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The Stone wall at West Sussex and Wildwood

There's History To Tell

by Mary Francillon for MLPA Newsletter, Holiday edition, 1994

One day during our first cold February week in Atlanta in 1985, in our new home on Wildwood Road, we found a welcome note on our doormat-a little poem about flowers and friendship, clipped from a magazine, with a comment about the cheery sight of the daffodils in our window. It was signed by Betty Haizlip.

That thoughtful gesture gave promise of neighborliness, a promise that Betty and her husband Bill more than fulfill, as anyone near their Wildwood-Lenox corner will tell you. But their part in this community goes far beyond that corner and, in fact, goes back into the 1930's, when Lenox was a gravel road, and even earlier.

Their house is a landmark known for the handsome stone wall that faces the north end of West Sussex Street, for the flag that usually flies on the terrace at the top of the stone steps, and for the tile roof of their homey low brick house. Bill and Betty themselves are far too animated to be called landmarks, but it's true that there are some benchmarks in their lives that line up with the history of this community.

Betty, then Betty Brown, grew up at 805 East Morningside in one of the earliest houses on that street. She remembers the double-decker bus that came up Morningside to the end of the line at Sherwood, the blacksmith shop that stood where the Texaco station is on Piedmont near Monroe, and J.S. Broyles grocery on the other side of Piedmont in the next block up.

As Betty Brown proceeded in school toward the business career that would include more than 20 years at Coca Cola, an enterprising boy named Bill Haizlip moved to Atlanta from Eatonton, Ga., with his family. He was about 12 and had what he calls a brogue, strong enough to get a lot of attention in the days when an Atlanta schoolroom didn't get many transfers from as far away as Eatonton. Talk to him now, and you know that his quick wit and his talent as a storyteller soon made his listeners educate their ears so they could understand that brogue. (The rewards are still great!)

Short on money but long on ambition and common sense, Bill started with a paper route for the old Atlanta Georgian, and in high school days scooped Byer's ice cream after the Georgia Cracker baseball games on Ponce de Leon. He will still brag about getting more scoops out of five gallons than any other employee could. ("You mean you were good at making the scoops hollow?" "That's right!" with a big smile.) Later, there was a full-time job delivering for Polk Musical Supply, at 29 Pryor Street and - after service in the Army - the start of his own delivery business, at first handling pharmaceutical products.

With 380 drugstores in the greater Atlanta area, getting supplies to them and getting filled prescriptions to their customers looked like a good opportunity to Bill Haizlip, and he took it. He provided timely and reliable delivery service, twice a day, to his customers. They could- and some did- schedule their own work by the certainty that Bill's trucks would show up on time. He had the first aluminum-body trucks in Atlanta when his competitors were still using bicycles. When penicillin came out ("They said it would cure anything!") and doctors across the state wanted to have it available quickly, Bill suggested to the Upjohn manager that Greyhound might consider carrying small parcels along with passengers. Sure enough, Greyhound thought it was worth a try, and Bill's company became a link in that chain, too.

Way ahead of the present courier and quick-delivery services, Bill Haizlip was seeing and filling the kind of business needs they now serve, selling efficiency. For example, he noticed the lost time when each business had to send an employee to the post office for mail and then sort it, eating into the business day when orders could be filled and payments deposited. He proposed to pick up a company's mail very early in the morning and have it on the doorstep when the first employee arrived at work. Many stores and other businesses saw the advantage in that, and so Bill's employees were at the post office at 4:00 a.m. to make his new service possible. And at the other end of the scale, Bill's company handled the first "piggy-backs" in Atlanta. His initiative and his eye for opportunity made his business "the Cadillac of delivery services" in Atlanta for many years.

Meanwhile, back in Morningside in the mid-30's, a man named Mifflin Hood had built a house for his daughter out in the woods on a hill where two gravel roads crossed, Lenox and Wildwood. Hood was in the brick and tile business, and the quality of his products is evident in the house today, inside and out, some 60 years later. His company name and the specific plant number are still visible on some of the pavers near the front door. Hood also built a four-stall stable for his daughter's horses back on the two-acre lot toward the creek. The second owners of the property, the Styers family, used the stable as a kennel for their champion boxers.

Monroe Landscaping, which was across from the present site of the Red Cross on Monroe, was responsible for the wall you see today on the Wildwood side. That's the third version. It was built by Sonny Reese after he came back from Italy, where Mr. Monroe had sent him to study architecture.

Though the Haizlips lived in Tucker in the first years of their marriage, they were in Morningside often, and always on Friday evening for dinner with Betty's family. Since they had hiked all over the area for years, the Lenox-Wildwood corner was a familiar spot, and the house there had caught Betty's eye. When a FOR SALE sign showed up one Friday, Bill and Betty had this conversation: "But we couldn't possibly afford it!" "I know, but it can't do any harm to look!" And the rest is history, as they say.

But with a Bill Haizlip twist, of course. In public, he stuck to the "can't-afford-it" line despite his own mother's urging, but when Betty went for an appendectomy, he made the deal and surprised her by tossing the papers to her on her hospital bed. That was August of 1954.

In the 40 years since, many changes have come to the neighborhood, but their house has a timeless appeal, and its walls have absorbed a lot of laughter. Some of the interior wood, by the way, was supposedly cut on the property. A colleague at Coca Cola, an older man, now gone, once told Betty Haizlip he knew exactly where she lived. He knew the spot well, he said, because one spring day he had carved a pair of initials on a beech tree some distance in from the road. The tree is still there, center blasted but alive, and you can still read part of the initials, stretched by 60 years or more of growth.

Another delightful link with the past came to light for the Haizlips in 1991, when they were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. They were married by a Morningside minister in his home, and on their anniversary they went to that house for old time's sake. They knocked at the door to explain why they would be standing outside having their picture taken. When they spoke the name of the minister who married them, the elderly woman at the door said "I am his daughter." She invited them in to reminisce with her, and they stood in front of the old fireplace once again, for the photograph.

That's what our neighborhood is like, thanks to people like Bill and Betty Haizlip. Hang around, and maybe your children will have stories like that to tell. In Morningside, we don't have to wait for New Year's Eve to sing "Here's a hand to welcome you..." and the other verses of "Auld Lang Syne."

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