Georgia Gazette

I'm Sid Hoskinson and this is Georgia Gazette. On today's edition, the race for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Paul Coverdell heats up, the support machinery for military dependence left behind by soldiers sent to the Middle East, cranks up at Army Posts across the state, plus author Terry K talks about his new book The Runaway. Stay with us. This week, under the gold dome, the big story was affirmative action that Democratic leaders pushed through the house by piggybacking it onto another bill. The affirmative action

proposal would give the state legal permission to continue programs that promote diversity. James Argros has our story. The legislation, which was added onto an unrelated hospital bill, bar state agencies from using quotas or granting preferential treatment, but allows them to take any action deemed necessary to carry out a compelling state interest, which protects federal highway contracts and college admissions policies. The measure was pushed through by Democrats, who used it to block an attempt by House Republican Whip Earl Earhart to ban affirmative action statewide. State Representative Calvin Smirey of Columbus helped write the Democrats affirmative action legislation, and he says it takes the issue away from Earhart, who's been using it to divide the General Assembly. From our equation, it's been settled. He may continue to try to do something, but again, I think he scraps and for straws. He's been defeated in committee. He's been defeated on the floor, and we hope that this is something that we didn't have to deal with, but the

fact that we dealt with, we had to deal with it as strong as possible. Earhart says, however, he will continue his fight to ban affirmative action, because he says the Democrats bill is just an attempt to skirt the issue this election year. Meanwhile, the version approved by the House now heads to the Senate. I'm James R. Groves. In other House action lawmakers voted to give juries in Georgia, the authority to sentence sex offenders to death, if they rape or commit aggravated sodomy against children under the age of 12. Winder representative Warren Massey sponsored the bill. He says he wants to permanently stop future attacks by repeat sexual offenders. Petifies themselves are on record as saying that they cannot be cured, you know, that they can't help themselves. So I want to help them stop. House members also agreed to exempt from the state sales tax food products sold by girl and boy scouts. Grass sod, newspaper ad inserts and coffins bought with money from the state

crime victim's assistance fund. Across the hall, senators debated a bill that would subject adults who leave guns within easy reach of children to stiff fines and jail time. Senators also approved a constitutional amendment that would exempt Georgia veterans who were held prisoners of war from paying car taxes. The measure will be on the November election ballot for a final decision by the voters. Also in the Senate lawmakers voted to change a 1952 law originally designed to unmask the Ku Klux Klan. The law makes it a misdemeanor for anyone to conceal their identity with a mask or a hood. The problem, according to the bill's sponsor, Don Zella James of College Park, is that Muslim women who cover their faces for religious reasons are breaking the law. She wants them exempted. We wanted to make sure that we amended this law to make sure that women of this religion who come to the international city of Atlanta and throughout the state are not arrested anymore or frisked or asked to leave.

Senator James says five women in Georgia have been arrested for violating the law. Legislators are 25 days into the 40 day session for a more in-depth look at the goings on each week under the gold dome. Listen to the legislative report with James R. Groves each Friday evening at 610 over most of these Peachtate public radio stations. Most Georgians are familiar with the candidates in this year's governor's race. Guy Milner, Lewis Massey and former labor commissioner David Poethers are on the list, but the U.S. Senate race remains somewhat of a mystery to many Georgians. Mike Savage reports on the candidate that Democrats hope will give incumbent Senator Paul Coverdell a run for his money. After a narrow defeat for Newt Gingrich's congressional seat in 1996, Atlanta businessman Michael Coles has returned to politics. The 54-year-old Coles will challenge Republican

Paul Coverdell, a freshman senator seeking re-election this year. In 1977, Coles began the Great American Cookie Company. Today, his company has hundreds of stores nationwide and sales of nearly $100 million. Coles has never been elected to public office, but he says being a millionaire is not as important to him as the values he learned from his family while growing up. The American dream is not just about being rich or buying a big house. It's about a good place to live. It's about having a decent car to drive. It's about having a great, a good, safe neighborhood to live in. And I think that those are the values that I grew up with, and those are the values that I will take to Washington with me and make sure that I am not only a protector of the American dream, but the greatest champion of the American dream for all Americans. In a news conference at the state Capitol this week, Coles received endorsements from Governor Zell Miller and another Democrat, Nebraska Senator Bob Carrey. He says Coles is a candidate familiar with Democratic values.

