There are certain people who are Atlanta. And for many of us, Ted Turner was one of them. I only met Ted once.
I was having lunch at Ted’s Montana Grill downtown with his longtime business partner George McKerrow while interviewing him for a magazine story. Back when I was editor-in-chief of a local luxury publication. (Lisa Rayner may or may not have been there. I know Claudia D’Avanzo certainly was!) George looked up mid-conversation and casually said, “Oh, there’s Ted.”
And there he was. Sitting in a corner booth eating a bison burger on a random Atlanta afternoon with a friend.
Then George walked me over to meet him, and Ted could not have been kinder. Warm handshake. Friendly. Totally at ease. No entourage energy. No performance. Above all, just Ted.
Meanwhile, internally, I was trying not to completely lose it because I had grown up watching Braves games on WTBS Superstation like half the South. Ted Turner wasn’t just famous to us. He felt like ours. Loud, funny, outrageous, wildly smart, unapologetically Southern. “The Mouth from the South” in the flesh.
Later, after interviewing Jane Fonda and his daughter Laura Turner Seydel over the years, I learned more about the man behind the legend. Savannah roots. South Georgia swagger. Big ideas delivered with a drawl.
And maybe that’s part of why people loved him so much.
Ted Turner never sanded the Southern off himself to be taken seriously. He built global brands, changed media forever, helped put Atlanta on the map, and still sounded like a guy you’d meet at a tailgate in Athens.
There’s a business and life lesson in that.
Basically, you do not have to flatten your personality to become successful. You can be brilliant and a little hayseed. Strategic and still charming. Sophisticated with a Southern accent. Two-Sided Southern, if you will.
To this day, Ted Turner’s fingerprints are all over this city and far beyond it. Rest easy, Ted. Atlanta won’t ever quite sound the same without you.