Opinion

By Walter Geiger


It was wet Saturday in Athens. It rained all the way over there. It rained all during the game and it rained all the way home – a long delayed trip back for Laura and me.

It was so wet in Sanford Stadium, the now expected bed-wetting by a Mark Richt coached team in a big game was just drops in the proverbial bucket.
[Full Story »] 

By Michael Ruffin

I work as a Bible study curriculum editor in my day job. One of my responsibilities is to write an every-other-week blog post (my Assistant Editor writes the ones for the intervening weeks, thankfully) offering additional commentary on the lesson for the upcoming Sunday. In one of those coincidences that sometimes happen, last Sunday’s Scripture seemed to offer an opportunity to apply the text’s message to a current event the discussion of which has been using up a lot of newsprint, airtime, and megabytes. [Full Story »] 

By Walter Geiger

Occasionally, my wife, daughters or the sweet ladies at my office will approach me with wrinkled noses and ask, “Do you smell something funny?”

This continues though they are all well aware that I bear the scars of five sinus surgeries - at least two of which were botched. During the last one, my friend, the superb Dr. Warren Dunn, went in through my left eyebrow and removed a honey-colored batch of MRSA from my frontal sinus.
[Full Story »] 

By Walter Geiger

Part reunion, part homecoming and pure Americana, Barnesville-Lamar County is in the throes of the 42nd annual Buggy Days it has hosted.

A group of community leaders, searching for a way to bring visitors­and their money - to the community came up with the idea of the festival honoring Barnesville’s heritage as the center of the Buggy manufacturing industry before the horseless carriage put an end to it all. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

Bobby Ross Phillips died in Adel, Georgia on August 31st. I had the privilege of speaking at his memorial service on September 3rd. Chances are pretty good that neither Bobby nor Adel mean anything to you, but they both mean a lot to me.

Chances are also pretty good that you’ve had someone like Bobby and someplace like Adel in your life, by which I mean that you’ve probably had somebody and somewhere that gave you a chance and, in giving you a chance, made a huge difference in your life. It was the summer of 1986. I had just finished my Ph.D. in Old Testament at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky; I had three degrees and no job. [Full Story »] 

By Walter Geiger

Somehow or another I got a farmer gene in my DNA. I’m not sure where it came from but I know it is there. My Dad came here from Switzerland with his parents as a small child.

They immigrated legally through Ellis Island. We’d be better off if all immigrants still came through that checkpoint but that is a column for another day. His dad worked in butcher shops in New York City and elsewhere. His mom worked in a college cafeteria. Daddy graduated from the University of Connecticut and Duke University with a masters degree in forestry. He spent years in the woods but is not a farmer.

My mom’s folks were all country people from around Bulloch County. [Full Story »] 

By Michael Ruffin

The year was 1974.

George Roy Hill had just won the Academy Award for Best Director for his work on the wonderful film The Sting when he received the following letter: [Full Story »] 

By Michael Ruffin

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the graduation of my class at Lamar County High School, the Class of 1976. The 1975-76 school year was the first year classes were held at the “new” high school, so we were the first class to graduate from there.

I wasn’t there, though.

Well, I was there for our graduation, but I wasn’t there for our senior year. [Full Story »] 

Augusta Chronicle

As far as God’s creations go, Cecil the lion was about as beautiful and majestic as they get. But he wasn’t human.

So why is the animal’s untimely killing in Zimbabwe by a Minnesota dentist on a big-game “hunt” seeming to spark more outrage than the industrial-scale murder of unborn human babies and the depraved marketing of their organs?

That is what seems to have happened since the Center for Medical Progress released its third and most gruesome undercover video of Planned Parenthood’s baby-parts brokerage. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

f all has gone according to plan, then your reading is coinciding with our moving. The movers picked up our furniture and other household belongings in Fitzgerald yesterday and are unloading them at our new house in Yatesville today.

If all goes according to plan, this will be our last move. We sure hope so.

We’ve moved a lot. [Full Story »] 

By Walter Geiger

It was blistering hot Saturday morning when we buried Ed Powell in the graveyard at New Hope Baptist Church out in Pike County. Ed lies in perpetuity about a mile as the crow flies from his longtime home on McLean Road.

Heat waves rose off the blacktop parking lot and into the leaves of an old oak on the church grounds as the small crowd sought what little shelter the funeral home tent provided from the onslaught of the sun.

Sweat found its way into my eyes. They burned and teared. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

Maybe you’ve had the experience; I know I have, and many times. You’re travelling to a place to which you’ve never been before. The trip takes whatever time it takes, but it seems like a long time. Then you return home, following the same route that you took to get to wherever you were going. Upon arrival, you say to yourself or to a travelling companion, “It sure didn’t take as long to get back as it did to get there.”

Chances are pretty good, though, that both the trip there and the trip back consumed about the same amount of time. The return trip just seemed shorter. Apparently we perceive the trip back differently than the trip there. And it doesn’t matter what your mode of transportation is; I’ve experienced the sensation travelling by land and by air. [Full Story »] 

By Kay S. Pedrotti

In The Herald Gazette office, my desk is about as far from the front door as it’s possible to be. But when the late judge William Thomas came to visit, I could immediately recognize the stentorian tones of his amazing voice. Usually I would dash up to the counter so I could say hello.

I will really miss that – and a lot of other things about Will Thomas. I think of him in the three words that defined my conversations with him: faith, courage, wisdom. He and Jean were among the first friends I made when we moved to Milner 10 years ago; we were working with the Friends of the Library Milner and the Sociables luncheons at Milner Methodist. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

Iwould have liked to have gone to church with Dusty Rhodes.

I never have, though, and now I never will.

Dusty died on June 11 at age 69. [Full Story »]