Carter and the Lullwater Ladies
Jimmy Carter, having suffered a stunningly lopsided loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, returned to Atlanta, not yet the wildly popular ex-President he would later become. Carter, who had played a significant role as Governor of Georgia guiding the Peach State through a turbulent era permanently relegating (or so he naively hoped) The “Lost Cause” myth and its violent progeny Jim Crow to the dust bin of history, was having trouble accepting his defeat to the B list red baiting ex actor.
Unlike irredentist racists like governors George Wallace, Lestor Maddox, and Orville Faubus, Reagan did not attempt to stand athwart history and scream stop. Rather, he recognized their vile protestations were too blunt an instrument for these more “enlightened” times. Pickaxes and such gave conservatism a bad name. His was a far more subtle message, refined in his fight against “communists” in Hollywood in the McCarthy era, as head of the Screen Actors Guild, and more recently in his successful battle to overturn a fair housing law in California.
The “N” word was off putting to genteel racists and even to some members of Nixon’s so-called moral majority (which history would prove was neither), but that old bugaboo, “states’ rights,” was a far more ambiguous term, acceptable to northern and western “copperheads,” but well understood in the states of the old Confederacy. Which is why Reagan, two weeks after accepting his party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit, headed to Neshoba County Mississippi to give a speech on states’ rights, a stone’s throw away from the earthen dam, where in 1964, the KKK had murdered three civil rights workers. Why use a bullhorn when a dog whistle sends the same message with the additional benefit of plausible deniability to claims of racism?
And yet, Carter had been thrashed. Reagan won 44 states and 489 electoral votes, returning home a defeated man, angry and bitter, not without good cause. He affiliated himself with nearby Emory University, and set about building a presidential library, which he hoped would put a positive end point to his public life.
While I had visited intermittently since leaving Emory, I did not truly grasp how much Atlanta had changed since I had decamped for California. Numerous Fortune 500 companies had joined Coca Cola and Delta, establishing Atlanta as the capital city of the “New South.” Midtown Atlanta, adjacent to Olmstead-designed Piedmont Park where the Allman Brothers Band had given those free concerts on Sunday afternoons during the ‘60s and early ‘70s - the southern Haight Ashbury that I first discovered back in my undergraduate days - was transforming from a hippie hangout of cheap apartments and used record and head shops to a canyon of high rises and corporate offices spreading north along West Peachtree Boulevard into fashionable Buckhead.
The interstates had been completed. I-85 came in from South Carolina and connected just north of downtown with I-75. This was the flight path of midwestern snowbirds passing through on the way to Florida’s warm winters, as they made their way from the far reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula through Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, before crossing into Georgia just south of Chattanooga.
I-20 ran east to west, past Al Capone’s final home in the macabre gothic Federal Penitentiary, before leaving Atlanta on its way to Birmingham. The city had recently completed the MARTA heavy rail system, the last such public transport built with a significant infusion of federal funds.
The problem for Atlanta as the ‘80s rolled forward was that the city had no natural barriers to unending sprawl. The perimeter beltway, I-285, had served as an informal outer boundary, but the developers, with no lakes, mountains, deserts, or oceans blocking their way, greedily eyed the beautiful pine laden hills and valleys that stretched out in all directions toward the Piedmont and beyond. In the mind’s eye of the real estate agents and developers, all that was missing was imagination.
That imagination would come from the most powerful government agency in the state of Georgia: the Georgia Operations Department (GOD). In a largely rural state, decisions as to where transportation dollars would be spent could mean life or death to a community. This gave the agency extraordinary sway among politicians who could live or die by the agency’s caprice. And GOD in the early ‘80s viewed itself as omnipotent, initiating two massive highway projects through the city of Atlanta.
Georgia State Route 400 began at Johnson Ferry Road where it intersected the perimeter highway, cutting its way north to Alpharetta, a bucolic expanse formerly consisting of pastures and farms but rapidly developing into a suburban “utopia” far from the problems of the rapidly diversifying city.
The Peachtree Battle neighborhood between Johnson Ferry and the massive regional malls in Buckhead were loath to be bought out of their beautiful homes to allow the new exurbanites easy access to luxury shopping. The neighborhood attempted to fight the proposed extension of the freeway through their community, arguing that increased traffic and pollution would both destroy their neighborhood and open all of northwest Georgia, clear to the Tennessee line, to development.