He understands that you've got to be persistent to be successful. He understands that sometimes the bottom drops out of your life, and through no fall to your own, you need some help to get back on your feet again. He understands what it means to create jobs. He's going to bring a fresh perspective to the Democratic caucus, and we intend to do all that we possibly can to assist Michael in his effort to be the next junior senator from the state of Georgia. Carrey is also the chairman of the Democratic Sanitorial Campaign Committee, and he believes this Senate seat is one they can win. University of Georgia, political scientist, Dr. Charles Bullock, somewhat agrees. The seat that is up for grabs this year is not reelected in incumbents, it's 1974, 1980, 1986, 1992. Each time the incumbent got turned out of office. So this has been a very insecure position with the Democrats and Republicans, so evenly divided right now in the state in terms of partisan loyalties and the voters. It suggests that we will have a close contest here.

Bullock says that Democrats will have to spend some time getting the Coles' name out to Georgia voters, because only those living in Atlanta are familiar with his name, from the race with Gingrich two years ago. Nationally, Bullock says Democrats are closely watching the Coles' Coverdale race and other key Senate races in the South, because Republicans have gained a foothold in a part of the country that has been historically Democratic. Now, right now, there are only seven Democrats left among the 22 Senators from the 11 Southern States. If Republicans can hold on to this more than two to one advantage among Southern Senators, it makes it very, very difficult for Democrats to win enough seats outside the South in order to take back a majority within the United States Senate. So it means that Southern seats which are up for grabs, Southern seats which are filled by Republicans, or ones on which Democrats will take a very careful beat in an effort to regain control of the Senate. However, Coles remains the only announce Democratic candidate for the Senate race. I'm Mike Savage.

This week thousands of Georgia Army troops received their marching orders and headed to Kuwait, where the U.S. has threatened military action against Iraq. Even as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan continued to press for a diplomatic resolution of the problem, the United States went ahead, putting soldiers in place in the Middle East should tensions erupt into a military conflict. Some 3,000 Ford Stewart soldiers will leave their families for deployment to the Middle East. With me on the phone is Roxy Parish, volunteer and family support program manager for Ford Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield in the Savannah area and thanks for being with us.

Tell me, what has this past week been like? It's been a behind-the-back activity, fast-paced and ever-changing. How are families handling the separations? Like they normally do, first of all with questions and a little anxiety and getting the answers and throwing themselves into helping really push the soldiers out the door. We've got family members, manning sewing machines, sewing on patches, updating phone trees, doing things that they can to help other people in their family support group. So everybody's just pitching in. How many of the families, for how many of the families is this the first major deployment and in the first major trip away for the soldier? Well, we don't have exact figures, but in all of our pre-deployment briefings for the family members, we ask that and we'll have in a room of maybe 400 people, we'll have maybe 15 or 20 that this is their first deployment and throw a lot of the soldiers in their first

as well. And the good thing about a family support group is that the other family members kind of embrace those that have never been through it and you see a mentoring process start to happen and they start saying, okay, these are the things you're going to experience. It's absolutely natural and normal. There's nothing wrong with you. You're going to feel a little anxiety and that sort of thing. What are the biggest problems that all of the families are facing and what programs are in place to help them deal with those problems? Well, of course, the biggest problem any family member faces, whether military or civilian is the unknown. You know, you can plan for and make all your contingency plans and anticipate but a car may break down. Those kind of things that come up that are unexpected. There are a myriad of programs. We have wonderful quality life programs that are designed to be the backup. One of the things that everyone needs to know is the first line of defense for a family member is their soldier. The soldier must first make all of the arrangements

to prepare their family. And it's not a one-time thing. It's something that's done on an ongoing basis. And once the soldier does that and then deploys the backup plans kick in. A is the soldier, B is the family support group. So if a car breaks down, you might want to call somebody in your family support group and see if they're near and can give you a ride or help you out. If not, then you may go to plan C, which is your rear detachment commander. The unit always leads behind someone in a green suit, a soldier, that's there as kind of a support to the family members as well and helps them interface with agencies throughout the installation. And then the last line of defense is, of course, those instant installation agencies who are there to answer questions, provide support and do the things that they can for the family members. Our local schools helping the children of these soldiers who are headed for the Middle

