protest the government trying to shut down a deadly virus, just stop!
Decker
Don’t tell me the government has no right to regulate what you do with your body when you oppress women all the time and harass women who are making a choice. You don’t know their circumstances, their health or their struggles. You don’t get to be pro-choice now.
Don’t tell me you are fighting for freedom when your dumb neighbor over to your left is carrying a Confederate flag. That is the ultimate slap in the face of freedom. It doesn’t represent the South. It represents taking away the rights, freedoms and humanity of an entire race. It’s the ultimate insult!
Don’t tell me that everyone has a choice to believe what they want while your racist friend carries a flag with a swastika. I don’t even know what hate-mongering thing you can justify with that move, but millions of people died because of their beliefs. And all the government is trying to do is stop millions more from dying. Wake up!
How dare you show up with a sign saying that COVID-19 is a hoax while you yourself are wearing a mask. Do you not even understand hypocrisy? Let me say it loud for those in the back. ‘SCIENCE IS REAL.’ It is real with global warming, it’s real with earthquakes that devastate communities and it’s real now.
Look, if you don’t want to quarantine, then don’t. Go to grandma’s house, visit with friends. But how dare you do something so reckless to our nurses and doctors who are fighting to save your lives. And how dare you question the validity of science because, God forbid, your roots might be showing or your nails chipping.
This is not oppression. This is not a hoax. This is not a ploy by the Democrats, the socialists, the Chinese labs or whatever your FOX News Improv show is telling you. Say what you want and the rest of the commentators will follow with yes, and? You are doing damage. You are killing people. I hope your hair looks great at the next funeral. We won’t miss you.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
Precision Planning, Inc.
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- For more details, visit https://www.ppi.us
- For a list of other sponsors of this forum, click here.
Kidding around during a pandemic is unacceptable
Editor, the Forum:
Today I drank a glass of water with 50 percent Clorox, drove an ultraviolet rod down my throat, then sat in Georgia’s bright spring sunshine.
I turned 70 this month becoming a new member of the babbling pantaloons buying myself a painting, a new one with “GILBERT” on it, and a bib to catch the drool to come. The case is just a physio kit for rugby and someone with my name makes all the balls and gear for English speaking rugby teams near Hastings. Cheap way to get gear like that. You don’t want to hear the family connection.
I remember too much, like mom telling me about working for Woolworths in the Depression and alcoholics would buy isopropyl alcohol and drink it because it cost 10 cents. They would die horrible, wrenching deaths. Drinking disinfectant would cause a similar effect. Suggesting this is moronic. Someone misinformed in basic toxicology that parents know could say this on national television.
Kidding around during a pandemic is unacceptable. We are like Rome standing in cinders of a burning empire with dementia and egomania to choose from, and we’re the world’s best hope.
— Byron Gilbert, Duluth
Dear Byron: Your best sentence is: “Kidding around during a pandemic is unacceptable.”–eeb
Governor’s action will cost lives, not improve situation
Editor, the Forum:
Gov. Brian Kemp is going to cost lives and have a huge outbreak and we’ll have to start all over with the stay-at-home and the economy will still do bad. People will have died for nothing/
— D.W. Rogers, Sugar Hill
Compares death rate, wonders if enough state patrolmen
Editor, the Forum:
Interestingly, in one day the death rate was 9+ percent in Georgia, while the national average was 5.46 percent on April 22. How is the Georgia Guv going to keep his citizens inside his state? I do not believe other states will appreciate a 60+ percent increase.
Are there enough State Patrol officers available? Who wants to increase their opportunity to be infected? But then again, I live in California (40 million people and multiple Pacific ports), where our rate is 3.7 percent. So, I apologize to those who question my comments about Georgia, but I worry about my family and friends in my beloved Georgia.
— Ashley Herndon, Oceanside, Calif.
