Fresh Loaf

Annie Maxwell

When did you discover you were blind?

When I was a child, we lived on a farm in South Georgia. My parents were sharecroppers. When I was small, nobody ever said anything about me not being able to see. I assumed everyone had the same situation that I did. I have light perception, and I have some contrast. If the grass is green and the sidewalk is concrete, I can tell where one stops and the other one ends. That’s the kind of sight that I had.

When my brother would see my mother coming — he’d say, “Oh, here comes Mom” — I would think he just knew because he was smarter than me. I didn’t realize that he could see her. When my brother was six years old, he started school. And I was a year older than him and hadn’t started. I was like, “Wait a minute! What is this?” I couldn’t figure out why he was starting to go first. I figured maybe I was just too bad, too hardheaded. I thought maybe I had to do something about my attitude before I could go.

When my brother would come home from school he would teach me how to write my letters in the dirt. So I learned as he learned. I thought when you went away to school they taught you to see.

(more…)

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Estimated number of people who were homelessness in Fulton and DeKalb counties for at least part of 2007: 22,000

Number of homeless children enrolled in metro Atlanta schools: 17,267

Percentage of Atlantans interviewed in 2007 who reported job loss or unemployment as their reason for homelessness: 42

Percentage of unemployed Atlantans as of October 2007: 4.4

Percentage as of October 2008: 6.8

Average monthly rent, in dollars, for a two-bedroom apartment in Atlanta: 834

Current monthly welfare benefits, in dollars, for a woman and two children: 282

Number of donation meters installed in downtown Atlanta to discourage the homeless from panhandling: 5

Number of new meters to be installed in other Atlanta locations: 11

Dollars, per month, that Baltimore collects from 10 meters in its main tourism district: 100

Sources: Hands On Atlanta, Tri-Jurisdictional Homeless Census and Survey 2007, United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, Georgia Department of Labor, ajc.com

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Atlanta’s volunteer rank out of 50 major cities: 31

Charlotte’s rank: 10

Atlanta’s road rage ranking: 6

Atlanta’s “Meanest Cities Towards Homeless” ranking: 4

Number of listed charitable organizations in Atlanta: 361

Number of violent crimes in Atlanta in 2007: 7,213

Number of Facebook groups about volunteering in the Atlanta Network: 41

Number of Facebook groups about partying: 297

Sources:Volunteeringinamerica.gov; nationalhomeless.org; autovantage.com; census.gov; superpages.com; facebook.com

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Neigeborn, 35, loves his work, which he’s been doing for more than a decade. But it’s stressful right now, because clients are more worried about their investments.

What is your background? How did you get into financial advising?

I am originally from Long Island, New York. I went to school at the University of Albany. Originally I was going to be studying psychology, which became my minor. I fell in love with American history; I studied it at the undergraduate and graduate level. I went on until I was about to complete my master’s thesis and my grandmother talked me out of it. She sat me down and said, ‘Honey, teaching on a college level – you’re going to be broke and you’re going to be unemployed a lot and this is not for you.’ And I said “…OK.” I was about 23. So my background was in academics, and I had not taken an economics class in college. It is interesting to find that many of us have not; we have lots of varied backgrounds. I traveled for a little bit after school, not really sure what I would do, came back. I came back to the states when I was 24. I had spent a little time overseas. I got a job in the telecommunications industry, which at the time was booming. I did that for about a year and this was at the height of the technology boom in the late 90’s. I came down to visit some friends in Atlanta, fell in love with the city, packed my bags and came. This was 1997. At the time, Prudential was hiring financial advisers. I had enough of a push to want to take on a very challenging job at 24, 25. I didn’t quite know what I was going to be getting myself into. It turned out to be a lot more challenging than I fully expected. (more…)

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Short on cash? Can’t get a loan? Want to sell that stereo, television, or peg leg? There’s always the pawn shop. Stop by Jerry’s Pawn Shop on the corner of Prior and Decatur. Dave Adelman owns Jerry’s Pawn Shop at the corner of Prior and Decatur streets downtown.

Where are you from originally and how did you get into the pawn shop business?
Originally from New Haven, Conn. I moved here in the 1970’s. How I got into the Pawn business was I got married in 1975 to my present wife, and her father was in the pawn business. But I never thought about getting into the pawn business — I had never been in a pawn shop before. I was in between jobs, and we were offered jobs in other cities but we wanted to stay here. So he had an employee in the hospital, and he needed somebody in the store just to help him out. So he asked me to come down and help him in between my job search and the rest is history. I kinda just fell in love with it. That was 30 years ago. It will be thirty years in ’09. (more…)

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If you see a non-human meat eater loping about Zoo Atlanta, chances are Rebecca Snyder knows the animal personally. Snyder, 39, hails from Iowa but relocated to Atlanta to pursue a doctorate in psychology. She’s journeyed as far as China to study maternal behavior in pandas, researching everything from the way the gender of the cub affects parental care to how the amount of time with its mother affects a cub. With Lun Lun’s recent delivery, Snyder is seeing 11 years of research come full circle.

“I have gotten to study Yang Yang and Lun Lun since they were born [in China]. I have known them their whole lives. I knew their mothers really well and now I am able to watch Lun Lun as a mother herself.”

Pandas weren’t the only animals to get busy recently. “The lioness just gave birth. It was great to see her as a mother. It is fun to watch [the lions] interact as a family.”

What does she find weird? When exposed to an object with a unique scent, a panda will pick the object up and rub it all over itself, “It’s fun. We expose them to lots of scents. Yang Yang loves Tobasco and mouthwash.”

“I have never been in danger. We work with captive animals so I’ve not felt like I wasn’t safe — though I do have nightmares about tigers escaping.”

A zoo PR rep didn’t want Snyder to talk about last year’s tiger escape at the San Francisco Zoo, which resulted in a visitor’s death. But Snyder did say a tiger couldn’t escape in Atlanta: “Our fencing is taller than San Francisco. We have measured since then and decided to [raise it] higher than what is regulation.”

- Mary Moore

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