This fight, waged against GOD and its allies in the real estate industry, would remain in the courts for ten years. In the end, the lawsuits proved futile. The battle was lost and as predicted, the northern suburbs would extend fifty miles past the old perimeter highway to the point where GOD is planning a second perimeter highway, possibly in Tennessee! This sector of Atlanta has large, beautiful homes with expansive verdant lawns as far as the eye can see - and traffic worse than Los Angeles, as drivers crawl daily through a giant parking lot masquerading as a freeway to shopping and the job centers in Buckhead and the center city.
In the northeast quadrant of the city a different preservation battle pitting communities against GOD was being waged, this time with my law firm brought in because of expertise in Federal environmental law, hired by the local litigators, as counsel to the neighborhood groups. While the Georgia 400 battle would be fought on traditional ground, favoring a powerful government agency that made strong - if specious - arguments necessitating transformative highway expansion, the other fight, closer to downtown, would prove far more interesting as well as unsettling to the elite real estate interests that controlled the city and state.
This fight would involve an ex-president, a former UN ambassador, the mayor of Atlanta, the city’s most powerful and well-connected law firms, Coca-Cola, a racial exclusionary clause, Emory University, a popular novel, and the nation’s most famous landscape architect.
As early as the 1960s GOD had proposed carving a freeway from downtown Atlanta, following the route of Ponce De Leon Avenue to connect the city to Gutzon Borglum’s confederate war memorial at Stone Mountain. The Mountain, where the modern KKK was founded in 1915, predated Borglum’s more famous carvings on Mount Rushmore, and depicted three rebel figures: Jeff Davis, the President of the Confederacy, General Robert E. Lee, and Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, a legendary Lee lieutenant.
The surrounding area was ripe for development and the highway department, with its forever trumpeting choric cacophony of real estate industry proponents promising suburban paradise, was determined to deliver. Anticipating approval, it condemned a large swath of land for the right of way heading out of downtown. The proposed road had one remaining problem: standing in the way of the freeway was a string of beautiful parks stretching out along Ponce that had been designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, who also counted designing New York’s Central Park among his many accomplishments.
Neighborhood groups had banded together in the ‘70s to fight the highway, holding regular protests until then-Governor Carter signed legislation to stop the roadway. The land lay dormant for the next decade. Times change and so do circumstances.
It would be several years before it came to light that conservative darling Reagan had likely committed treason, cutting a deal with the Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini to keep American hostages until after the election, in return for spare military parts.
Cue the director of GOD with a project that would never die. It was a rueful irony that Carter, the ex-Baptist Sunday school teacher, was being forced into a Faustian bargain! GOD would deed the previously condemned property for the Stone Mountain Freeway over to the Carter Presidential Library, in return for a six-lane freeway connecting downtown, the library, and Robert E. Lee Blvd in Stone Mountain. Carter was left to make the argument that his library and International Center for Peace needed a freeway for the massive traffic that would surely follow, and to connect the presidential library to nearby Emory University, where Carter was joining the faculty.
The community was outraged. The faculty at Emory, many of whom lived in the Lullwater, Druid Hills, and Virginia Highlands neighborhoods adjacent to the proposed freeway, were apoplectic, and vowed to fight. At the outset the case had similarities to the Georgia 400 struggle. GOD continued its claims, originating twenty years before that increasing traffic demanded a new freeway in the corridor.
However, there were additional issues unique to the Ponce right of way. Some were apparent from the start, others would reveal themselves through the years-long discovery process. The status of the Olmstead parks was critical. These were historically significant assets that would require a finding, under the Federal National Environmental Protection Act-mandated process, that there was “no feasible alternative” to the multi-lane highway. Other NEPA issues included the impact of a new freeway on ridership numbers for the newly completed MARTA east line as well as potential harm to Sweet Auburn and The King Center located nearby.
The Department’s case was grounded in traffic studies. Carter, being leveraged by the state agency, claimed that there would be significant auto traffic drawn to the presidential library, peace center, and city park. The ex-president was represented by numerous lawyers from the city’s white shoe firms, the defense team being headed by an ex-Attorney General for the United States. The Mayor and downtown business establishment also strongly supported the project.
The firm where I had been hired was small. There were two partners and me, the only associate. With a small support staff taking on the city’s establishment, GOD, the mayor, and an ex-president/favorite son, it did not look particularly promising. Even less so when the federal judge assigned to the case was a Carter appointee who, despite requests and motions to recuse himself due to the obvious perceived bias, refused to do so.
