7
Mayor of Buckhead
Sam’s 2009 Mercedes glides up I-85 north near the 400 Connector toward the heart of Buckhead, one sunny day last month. Now 90, he’s in remarkably fine fettle, though not without his twinges in the hinges. The man who brought mobility to Atlanta walks with a cane, but he still drives and he’s still robust enough to get anywhere he wants to go, including into the office six days a week.
All at once, Sam raises straight up behind the wheel.
“Just look at that!” he says.
He points a finger at the Buckhead cityscape.
His excitement is absolutely genuine, like a kid seeing the ocean for the first time. Or maybe like 14-year-old Buddy Massell, admiring a campaign poster he’d just finished painting in a Druid Hills driveway.
Buckhead.
Tall buildings line up handsomely along the northern skyline. The skeletons of even more, like steel seedlings, rise toward the light among multistory offices, apartments and hotels. The bright late-summer sun glints off a mini-metropolis of glass and metal.
It’s an impressive panorama, a shining city on a hill.
“That just makes me happy,” Sam exclaims. “Just look at that!”
He might as well be saying, Just look what I did!
It’s a luminous legacy for a luminous lifetime of service.
For the past three decades, Sam has led the Buckhead Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to orderly growth and quality-of-life issues in a section of the city that accounts for an outsized percentage of Atlanta’s ad-valorem tax revenue.
Many Atlantans refer to him as “The Mayor of Buckhead.”
During his 30 years helming the coalition, Sam has steered Buckhead on a steady course toward prosperity.
He brought Buckhead through thorny politics to get the Georgia 400 connector built, connecting Buckhead to north Georgia. He helped Buckhead overcome an image problem caused by late-night clubs and spotty policing from the City of Atlanta during the late 1990s. And Sam led Buckhead through the Great Recession, when a multi-block construction project conspicuously stalled on Peachtree Road. The recovery earned him widespread praise. In all, Sam’s leadership has made Buckhead an internationally known brand name, like Rodeo Drive, synonymous with lux lifestyles and a climbing skyline.
Now in his ninth decade, Sam proudly escorts a new bride, Sandra Gordy, a protégé who served as a CEO at one of the family businesses. He still counsels politicians and wrangles business deals and cuts ribbons and flies the Buckhead flag around the clock.
***
Once upon a time, a dusty traveler coming along the pioneer trail welcomed this sight: a rude building in a clearing in the piney woods. Libations cool and wet waited just inside a tavern. A hot meal, too.
Greeting new arrivals atop a wooden post out front rested a buck’s head, its imposing rack spread in welcome. People came to call the spot Buckhead.
Today, from the Buckhead Coalition offices on the fifth floor of Tower Place, Sam Massell admires a different kind of imposing rack – those multiple spires of manmade concrete, steel, and glass spreading for miles in all directions.
From certain parts of the building, on a clear day, Sam can see all the way to Stone Mountain in the east and Kennesaw Mountain in the north.
If you point today at that rising Buckhead skyline and ask any passerby on the street a certain question, you’ll hear a certain answer.
Excuse me. May I ask if you’ve ever heard of Ben Massell?
Hmm. I’m not sure. Is he … maybe … related to Sam Massell?
Well. Yes.
Yes, he is.
ABOUT THE STORY
In 2014, I met Sam Massell on an assignment for Georgia State University Magazine. Soon after, we began work on a long-overdue history of Sam’s colorful life. A book resulted. “Play It Again, Sam: The Notable Life of Sam Massell, Atlanta’s First Minority Mayor” launched Labor Day weekend at the AJC Decatur Book Festival. Sam’s generous gifts of time, contacts and candor deserve all the credit for this work. As writer, I only hope to have captured enough of Sam’s remarkable spirit and chronicled enough of his enduring achievements to do him justice.
Charles McNair
Freelance writer
personaljourneys@ajc.com
ABOUT THE WRITER
Charles McNair is the author of “Play It Again Sam: The Notable Life of Sam Massell,” published by Mercer University Press. He is also a writer for business clients as a founding partner in MAS Strategic Communications, as well as a novelist, whose latest project is the serial thriller “The Epicureans,” which appears one chapter per week in the online magazine The Bitter Southerner. A native of Alabama, he lived in Atlanta for 25 years before moving to Bogotá, Colombia in 2015.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Hyosub Shin was born and raised in South Korea. Inspired by the work of National Geographic photographers, he came to the United States to study photography and joined the AJC photo staff in 2007. Past assignments include the Georgia Legislative session, Atlanta Dream’s Eastern Conference title game, the Atlanta Air Show and the Atlanta Braves’ National League Division Series.
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