Celestine sibley biography of michael
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CELESTINE SIBLEY
Nurse. Volunteer. social activist.
2010 Inductee, Georgia Women of Achievement
“Her impact...could never be put in perspective. And later, as apolitical and social columnist, she knew no bounds.”
– Furman Bisher
Celestine Sibley (1914-1999) won many awards and served many humanitarian causes during her career as a reporter, columnist, and author, becoming an iconic adopted daughter of Georgia. She was born on May 23, 1914, in Holly Florida to Henry Colley and Evelyn Barber, known as “Muv” later in Sibley’s columns.
At age seven she and her mother moved to Creola, Alabama, where she was adopted bygd her stepfather, Wesley, Reeder Sibley
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Occasionally, books are published in the U. S. that can best be described as “oddities” which acquire a kind of cult following. Their popularity has little to do with literary merit, even though they frequently have much to say about social and cultural matters. Essentially, they appeal to our fascination with the bizarre, morbid and extraordinary.
Some notable examples are: In Advance of the Landing by Douglas Curran (extraordinary photographs and interviews with people who believe that an alien invasion is imminent); and Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (a bizarre photographic journey which depicts the impact of the Depression on Wisconsin’s rural farm life). Oracle of the Ages is a biography of Georgia “witch and fortune-teller,” Mayhayley Lancaster, who died in 1955.
According to the author, Dot Moore, there are a significant (though dwindling) number of people who not only remember Mayhayley but are willing to talk about the tall, thin woman with one eye who lived in a Hea
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Cityscapes
Editor’s Note: Among the many discoveries I made while researching and editing a collection of my late Atlanta Journal-Constitution colleague’s 60-year reporting career were her dispatches from Hollywood. By the 1990s when I worked with her in the newspaper’s Features Department, Celestine was best known for writing a column that ran multiple times each week in the Living section. But she had also served as the paper’s first female assistant city editor during World War II and covered murder trials, the Georgia legislature (the state capitol’s press gallery is now named for her) and lots of breaking news.
After stumbling upon a photo of her on set with Clark Gable from the 1950s and inquiring about it in her office one morning, Celestine matter-of-factly described her four-year stint flying to Hollywood in the early 1950s to interview the stars of the day and visit them on-set. At the time, Hollywood executives were terrified of the increasingly popular glo