Sometimes it is best to cool your heels and keep your head low.
When the RMS Titanic hit the iceberg, Second Officer Charles Lightoller was just taking off his shoes and settling into his bunk. He heard the commotion of footsteps outside his doorway, but instead of sticking his head out and asking what was going on, he stayed right where he was.
At the Senate hearings shortly after the disaster, Sen. William Smith asked Lightoller wasn’t he curious to know what might be going on?
“No sir, my duty was to be in my quarters. When I was needed elsewhere, that is exactly where they found me,” Lightoller replied.
That was Mayor Garnett Johnson’s attitude when the FBI paid a visit to the Marble Palace. If he was needed, he would be in his office.
“I never saw them and they didn’t ask to see or meet with me, so I just went about my work,” Johnson said.
The sudden and unannounced visit by the FBI caused rickochets of speculation to bounce through the government, but pretty much everyone already knew the score.
No one, except maybe the Augusta Commission, bought former Director of Augusta Housing and Community Development Hawthorne Welcher’s excuse that $6.3 million just “vanished.” The fact that Welcher withheld the information from the commission and the mayor for months while trying to stall the Treasury Department in their collection efforts eroded his credibility like turpentine on varnish.
Speaking of credibility, I know for a fact that Mayor Johnson couldn’t summon the six votes and no one on the commission would dare make the motion to fire him. Instead they paid him to sit home and eat popcorn while they conducted an “audit.” I am willing to bet that if he claimed to have “personal and spiritual issues” for which he needed to seek treatment in New York, they would have paid for the personal reflection stint, welcomed him back with open arms and laud him for his bravery.
Then the damn FBI had to get involved!
Over the years, as a journalist, I have learned a few things about the FBI; they do not just saunter into town and ask to see your file cabinets on a whim, and by the time they get around to asking to see inside your oven, your goose has already been cooked.
Rarely does an FBI agent ask a question that they don’t already know the answer to.
Welcher has not reached out and responded to any of the media reports stating that he is at least a part of what is being investigated; his silence is telling.
Welcher is likely the low hanging fruit. I am willing to bet Welcher is singing louder than James Brown at the Apollo.
Yeah, Johnson says he only “heard” that the FBI was in the building and he was doing his duty by staying in his office and not getting involved. I am also pretty sure that while he was in his office, he had his feet up on the desk and was smoking a victory cigar with a big smile on his face.
James who? The Godfather of what?
The Augusta Coliseum Authority last week did one of the most boneheaded things I have seen in recent years. They announced that the new arena currently under construction will not have James Brown’s name attached.
Social media immediately erupted and, Primary Wave, the company that currently owns the trademark to Mr. Brown’s name and likeness immediately issued a statement letting everyone know that this was not their decision.
The statement read in part, “Let us be clear: there are no financial demands, no restrictions, and no barriers—only our full support for James Brown’s name to remain where it belongs.”
To be perfectly honest, I grew up in this town, and I have never been able to figure out why the public in Augusta waited until the man was nearing the end of his life to give him the respect that he deserved.
Sure, he did have a very public meltdown for which he served prison time for, but Mr. Brown didn’t get his due for his accomplishments long before the mid-1980s arrest. Augusta never warmed to the man who Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson called their mentor.
James Brown was proud to call Augusta his home, but Augustans just did not see him for the superstar that he was. Granted, I like the rebranded Lady A’s music just fine, but none of those home towners were ever asked to share the stage with Luciano Pavarotti and Tina Turner.
It was either Jo Mama from WRXR or Mark Summers of WBBQ who had a running gag on the radio where they portrayed the Godfather as a gravelly-voiced, unintelligible version of Charlie Brown from the Peanuts comics that could only grunt and hollar out, “Good God!”
Of course, the radio skit was funny, but it is just one example of how Brown was treated.
Everywhere else from the UK to Japan, James Brown was treated like rock and roll royalty, but he couldn’t give away tickets to his birthday bash even with stars like Dan Ackroyd in tow.
Taking James Brown’s name off of the arena would be like Liverpool trying to distance itself from The Beatles.
This will all go down like the renaming of Augusta State University to Georgia Regents University. The Coliseum Authority will likely back down due to the public pressure and restore the name.
Otherwise, I will join the other James Brown fans and call for the authority members to be tarred and feathered like the Scallywags that they are imitating!
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter, Editorial Page Editor and weekly columnist for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
