Tag Archive for marianne green

The Power Of Way Back When

January 30, 2013 Editorials, Letters To The Editor Comments Off

The old news in this feature in the Enterprise Recorder stirs memories, usually pleasing to recall. That was my anticipation as I read an item in the January 25, 2013 issue. The lead appeared routine: January 29,1943. Pvt William F. Brooks of Lovett finished training at Aerial Gunnery School and was given the rank of sergeant. From Lovett? THAT’S FRANK BROOKS! The good looking, blonde, blue-eyed neighbor . . just ahead of my sister’s class at Greenville High School, one of those older kids who awed us small fry. Frank Brooks brought home the reality of WWII.
The war in my childhood had been saving tin cans and aluminum gum wrappers, saving enough pennies to buy savings stamps for my filled book to get a war bond ($18 bond would grow to $25), seeing the rail cars full of pine stumps (pine tar for what?), doing without sugar and using white stuff for butter (color came later to margarine) — our every day overshadowed by knowing that one of us was on a Navy ship in the Pacific war zone. BUT FRANK WAS MISSING! FRANK WAS KILLED IN ACTION! Word filtered through my childhood fog that Frank was the gunner in that front bubble on a bomber that had been shot down. The Brooks family’s tragedy ratcheted up our anxiety although unaware of Midway and Coral Sea battles where the carrier Yorktown was sunk and my brother spent hours in the water before rescue. My cousin’s wounding in North Africa had been alarming, bearable because he would be back stateside. It was Frank Brooks who made even a little country kid comprehend how terrible war is.
Marianne Green

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Letter to the Editor: I Voted To End Madison Dry

August 23, 2012 Letters To The Editor Comments Off

Madison County people are as smart and discipined as people in the rest of the United States. The Madison Yes objectors expressing their fears in statements and signs are selling short the people who keep themselves and their children off drugs and behave themselves drinking beer at backyard barbecues. People who do not drink and fear alcohol besides beer evidently do not know people who enjoy wines as well as a mixed drinks on occasion. Madison citizens can use alcohol in moderation as successfully as they use automobile speed semsibly.
Another reason I voted FOR is that I despise hypocrisy and wilful blindness. Objectors say nothing about the alcohol sold here in umlimited amounts of beer at groceries. Worst, gas stations sell beer, too. Beer can addle the brain, interfere with safe driving, prompt family altercations and lead to addiction through a pattern of abuse. Attack the legal sale of stronger spirits and ignore beer sales? That is hypocritical and not logically defensible.
Marianne Green

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Emotional Discussion at County Commission Meeting

March 3, 2011 Front Page One comment

By Lynette Norris
Greene Publishing, Inc.

Budget cuts and drug testing contracts made for some intense public input at the March 2 meeting of the Madison Board of County Commissioners. First up to speak was Marianne Green addressing the need of the entire country, particularly Madison County, to do more than just talk about budget cuts at a time when state and local funding sources that have helped Madison in the past are now drying up. Green herself, having received notice that her late husband’s Survivor Benefit Plan was cutting her monthly benefits by $30 a month, told commissioners that she had asked Congressman Ander Crenshaw to work on a “share-the-pain” plan to cut $30 from the monthly income of everyone else who has retired from government (Green’s late husband retired after 30 years in the U.S. Navy).
Budget cuts were also the initial reason the Commission had taken bids from several drug testing companies months earlier, to see if there was a less expensive, local alternative to the one currently being used, Airport Medical in Valdosta. In its January meeting, the Commission had awarded the contract to Tax Doctor and More, MD, owned by Meshalene Love-Taylor. However, at its February meeting, after reviewing the proposed contract and seeing no significant cost savings, the Commission voted 3-2 to rescind their earlier action and remain with Airport Medical.
“What in the world happened?” asked Rev. Albert Lee Barfield. “In this time of tightening belts…this is a slap in the face of every Madisonian tax-payer, when someone in the county can do it, work still goes outside the county.” Barfield went on to say that “we need a partnership between county and black-owned businesses…she (Taylor) is local, and I think we ought to take a lot of stock in our local businesses. It’s what made Madison.”
Barfield then questioned each commissioner about why he or she had voted for or against the contract at the last meeting. Those who had voted for it cited cost savings and “shopping locally,” while those who had opposed it said they had not seen any significant savings after reviewing the contract. Commissioner Justin Hamrick declined to answer.
Sheriff Ben Stewart took the floor to respond that some services needed to go out of the county, to companies that had no ties whatsoever with the community. “I’m not against her (Taylor), I’m against anyone local drug-testing.”
It would be a conflict of interest for anyone local, he added, because “we (in the Sheriff’s Office) have to deal with people in a negative fashion. We write them citations, we put them in jail, we hurt their feelings…if that place in Valdosta burned down tomorrow, I’d ask that we use a drug-testing service in Tallahassee or Perry or Lake City.”
The discussion ended with Barfield asking about the county’s minority advancement policy and Commissioner Renetta Parrish referring him to Oliver Bradley of the EEOC. Stewart assured everyone that he had an open-door policy and that anyone who had any concerns with the Sheriff’s Office to come by and he would be glad to discuss them.

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