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Bill Montgomery
Number of posts: 26
Email address: email
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Posts by Bill Montgomery:
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Vanitize Your Ride
It’s great to see that the AJC, my journalism alma mater for a generation until I retired, recently ran a fascinating and lengthy story about the “prestige” license tags that thousands of Georgia drivers put on their cars for only $35 to the DMV.
For the record, I wrote the same story, oh, 30 some years ago, and had a fun time doing it.
Criminally Stupid
Humourous side to a job that often wasn’t
In more than three decades as a reporter with the AJC, mostly covering cops, crime and other forms of wrongdoing and public idiocy, (see legislature, Georgia) what I wrote was seldom funny. I guess that’s why the rare exceptions stick with me years. There were two, and both took place in the south metro Atlanta area near College Park.
The first was an attempted robbery of a Taco Bell by a 20-year-old guy with a shotgun and wearing baggy, low slung pants drooping around his butt…
Tree Lighting
Covering Labor Day at Stone Mtn
One of my most enduring, indeed, ironically humorous memories from years of reporting for the AJC, especially if you have a twisted fancy for the absurd (and bizarre) like me, occurred on a Labor Day weekend at Stone Mountain a generation ago. I had been in Atlanta for about a year, and was assigned to work a Saturday evening and night, like many newcomers, for the Sunday paper. My assignment: to watch an annual Ku Klux Klan rally at the foot of the iconic mountain. Not to write anything, the night city editor instructed, unless “something happens.” And boy, something sure as hell did.
The Most Despised
Dispensing Justice
There is a social ladder behind prison bars as rigid as any on Palm Beach or Martha’s Vineyard , and on the very bottom rung is the child killer and molester.
The most despised too, as I was reminded by Sunday’s AJC in a fine piece by Bill Rankin about the grisly murder of child molester Steven O’Bara five years ago behind the grim gray walls of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, known as “The Big A.
Das Waren Zeiten
Blitzed on Deutche Wine
I wish Mel Brooks, maestro of the Broadway hit and the even funnier movie version of “The Producers” — his whacko inspiration that made an insane musical comedy out of Nazi Germany — could have been with us one inebriated night a generation and more ago.
Who knows what more zaniness Brooks’ twisted humor could have added? Especially if he had guzzled as much wine as my fellow airmen and I had. The possibilities are endless. Because I’m sober as I write this, I won’t try to come up with any. I’m not that creative. Or addled, take your pick.
Rush to Judgment
Rush Limbaugh, contraceptive
Mike Luckovich crafted a real winner in his Wednesday a.m. AJC cartoon mocking the loud, perpetually pissed off Rush Limbaugh: a poster of the radio talk jock on the bedroom wall of a couple as the perfect contraceptive.
The drawing captures the essence of Limbaugh’s shtick on the radio, and how he comes across to me as a person – fat jowls, a cavernous open mouth, mean, slitted eyes. He sounds so angry, sometimes I halfway expect his head to explode, soiling the studio carpet.
Since that hasn’t happened in over 20 some years, I suspect his radio rants are in part just that, an act. It must work, since it’s made the loudmouth millions.
Military Life
Christmas Chow
Decades later, I fondly recall the really fine holiday noon meals every Christmas and Thanksgiving dished out by the chow hall at Hahn Air Base in Germany during three years serving my “friends and neighbors” in the Cold War.
To be fair, and counter the legends about military chow, the food there was rarely poor, and ranged from OK to “pretty good” more days than not. But the cooks turned out a really great spread for the two traditional late year holidays.
Turkey, ham, roast beef, dressing, sweet potatoes, even shrimp cocktail, butternut squash, cold jellied cranberry sauce, pumpkin, apple and mince pie, strawberry the works. And the high point of the day, if you were on duty and had to return in less than an hour to humping a flight line of fighter jets in the snow and/or frigid cold for another four hours (or more} with an M-16 on your back.
