Sign of the Times
Athens' Only Independent News Stand Closes Its Doors
originally published May 14, 2008
Ben Emanuel
Barnett's News Stand owner Midge Gray
I get a call from Barnett’s News Stand. For the first time, I think, they’ve sold out of our magazine, and they need some more. I gladly take the call.
“Hey Ramsey, this is Midge. I hate to say this, but we’ll have to settle up soon because we’re closing our doors,” the owner explains.
“But, why?” I ask.
“People just aren’t buying magazines and newspapers like they used to,” she replies. “I want to see you though, so come on over.”
Disheartened, I hang up the phone. In the magazine business, it’s rare to receive phone calls from vendors, especially from ones who know you by name. So, I head down to the 66-year-old landmark, the only independent news stand in Athens. College Square is alive with the music and protest of the annual Human Rights Festival. I walk under the faded red awning past the outdoor news rack, faithfully stocked with the Sunday New York Times, the AJC and the Banner-Herald, and push open the heavy glass door.
Barnett’s hasn’t changed since I first discovered it 13 years ago. I smell the comforting scent of ink and paper laced with tobacco, inhale the same old dust, and glance around at familiar mastheads. I wave to Rich Whiteman, the clerk behind the counter, whose beard seems to grow longer with each passing year. On May 18, the day Barnett’s will close, Whiteman will have worked here for 20 years “on the nose,” he says.
A customer pays for a pack of cigarettes. “This place has been here my whole life. I’m sure going to miss it,” he exclaims before tipping his hat and stepping out the door. The floorboards creak beneath my feet as I browse the back corner of the store, where the racks hold literary and art magazines. I remember discovering so many publications here. Like so many windows, they offered different views of the world. I remember picking up my first copies of Mother Jones, The Sun, The Paris Review, Oxford American and Adbusters: titles I might not have discovered if I had never browsed Barnett’s - titles that don’t pop up on most Google searches. I remember digging into whatever caught my eye, sometimes sitting Indian-style on the worn brown carpet so engrossed in what I was reading. The management never bothered me nor asked if I planned to buy what I was consuming.
Owner Midge Gray walks out of the stockroom, where she’s taking final inventory of all the titles she’s stocked through the years. She smiles a defeated sort of smile. “When we first bought the place, we had one distributor in Atlanta that sold mainline titles. I had to go out and find the smaller distributors to get the more obscure magazines. Three of those distributors have gone out of business,” she explains.
Gray admits Barnett’s hasn’t physically changed much since she and her former husband bought it in 1978. She points out the cigar cases, which came with the store. A low tiled ceiling supports rickety fans and fluorescent lights, which illuminate the wood-paneled walls and shelving. “Maybe I should have changed some things,” Gray wonders aloud.
Meanwhile, the publishing industry has evolved at an incomprehensible speed. Print publications have moved online, supermarkets have expanded their newsstands, magazine distribution agencies have been consolidated, Amazon.com offers click-button shopping and big chain retailers can buy in bulk and sell printed material at a discounted rate. All of these changes have contributed to a steady decline in revenue at Barnett’s and the overall frustration of its owner, who still believes in good old-fashioned customer service.
“I remember the days when I could call a distributor directly while the customer was standing there and ask them for a particular magazine. I just can’t do that anymore. The customer wants an answer right away, and I don’t blame them,” says Gray.
Now, Gray complains about having to call a customer service center in Vancouver to order magazines as local as Georgia Trend. Since the industry’s consolidations in the 1990s, she has dealt primarily with one magazine vendor – The News Group, one of four wholesalers who now control 90 percent of the single-copy sales market in the country, according to the Wall Street Journal. The consolidation of periodical distribution has been driven by large retailers, attempting to diminish costs by ordering magazines and newspapers for entire regions, rather than for specific local markets.
“We used to have a really nice selection of art magazines, but the distributors stopped carrying a lot of the smaller publications,” Gray says. “They said then what I’m saying now, 'It’s just a business decision. We can’t afford to carry those titles anymore.’”
Gray has always worked directly with local publishers. For three years, I have schlepped armloads of fresh-off-the-press magazines into Barnett’s, where Gray clears out a prime location for them on her most popular shelf.
“I think it’s important to support local businesses,” she says. She also supports her employees, which explains why customers could always expect to see familiar faces inside Barnett’s. Ever since her full-time manager and friend, Carl Smith, died of a heart attack two years ago, Gray says things just haven’t been the same. A photo of Smith hangs behind the counter, where he greeted customers for 20 years.
