(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Augusta Press.)
While most of us were celebrating Thanksgiving, several residents of Summerville and Forrest Hills were plotting another Fourth of July. They want independence from Augusta to create their own city, town or maybe kingdom of Summerville.
Opinion
Seceding from consolidated Augusta came up last year during redistricting when the local majority-Black ad hoc redistricting committee tried to split up District 3 in Summerville six ways from Sunday. Maybe it was just three ways from Sunday, but six ways is how the saying goes.
Anyway, putting parts in Districts 1 and 2 didn’t sit well with the folks in Summerville who consider the area a historical neighborhood. Many saw it as a deliberate attempt to weaken the the White vote bordering on taxation without representation. And we know what that led to before this country freed itself from English control and started collecting its own taxes.
Augusta attorney Wright McLeod, who lives in Forrest Hills, first floated the idea of creating a new city of Summerville last year, but nothing more was said about it, and everybody thought the idea was dead. But it wasn’t, and following in the footsteps of the city they’re trying to leave, they’re working with a consultant to tell them what to do and how to do it.
According to McLeod, there’s nothing unique about an area within a county becoming a new city.
“Cities in Georgia come and go,” he said.
And the arguments for creating one are the same as the ones used to sell consolidation, he said. It will save money and be more efficient.
When asked whether there’s much support for the idea, McLeod said, “A better question is, ‘Who is willing to stand up?’ I’ve talked to dozens of people. There’s no commitment yet.”
A meeting at 6 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 4 at the Social Building, 207 Elkton Court, in Augusta, could gauge whether commitment will be forthcoming. The public is invited to attend.
Creating a new city is a two-year process, he said.
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“First, you must have a fiscal feasibility study, so as part of that process you hire a university, and they do a study, and they say, ‘Yes, this can be done.’” McLeod said. “You don’t just throw it out there. Ultimately, there are two votes by the entire population of the proposed new city only. The first vote is on deed annexation, whether to break away from the city at large. The second vote is on incorporating the new city. Both votes must pass. Then it has to pass the Legislature, and the governor must sign it.”
The new city would have to provide three of 10 services, and it can contract with other municipalities for services.
“A new city doesn’t go in in one fell swoop and do everything,” McLeod said.
McLeod also said the window is closing on creating a new Summerville.
“I think it’s going to get harder and harder to get through,” he said. “If you believe Georgia is trending blue or purple, then time would be of the essence.
“This is nothing more than Wright McLeod and some friends. Try, or you regret not trying or determining it’s not the best plan. There are pros and cons. My take right now is the pros outweigh the cons.”
Political consultant Dave Barbee said creating the city of Summerville could be done.
“It just depends on whether they have the will to do it.” Barbee said. “It’s up to the folks who live there to do it. It is legitimate. I don’t live in the district, but it depends on the geographical area they want to take in.”
There is both legal and legislative precedent for creating new cities in Georgia, such as:
– City of Augusta, 1996
– Sandy Springs, 2005
– Johns Creek, 2006
– Dunwoody, 2008
– Brookhaven, 2012
– Stonecrest, 2016
– South Fulton, 2017
Turkey Overload
Not much was cooking at the Marble Place last week because the turkeys had flown the coop. I’m tired of writing about them anyway. So, I’m changing the subject to my favorite subjects – cookbooks and cooking – seasoned with whatever comes to mind.
Spam Good
The most useful cookbook, “Favorite Recipes from the Deep South” had to be retired after the back cover fell off and I lost a few pages. Mama gave it to me in 1964, and it saw me through years of casseroles – tuna noodle, asparagus and English pea. Bing cherry and Coca Cola congealed salads, sour cream pound cakes and Chicken Breasts Supreme in mushroom soup. Once I made a ham loaf using a recipe from that cookbook, and after going through the trouble of grinding up ham and mixing in all kinds of other things and baking it in a loaf pan, it tasted exactly like Spam.
I love those old cookbooks from the 1960s and ‘70s because just about everything had lots of real butter in it, and reading them is like walking down memory lane. Many of the ones by churches and Junior Leagues have the names of the women who submitted the recipes below them.
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A Taste of the Past
My favorite is Georgia Heritage, published by the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the State of Georgia in 1979. Reading it is like reading a Who’s Who of Prominent Women in every town in Georgia. There are recipes from women I knew in Athens when I was 17 years old and working at Watson’s Drug Store, which became Hodgson’s Drug Store. I didn’t really know them. I just knew their husband’s names and dipped their ice cream.