The lead attorney for the firm was a superb litigator - one of the best. A brilliant trial attorney who could leave juries in tears with his impassioned courtroom presence. But that alone would not be enough, not with what the other side brought to the case. I discovered shortly after the case began that we had an ace up our sleeve: what the judge derisively called “the neighborhood ladies.”
You see, the proposed freeway, in addition to all of the above issues - destroying the invaluable parks, threatening the financial viability of the public transit network, and isolating the historic African American community of Sweet Auburn - did one more thing that would be instrumental in its demise. It turned the “neighborhood ladies” of Lullwater Drive and the university community into fierce and unrelenting opponents.
The “ladies” were a diverse bunch, but at their heart were a core of leaders who on the surface appeared to be well-mannered, demure southern belles. In reality, a more deceiving stereotype never did exist. Several, as it turned out, were the wives of Emory professors, themselves possessing advanced degrees from Ivy League universities. They had taken time off from budding careers to focus on child rearing, but once activated in opposition to the parkway they believed dead, would provide the research and history necessary to drive a fatal stake into this seemingly inevitable beast.
At the heart of GOD’s case were the traffic projections for the library, as well as the corridor itself. They would be used by the Department’s lawyers to show the need for the additional highway capacity and to eliminate the “no build” alternative analysis required by law. The projections needed to be disputed with hard facts, and the outraged “housewives” set about doing just that. They began by setting up traffic monitors on Ponce de Leon and North Ave. They then dug through dusty department archives, and studied visitor numbers at existing presidential libraries throughout the country. They conducted regression analyses on ridership numbers on MARTA both with and without a competing highway, and developed a compelling economic analysis showing potential harm to Black-owned businesses located along Auburn Blvd. near The King Center.
And, lastly, they dug up one little historical nugget. The land for the Olmsted Parks had been deeded to the city by Coca-Cola’s founder. In the original deed to the city, written in the early part of the twentieth century, there were two features standard to grants from wealthy benefactors in that era: an exclusionary clause reserving the parks for the exclusive use of the white race, and a reversionary clause that if the land were to be otherwise used by the city the property should revert to the donor’s family, whose heirs remained numerous in the area.
The modern courts had struggled before with these atavistic remnants from a less enlightened time, eventually settling on a somewhat subjective test. The test came down to determining whether the original grantor had placed the clauses in the deed simply as a matter of common practice at the time, in which case the clauses could essentially be ignored by modern courts, or, if it could be determined that the grantor meant what he said, courts had to determine whether the clause must be upheld.
In most cases the grantors were long dead, and determining their intent was impossible. The City’s African American mayor was sitting on the horns of a dilemma. If he conceded that the clauses had not been enforced, the parks could revert to the heirs. If, on the other hand, he claimed the city had the right to abrogate the clauses, then the Parks might revert to, -wait for it - the heirs! This was a sleeping dog that had been left to lie, at least until the ex-President and GOD kicked this angry hornet’s nest.
As it happened, there were grandchildren alive who would testify that, true to a man of his generation, their grandpa had meant what he said. While the heirs could be viewed as having a financial interest in the issue, there was also abundant evidence that excluding African Americans from the parks was, in all likelihood, not incidental to the gift. This issue would, of course, complicate the proceedings to no end. And to violate the grant in totality by building a freeway where the grantor’s intent was a public park, well who knew where that might end?
The highlight of the discovery process was the deposition of former President Carter taken in the Federal building in downtown Atlanta, less than a year after Carter had vacated the White House. In a conference room lacking the ornamentation one imagined would surround an ex-president, and with Secret Service agents standing by, I was able to witness up close, one of the marvels of the American political system.
Like any citizen, a former president could be brought before a court of justice. Carter, ever gracious, entered after we had been seated for a few moments. He took his seat after shaking hands all around, directly across the large, gleaming conference table from us.
A smallish man with a soft southern drawl, Carter answered all the questions asked, forthrightly making the case for why he believed a six-lane freeway was necessary for the new Carter Center.
He carefully laid out the case for scholars and school children, as well as university conferences. Most impressively he drew on his experience bringing together Menachim Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s leader, who, in the quietude of a bucolic presidential retreat, had agreed to the Camp David Accords, hopefully bringing a lasting peace to historical enemies in a region where that was exceedingly rare. Carter fervently believed that his Center for International Peace could serve a similar function in bringing together combatants away from distant battlefields, at a location where they might witness the humanity of their enemies.