Downtown has also changed a lot since 1978. Before College Avenue became a one-way street, Gray recalls it was easier for customers to run into her store. She remembers a time when downtown supported four independent booksellers. “There used to be room for all of us,” she says.
However, Gray has enjoyed the pedestrian traffic and close proximity to campus. An avid sports fan, she recalls the Friday night before the first UGA football game of 1980. Herschel Walker strolled into Barnett’s and bought a bunch of comic books for his bus ride to Tennessee. “I remember how polite he was,” she says. “Dominique Wilkins came in here and sold me his All American League ring back when the price of gold climbed so high in the ‘80s. Later I sold it back to him,” she says.
Sports celebrities aside, Gray claims she’ll miss her regulars more than anything else when her store closes. “This is the end of a tradition, the end of an era,” she says. “People are upset, and I’m upset. But it’s time to make a change, and I hope people will embrace the new business that opens here.”
Gray plans to lease the space to another local entrepreneur, Diana Harbour, who will relocate her shop, Red Dress Boutique, from its current location on Baxter Street to College Avenue. Gray also plans to spend more time with her grandkids and do some volunteer work, but doesn’t rule out the chance of returning to work.
“I’m still young,” she says. “I sure am going to miss the people,” she continues. “So many folks have come in since they heard the business is closing. It makes you think, ‘Where have you been?’”
Like so many local businesses downtown, Barnett’s has been a beloved institution. But landmarks don’t always make money; people take gathering places for granted.
“I just want to thank Athens for 30 great years. I’ll miss everybody,” Gray says, her eyes welling up with tears. Before I leave, Midge hugs me goodbye. I wonder if I’ll ever feel so proud to see my magazine on a news stand again.
Nix is the editor of Lake Oconee Living, a magazine published by Main Street Communications, an independent publisher based in Madison.
The Athens Farmers’ Market
Country Comes to Town When Local Growers Launch a New Effort This Weekend
originally published May 14, 2008
Kelly Ruberto
Ask any relative newcomer to Athens: based on this town’s style, its reputation as a hip, progressive city, there have long been plenty of things you’d expect to find here, but which have taken a bit of time to show up. The past year or so has been a good one for breaking the pattern, as both the now-truly-local brewery (of course!) and the downtown arthouse cinema (duh!) have opened up. Bus routes are getting more frequent; bicycle commuters too. The local government is more serious about waste reduction, water conservation and its own energy use (little electric cars patrol downtown for trash!). These are all signs of progress, but still, great things happen in other cities, and once they arrive, Athens asks, “Where have you been all my life?”
The latest in that lineage: an ambitious good-sized farmers’ market - a place not only to buy local produce, but to socialize on a Saturday. Countless cities have markets that mean something to local residents, and this Saturday, Athens begins catching up with the pack.
No, this town has not been without markets in the past. The most constant and visible one lately has been the “Athens Green Market” held outside Big City Bread since 2001. From 2003 to 2005, a small market spent summers on College Avenue beside City Hall with the blessings of the Downtown Development Authority (but without the “organic” or “sustainable” labels affixed to the Athens Green Market). Before any of those, there was the old market held under the pavilion at the Cooperative Extension Service property on West Broad Street, just east of Hawthorne Avenue. That market closed in the 1990s after decades of service. Also, since 2001, there’s been the virtual, web-based market called Athens Locally Grown, which features weekly pick-ups of pre-ordered goods, but has never done any real advertising or promotion.
In the past year, Locally Grown saw its customer base grow more than five-fold. Organizer (and farmer) Eric Wagoner reports that a little under 200 customers at the start of the 2007 growing season, with 30–40 orders per week, “exploded” into around 1100 customers now, with about 200 orders per week. The farmers selling through Locally Grown, Wagoner says, are reporting “about $7,000 per week combined, here during the slow part of the year, when most farmers’ markets in the state aren’t even open yet.” What’s that tell you? Simple: local interest in local food is booming.
Also in 2007, Athens’ Craig Page founded a nonprofit called PLACE (Promoting Local Agriculture and Cultural Experience). Page says he began the endeavor hoping to promote the many benefits of local farms and local food, from land preservation to health and nutrition to boosting the local economy. He soon found, though, that interest was high enough - and fellow activists numerous enough - that the community-based work of promoting the concept of local food was already underway. Then Page looked for a niche. What could his new organization do? What role could it fill that wasn’t being filled? “When PLACE incorporated,” he recalls, “I started talking to people, and they were like, ’What about a farmers’ market?’ So I started saying, ’What about a farmers’ market?’”