East cope with the loss of a parent. Oh, sure. The schools, we have such a wonderful partnership in this area. And of course, you have to know that we've done this a lot. I've been here since 1983 and we've been through Grenada and Panama and Desert Shield as a storm in Somalia. And we knew that it was imperative that we developed this partnership with the schools. And it's not anything we had to sell to them, but it was something they were eager to do. They have been wonderful. Their counselors are geared up to help the children. They have little meetings and little talking sessions. And I've been, you know, several family members have told me about how their children would come home and tell them about warm fuzzies and cold pricklies and how important it is to keep a smile and to ask questions if you have concerns and that sort of thing. So I think that there are wonderful things happening in the schools for the children. Do you see any similarities this time around with Desert Storm? Well, the obvious right off the bat is the uniform. You know, normally we see people in green be to use day in a day out, but of course we're seeing the decent use. And

that's always kind of a little alert signal. But the similarities are, I think, the determination. We say, okay, we've got a job to do and we're going to get in there and we're going to do it. Whatever it is, we don't, you know, know right now what the extent of it will be, but that it's getting in there and doing what we have to do. Well, thank you very much for being with us. Sure. It was my pleasure. Roxy Parish is the volunteer and family support program manager for Ford Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield in the Savannah area. Full, the recent, dismal and wet weather has got new down. Georgia Gazette commentator Lynn Coulter holds out a ray of hope as she looks forward

to the wonders of a southern spring. Send me a tape recording, my friend wrote last spring. A job relocation had taken her family to Seattle. When I read her letter, I pictured her writing to me at the table in her new kitchen, scribbling her name with a loopy flourish and leaning back to and hail on her ever-present cigarette. I need something to listen to, her plaintive note said. Seattle doesn't sound like home. A recording of what I wondered, not my voice or my son, surely. My friend and I spoke often on the phone. I called again to find out what she wanted. The sounds of the night, she explained as if I should have known. When the weather warms up, open your back door and listen. I miss the croaks and peeps and chirps and whores. Their nights have a sound all their own. We had talked about how she'd miss seeing the dogwoods bloom in the Pacific Northwest. She'd bought galoshes for the rain and laid in a store of winter woolen's against the colder cloudy weather. But she didn't expect to miss our sounds. Until she left, she hadn't realized how different the south sounded from

another part of the country. And so I picked a froggy night to make a recording. The kind of night when spring rain and cool air conspired to drape a dank, low mist over the lawn. I rewound to tape on my machine and dragged a folding chair outside. It's aluminum legs sank a little into the wet grass. When it settled, I sat down, stretched my legs out in front of me, and leaned back to wait. It took a while for me to hear. At first I strained to see through the darkness, punctuated as it was by street lamps and the blinking lights of passing planes. Then I gave up trying to see. It occurred to me that sometimes sight can hinder you from finding what you're really looking for. Finally I heard it. The night was singing, or at least the creatures around my lawn were tuning up. The sounds weren't the bird songs of daylight hours, though. Instead I heard whistled bell-like sounds coming from a wet and boggy spot in our woods. The singers were spring peepers, tiny green

frogs common to the south. Other frogs sang too, frogs whose names I'd find later as I, thumbed through a field-guide to southern wildlife. Carpenter's frogs calls, rang out like the blows of hammers on nails. Toads puff their throats-hacks like balloons. Still other voices honked and rasped, bleeded and barked, trilled and croaked. Throughout that spring I listened and recorded. By summertime new voices were added to the symphony. Feel crickets began to chirp, noises made by scraping their rough wings together. The crickets sang faster as the weather warmed up, the number of their chirps rising with the temperatures. Katie did's join during the summer, calling out their names. Katie did, Katie didn't. Cicadas made a loud electric buzz from the trees, a singing sound that almost hurt my ears. Soon grasshoppers were bouncing off my ankles as I set outside to listen. They played in the orchestra too, sawing their legs over their wings, matches of violin and straws of

bow across his strings. I mailed the recording to my friend at the end of the summer when the tape was full. It's wonderful, she told me when she called one night. I'm sitting outside on my back steps listening to it. I pictured her there in the dark, a cigarette glowing faintly between her long fingers. It's getting cold again here she added. I heard the clatter of wind chimes on her deck. And behind her voice I caught the chatter of summer crickets and the throaty croaks of frogs. Her tape player was spinning under the Seattle sky, playing out the sounds of our southern night music. Lynne Coulter is a freelance journalist, wife and mother, and soon to be novelist. She lives in Douglasville. I'm calling you. Where do you answer to?

There's a new book by Georgia Author Terry K on the shelves. According to the book Jacket, the runaway is the novel he has wanted to write his entire career. It's the story of the earliest beginnings of desegregation in the south. It tells of the relationship between two boys, one black, one white, whose destinies it seemed, were to spark the flames of change. Terry K lives in Athens where he spoke recently with W.U.G.A.'s Mary K. Mitchell about his new book. You've tackled some pretty serious issues in your previous novels, but the runaway seems to make some very powerful statements about race relations. What do you want readers to come away with after reading the book?

