I’m not saying that I know any more about love and marriage than anyone else. However, when someone asks me what my greatest idea was, only one comes to mind – my family.
It all started when I was trying to get votes. Not for myself, but for Atlanta mayoral candidate Maynard Jackson. My firm had been hired to help him win the election.
Maynard Jackson’s campaign for mayor of Atlanta was a victory, too. The new mayor was incredibly gracious and thankful. He said to me, “Should I ever be able to help you, just let me know.â€
Now it was time to propose, so I called him. And I also called the Japanese firm that owned Atlanta’s tallest building, the IBM tower. And I called CBS, and I called the caterers, and I called in three producers from my agency.
Just before the six o’clock news, Cynthia received a message from her news director that a white-collar drug bust was about to go down in the penthouse of the IBM tower in midtown Atlanta. The police chief had been told to give Cynthia Good the exclusive story. The news director told her it would be the lead story, live, and that she should hightail it down to the tower to get the story.
Leading two camera trucks, Cynthia Good raced to the intersection of Peachtree and 14th Street where she witnessed some twenty police cars surrounding the building, a SWAT team and a fire truck (I couldn’t swing the chopper).
Cynthia demanded to be let into the building. She was told, “Sorry, ma’am, no one goes in. This is a very dangerous situation.†But Cynthia persevered and finally prevailed. Except for one last catch: a Red Dog SWAT team would have to escort her to the fiftieth floor, which it did. Once there, they broke down the door.
Behind it, she found not a Columbian drug cartel, but a knight of sorts – me – and dinner, champagne and musicians playing as the sun sank behind the picture windows, and I sank to my knees. She sank, too. And we’ve been afloat for 17 beautiful years!
- Joey R., Atlanta, Georgia