Putting It Together
“It’s something that’s been talked about over the last few years,” Wagoner says. The Athens Green Market - successful as it’s been - is ultimately limited by the typical negatives like a lack of space to expand and inadequate parking. “There was just never any other place to go to,” Wagoner says, “and farmers being the busy people that they are, they never got up the gumption to find another location.”
Farmers are also independent-minded, Wagoner points out, so it’s been important for Page’s organization to serve as a glue to hold them all together toward a common cause. That process began with a series of “Athens food activist networking sessions” over the past year, and to some degree it has its result in the makeup of the board of directors of the new farmers’ market, which includes a handful of farmers along with Page and other activists. County extension agent Amanda Tedrow has been a key ally too, Page says, and sponsorship under the nonprofit umbrella of Common Ground Athens is part of a move toward seeking grant money to help sustain the market in future. A lot of energy went into finding a suitable location. Downtown didn’t work out for various reasons (city officials were apparently jittery about the large Downtown Development Authority parking lots along Dougherty Street), so the geographic search widened early this spring. (“I started calling the churches down Prince,” Page recalls, “and they all told me no.”) Eventually, Bishop Park was floated as a site, and all the growers were enthusiastic: it’s got plenty of parking, a covered pavilion, a basic kitchen and boasts easy accessibility from nearby neighborhoods as well as an in-town-enough location.
Still, pulling all the pieces together - and being ready to open for business at the start of the growing season - hasn’t been easy. “I’m excited,” Page says now. “It’s going to happen. I was worried in February that it wasn’t going to happen… Now that I’ve gone through the process, I can understand why it’s taken so long for Athens to get - or ’re-get’ - a farmers’ market.”
It’s All in the Name: “Local and Sustainable”
What kind of market are we talking about exactly? Its name is “Athens Farmers Market, LLC: Local and Sustainable.” You won’t see the word “organic” attached to this market, that being a designation defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that doesn’t fit well for small farmers. The market’s growers will, however, be required to follow the guidelines of the alternative “Certified Naturally Grown” designation put together by the National Organics Program (though without actually having to have that program’s stamp of approval). Prices, Page says, will reflect the growers’ sustainable-land approach - as well as what he calls the “true cost of food” - but shouldn’t be out of line with other presently available organic and sustainable foods. Growers will also come from within a 100-mile radius of Athens, and all goods for sale will be homegrown and handmade. (Rules like those are, unfortunately, necessary to prevent the pitfalls of some markets, where it’s not unheard of for goods to be trucked in.) Also, in keeping with another booming local scene, a quarter of the market’s booths are open to local craftspeople. All of the guidelines, as well as an application to join the market, are online at www.athensfarmersmarket.net.
Also on the docket: live music, cooking demonstrations, and down the line, prepared foods (though 1000faces Coffee and Luna Bread plan to make their goods available at the grand opening) and social outreach components, like apprenticeships to teach hands-on small business skills to local youth. The goal is to foster the kind of community spirit that, in Page’s words, will help to “grow local farms and local farmers.” The planned schedule for this year is to be open Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. through Nov. 16.
“I hope the community’s going to be excited about it, and it’s going to become a regular thing in Athens to get up Saturday morning and go to the market and get some good vegetables,” says market board member and new farmer Jay Payne. Signs point to Payne’s hope becoming a reality, if only because Athens appears to be reaching a critical mass of growers, activists and customers not seen in recent years - though Payne does note that “there’s been a small group of sustainable farmers here for years who’ve sort of kept it going.” Those include the growers at Mills Farm in Clarke County, Backyard Harvest in Oglethorpe County, McMullan Family Farm in Hartwell, and Sundance Farm in Danielsville - all of whom have been a part of Athens Locally Grown for years. Locally Grown’s Wagoner, though, says he’s not in the least worried about his network losing growers. Maybe they’ll set up on Saturdays, maybe they’ll stick with his weekly Thursday pick-ups, or maybe they’ll do both - it’s “not a zero-sum game,” Wagoner says. Meanwhile, he says, “I do accept that what I’ve helped put together has helped put the damper on the Saturday [Big City Bread] market, and it’s possible that the change of venue brings a group of advantages of its own.” Besides, he says, there’s too much community interest now for him to worry about competition. “From a business standpoint, it’s competition, but I really don’t look at it that way, and I think having more options to buy local food is good for everybody.”
