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A Suburban Eden Where the Right Rules [1]
['Peter Applebome']
Date: 1994-08-01
As he watches the East Side All-Stars go through their paces under the tutelage of a small army of Little League dads, David Smith sounds like an advertisement for the Southern good life.
"I came here in 1973," Mr. Smith said, sitting in the metal bleachers at Fuller's Park, watching his 9-year-old son, Quincy, play on a manicured diamond. "I had a friend who said: 'You've got to come down here. If you don't like it, I'll pay your way back.' It was paradise. It was vibrant, growing. Detroit was stagnant. You can travel around the whole world and not find a better place to live than this."
In a county that doubled in population in the 1980's, that is a familiar refrain.
It was echoed by Steve Delaney, a lawyer. "When my father came to visit me from New York when I was in law school in Atlanta in 1978," Mr. Delaney recalled, "he said: 'Stay here. This is the next New York.' What he meant was the old New York, the New York of the 40's, a great place to live and raise kids. He was right. Being here, I feel I've died and gone to heaven." Friendliness and Manners
Barbara Wolfe, a 36-year-old mother of two, was so appalled by the anti-gay resolution that she joined the Cobb Citizens Coalition, a group organized to oppose it. But when she talks about life in Cobb County, she has mostly good things to say. She loves the hills and trees, the friendliness of the people, the good schools, the affordability of housing, even to a point the Sunday-school manners and well-scrubbed sensibilities.
"I like that people are more down to earth, more polite, that you don't have to walk around screaming and yelling and being rude -- you know, the whole New York thing," said Mrs. Wolfe, a native New Yorker who formerly lived in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "It seems crazy listening to myself say this, but sometimes I think that there are a lot of the characteristics that come from some of this fundamentalist religious stuff that I hate that also cause it to be so pleasant here. If they didn't make it political it might be perfect. But it's not."
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/01/us/a-suburban-eden-where-the-right-rules.html
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