It was an impressive presentation, and I could not come away with anything but admiration for this highly intelligent and well-intentioned man. While the vast majority of politicians were well-practiced in the stygian arts of perfidy and masters of hallucinatory gibberish, forever beaching themselves in ideological shallows, this was a man well-suited to the deep end of the pool. In something rare among American politicians, Carter also evidenced a deep knowledge of history beyond US borders.
In that room, however, I also witnessed Carter’s Achilles' heel - the one that the slick Bedtime for Bonzo adman would ultimately use to bring him down in the 1980 presidential election - his complete lack of charisma! While the ideas that Carter laid out were truly inspiring, to hear him in his soft Plains, Georgia drawl, we had to lean in and focus hard. My mind would wander, and I would have to slap myself back to the present. An unfortunate weakness for a college professor, I thought, but absolutely deadly for a national leader, let alone a president.
After months of discovery, during which time tensions and accusations of bad faith abounded, the case finally made its way to the courtroom. GOD and the Carter lawyers plus legal counsel for the Mayor and the city led off. They made described the massive traffic to come from suburban growth, as well as the myriad hordes expected at the presidential library. They smugly rested their case.
The next morning my boss put on our first witness of many, a neighborhood leader with an Ivy League PhD in classics. She proceeded to tear the Department’s case apart. The real-time traffic surveys on Ponce showed that GOD overestimated vehicle flow by thousands. Witnesses compared Carter library estimates to every other presidential library, emphasizing those of FDR, Eisenhower, LBJ, and Truman, twentieth-century leaders who’d served multiple terms and had far greater historical impacts. They showed that not one of these institutions required a freeway to accommodate visitors.
The judge made little attempt to hide where his sympathies lay. Despite strenuous objections, he allowed the state lawyers to repeatedly question the qualifications of our witnesses to present the evidence they had so meticulously compiled. At the end of the day, the court took the case under advisement and promised to deliver its opinion in short order.
When the decision came down soon thereafter, the clients were outraged. Despite having torn holes in every argument proffered, the judge ruled in favor of Carter and GOD. This was not totally unexpected considering how the trial was conducted, I was still caught by surprise, and I must admit, I found the whole thing depressing. I called home to tell Cal, who had her own “toy” telephone she could operate with her nose. Sarah never suspected, a secret between Cal and I.
Cal had become quite the student of the law as developed by humans. She even claimed that she had recently perused all federal cases since 1787. As cynical as any of the gods with regard to human duplicity, she had come to believe after experiencing with me law school and the bar exam that this was the best system humans could design to achieve justice. She said it would be downright depressing to lose her bet with Satan who took the under on the odds that legal systems designed by humans were incapable of anything more than arriving at decisions based upon greed, avarice, and political advantage.
We had already drafted an appeal just in case the fix was in, which it clearly was. We quickly filed the necessary paperwork that very day, asking the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in Atlanta, to issue a writ of mandate, based on permanent and irreparable harm, to stay any action by GOD pending an appellate hearing.
The powerful agency was not taking any chances. They had the Caterpillar D7s and tree removal operations perched at each of the parks, ready to move. They fully intended to get to work the next morning, hoping to change the facts on the ground before the judges in the 11th Circuit could even review the brief put across the desk just before the court closed, several hours after the not so stunning decision by the trial judge.
I was tasked with driving our clients back to the office in the Equitable Building, across from Central City Park, to plot the next moves. The women were furious. Like Cal, (maybe it is a woman thing), they wanted to believe that Lady Justice could be blind. They had played by the rules and presented the evidence, yet it appeared, despite their scrupulous efforts, that all might still be lost. They spent several minutes grousing about injustice, while complaining that belief in both Santa and the Easter Bunny were now lost, along with their faith in the American legal system.
Watching Reagan dismantle one progressive policy after the other, and having now witnessed up close powerful well connected polluters literally getting away with murder, I must admit that I had developed a rather fatalistic attitude toward American justice, and initially excoriated our tearful clients with the somewhat cynical admonition to “get off the yum yum tree,” a line used by a law school professor with regard to discrimination against black defendants in the criminal justice system. They all sat glumly, stuck in traffic across from the depressing remnants of Underground Atlanta, lamenting the capricious nature of power and politics.