Payne, meanwhile, points out that the local food movement is really a move back to basics, and that independence from today’s conventional large-scale agribusiness is only natural. There’s an oft-told story in small-farmer circles, he says, about a jazzed-up new sustainable organic farmer talking to an old-timer who’s been farming all his life. The new guy can’t get over his excitement with the endeavor, and the old guy says simply, “Well, I guess I’m so old-fashioned I’m ahead of the times.”
WHAT: Athens Farmers’ Market Grand Opening
WHERE: Bishop Park
WHEN: Saturday, May 17, 8 a.m.–1 p.m.
Entering the World of Political Refugees
Encounters With Jubilee Partners, Part 2
originally published May 14, 2008
Samuel and Kartee Johnson, seen here on Stone Mountain with their sisters, fled civil war in Liberia and left behind life in refugee camps in Guinea on their way to America and to Jubilee Partners.
The dining hall was alive with conversation and laughter. This would be my second visit to the Tuesday night common meal at Jubilee Partners. Don Mosley had informed me that two members of a Liberian family had returned to visit, and would be good candidates for an interview. They had recently moved to Atlanta (generally, refugees stay at Jubilee for two months, after which a placement is found for them, usually in the Atlanta area). Their reason for return became obvious in the course of the interview.
Most of those present were volunteers and staff, including permanent residents. The mood I picked up on that night, and which I have invariably sensed when at Jubilee, was of a serenity mixed with mirth and kindness. Such ways of being strike me as coming from another time and place, possibly monastic, though no one would mistake the crowd for an austere, religious order. They were having too much fun.
Among the diners, comfortably conversing at a table, sat Samuel and Kartee Johnson. Introductions were made. With his open, blazing yellow shirt, bright eyes and carefully ringed curls, Samuel seemed a shining young man of the tropics. Kartee, wearing a shirt of earth tones with ropey white embroidery, had on a necklace of wooden beads, in the center of which hung a white shell. Not knowing their origin, one might as easily conclude that they were young African Americans. They both greeted me in a friendly manner, yet I sensed a certain guardedness that I inferred must come from years of insecurity, and a part of me felt profane, as a stranger, sitting down to talk to these survivors of unspeakable woes.
In 1989, Liberia was a bad place to be. The country was in a state of civil war. President Samuel Doe, his own reign the result of a coup, had survived a failed coup attempt against him, and in its aftermath faced an uprising from the Gio and Mano tribes, rising in arms against governmental abuses. The insurgence was led by Charles C. Taylor, an elite like Doe, who had been groomed for rule through high-level affiliations in the country. Over the next seven years, 200,000 would die and a million would be displaced. Samuel and Kartee’s father would disappear during this time, and their mother and siblings would flee to neighboring Guinea. Though the family is Liberian, the majority of their lives has been spent as refugees.
The two young men were open to talking. Details of carnage and suffering, unfortunately the stuff of typical media fare, were not uppermost on their minds; more salient and life-giving were thoughts of their new home, new friends and passions, such as school and soccer.
And who could blame them for facing toward the future? They had lived most of their lives in refugee camps, had come to Jubilee in a state of literal deliverance from evil. What most interested them was using their experiences to help others achieve a sense of hope and positivity in life. No small part of these sentiments was fueled by deep religious feeling.
In fleeing Liberia, the family ended up in a situation the young men described as worse. Though the camps were established as a refuge from the ravages of war, the Guinean army itself treated the refugees as enemies, mistreating, and in many cases, killing defenseless women and children there. It was in the camps, in 2000, that robbers broke into their living quarters, stabbing one brother in the stomach and beating their mother so badly she never recovered. She died in 2006.
Kartee
Kartee recalled life in the camp. “When I stayed in the camp, it was like being in a forest,” he said. “There was wildlife and stuff like that. They had scorpions. It’s not something you’d want to be playing around with. You’d just lay down in a small bed, not a bed but a mat. You’d just try to spend the night there… ”
Kartee and Samuel, fraternal twins now 18 years old, had fled Liberia with their family in the late 1990s. They learned in early 2007 they were eligible to come to the United States. Samuel reported that at the time of their leaving Guinea, “there was a strike going on; they wanted change.” He continued, “As a refugee, you don’t have any rights. They were looking for refugees; they were blaming them for the problems; they wanted to get rid of them. Life was very hard. One morning you wake up and you don’t have anything, only your clothes. So life was very hard.”