Maybe two things. Number one, I would like for them to come away and say, you know what I've just read is a kind of a mystery story set in 1949 in the rural south. They want to read it only on that level that's perfectly fine. I would also like for them to read it on another level. And it's that desegregation in the south began to me in 1946 when the war ended and those people who had grown up on those small farms and the rural south all over the south had gone to war. Now they've returned. They've been at the Pacific. They've been to the European theaters. They've met men from New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Texas and California and Montana. They came back and they were changed. Subconsciously I think, but they were changed. And because they were changed, there were more tolerant, more understanding, etc. Now, nothing magical happened because of that. But when desegregation became a civil rights movement, they remained passive. And because of that passivity, I think

they made a great contribution to the success of desegregation in the south. And I'd like for people to know that, to read that. Is that why you picked the 1940s instead of the present day to make your points? Oh, sure. Because I think the present day is a completely different story. This was the beginning of what I have viewed from my own perspective, having been born in 1938. My own perspective of what's happened in the south in the civil rights movement, from the time I was born to what goes on today. Now, my original idea was to write the book that covered all of those years. There would have been three parts to it, the beginning, the civil rights movement, and then the adulthood of these two men. But they wanted the first part. And that's what this book is about, the first part. After one incident in the book, the sheriff thinks a white woman willing to risk being ostracized by her community, by standing up for a black family, was more than rare. It was unthinkable.

Yet you have this woman and the white male sheriff put just about everything on the line to see that justice prevails. Could this have happened in real life? Of course it did. And that's one of the reasons I wrote the book is because I think there's been tremendous misrepresentation of what the south was really about and the whole issue of race. And for the most part, in other parts of the country, it is literally a black and white issue that there were the white people who dislike the blacks and the blacks who were, you know, who were mistreated. Well, generally speaking, you could say that might be true, but there were many, many whites who really put it all on the line to say, this is wrong, the way people have been treated. This character is based on my mother. My mother was a very, very aggressive, strong, willed person who believed in justice. And I mean, this character was very simple for me to write because she was powerful that way. And she didn't mind

standing up and saying, I don't care who it is, white, black, it doesn't matter. This is wrong, it's wrong. Did you have someone in real life that you based the character of the sheriff on? The sheriff, the sheriff is based on a character that I had known, not necessarily in law enforcement, but just men that I've known who had changed. A lot of it comes from my brothers-in-law. I had a number of brothers-in-law who fought in World War II. And I, as a, when they came back from the war, I was a very young man, but I know over the years how it affected them and the kind of changes that they, that they went through in the kind of men they are now. So yeah, I would say probably the brothers-in-law more than anything else. On a lighter note, you have two young boys in in the book that want to pretend they're like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I wonder what you wanted to add to this story with that analogy. Well, I really wanted to say that the people born of that time, who were young men in that time, as I was in 1949,

was 11 years old, the same age essentially as these two young men, we were the changes and we didn't know it. We would become the transitional generation from the very prejudiced bias, segregationist self to those people who went through the transition where desegregation was a reality and a successful reality. But I hasten to say, I use the word desegregation to me there's a huge difference between desegregation and integration. And I think desegregation is a legal matter for the most part. And we have rather successfully achieved that. Integration is not a legal matter. We have not achieved it. Not sure it will ever be achieved. But it is certainly an issue today. Without giving away too much of the end, I think that there's a twist to the end of your novel, which will surprise quite a few readers.

But it also might dismay some. Did you think about the more implications of ending the story the way you did? Of course I did, sure. There was never any hesitation in my part whatsoever to end it the way I've ended it. Because what I want to say, at the almost metaphorically, I suppose, change was there. This is 1949, the setting of the book. That was a period of change. And this change was going to become violent. It was going to become very dramatic. It was going to become dynamic. And I wanted to make that obvious that one of the things about the book, and I tried not to hide many things. I wanted to be very obvious what this story is about. That's why I chose the two young boys, one black, one white, and their friendship. That's the way it was when we were growing up. And what happened happened to all of us, I think, in those communities, in those particular situations. There was a day when my young black friend, my age, called me Mr. Terry, when

I was about 12 years old. Well, that's something you can't forget. Because that was a huge shock to me, and a huge change in my life. So, you know, it's taking the characters and trying to make them, to be as fateful as you can, to who they were, or who they could have been, or who they will become. Terry K's new novel to run away is published by William Marrow of New York. You can talk to Terry K yourself Sunday evening at 8 on Cover to Cover a Peach State Public Radio's book club of the air. Make a note of this toll free number, 1-888-66-PEACH. The book under discussion is K's to dance with the white dog, which is now out in paperback. That's

