“Who is Upshaw Bentley, Homer? You can beat him.” I actually said that, or words to that effect. I was urging Commissioner Homer Cooper to run for mayor, which he did, and I turned out to be the only person in Athens who didn’t know Upshaw Bentley. Upshaw never held that against me. For one thing, it didn’t matter to his vote total, and for another, he was too much the  gentleman to need to waste time fretting over scruffy dissidents. For a third thing, Upshaw was just a genuinely nice guy who was able to tolerate people outside his established comfort zone. 

Upshaw ran for mayor, not because he was politically ambitious but as the kind of community service he always did when it was needed. And he was a good mayor, as he was good at everything he did and in the same genial way, kind amused by it all. I can imagine that if he was your lawyer, his presence and knowledge of the people involved would have a calming effect on you and on your adversaries, too. I knew Upshaw for a long time, but only from a distance, and from my perspective, one of his great strengths was that he didn’t get his own ego mixed up in things, probably the secret of his success. I was sitting next to Upshaw one night in City Hall, during some kind of public public hearing while he was mayor but not presiding. It was fairly soon after Upshaw had succeeded Julius Bishop, and an activist at the podium made the charge that Julius was still running the city through Upshaw. “And doing a piss-poor job of it, too,” Upshaw muttered to me. 

I did have the advantage that one of Upshaw’s lifelong best friends was my pal Bucky Redwine, whose stories about Upshaw humanized him and made him much more than just the smooth man in the wrinkled seersucker suit. Bucky, of course, could humanize anybody, and he told me of their hijinks during school when Bucky’s father would rent a room in the old Georgian Hotel for business associates during football weekends but only use it on Saturday, turning it over to Bucky and Upshaw on Fridays. Bucky told me about Upshaw learning to fly a P-47 fighter plane during the war, and how Upshaw shot at the target and severed the rope pulling it behind the tow plane. (There he was again: Citizen Bentley, doing what needed to be done.) And when Upshaw and Frances got married, of course Bucky and friends saw to it that when Upshaw knelt at the altar, the audience could clearly see written on the sole of his left shoe, “To Hell” and on his right, “With Tech.”

What a small smattering of Upshaw stories I know. How many there are! And, how many there were that only Upshaw knew, and the people he helped—quietly, and behind the scenes.

I’ve recently had the privilege of doing some advance reading in the soon-to-be-published new book of Athens history, The Tangible Past of Athens, Georgia. Inevitably, such a book spotlights the citizens who have made Athens what it is and by doing so reminds us that throughout our history there have been people whose personal success has advanced their city’s success. In every generation there have been those who were able to work hard for themselves and their families and also for our community. They rise up from these annals. They were here. They walked our streets. They did the civic work that needed doing. They left their imprint on our town. And now Upshaw has joined them. Now he, too, belongs to history, and to Athens.