From the Magpie's nest:

                Two  recent stories account for most of Program #7.

The first was the announcement  that Bowen Homes was about to become history. The  U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had  given the Atlanta Housing Authority the green light  to raze the sprawling northwest Atlanta housing project, home to nearly a thousand residents. Twenty eight years ago  Bowen Homes made national headlines and it couldn't have happened at a worse time. WXIA  Eleven-Alive reporter Jon Shirek captured the scene so well as part of his thoughtful appreciation of colleague Neil Craig, the highly respected Atlanta broadcast journalist, who died this past February:                                                   

Neil didn't just cover stories. He owned them, on behalf of the viewers, conveying not just information, but truth. Consider what happened on October 13, 1980.

The day dawned with the first frost of the season coating metro Atlanta's trees, streets, homes and offices-- a bright, crisp, autumn morning that belied the bleak tensions ready to snap, citywide: a serial killer had been targeting children from Atlanta's poor, black neighborhoods. The children who lived in Atlanta's Bowen Homes public housing on Bankhead Highway, N.W., for example, would have been in the murderer's bulls eye.

A Bowen Homes maintenance worker arrived at work that morning in time to fire up the boiler in the community's daycare center, so the children would be warm when they arrived. And by 9:00 am, most of the pre-schoolers were in place, settling in to their daily routines. That's when the daycare center exploded.

Minutes later, Neil heard the alarms coming across the newsroom radio scanners, and he was on his way to Bowen Homes, along with Photographer Ron Loving. Neil's intimate knowledge and understanding of Atlanta and of the murdered and missing children story told him, immediately, that people at the scene and across the city would suspect that the murderer had struck again. He was right, they did suspect it. Atlanta was on the verge of coming apart in riots.

For the next several hours, and for days after that, Neil Craig's dogged, steady reporting focused on facts, on digging out the truth calmly and carefully and commandingly. He was able to confirm what had happened…the daycare center's old boiler had simply exploded. Yes, the murderer was still on the loose (and would strike again and again for seven more months). But the children's tragedy that morning, of lives lost and bodies maimed, was, in fact, an accident, and it was unrelated to the murders. The power and eloquence of Neil's reporting on the story that day is remembered, as well, for what he did not say as for what he did say. He simply ended his story that first evening after the explosion with the video that Ron Loving had captured-- a child's twisted and bent red wagon, being used to help carry away the rubble. Neil let Ron's picture speak what no words could express.

That is Neil Craig, day in and day out. Neil has poured himself, his heart and soul and mind and body, into every story he's ever covered.

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                The second story was Bloomberg News reporter Steve Matthews' informative piece about the forty thousand  New Yorkers who relocated to Atlanta from 2000-2005. These lucky residents actually owe a lot to an earlier large influx of up-east "settlers"  who introduced us to new foods, new dining experiences and new lifestyles benefitting the locals as never before. We chronicled the New Yorkers' Network in a 1986 piece requested by the Voice of America which also ran on the News Monster.                                            

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           Around 1982 Atlanta Sidestreets Entertainment Editor, John Kramer, welcomed back to the city the incomparable Cleo Laine. From  John Kramer's notes:   

I started to tell you at lunch about the Cleo Laine piece.

We met at Chastain before her sound check at 10:30 in the morning and talked for almost an hour before we started on tape.  Once we started you heard what came out. What you don't know is that I looked over at the Marantz at one point and saw that we had run out of tape. I never told her & just kept going until we had naturally ended our conversation. 

We literally fell in love with each other that morning (sorry Mr. Dankworth). At one point someone barged into the area where we were talking to tell her that the orchestra was ready for her sound check. She politely told that person, "Can't you see that I am speaking to this delightful gentleman?"  I turned all shades of red.  We emerged from our "interview" about a half hour later.  The PR person for the ASO was pissed but I got a terrific interview..

There's a reason why she is a Dame!!

JK