Up Front | From the Editor

March 2001: Vol. 80, No. 2

hen people ask me how we decide what stories to run in Georgia Magazine, I have a standard answer:

"With 200,000 alumni, 9,000 faculty and staff, and 30,000 students to choose from, our problem isn't what to put in GM, it's what can we afford to leave out?"

If you doubt, for even a moment, that the sun never sets on the Bulldog Empire, consider this abbreviated list of features we've done during the eight years that I've edited this magazine:

Every issue of Georgia Magazine is a reminder that the sun never sets on the Bulldog Empire.

White House advisers, cave diving, Pulitzer Prize winners (3), Dean Rusk, a pony-tailed Atlanta lawyer, Jack Davis, Billy Payne/'96 Olympics, Redcoats, Lamar Dodd, Uga (IV-VI), "Father of Modern Ecology," Zell Miller, Ellis Island, demolition experts, Rhodes Scholars (3), Fortune Magazine, four NCAA titles in '99, UGA at Oxford, affirmative action, "Toy Story," cloning, Herschel Walker, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dalai Lama, Widespread Panic, Central Park, Cuba, Goldberg, Bronx Zoo, UGA at Cortona, and—pausing to take a breath!—U.S. Olympians.

And every single one of those stories involved a member of the UGA family or the University as a whole.

The issue you hold in your hand is no different, but it travels not so far geographically or topically, as it does in time.

Our cover story on the desegregation of the University focuses on the events of 40 years ago, when Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter crossed—and shattered forever—the color barrier at UGA. Our story also focuses on the recent events of Jan. 9, 2001, when most of the key figures in that drama returned to campus to commemorate and analyze what happened here in '61. (See "Letters" for people's impressions of that unforgettable day.)

To Paul Torrance, the "Father of Creativity," 40 years is also an important time window because that's how long he studied people who were elementary school students in the 1950s to determine how creativity influenced their lives.

Do you like Broadway? Well, if you had hit The Great White Way at the right time, as GM did, you could've seen two UGA grads playing monster roles at the same time—Rob Evan in the title role in "Jekyll & Hyde" and Shuler Hensley as Javert in "Les Misérables."

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil spent more time on The New York Times hardback bestseller list than any book in history, and, as most GM readers know, attorney Sonny Seiler and Uga IV-V play prominent roles in the book and movie (see Dec. '97 issue). What you may not have known is that the photo of the Bird Girl statue that graces the cover of Midnight—setting the tone for the entire book—was taken by noted photographer Jack Leigh, who has a new book out.