Send us your thoughts: We encourage you to send us your letters and thoughts on issues raised in GwinnettForum. Please limit comments to 300 words. We reserve the right to edit for clarity and length. Send feedback and letters to: elliott@brack.net
Peachtree Corners Rotary seek food for cooperative ministry
Peachtree Corners Rotary Club reports that the Norcross Cooperative Ministries (NCM) is in desperate need of supplies to meet the rising demand of the community during COVID-19. The club has established several drop off locations to allow donations to the NCM.
Drop-off locations include the UPS store at Spalding Drive and Holcomb Bridge Store, 7742 Spalding Drive (next to Publix), and Hollywood Feed in the Peachtree Corners Town Center at 5215 Town Center Boulevard, Suite 660. Both have set up boxes just inside the door of the stores for donations of non-perishable goods.
Some of the specific items needed by the Co-op are cereal, canned vegetables, beans, beef stew, and one pound containers of rice.
5 schools and 17 students nominated for Shuler awards
The ArtsBridge Foundation has announced the nominees for the 12th Annual Georgia High School Musical Theatre Awards, including 17 students from five schools within Gwinnett. The winners will be unveiled in a follow-up online event to be scheduled and announced in May.
Presented as the Shuler Hensley Awards named for the Atlanta-born star of the stage and screen—recipients are recognized as the best of the state’s high school musical theatre students and schools. The complete list of nominees is available online at ArtsBridgeGA.org/2020-shuler-award-nominations.
Kaczmarczyk becomes PCOM interim chief academic officer
Kaczmarczyk
Only a short time before PCOM Georgia moved to remote learning, Joseph M. Kaczmarczyk, DO, assumed the role of the campus’ interim dean and chief academic officer.
Dr. Kaczmarczyk earned his Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree from Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM), completed residencies and board certifications in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Occupational Medicine, as well as a board certification in Holistic and Integrative Medicine. In addition, he earned Masters’ degrees in Physiology and Biophysics, Public Health, and finally Business Administration through an executive MBA program.
He has worked in academia since 1987, holding titles from clinical instructor to associate professor. In 2010, after a 23-year career in the US Public Health Service (USPHS), he retired at the rank of captain and joined PCOM in Philadelphia as vice chair and professor in the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, assistant OB/GYN residency program director, and OB/GYN clerkship director.
Subsequently, he was promoted to assistant dean of clinical education, associate dean of clinical education, and associate dean of undergraduate medical education, before accepting the interim dean role in Suwanee.
Dr. Kaczmarczyk has held numerous national leadership roles. He has served as the president of the American College of Osteopathic Obstetricians and Gynecologist, of which he is a Distinguished Fellow, and as chair of the National OB/GYN faculty of the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners. He was the senior medical advisor on the staff of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and the medical officer in the US Food and Drug Administration Office of Women’s Health. In addition, he served as a medical officer with significant research administrative responsibilities in the National Institutes of Health Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute Child Health and Human Development of the USPHS.
He often reminds students that “Everyone’s journey through medical education is unique. Recognize your journey as unique. Embrace it. Own it. But most of all, enjoy it.”
When asked about his goals for PCOM Georgia in these turbulent times, Dr. Kaczmarczyk replied without hesitation, “I aspire to make a difference in the lives and careers of our osteopathic medical students and the future of PCOM Georgia.”
GGC student producing PPE on college’s 3-D printer
Estephanie Gonzalez, a Georgia Gwinnett College laboratory supervisor, researched health care workers immediate personal protection equipment needs on the internet. She determined that GGC’s machines could produce desperately needed face shields and ventilator parts. Gonzalez enlisted GGC student Jesse Merida, a senior majoring in digital media, who has several semesters of experience working with the 3D printers. Merida took the downloaded UCLA designs and started printing during the last week of March. Gonzalez and Merida settled on a face shield design to start with because, while not as effective as the N95 respirators, face shields still assist in preventing droplets and airborne particles from entering the eyes.
- See Merida work on the machine in a You Tube presentation above.
