Jeff Hullinger, who has been covering the news in Atlanta for four decades, has had a yen for history going back to his childhood.
“I’d drive my parents crazy on road trips because I’d want to stop at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas or the Herbert Hoover library in Iowa,” Hullinger told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Now with Georgia Public Broadcasting, Hullinger is able to scratch his itch for quirky and interesting stories about the state with a new show called “Georgia Legends.” Each of the six episodes feature two stories including interviews with well-known Georgians like civil rights legend Xernona Clayton, Home Depot founder and Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank and former Georgia governor Nathan Deal.
But it’s the offbeat stories that resonate. For instance, Hullinger explores a rivalry between two hot dog franchises, Macon’s Nu-Way Weiners and Atlanta’s Varsity.
“This was like Brezhnev and Nixon,” he said, referencing the 1970s-era U.S.-Soviet detente. “They would not intersect. They would not invade each other’s territory, which has had some fraying over the years but is still in place. I was really interested in that aspect of the story.”
He visits Georgia’s oldest welcome center in Sylvania, which opened in 1962 and survives courtesy of state funding. “It’s a stretch of highway as relevant as a Gov. Sanders speech,” he said, referencing the state governor Carl Sanders from 1963 to 1967.
Hullinger noted that the U.S. interstate highway system made the center semi-irrelevant decades ago yet it manages to survive with an average of 200 visitors a day. “A generation of us remember visiting relatives who lived in states far away by driving tiny two-lane roads eating at mom-and-pop restaurants and staying in crummy hotels,” he said. “The interstates changed that and many small communities suffered.”
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
On the show, he also recounts legendary poet Robert Frost’s love affair with Agnes Scott College in the 1940s until his death in 1963.
“He would stay in Decatur before going to Florida in the winter,” said Hullinger. “He didn’t just do a symposium. He lived there. I got a hold of a women who was a student at the time and has books signed by the great man and remembers conversations with him. He would read from his favorite passages of his works. There’s a giant bronze statue of Robert Frost on campus. I love little forgotten historical nuggets like this.”
Hullinger is not a Georgia native but he has become a true student of the state’s past since he came to Atlanta in 1984. For nearly two decades, he became a prominent sports anchor at WAGA-TV and, for a time, juggled multiple TV and radio gigs. He wanted to become a news anchor but conflict with management at WAGA in 2002 led him into TV exile for several years. Soon after the AJC wrote a story in 2010 questioning why Hullinger was unemployed, 11 Alive hired him as a news anchor, where he stayed for 13 years.
He joined GPB in 2023. “Georgia Legends” is his first major on-air project for the media operation, though he has provided dozens of colorful stories for his “Hullinger’s Musings” blog on the GPB website. In just the past month, he has written about a fisherman who bagged a 7-pound largemouth bass at the lake at Piedmont Park, Friedman’s Shoes moving locations in downtown Atlanta for the first time in 96 years and the 141-year history of the Westview Cemetery.
“These kinds of stories kind of get lost in modern Atlanta, where the focus is so much on growth and the future,” he said.
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
Credit: CONTRIBUTED
IF YOU WATCH
“Georgia Legends,” 9 p.m. Mondays on GPB and on demand on gpb.org
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