Patrick O’Carroll, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACMI became The Task Force’s fourth President and Chief Executive Officer in 2022. A physician and public health professional for 37 years, Dr. O’Carroll has extensive experience working across numerous public health domains including global health, epidemiology and disease surveillance, injury control, tobacco use prevention, adolescent health, disaster response and emergency management, public health information system development, bioterrorism, and epidemic control.
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THURSDAY MAY 2 Brighter Futures Fundraiser
The Lost Druid, Avondale Estates
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FRIDAY MAY 3 Meeting/
Speaker:
TBD
Get a sneak peek at upcoming speakers on the website HERE.
MEETING RECAP | APRIL 12
Guests
Jill Joplin | DeKalb Library Foundation and
President of the Decatur Business Association,
guest of Tim Martin
Mike McGuire | guest of Barbara Tedrow
Scot Lockman | DeKalb Library Foundation,
guest of Alison Weissinger
Leslie Wingate | Decatur Book Festival,
guest of Alison Weissinger
Catherine Zuber | Rotary prospect,
guest of Art Rosser
Jeremy Hanff | Rotary prospect,
guest of Jason Conn
Zohirul Alam | Rotary prospect,
guest of Jason Conn
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Event Update! The Brighter Futures Fundraiser is coming up fast!
DATE: Thursday, May 2
Time: 6 PM
Place: The Lost Druid, 2866 Washington St,
Avondale Estates, GA 30002
Jason Conn reported that Intown Hardware-Decatur is donating a Big Green Egg for the Foundation auction. Jason also announced that tickets for the Egg are available for $20 each or 6 for $100. All sales go to the Foundation.
Art Rosser talked about more types of experiences we can consider for getting sponsorships like pub crawls and tickets for the Atlanta Open tennis tournament.
Maria Alvarez reminded us that the end date for sponsorship signups is April 19.
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Toy Park Bench Update
Chris Brannon announced that the club contributed benches which were installed in the Decatur Toy Park in commemoration of James Brewer-Calvert’s work with the Decatur Rotary Club. There will be a Rotary cleanup service of the park on May 11, 9 am to 1 pm. Volunteers welcome!
SPEAKER RECAP
Sara Butler, Author
Fortune and Folly: The Weird and Wonderful Life of the South's Most Eccentric Millionaire
Sara Butler talked to the members about her book, Fortune and Folly.
Nestled in the outskirts of Atlanta, in a suburb called Druid Hills, lies Briarcliff Mansion. It sits on Briarcliff Road in the Briarcliff neighborhood, surrounded by strip malls and businesses with Briarcliff in their names. The mansion and the land it occupies are owned by Emory University, which refers to it as its Briarcliff Campus. Fortune and Folly, in part, illuminates the largely lost story of how the mansion, and the entire surrounding neighborhood, got its name. But in order to understand the mansion, we have to understand the man who built it.
Briarcliff Mansion once belonged to a man named Asa Candler, Jr. ― or Buddie as friends and family knew him. The second son and namesake of Coca-Cola founder Asa Griggs Candler, Buddie was a wealthy real estate developer of great successes and greater failures. A man of big vision and bigger adventures, and a socialite whose boisterous, unapologetic personality made him both beloved and reviled in the Atlanta community between 1910 and 1950. But after he passed away in 1953, his stories faded from memory, either tangled up with or overshadowed by his father.
The mansion today.
It’s no mystery why Briarcliff garners attention. It’s self-consciously grandiose, built to display maximum grandeur to the neighborhood. It towers over the landscape, set far back from the road behind a filled-in, overgrown pool. Its face is stitched together where a music hall was added two years after the main house was completed, and the bricks don’t quite match up.
Fortune and Folly offers a deep dive into the life of Asa Candler, Jr. to excavate a piece, and place, of Atlanta history. A copy of the book was presented in the speaker’s honor to the DeKalb Library System.
Thank You to Our Club Sponsors
We are grateful for the support of our local sponsors, and we encourage our members to support them in return.
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