I was amazed at the maturity and composure of this young man. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, he recounted his family history like a philosopher. Yet everything about the experiences he related evoked a hell more raw than most Americans will ever know.
“We thought we were saved when we crossed the border from Liberia to Guinea, but it was worse,” Samuel said. “We were beat up all the time by a group of military, but we kept faith in God and prayed a lot; and we have survived today because of our faith. When I came to the U.S., it was really hard for me because I was afraid. I didn’t know the people would be nice, because first of all, I moved from my country to escape war, then I moved to another country and it was worse. So, I was afraid at first.”
Among the formalities upon entering this country, one notable irony for these young men was being pressed to register for the draft. Samuel explained that he and his brother were told they could “get better jobs” if they signed these documents. Though I did not press the issue, this part of the interview has haunted me. After the horrors to which they were subjected, the prospect of possible enlistment seems unthinkable. Yet other males their age in this country have the same reality to face.
Samuel and Kartee both draw from a deep religiosity, their resilience a far greater testament to faith than the barrages of ersatz born-agains ranting through amped-up media outlets often seen in this country. And their faith in Jubilee is just as real. Said Samuel of the community, “I was very happy because God answered our prayers and took us from the hell of war in Africa to the paradise of our life at Jubilee.” But this paradise, as for other refugees arriving at Jubilee, could only be revisited, not retained. The next stop for the Johnsons was Avondale Estates, in Atlanta. Housing had been provided for them, but conditions were far from secure, prompting memories of earlier troubles. “It was hard for us. The police were always around. The [refugee resettlement agency] was the one in charge of housing. They found the apartment. They saw it wasn’t going good so we decided to talk to them about a better place. The place we’re in now is much better. It’s more secure.”
Samuel
In the course of the interview, I realized that Kartee and Samuel were much more concerned with the possibilities of their new lives than they were with recounting the horrors that they experienced. Kartee was intent upon making a difference in the lives of others. “I do feel that I have some part to play in the future in some people’s lives. Things happen, of course, but if you can overcome it, it’s a good example to show to other people that they can do it. I feel that God is calling me to do something.”
I looked with Kartee at a newsletter that showed him and his siblings (three brothers and two sisters) together having a blast at the pond at Jubilee. “Right now in the U.S., this is the family that is here, and we have other family members, but since ’98 we haven’t seen them,” he said. I asked him who was missing. “A sister and a brother and my dad and grandparents,” he replied. He has no idea where his father might be, and continues to search for him. I asked him how his family got separated. “It was because of the civil war. Nobody knows which direction they took. When we escaped from the war we were in a neighboring country. We put in a notice that we were looking for our parents. We have spent eight years without getting a response. And we will still continue searching.”
Samuel was drawn into the conversation when it came to bear again upon his home country. We had been talking about what it was like during their last days in Liberia. He recounted the scenes of tragedy all around him, of children on a path that he had, amazingly, been able to avoid.
“There were child soldiers. They give them drugs, they give them guns, and they do not recognize their parents. So, that was very sad,” he said. He went on to express his belief in how blessed we are in this country not to have these problems, but also said that he feared there being so many guns in U.S. cities, citing some of the events on local and national news that caused him to think of war again. (Among the brothers’ spiritual qualities, I realized, is pacifism.) Recounting the recent case of an armed elderly African-American woman in Atlanta who was shot to death by local police, Samuel’s summation was that “he who lives by the gun, dies by the gun.”
In addition to acknowledging his mother’s role through years of hand-to-mouth existence as a source of spiritual strength and stability for the family, Samuel made clear to me that he was also acutely aware of the slender strand of good luck that attended his family’s rescue from the miseries of refugee life in Africa, and the central role of Jubilee Partners, which acted in their behalf as sponsors. “Jubilee has been a lifesaver for me, because everything started here,“ Samuel said. ”If it wasn’t for Jubilee, I don’t think I could be in this country. They taught us how life goes. They taught us that if you are meant to do something with your life, you can do it. I had courage before, but they reinforced my courage. I owe Jubilee a lot, and like I always say, I consider it to be my one home.”
To be concluded with the stories of an ethnic-minority Karen refugee from Myanmar.
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