Yesterday afternoon I received this picture of Dick Rich (center) and Georgia Governor Carl Sanders (right) from Dick Rich’s grandson, David Barnett; when David sent this to me, he couldn’t (nor could I) have known how much it would soon mean to me - Gov. Sanders died a few hours later at age 89. I’ve had the privilege to work for the Governor’s law firm, Troutman Sanders, for the past 8+ years. Please see my August 21 post on this page for a recap of my recent conversation with Gov. Sanders about Rich’s (which I’ve posted, in part, below): David, thank you! Rest in peace, Gov. Sanders. Its been an honor. (And, btw, if anyone knows who the gentleman on the left is, please let me know.) ____________________________ From my August 21 post: Interesting morning – small world. Some of you may or may not know, but for a day-to-day job, I do PR for Troutman Sanders LLP. Many ask how I can do PR for a law firm, so I explain to them that the firm consists of 650+ attorneys in 15 offices spread out on three continents and headquartered in Atlanta. That usually ends that discussion. Anywho… Governor Carl Sanders (1963-1967), one of the founders and namesakes, still comes into work every day. Now, in my job at the firm, I’ve meet him and conversed with him many times over the years, preparing him for interviews, press junkets, etc., but for whatever reason, I had never gotten him to sign my copy of his book, “Carl Sanders: Spokesman of the New South,” by James Cook. I decided to change that today and went up to his office. There, as he signed my copy of his book, I handed him a copy of my book on Rich’s, which I hadn’t done yet. Well, the floodgates were opened… We discussed everything from JFK, George Wallace, segregation, anti-segregation, how Birmingham could have been what Atlanta has become, life, death, my 92 year-old grandmother and the fact that she still drives (to which the Governor exclaimed, “She still drives!), etc., etc. But the most interesting story (and the one pertinent to this page) was one about Dick Rich that I hadn’t heard before. Per Gov. Sanders, when he and Betty Foy, his wife, moved into the old governor’s mansion that used to exist in Ansley Park (Edwin Ansley’s old home, occupied by first families since 1925), it was Dick Rich, a friend of his, who made the old stone structure a home. Apparently, the old mansion was in pretty bad shape. Dick Rich told Gov. Sanders that he’d do everything he could to make the monolith a home. And he did just that – furnishing, arranging repairs, etc. I had known that Rich’s helped carpet the GA State Capitol in the 1800s, but I didn’t know it helped furnish the second governor’s mansion in Atlanta (the first one, which sat where the Westin Peachtree Plaza is at, having been torn down years earlier). Ironically, it was Gov. Sanders who helped build the current mansion on West Paces, which was first occupied by Lester Maddox in 1968. I’ll save that story for Dr. Catherine Lewis’s forth-coming book on the subject. All in all, just wanted to share and to document; I only mentioned Gov. Sanders once in my book on page 142. What a man. You could spend hours talking to him and viewing the mementos of his life in his personal conference room. Think about it, he was governor when JFK was the president. How cool, and to come full circle: we all know it was events at Rich’s in October 1960 that got JFK into the White House!
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 23:47:34 +0000
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