Walton EMC’s Round Up distributes $131,770 to agencies
Walton EMC’s Operation Round Up has distributed $131,770 throughout its service area in March grants. CEO Ronnie Lee says: “During times like these, the generosity of Operation Round Up is more important than ever.”
These agencies that provide emergency food, shelter and medical needs received funds from unclaimed capital credits:
- ACTION – $10,000 for the Full Plate Rescue program.
- Atlanta Community Food Bank – $10,000 for food purchase and distribution.
- Faith in Serving Humanity – $15,000 for their children’s feeding program.
- Partnership Against Domestic Violence – $7,500 for their children’s shelter.
- Salvation Army, Athens – $15,000 for their emergency feeding and shelter program.
- Salvation Army, Gwinnett – $15,000 for their emergency feeding and shelter program.
- Step by Step Recovery – $15,000 for their homeless shelter.
These agencies received funds from rounding up customer-owners’ bills to the next dollar:
- Georgia Options, Inc. – $5,000 for Communication devices and software for developmentally disabled.
- Loganville Police – $4,000 for their Drug Abuse Resistance Education program.
- Skye Precious Kids – $5,000 to support families with children facing life-threatening illnesses.
- United Home Scholars – $1,500 for a soccer program for home and private school students.
- United Way of NE Georgia – $4,550 for their Dolly Parton Imagination Library that provides books for children from birth to age five.
- Six Families – $24,220 for emergency needs.
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
From Billy Chism, Toccoa: This afternoon, I finished The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. It was 
excellent. It is nonfiction, covering from May 10, 1940, to May 10, 1941, Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister. it gave a fresh look at that time period, focusing on Churchill‘s family and inner circle, as well as key German leaders. It gave me a whole new understanding of the Blitz and the devastating toll of civilian lives lost and the massive destruction in a number of cities beyond London. All taken from diaries, letters, memoirs and other research. Reads like a novel. Just a great book from beginning to end. In fact, I knew the ending and still didn’t want it to end. The epilogue, after having read the book, was fascinating in itself.”
An invitation: what books, restaurants, movies or web sites have you enjoyed recently? Send us your recent selection, along with a short paragraph (150 words) as to why you liked this, plus what you plan to visit or read next. Send to: elliott@brack.net
Lawrenceville native Arp becomes well-known columnist
In the late 19th century Bill Arp’s weekly column in the Atlanta Constitution, syndicated to hundreds of newspapers, made him the South’s most popular writer. Others surpassed him in literary quality, but in numbers of regular readers, no one exceeded Bill Arp.
“Arp”
Bill Arp was born Charles Henry Smith in Lawrenceville on June 15, 1826. He married Mary Octavia Hutchins, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and plantation owner, and started a family that would eventually include ten surviving children. Smith studied law with his father-in-law and then moved to Rome in 1851.
Smith took his famous pen name in April 1861 when, after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation ordering the Southern rebels “to disperse and retire peaceably.” Smith wrote a satiric response to the president in the dialect favored by humorists of the day (“I tried my darnd’st yesterday to disperse and retire, but it was no go”) and signed it “Bill Arp,” in honor of a local “cracker” named Bill Arp.
The letter to “Mr. Lincoln, Sir” was reprinted across the South and made Bill Arp a household name. During the war Smith wrote almost 30 more Arp letters for southern newspapers, attacking Union policies, praising the Confederacy, and describing in a humorous fashion his family’s experiences as refugees (“runagees,” he called them) while fleeing from advancing Federal troops in 1864. Arp later criticized the nation’s Reconstruction policies in letters that often expressed a good bit of frustration, even anger. The Arp letters ended in the early 1870s, as Reconstruction came to a close in Georgia.