One of the passengers, whom we shall call Betty Lou - her real name shall be withheld to protect the potentially guilty - knew that I had worked in California on various environmental issues and asked me whether environmentalists in California had developed tactics for situations like this. I was thinking initially of Mark Dubois and his ultimately futile efforts to save the Stanislaus River Canyon by chaining himself to the river bedrock but thought better of referencing this act of desperation.
Cal, ever the environmental radical, had something else in mind. She had recently come across something far more relevant in a book I had just finished. In Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang, a fictional band of outlaw brothers and sisters had “monkeywrenched” Glen Canyon Dam through various non-violent actions. They had relentlessly sabotaged government equipment in their guerilla war against the State of Utah and the Federal Bureau of Reclamation. But this was fiction!
Cal was insistent that this book provided a roadmap for the “neighborhood ladies.” I had my doubts. Research and data gathering was clearly in their wheelhouse, civil disobedience which included committing Federal felonies by destroying government property seemed a stretch. I was really careful. I knew I would be skating on very thin legal and ethically dangerous ice, so I book-ended my response with caveat upon caveat, in addition to several disclaimers.
“As we speak, our la clerk is at the court house filing our appeal. Now I understand that facts on the ground might very well change before the court even looks at the brief, so our options are limited. As your attorney I can only advise you to follow the law and pursue all legal challenges. That is my carefully considered legal counsel.
Now, changing the subject, I said, I love to read. Do you?” All heads nodded in the affirmative, not yet understanding where I might be going with this. “I recently read a wonderful novel about an environmental struggle in Utah. The title is the Monkey Wrench Gang. You may wish to give it a look.”
And that was that... Or so I thought. The next morning while I was shaving, Sarah called from Oakland and nearly shouted into the receiver that there was a breaking story on the national news emanating from a park in the City of Atlanta. I needed to turn it on immediately. The story was being beamed live from Ponce De Leon Ave. There were Federal agents, Atlanta Police, Georgia Highway Patrol, and special agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation swarming the parks. News ‘copters were hovering overhead.
Up in the trees, perched daintily on outstretched boughs, were the “neighborhood ladies” dressed in their finest garden party finery. The police below had bullhorns and were demanding that they “exit the premises with all deliberate haste or face the full force of the law.”
The ladies were flat-out refusing to come down. They had picnic baskets and by all appearances were prepared for a lengthy confrontation, daintily luxuriating in their languid extravagance high in the boughs of the heritage trees, looking for all the world like Alice curtsying before the evil red queen. The officers of the law were already red-faced, not used to this type of defiance, especially from these cultured southern belles who usually appeared so docile and compliant when confronted by uniformed representatives of state power.
It’s not like they could solve this problem in their normal fashion with batons, guns, and fists; these protesters were not poor, black, and powerless! These dissidents had lawyers - they were upper class women for god’s sake, and there were TV cameras everywhere! If they climbed up and dragged their asses down, they might cry. They might bleed all over their beautiful crinoline dresses. The optics would be terrible!
So the law enforcement professionals huddled together away from the cameras to determine a plan of action. Underestimating by magnitudes the resolve of the tree sitting ladies, they decided to start up the chainsaws and bulldozers, figuring they would scare them down. The heavy equipment had been brought to the sites under cover of darkness and was ready to go. These delicate flowers would surely quake in their espadrilles once they heard the roar of some good old-fashioned American diesel-powered industrial machinery.
The police gave the signal and the dozer engineers hit the ignition switches as the chainsaw operators yanked their cords. The Cats roared to life, billowing great clouds of black smoke. The chainsaws caught, spun a few cycles, and just as quickly sputtered and powered down. The Cats lunged forward a few feet, belched noxious entrails of soot, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter into the crisp morning air, and just as quickly burped loudly and went silent. The burly construction foreman, not yet understanding exactly what was going down, ordered all to give it another go. This time nothing happened. All the equipment was completely dysfunctional.
I had just come upon the crazy scene, listening on the radio to a play-by-play as I drove the few miles from my Druid Hills apartment. I had arrived at Dellwood Park just as it became clear that none of the heavy equipment was operating. I flashed my business card, showing I was on the legal team of the miscreant tree sitting trespassers.
