Public Service At The Station - 1434 Words

With a house in the suburbs and a small family, life on the outside looked as ordinary as it seemed. However, growing up in the Atlanta Bonnie Lee Kellogg knew, the controversy was in plain sight. Her first experiences with music occurred as a teenager when she bought her first AM radio. During the nights, she would listen to various stations across the states where 50,000-watt coverage was available. Red Jones, the on-air disk jockey of her local radio station, announced her as the winner of a contest to â€Å"be a disk jockey for the day† (Kellogg 2016). Even after the contest had finished and her prize received, she would continue to work at the station writing PSA’s (public service announcements) and was assigned other errands. She would†¦show more content†¦She was a liberal thinker living amongst conservative minds. Many of the friends that she had were considered â€Å"outcasts† by Atlanta social standards. One of her friends was expelled from the Peace Corps because he dared to date a black woman in Africa. She went to high school with the son of a governor who took out an ax to repel demonstrators and shut down his restaurant rather than â€Å"serve blacks† (Kellogg 2016). Dating the captain of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, the couple would remain in â€Å"safe† neighborhoods out of fear of the violence he would face for being out with a white girl (Kellogg 2016). Working in the radio industry, she had a lot of black friends, and it was recalling those moments in the present how unusual it was to go to the clubs and see artists such as Ray Charles and the Fifth Dimension performing in person. Growing up listening to black artists, there was a lot of hostility regarding the racist attitude of the rest of Atlanta versus her own. This is evident in an essay written by her in 1976 titled â€Å"Today I’m Going to Be Green† served as the advertising campaign for ARCO oil that envisioned her persp ective of the world in the year of 2076. In her writing, she imagined the world â€Å"where color didn’t matter† and is optimistic about the direction concerning the progress going forward (Kellogg 2016). Her support for equal rights was a part of her principles, witnessing the funeral parade of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from a tall