Cover to Cover with author Terry K and host Singen Flynn Sunday evening at 8, over most of these Peach State Public Radio stations. Still to come on this edition of Georgia Gazette, Thursday's solar eclipse, sports writer and NPR sports commentator John Feinstein, and an in your face exhibit of works by black women artists, you will not want to miss a minute of this. There will be a total eclipse of the sun on Thursday, February 26th. Unfortunately,

the only people who will get to see it are those who find themselves in its narrow path, as it sweeps over the Galapagos Islands in the South Pacific at sunrise and travels across the world to disappear over the Atlantic Ocean at sunset. We in Georgia will see a partial eclipse, only about 15 percent of the sun will be obscured by the moon's shadow. With me to shed a little more light on this celestial event is Carol Rutland, director of the Coca-Cola Space Science Center in Columbus. Thanks for being with us. Oh, thank you for asking me. Could you just tell me a little bit about this eclipse? What exactly will we be able to see in Georgia? Well, beginning about 12 noon, we will be able to see the first bite, what we call the first bite out of the sun. And it's important to remember that since we're only seeing it partially, that you have to view it indirectly, either through special filters, you might try going to an observatory or planetarium because they will probably be having some

indirect viewing there. But we will only see like a small crescent. Viewers can also prepare their own viewers with like a pinhole camera. Maybe you made an elementary school where you just take a piece of cardboard, prick it with a pen, let the sunlight come through and you see the reflection on yet another piece of cardboard and you can see a crescent so that you can see exactly what it looks like. Now how often does an eclipse occur? An eclipse occurs, a total eclipse of the sun roughly about twice a year. But the reason they sometimes seem rare to us is because they just cut out such a narrow pathway and you have to be right under the pathway of a total eclipse as you described at the beginning in order to see it in totality. Lunar eclipses, there are many more of and also the shadow is so much larger that when there is a lunar eclipse, we are treated to it much more often. But with the sun, there are about two a year somewhere

over the earth. Are there any superstitions that still exist regarding solar eclipses? Oh yes, I think I remember a solar eclipse several years ago, down in Java, where everyone the people that were in the country that were protecting the eclipse viewers had to turn away from the sun because they thought it was an evil spirit and would take their spirits away if they actually looked at it. And I'm sure that still goes on in some parts of the world. I have another question regarding a total eclipse of the sun. It doesn't just get darker like it would at sunset. This guy gets a very odd, often greenish color. Explain to me why that happens. Why does the air feel so heavy and the sky gets so strangely colored? It's very interesting. It has to do with the position of where the sun is and remember that all that light is coming through our atmosphere. In the middle of the day, where at sunset

and sunrise, you're actually losing the sun, the light rays are being bent. They're being bent to a certain extent around the shadow of the moon. And that gives us a different effect that we're not used to seeing. So different colors are being absorbed or being bounced out around or refracted around the shadow of the moon. So it gives you truly the closer you are to totality. It's a very eerie feeling and you can even sense the shadow of the moon as it sweeps down across you. It's like moving thousands of miles an hour. And when you're under the path of totality, you really can understand why superstitions like hundreds and hundreds of years ago came about because it's a very phenomenal effect. This under totality will be able to see the stars, the planets that are in the sky during that period of time. And then, of course, the corona of the sun that we only see during

a total eclipse. One last question. Tell me what's going on at the planetarium and the observatory where you are on Thursday? Well, we will be opened all day and we're doing several different things. Folks will be able to come in and see the image of the partial eclipse from our observatory on a huge screen that we have out in the plaza area. And then we're also going to have groups of students that will be in and actually we're linking up with the Farm Bank Science Center and they are going to be observing not only the eclipse as it is partially in Georgia, but we also have a link up with a rhubus so that we will be able to go back and forth and see the total eclipse as well as what we're seeing. So we will have programs going on from 11.30 until 2.30 in the afternoon and I know Farm Bank is doing the same in Atlanta. Well thank you, Carol. You're welcome. I've been talking with Carol Rutland, director of the Coca-Cola Space Science Center in Columbus about Thursday's partial solar eclipse.