The head of the FBI’s Atlanta office, a crew cut fed in a boxy black suit, white button down oxford, striped club tie, and brown wingtips marched over and leaning in very close, growled menacingly in my ear, “counselor, I highly suggest you convince those fuckin prima donna bitches to cut the shit, get out of the damn trees and go set up their tea cozies. Let these men get on with their jobs, or so help me, I promise, I will fuck them up! Those fuckin princesses will squeal like pigs when they have to give up those pretty white dresses for orange jump suits at a Federal Supermax. I am certain the guards will enjoy watching the little cunts shower!” Now get them out of the fuckin trees before I get REALLY mad!”
I made my way among the cops, reporters, live TV cameras, frustrated equipment operators, and the just plain curious waiting to see how this Mexican standoff would end. I looked up to see Betty Lou (again, not her real name) surreptitiously reach into her Abercrombie and Fitch picnic basket and take out what appeared at first to be a delicately crafted cucumber sandwich, white bread crust carefully pared away. When she peeled back the Wonder Bread ever so slightly, I saw not neatly sliced cucumbers, but a copy of Edward Abbey’s clarion call to arms. She briefly flashed it at me, smiled sweetly, closed up the offending sandwich, and buried it once more in the stylish wicker basket.
In an instant, it all became crystal clear. I thought back to the ride from the courthouse yesterday. Had I said anything that could come back at me? I could be disbarred! But when I played it out in my head, all I could be found guilty of was a conversation about literature. Whatever happened after that could not be pinned on me.
I climbed the tree and settled on a branch just below Betty Lou. “Look,” I said. “While I greatly admire your gumption, these cops are really pissed off. They’re ready to throw the book at you. I am not certain how many Federal and State laws you might have violated, but these guys are serious. They are not used to being shown up, not least by a bunch of women. You all could do some time, and I’m not sure we will be able to stop this train once it leaves the station. Are you sure you want to go on with this?”
Betty Lou smiled at me with a mixture of condescension and sympathy. Her deep blue eyes shone bright, and her pert red mouth parted slightly to reveal perfect white teeth. “Mr. Cooper, I appreciate all you have done for us, but my friends and I have been underestimated our entire lives. We were raised to be docile little southern belles, which never fit quite right. We recognize that what we have done or not done may have consequences, but we were also raised to know right from wrong and what these people are attempting is just plain wrong.”
“We are steel magnolias. And besides, June over there - her daddy is on the Georgia Supreme Court. Delilah’s daddy is on the Bd of Delta Airlines. Catherine heads the social committee at the Piedmont Driving Club and Lynette is on leave from Coca Cola where she is an assistant to the CEO. We’ll take our chances with the G-man and his Hitler youth.”
Civil disobedience was alive and well among the upper-class ladies here in James Oglethorpe’s twentieth-century colony! I was quite proud of whatever “small” part I might have had in encouraging this courageous act.
The cops threatened, and the Chief spewed splenetic rage and called upon God almighty to smite these radicals. Lucky must have been having a field day observing the chaos. The rest of us were truly enjoying the spectacle. My small part would not be revealed. GOD officials played loud music and several law enforcement officers even climbed up to attempt to reason and threaten jail time. But the “ladies” were implacable. They would not come down until the 11th Circuit ruled on the appeal.
It rained. They stayed. The Mayor came to plead with them. They stayed. They sent in a Carter relative to convince them that well-bred southern ladies did not defy the law, also to no avail. Exactly two days after those ten respectful, educated daughters of the South climbed onto those trees, the 11th Circuit issued a temporary restraining order stopping all action in the parks until they could rule. The appellate judges swatted away the weak, error laden, (if stridently believed by the department and the big money suburban developers backing them), factually shallow arguments, like so many fat lumbering horse flies. The Court of Appeals overturned the trial judge, ruling on behalf of the neighborhoods, and the parks were saved.
Today, President Carter’s beautiful library and International Center for Peace sit proudly in a sunken glen where almighty GOD had planned the freeway. It is served by an inauspicious two-lane parkway winding through the beautiful Olmsted Linear Parks.
When the ladies climbed down from the trees, they immediately came by the offices downtown. With the doors closed, peering down at the crowded street life, I sat back and warily asked the question I had dared not ask before. “What happened to all that machinery?”
Betty Lou looked up demurely and quietly parried with a question. “Do you really want to know?” I realized that I did not!
Miraculously, all charges against the tree sitters disappeared over the coming months.
Cal once more (almost) had her faith restored in the American justice system. Satan paid up. “How much better could life among the Gods be?”