Marianne Gordon, who was to become Kenny Rogers’ fourth wife, used to come in the store, too. She was remarkably beautiful and wore a remarkable amount of makeup. Her mama had her hair done at the beauty shop next door, and the beauticians would come to the drug store and tell us about how she’d brag about all the jewelry Kenny had given Marianne.
Kim Basinger’s mama would bring Kim and four other little towheads into the drug store and line them up at the soda fountain for ice cream almost every day. Kim’s mama reminded me of a faded beauty, and her hands looked like she did a lot of housework. She seemed like the kind who pushed her children to excel. Like a show business mama although I don’t know she was ever that.
That was my first real job, and it wore me out.
Sometimes I’d walk home for lunch and fall asleep across the bed for a short nap. When I didn’t come back after a few hours, they’d send somebody to come wake me up. I guess they liked me, or they would have fired me. It was long hours standing on my feet, so I’d go behind the cosmetics counter and spray them with the sample bottles of cologne to cool them off. I worked with an older lady named Vonie Oliver. She’d worked her entire life in retail, mainly in drug stores. She loved me for some reason and gave me a bottle of Jolie Madame perfume, which I still have on my dresser. Sometimes I take the stopper out and breathe the perfume in and think of her.
An Appetite for Murder
In Georgia Heritage, there’s a recipe for lamb stew from Mrs. Leonard John Mederer (Hyta Plowden), of Valdosta. She was known all over the Southeast for her prizewinning daylilies. I went to her house one time, and she had at least an acre of them blooming in her backyard. She also had peacocks roaming around and roosting on the wrought iron tables and chairs on her large back verandah.
People say the Mederers spent a fortune on the defense of their nephew Keller Wilcox Jr., who was convicted of killing Hellen Griffin Hanks, the pretty 34-year-old mother of three young children, and burying her body in a field in south Lowndes County in 1972.
She was working at Wilcox Advertising Agency, and friends said after she disappeared that she’d told them Wilcox had sexually harassed her. Some people said she’d run off with another man (don’t they always?). Then eight years later a man ploughing up roots in a field struck the wooden Wilcox Advertising Agency box she’d been buried in.
At the trial, an old man who’d worked for the Wilcoxes for many years testified he’d helped bury the box one rainy night. He said they put her in a box and then put her legs in.
The defense claimed the old man was senile, but the prosecution had her remains exhumed and found cut marks on her leg bones. A key piece of evidence – a key to Wilcox Advertising’s truck that the prosecution contended was accidentally dropped into the box – was found along with Hanks’ dismembered remains. There were only two truck keys, and when the company truck was later sold, there was only one key.
I read that the key was the linchpin in the case.
Wilcox was sentenced to life in prison for her murder. In 1985, a federal judge in Macon released him because he thought the prosecution’s treatment of the elderly black man on the stand was too harsh. That ruling was challenged, and Wilcox went back to prison in 1987. He admitted killing Hanks in a letter to the parole board in 2008. An admission of guilt is not the same as a confession but was a requirement for the parole board to consider his case. He remained in prison until his release in 2017.
Hanks’ son, David, who was 13 years old when his mother disappeared, wrote “The Disappearance,” a novel about his mother’s murder. He was among the award winners of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize presented to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General.
David also wrote the Carson Griffin nuclear thriller series: “Black Waters,” “Power and Ore,” and “Euphrates Yield.”
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Garden City Sampler
Augusta is well represented in Georgia Heritage with many prominent Colonial Dames, such as Mrs. William F. Toole; Mrs. Clayton Pierce Boardman Jr. and Mrs. William Shivers Morris III.
And did my heart skip a beat when I saw Bea Massengale’s devil’s food cake with seafoam icing from Mrs. Thomas Maxwell Blanchard. I hadn’t thought of seafoam icing in 30 years. The secret was knowing when the boiling water and sugar could spin a thread. If you knew that, you could make seafoam. If not, you had goop.
Recipe for Disaster
Now, don’t think just because I love Southern cookbooks, I can’t cook fancy when I want to. I made quiche Lorraine from scratch before anybody I knew had ever heard of it or knew real men didn’t eat it. I’ve made baba au rhum twice in my life and spumoni once. That was for dessert for the coaches’ wives at the University of Georgia.
I had never made it before. In fact, I’d never even heard of it, but it sounded like a good dessert after lasagna. I mixed up the ingredients just like the recipe said and froze the concoction. When I served it, after a few bites there was dead silence. Then Barbara Dooley said what they were all thinking, “This is awful!”
Everybody started laughing. I never made spumoni again.
Sylvia Cooper is a columnist with The Augusta Press. Reach her at sylvia.cooper@theaugustapress.com