Eight years ago, filmmaker Michael Moore first gained notoriety and an Oscar for the movie Roger and Me. His documentary about the effects of the closing of the original GM assembly plant on his hometown of Flint, Michigan. More as a knack for showing up with a camera and microphone in places where he's not invited. From 1994 to 1996, he coaxed everyone from Congressman to Klansman into making jackasses of themselves on national television. The show was called TV Nation and it's now out on video. John Robinson has this review. Tonight, Michael Moore goes in search of the Russian missile pointed at his hometown.

While the release of Jerry Springer's Too Hot for Television video may be peaking prairie and interest in video stores, the stuff that's really too subversive for television may be Michael Moore's TV Nation. Always in step with the most current government policies, Moore inaugurated his first episode by taking advantage of NAFTA and moving TV Nation to Mexico, where his profit margin would be much higher and he wouldn't have to deal with those pesky U.S. environmental and health regulations. Doing some initial legwork, Moore visits a world pool dishwasher planned in Mexico and talks to its manager. Do you speak Spanish? A little bit. How would you say in Spanish? As soon as you get your arm out of that machine, you're fired. Please direct me to where I dumped the PCBs. I'm not going to say that. In another segment, when it's discovered that Mississippi is about to become the last state in the Union to officially outlaw slavery in 1995, Moore sends an African-American TV Nation correspondent down there to buy some white slaves and parade them around the

shopping mall, chains and all. The slave thing was pretty cool. I went to the state capital to show my appreciation. To ask the thing, I have some slaves. Personally, that's from what? Some slaves. You do? I have six. Well, I'm glad you do, I don't. Before getting back to the plantation, I stopped at the mall for supplies. It's alright if I bring these guys in here. What are they? They're slaves. Oh, okay. Each episode is also sprinkled with actual TV Nation polls conducted by a real polling firm. These painfully point out the absurdity of the media's reliance on polling statistics to be indicative of popular consensus. Ten percent of the American public would pay $5 to see Senator Orrin Hatch fight a big mean dog on pay TV. 86 percent of all the ores would root for the dog. 100 percent of women's ores would root for the dog. Perhaps the most unbelievable show is the Love Night episode, in which the theme of the

night is, Love those who hate. More decides that the only way to stop hate groups is to show them that Love is the only answer. So he sends a chorus line to the Aryan nation's annual gathering. Takes Timothy McVase cohorts, the Michigan militia, to a carnival, and bakes a cake with them. And finally winds up at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Georgia with a Marriachi band. The even set up a kissing booth at the Klan rally. In many ways, Michael Moore is an absurdist gorilla update on the traditional American humorist. Like a modern Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court, Moore likes to place himself

in hilariously awkward situations in order to give us a fresh perspective on the cultural institutions whose power and authority we too often take for granted. More specifically, he's a self-appointed spokesperson for the millions of blue-collar Americans whose well-being seems to be continually taken too lightly by the corporations who depend on them. Yet, Moore rarely lapses into pedantics, and a profound sense of humor always overrides self-righteousness, making TV nation truly one of the most subversive television shows ever. Viewer John Robinson works at movies worth seeing in Atlanta's Virginia Highlands neighborhood. Author and NPR sports commentator John Feinstein has written books about golf, major league

baseball, professional tennis, and college football. Now he's taken apart last year's college basketball season in his new book, March to Madness. Quoting Mr. Feinstein, the book takes a rough and tumble look at the 1996-97 season in the Atlantic Coast Conference. He got together with James Argroves recently to reflect on the season and to talk about his new book. I think in the back of my mind all the years I covered the ACC first when I was in college and then at the Washington Post and then working for various outlets after I left the post. I think the thought in my mind was that at some point I'd write some kind of book about my experiences in the ACC because I saw so much and knew so many people and the thought came to me that I haven't written anything a book on basketball since 1989 and it was time to go back to basketball and why not go back to the place where I cut my teeth as a reporter and where I knew the most people. I really believed I could get access to

most of the coaches to get inside the locker rooms and inside the meetings and inside the huddles during the games and that was what I started out with as a concept and seven of the nine coaches agreed to give me complete access and the other two Dean Smith who has told me he wouldn't let his mother in the locker room and I said your mom's not doing a book on ACC basketball and her send a cadancy state who didn't know me. He was the one coach in the league I didn't know because he was new last year even though they didn't let me in the locker room during the games they gave me tremendous access to themselves to their practices and things like that so I think it worked out very well. You mentioned Dean Smith I was he bothered by the fact that you were a graduate of Duke. Dean and I have always had discussions about that through the years in fact he always would say to me you've been very fair to us for someone who went to Duke and I would say what is that for someone who went to Duke part either I've been fair to you or I haven't been fair to you and he would laugh and we would sort of debate it and Dean and I always had a good relationship. In fact the first time I met him was as an undergraduate at Duke

