Category: Georgia

No one at the public radio station warned Phoebe Hoss not to read the f-word. She’s 84, after all, with white hair and lovely manners. Perhaps the interviewer thought it unnecessary. Never mind, she read it anyway, although you didn’t hear it if you were listening, thanks to some sound engineer.

Flying from the lips of her then 9 year-old son as he looks for a weapon to attack his friends, the f-word appears repeatedly in the opening of her book, All Eyes:A Mother’s Struggle to Save Her Schizophrenic Son.

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One day soon, Jim Jackson will close the doors on a drug store in the small northwest Georgia town of Summerville that has been in the family for 114 years. Shuttering Jackson Drug Co. wasn’t an easy decision, because Jim was the third in a line of family pharmacists who had weathered panics and depressions. But the state had announced yet another cut in Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement, and since most of his customers are uninsured, cash was going to drain from the business like, well, that once in the coffers of Bear Sterns, only in smaller amounts.

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It’s primary time in North Georgia where I visited last week. The signs are everywhere, in store windows, on lawns, on the side of the road, and most prominently, in my hometown of Summerville, on the sides of vintage pickup trucks that have been dispatched in the service of the incumbent tax commissioner.

There are also races for sheriff, county commissioner and state legislators. As in many locales these days, none of the signs designates the party of the candidate advertised. You can’t even find the party affiliation of the candidates in the local newspaper, although I assume that it will appear on the ballot.

So it was interesting when I paid a visit to my brother’s drug store across from the Chattooga County courthouse to hear a man delivering packages raving loudly that he didn’t think much of a community that would let liberals park on its streets.

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