Author: tonyrehagen

Sir Foster’s Rise to Organist Fame

/ tonyrehagen

Screen shot 2015-02-16 at 6.12.11 PMSIR FOSTER DIDN’T upstage the players at last year’s NBA All-Star Game in New Orleans, but he did create quite the stir. As Carmelo and KD dribbled and drove to keyboard renditions of OutKast and Kanye, the nation took notice. Suddenly, the organ was cool and the organist an unlikely star.

This was, of course, not news back in Atlanta, where classically trained Foster Carson was plucked from obscurity after answering the Hawks’ Craigslist ad in 2009. He began in the rafters but soon moved courtside, where he, as much as the scoreboard, now dictates the mood at games — improvising everything from Big K.R.I.T. to the White Stripes. “It’s a Broadway play,” Carson says, “and I’m the orchestra.” Says Hawks superfan Ludacris: “He’s providing the musical landscape.”

Some might say he’s also providing cover. Offseason scandals rocked the Hawks after a leaked email in which owner Bruce Levenson blamed poor attendance on black fans having “scared away the whites,” and after GM Danny Ferry said Heat forward Luol Deng has “some African in him.” Since then, the franchise has hired the NBA’s first “chief diversity and inclusion officer” and announced efforts to enhance the fan experience.

Who better for that than 27-year-old Carson? During a recent Hawks win, the Georgia native donned a Dominique Wilkins jersey and mimicked Nique with a windmill slam of the keys, pivoting from “DE-FENSE” to Van Halen’s “Jump” in the second it takes to whistle a jump ball. “I always wanted to play in the NBA,” Carson says. “I guess you could say I do.”

This article appeared in ESPN‘s Feb. 2 issue.

Shipped Away

/ tonyrehagen

roswell-h-400x500On any given workday, the stretch of Georgia 9 that cuts north-south through Roswell is a four-lane wall of cars. Almost as old as the city itself, the thoroughfare was once little more than a dirt wagon path called the Atlanta Road, connecting this mill town to the burgeoning railroad hub some twenty miles south.

The road also serves as a dividing line. To its west sits the tree-canopied town square, its centerpiece an obelisk water fountain bearing the names of Roswell’s founding families. Repeated on nearby street signs—Bulloch, Pratt, King—these are the surnames of wealthy planters and industrialists who, in the 1830s, moved inland to escape Georgia’s muggy, mosquito-infested coast. At the southern end of the square, a squat stone monument commemorates their leader, Roswell King, a banker, politician, surveyor, and plantation manager, “a man of great energy, industry, and perseverance: of rigid integrity, truth, and justice.” And on the hilltop beyond looms Barrington Hall, a columned, whitewashed mansion built for Barrington King, Roswell King’s eldest heir. The antebellum manor, like Bulloch Hall due west, has been restored as a museum, a memorial to the romantic affluence that for some is synonymous with the Old South.

On the east side of Georgia 9, as the hill drops toward the creek bottom, the architecture changes. The structures are smaller and more tightly packed together. One storefront with broad single-pane windows is dated 1854; it provided goods for employees of the Roswell Manufacturing Company, the King family’s cotton mills that once drew power from Vickery Creek and the labor of hundreds of women, children, and men to make cloth and thread and candlewicks. Farther downhill, you will find a cluster of brick row homes that housed the millworkers. These buildings line places with no-nonsense names like Factory Hill and Mill Street, but they once were home to the Woods, Sumners, Kendleys—and countless other families whose names have since been lost to history.

For decades, the two halves of Roswell coexisted in relative harmony. Then, in the summer of 1864, war came, exposing a divide almost as deep as any clash between North and South and setting the families of Roswell on divergent paths.

The Kendley family story starts with a bit of luck.

Read the rest at atlantamagazine.com