when I had written a column in a Duke Chronicle saying that if Bill Foster who was the new coach at Duke at the time was looking for a role model on how to build his program all he had to do was look down the road to Chapel Hill and I introduced myself to Dean a couple weeks later in the North Carolina locker room after a game and I was shocked when he said oh I read your column in the Chronicle you were very fair to us I was really surprised that a Duke student would appreciate our program and that sort of was the beginning of our relationship and as I said he was very cooperative with me in this book gave me a lot of time and I'm sorry he's gone I think the game misses him and I know I miss dueling with him. As you have done in a couple of other books most notably a season on the brink look at Indiana basketball and a good walk spoiled in which you looked at life on the PGA tour. You spent a whole year following specific people throughout the entire length of the sport and you did that during the entire ACC season last year what are the advantages

of doing that when writing a book? Well I think the big advantage Jimmy is to be up close and personal with your subjects. I think there's a big difference to a reader and for me as a writer when you can say rather than say Shoshesky told his team at halftime that it needed to play harder defensively and instead of writing that I get to describe exactly what he did in the locker room just as an example during the Clemson game at halftime he was so upset with his team's aggressiveness that even though he had back surgery a little more than two years ago he took a ball rolled it down the middle of the locker room and dove on it in right in front of his players to show them what he wanted them to do and as he was walking out of the locker room he turned to his assistants and said if my wife finds out about that I'm a dead man. So that's the kind of thing you can only get if you're there. You're not going to get that if you go in after the game and say so what happened at halftime. And basically you build up a rapport with both the players and the coaches I guess it

gets to a point where they hardly even notice you're there. That's the point is to be invisible, in fact when I did season on the brink Steve Alford who was the captain of that Indiana team later wrote his own book about playing for Bob Knight and the chapter on his junior year which was my year at Indiana was entitled The Invisible Man and that was a reference to me and I took that as a high compliment and one of the things I try to do is get be there a lot early in the year so that they get used to me being around I remember showing up to see Wake Forest play Campbell very early last season and Dave Odom said to me why are you here for this game? I said so when I come in here for the Carolina game you won't even notice me and that's sort of your goal starting out of course you have to have the trust of the coaches in the first place to get inside the locker room. Once you're in there you try to sort of go stand in the corner and stay out of the way. And it's apparent from reading the book that it was no holes bar they didn't hold anything back because you were in the locker room. They really didn't and to the credit of the seven guys who had me in there I always say

to people beforehand if you think something's really too personal or if you are uncomfortable by my presence obviously it's your locker room it's a privilege for me to be allowed to be in there. At any point if you turn around and say John could you excuse us for a minute I'm out of there and not once during the season did any of those coaches do that and I think that's to their credit. And could you have picked a better year I mean you had Wake Forest which had the player of the year in Tim Duncan it was Dean Smith last year and a year when Mike Shoshesky really rediscovered his love for the game again. Yeah I will give myself some credit in that I picked last year because I knew Shoshesky and Kremens were turning 50 and that's always a benchmark in anybody's life but I think especially in a coach's life because you start to feel like your past half time to put it in coaching terms. I didn't know it was going to be Dean Smith's last year but I thought he would break eight off roughs record and that would be something to watch and as you say the story with Tim Duncan at Wake Forest sort of perhaps the last great senior and even from my point

of view writing the book the fact that this was Dave Odom's big shot to get to the final forward to have a team play with a real chance to win a national championship and didn't work out but it was a fascinating story to Chronicle. NPR sports commentator John Feinstein and who's been talking about his new book March to Madness the view from the floor on the Atlantic Coast Conference is on bookstores shelves now is it? I certainly hope so Jimmy I hope it's flying off of bookshelves. John thanks for being with us again on Georgia Gazette. Thanks Jimmy my pleasure. In the 1996 Summer Olympics the City of Atlanta showcased a wide variety of art through hundreds

of special exhibitions. One of these was Spellman College's Bearing Witness Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists. This show of 48 paintings, sculptures, prints and mixed media has been on a national tour for the last year and a half and just recently it returned to Georgia. Melissa Gray paid a visit to the Columbus Museum of Art to take a look. A modern fertility belt mixes intricate metal work with a professional woman's conflict between career and children. A self-portrait parent uses shadows of discarded keys to represent the condition of the artist heart and soul. These are just two of the many images confronting the visitor of Bearing Witness Contemporary Works by African American Women Artist. Dr. John Teal Robinson is the associate professor of art history at Spellman College in Atlanta and curator of the Traveling Exhibit. He says that although race and gender link the artist, each work is still an individual expression of personal experience.