In 1877 Smith and his family moved to a farm in Bartow County, just outside of Cartersville. A year later the Atlanta Constitution printed a new letter from Bill Arp, his first in half a dozen years and the beginning of a 25-year series of weekly columns called “The Country Philosopher.” The letter, on the joys of farming, was in many ways different from the Bill Arp of the war and Reconstruction. Gone was most of the dialect (it would never completely disappear), but more important, the subject matter had changed: Arp now wrote delightful epistles of the pleasures of rural life, the comfort of home and family, the independence and strength of Georgia’s common folk, and the bright memories of the days of his youth. Arp still wrote occasionally on political, economic, and social issues, including a number of pro-lynching columns in the 1890s, but it was his “homely philosophy,” as it was called—his writings on the farm and fireside, the past, and various pastoral topics—that made him so popular.
The message of Arp’s Constitution columns was ambiguous. On one hand he promoted the economic growth of Henry W. Grady‘s New South program; on the other hand he criticized many aspects of New South society, and one can read his homely philosophy as implicit criticism of the new age. Perhaps this explains his popularity: he reflected the ambiguous feelings of many other New Southerners.
Smith died on August 24, 1903, and is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Cartersville.
- To view the Georgia Encyclopedia article online, go to http://georgiaencyclopedia.org
Pretty soon, we’re gonna exhaust photos of U.S. lighthouses
Yep, we’re suckers for lighthouses. Here’s another. Tell us where it’s located by sending to elliott@brack.net, including your hometown.
The most recent Mystery Photo turned out to be relatively easy, as several readers responded with the right answers. They included Susan McBrayer, Sugar Hill; Lynn Naylor, Norcross; Robert Foreman, Grayson; Howard Hoffman, Berkeley Lake; Cindy Evans, Duluth; Tanya Moore, Norcross; Lee Thompson of Lawrenceville; Frank Sharp, Lawrenceville; and Jim Savadelis, Duluth. The photo came from Frank Sharp of Lawrenceville.
Lou Camerio remembers going to Knoxville for the World’s Fair celebration: “The gold tower is the Sunsphere. This was the site of the 1982 World’s Fair that bankrupted the City and State of Tennessee. The Art Museum is just to the west of the park. We were there in 1982 because Betsy, our daughter, performed with Georgia Girls Baton Academy. She was five years old. We stayed in a rented Winnebago with my parents, mother-in-law and two kids aged 3 and 5. That much I do remember. And in the parade, Betsy was the smallest and marched at its end.”
George Graf of Palmyra, Va. noted that the museum is a concrete building and consists of four stories, sheathed in locally quarried pink Tennessee marble. The museum includes five galleries and two large outdoor garden areas. In 2013 and 2014, the museum underwent a comprehensive, top-to-bottom restoration and renovation at a cost of nearly $6 million. The building’s Tennessee marble cladding was cleaned and restored, and the entry plaza and third floor terrace were rebuilt and repaved with pink and gray Vermont granite. The North Garden was also redesigned and planted with native trees and shrubs.
Allan Peel, San Antonio, Tex. told us: “Originally called the ‘Dulin Gallery of Art’, the museum celebrates the art and artists of East Tennessee and was first opened in 1961 in the 1915 H.L. Dulin House in a west-side residential neighborhood. Troubled with limited space, security, and climate control, the museum was moved to a more suitable location in 1982, and its name was changed to “Knoxville Museum of Art” in 1987.
“In 1984 it was decided that the museum should be housed in an even larger, more modern facility to be built at the site of 1982 World’s Fair in downtown Knoxville. As such, the Knoxville Museum of Art’s current home is a 53,300 sq. ft., four-story steel and concrete building that is sheathed in locally quarried pink Tennessee marble. Designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and named in honor of Jim Clayton, the largest single contributor to its construction, the new Knoxville Museum of Art was opened on March 25, 1990.Incidentally, the gold dome visible to the right in the mystery photo is the ‘Sunsphere’, a historical, 266-ft high hexagonal steel truss structure, topped with a 75 ft gold-colored glass sphere that served as an observation deck and the symbol of the 1982 World’s Fair.”
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