Atlanta, Georgia

I missed my high school’s 50th reunion two years ago, but I learned from the directory of my classmates, that our class president, Jim Siwy, was now living north of Atlanta.  I hadn't seen Jim in over fifty years, but had thought about him from time to time, as the weekly dispatches he sent to our local weekly newspaper about a bike trip he’d taken with three others to Mexico in 1973 while on hiatus from Harvard, had been one of the impetuses in making me a touring cyclist.  I’d long wanted to hear his reminisces of that trip.   Knowing that I’d eventually be making a circuit of Georgia tracking down its twenty-three remaining Carnegie Libraries, I noted his location in Roswell so I could drop in on him and learn if that trip had turned him into a bicycling fiend as my first trip did to me

I was aware at the time of Jim’s trip and of the legendary English cyclist Ian Hibbel and a few others, but here was someone I knew, who had actually gone and done such a thing when it was still a novelty.  Our lives had gone separate paths, but we had enough of a shared past that we were far from strangers to one another and would easily reconnect. 

As I closed in on Atlanta, I emailed Jim with a heading of “Jim Plunkett, as the last time we had seen each other was at the Orrington Hotel in Evanston where the College All-Star football team was staying as they prepared to play the previous year’s Super Bowl champion in the first game of the new football season.  I was a student manager for Northwestern’s football team, and since the All-Stars would be using Northwestern’s practice facilities, I was able to serve the All-Stars in a similar capacity during the three weeks they prepared for the game. Plunkett, that year’s Heisman trophy winner from Stanford, was the team’s quarterback.  I happened to be preparing to drive him to practice when my friend Jim happened to drop by.  I introduced him to Plunkett, as “my friend who attends the Stanford of the east.”

Jim said my email invoking Plunkett and that I’d like to drop by to talk biking was one of the most unusual he had ever received, and would be glad to get together.  He was presently working out of his home as a clinical psychologist and would be free after four.  He knew the traffic in Atlanta, twenty miles south, could be horrendous and offered to drive in and bring me back.  I could have none of that.  I had two Carnegies to visit before heading up to Roswell.

There had been six including the palatial main library built in 1898.  It had been the first in Carnegie’s giving outside of Pennsylvania.  It had been torn down in 1970 but its location, where the new library stands across from Margaret Mitchell Plaza, is marked by a street sign acknowledging Carnegie.  

Only one of the three branch libraries, also dating to 1898, still stands.  It is now a bank.

Less than half a mile away on the Georgia Tech campus is another Carnegie, a most distinguished building now serving as the office of the president.  The sixth Carnegie in Atlanta was on the Atlanta University campus and is no more.

Atlanta also offered up a Statue of Liberty, one of two in the state, with the other in Rome.  

This gazed up the grand golden-dome state capital building in Liberty Park.  It was accompanied by the standard plaque explaining its connection to the 40th anniversary of the Boy Scouts.

Just a couple blocks from the capital was a row of domed tents along the sidewalk inhabited by the homeless, the first I’d seen since Memphis on Day One of these travels.

Jim was right about the traffic in Atlanta.  It was particularly hectic in the evening rush hour.  I was forced on to the sidewalk for some stretches.  The ride was made even more arduous by a non-stop succession of steep climbs, adding up to the most vertical feet I had gained on  this trip in one day by almost one thousand feet—over four thousand feet in seventy-five miles.  But now on day twenty-five of these travels, the legs are nearly fully-conditioned and only felt a minimum of strain.  It was a surprise how developed and built-up Atlanta was all the way out to Jim’s house.

When I emailed Jim I asked if he’d be available for a chat or a bike ride.  He replied that he no longer had a bike, so he’d avoided the addiction that befell me.  When I biked coast-to-coast on my first noteworthy trip, four years after Jim’s ride, I alternated between thinking I’d throw my bike into the Pacific and never want to ride a bike again or being committed to the bike for life.  We know how that turned out. 

It wasn’t anything like that for Jim.  When he ended his trip in Guatemala he sent his bike home and continued to use it while in college, but never to travel.  He actually aborted his trip a little early.  He and his three traveling companions had intended to bike to the Panama Canal, but the roads deteriorated to such a degree in Guatemala, and the truck traffic heightened on the Pan-American Highway, they all agreed to end it there.

They’d had a most satisfying 4,000 mile trip, the first for all of them.  It had been the brainchild of Andy Baldwin, another classmate of ours who died a few years ago.  Andy edged out Jim as the salutatorian of our class.  I happened to mention the valedictorian, who went to Harvard with Jim, in a previous blog post. He was the one whose mother took him to Selma in 1965 when he was thirteen to march with Martin Luther King. 

Andy went to Stanford and happened to meet the legendary two couples profiled by National Geographic as they were engaged in a “Hemistour” biking from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the Burdens and Siples, who went on to found Bikecentennial (now Adventure Cycling) and the seminal first bike route across the US for the Bicentennial in 1976 and who I’ve also met in my travels.  Andy recruited Jim and two others to try to meet up with them along the way.  Jim didn’t even have a bike when Andy threw out the idea, but he went and got himself a Gitane racing bike and a week later met up with Andy and two others in Mississippi to begin their chase, even though they had little means of tracking the Siples and Burdens as they headed down Baja and the Pacific coast and never did meet up. 

After one day on the ride everyone had to replace their wheels, as they’d all shown up on high quality bikes with tubular tires, meant for racing.  They’d each suffered a flat and discovered how difficult it is to patch a sew-up tire.  I’d made the same mistake on my initial warm-up ride to Detroit, as there was little advice to be found on touring back in those days. After that they had no major issues, other than one of the group needing his rear rack welded and also getting hit by a truck deep into Mexico.

I was able to supplement Jim’s fond recollections with rereading his dispatches later that night complete with photos of the Jim I recognized still looking like the star of our high school football and basketball teams that I wrote about for the school newspaper.  He’d lost none of his easy-going, ever-positive personality.  And his wife Janet, who he met when getting his PhD at Florida, a retired high school English teacher, was a prefect complement.  We had as pleasant of an evening as if we were lifelong next door neighbors.  

Jim said that Andy, who went on to be an emergency room doctor in Louisiana, redirected his urge for adventure from cycling to rafting rivers all over the world.  Jim never joined him, as he committed his life to family and career and church, though he enjoyed the reports he sent complete with photos.

Jim remains an ardent sports fan and was delighted to have recently attended a Braves baseball game with Janet, also an ardent fan, in a packed stadium with no one wearing masks.  He’s eager to reopen his office and start seeing patients again face-to-face.  It’s been so easy to do it via zoom and over the phone, he hasn’t quite done it.  He may be seventy, but he’s not slowing down at all.

I have two Carnegies left in Georgia, then it’s on to South Carolina.  The day before Atlanta I had the opportunity to spend time in a Carnegie still functioning as a library for the fiat time in Georgia, as the other two Georgia Carnegies still serving as libraries I’d gone by on this trip hadn’t been open. 

The Eatonton Carnegie had had a large addition to its backside, but its front, despite no longer being its entrance, conveyed that welcoming Carnegie aura.  There was no Carnegie portrait on display, but it still hummed with his presence.