The piece that I feel is the signature piece of the exhibition and it's by Betty Sar. Betty Sar was born in 1926 and she is one of the senior artists in the show and this is her piece entitled Watching. As Sar is best known for doing assemblages or pieces where she gathers items from junk yards and found objects, pieces that she finds at old antique shops, discarded things. The furnace grate, it has seen hot and cold air and so has the artist. She's peering out from behind the furnace grate which is now a window and then she does that something else. She places on this furnace grate a bird which is symbolizes Jim Crow racism and she's making a very powerful statement about what she has as a woman, as a person from a certain ethnic group and as an artist had to experience in her life.

One of the most eye-catching of all the works in Bearing Witness is Bait Ringled Story Quilt about the life of filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Dr. Robinson says Ringled's use of this traditional African-American medium makes her depiction of Riggs's life and impending death from AIDS feel more personal. The quilt is not a requiem she says but a celebration of Riggs's life. Riggs made films on black gay men in America and was unapologetically upfront about his orientation and so is the quilt. He's here very boldly with his Miss America t-shirt. She asks him what were some of his favorite quotes and you can see that she has put those quotes around him. What happens to a dream deferred? This is one of Langston Hughes's black men, loving black men, freedom, been in the storm too long. One tongue's untied which is one of his movies and then in the four corners of the quilt are people that were very close to him are people who he felt had influenced him in his lifetime.

This is his grandmother who raised him. Of course the poet and writer James Baldwin up in the right hand corner. This is Audrey Lorde, the lesbian feminist, mother, poet, writer and then Harriet Tubman. A courageous, a truly courageous woman who led many, many slaves to freedom. Dr. Robinson says it's easier to understand Ringel's work when you're culturally literate and the same holds true for the mixed media works by Generation X artist Lorna Simpson. His billboard-sized collection of wall hangings owes a lot to Warhol in that it consists of multiple black and white print images of wigs and hair pieces set on large blocks of manila colored felt. The wig styles vary from colonial times to today and interspersed among the wigs are statements which at first seem to be non-sequitors.

What she says here is Gladys Bentley appeared at a nightclub in LA in 1940. The club had to get a special police permit to allow Gladys Bentley 250 pound colored entertainer to wear trousers instead of scourge during her art. Well Gladys Bentley was a lesbian. She just sort of puts that in there. She never says that to us but we have to think about it. Now why would Gladys Bentley want to wear trousers instead of skirts and we have to make that connection? Lorna Simpson's work is not for the faint hearted says Dr. Robinson. It makes you confront long held social customs and question their real purposes. There are messages in this art for a lot of folk. It's not just for African Americans and I have to stress that again and again and again. I mean some of the things that she's dealing with about props and the wigs that we use

to disguise ourselves, to keep people from knowing who we are, to protect ourselves. I mean these are things that all of us do. You know it's not for a particular ethnic group. The message that she has here is for a lot of folk. Baring Witnesses Contemporary Works by African American Women Artist will be on display at the Columbus Museum of Art through March 16th. I'm Melissa Gray and that's Georgia Gazette for this week. Our program was produced by Susana Capeludo and Melissa Gray with additional help from Teresa Sanders and W.U.G.A. in Athens. Our engineer was Art Sweat. Next time our consumer guys are back, Secretary of State Lewis Massey and Barry Reed, head of

the governor's office of consumer affairs, will be in our studios taking your calls and answering your questions. That's the special consumer edition of Georgia Gazette, Friday, February 27th at noon. In the meantime, I'm Sid Hoskinson and for all of the Georgia Gazette team, thanks for listening. Broadcast of Georgia Gazette is made possible in part by a grant from West Point Stevens. If you have any comments or questions about this program, please write to Georgia Gazette, Peachtake Public Radio, 260 14th Street, Northwest, Atlanta, Georgia, 30318. Or you can access Georgia Gazette on the worldwide web at www.gpp.org. Georgia Gazette is a public affairs presentation of Peachtake Public Radio. Georgia Gazette is a public affairs presentation of Peachtake Public Radio. Georgia Gazette is a public affairs presentation of Peachtake Public Radio.

Georgia Gazette is a public affairs presentation of Peachtake Public Radio. Georgia Gazette is a public affairs presentation of Peachtake Public Radio.