One of Savannah’s most prominent Hollywood connections is television and screen actor Stacy Keach. Stacy was born in Savannah to two Hollywood parents in 1941. [His mother was the daughter of a hunting companion of Theodore Roosevelt, William Peckham This sentence is confusing]. Mary Peckham Keach received a Master’s Degree in Drama and Speech. While at her alma mater she met Stacy Keach Sr. whom she married and had the two sons Stacy Keach Jr. and James Keach. The two sons would have prominent Hollywood careers.

 While Mary was here she taught English in Savannah schools prior to the birth of Stacy Jr. Stacy Sr. would teach at Armstrong State College and in 1937 form the university playhouse, forerunner to the Masquers. It was Stacy Sr.’s job. that would take them away from Savannah. The family of three moved to Flushing, Long Island. The father became a talent scout for RKO, one of the five big movie studios of its time. It was there in 1946 they gave birth to their second son, James. In 1948, the Keaches moved to the San Fernando Valley. Mary would become active in community affairs. The two brothers were now close to Hollywood. Stacy Sr. would have an outstanding career as an actor. He would appear in ''Pretty Woman'' (1990 in which he played a senator, and ''Cobb'' (1994), in which he portrayed the baseball star Jimmie Foxx. He appeared in television shows like ''St. Elsewhere,'' ''Dynasty, ''Baretta,'' ''The Incredible Hulk,'' ''Adam 12,'' ''Barnaby Jones,'' ''Kojack,'' ''Mannix,'' ''Marcus Welby, M.D.,'' ''Bonanza,'' ''Wagon Train,''  among others.

Stacy Keach Jr. would excel at his studies as a Fulbright scholar to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and attending the University of California at Berkeley and the Yale Drama School. He became a brilliant and prolific stage actor, winning awards for his performance in King Lear. He was also an accomplished pianist and composer writing the music for the film, Imbued (2009), in which he also starred. In the seventies he was a major actor working with legendary actors and directors. He starred in movies such as The New Centurions_ with George C. Scott; Doc Holiday with Faye Dunaway in the film 'Doc' (1971); an over-the-hill boxer, Billy Tully in Fat City (1972); directed by John Huston, and The Long Riders (1980), which he co-produced and co-wrote with his brother, James Keach, directed by Walter Hill. On the lighter side he played in Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud (1970), was the oldest living lecherous Wright Brother; and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) where he played a crazed albino out to kill Paul Newman. He was also in the cult movies Up in Smoke (1978), and the sequel, Nice Dreams (1981) as Sgt. Stedenko.

His most prominent television role was as Mickey Spillane’s fictional detective Mike Hammer, which he played in numerous stand-alone television films and at least three different television series throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

His stellar career has been recognized by many. He played Ernest Hemingway, for which he won a Golden Globe as Best Actor in a mini-series and was nominated for an Emmy in the same category. He has been the recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from Pacific Pioneer's Broadcasters, the San Diego Film Festival, the Pacific Palisades Film Festival, and the 2007 Oldenburg Film Festival in Germany and the 2010 Lifetime Award from the St. Louis Film Festival. In 2008, he received the Mary Pickford Award for versatility in acting.

Amazingly Keach was born with a cleft lip and a partial cleft of the hard palate.  This has led to him wearing his signature mustache to hide the scars. He has served as honorary chairman of the Cleft Palate Foundation. Despite this he may be the greatest actor Savannah has ever produced.
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I have been on vacation so I have republished old posts for the Short Stories and Historical Ruminations. But the Cranky Man Philosophizes is new and awaits your reading.

Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. Turner was born a free-man in Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina on February 1, 1834 and died on May 5, 1915. The eighty-one years of his life were one of America’s remarkable stories He received his preacher's license in 1853. He became pastor of Israel AME church in Washington D.C. During His ministry in Washington DC Abraham Lincoln commissioned Turner to the office of Chaplain in the Union Army,  This made him the first Black chaplain in the United States Army in 1863. He primarily served the First Regiment of United States Colored Troops, a regiment he helped create and for which he recruited soldiers he traveled throughout the South as an itinerant evangelist, going as far as New Orleans, Louisiana. His religious career was significant because of the many A.M.E. churches he started after the Civil War.   
Turner may be considered as a precursor of the Black Liberation Theology Movement of the sixties and seventies. In his sermons, he often stated that God is a Negro, a phrase meant to show God’s unique concern for Blacks, a concept shocking some even today. In 1885, showing his well-known radicalness, he became the first A.M.E. bishop to ordain a woman, Sarah Ann Hughes, to the office of deacon[1]
          He was equally groundbreaking in his political career. Reverend Turner helped organize Georgia's Republican Party and served in the State's new Constitutional Convention. He was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives to represent Macon, becoming one of the first Black legislators in America. His term was cut short and the revocation of many of the reforms of Reconstruction. In 1868, the vast majority of white legislators decided to expel their African American peers on the grounds that holding public office was a privilege denied Blacks. When the Georgia legislature was voting on whether to seat the newly elected Black legislators, Reverend Turner delivered a speech, “Am I Not a Man,” that is still recognized as one of America’s greatest speeches.  A quote from the speech reads:
 
Mr. Speaker: Before proceeding to argue this question upon its intrinsic merits, I wish the members of this House to understand the position that I take. I hold that I am a member of this body. Therefore, sir, I shall neither fawn nor cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg them for my rights. Some of my colored fellow members, in the course of their remarks, took occasion to appeal to the sympathies of members on the opposite side, and to eulogize their character for magnanimity. It reminds me very much, sir, of slaves begging under the lash. I am here to demand my rights and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood. There is an old aphorism which says, “Fight the devil with fire,” and if I should observe the rule in this instance, I wish gentlemen to understand that it is but fighting them with their own weapon.[2]
 
 
Though his eloquence was unmatched, the Black legislators would eventually be unseated.

         Turner’s significance for Savannah was his appointment to work at the Custom House and served as a pastor of the prestigious St. Philip's AME Church here in Savannah. In 1876 while serving at St. Philip’s he was elected manager of the publishing house of the church. Four years later, in a hard-fought and controversial contest, he won election as the twelfth bishop of the AME Church. Much of his time was spent in Georgia, where he preached at revivals in Macon, Athens and other places helping phenomenal growth in Georgia AME churches. While Bishop He wrote The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity (1885), a popular guide to Methodist policies and practices.
.          Turner supported Black Nationalism and emigration of Blacks to Africa, a concept that would plant ideas for Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X in the twentieth century. He owned two newspapers: The Voice of Missions (he served as editor from 1893 to 1900) and later The Voice of the People (editor from 1901 to 1904). These newspapers helped him found the International Migration Society, an effort to move Blacks from the United States back to Africa where they could find equality in economics, political, and social spheres. He organized two ships that left the Savannah harbor with a total of 500 or more emigrants, who traveled to Liberia in 1895 and 1896. Turner also served as chair of the board of Morris Brown College from 1896-1908 a historically black university.
           Turner was ahead of his time and his term as pastor of St. Phillip’s Church (see picture below) here and later becoming bishop do the Georgia AME allowed him a platform to challenge the lynchings and the establishing of Jim Crow laws. He was a proud voice crying in the wilderness of Georgia and Reconstruction America in Savannah many years before Black mayors, Black uncontested state representatives, and Black council members could be found. Savannah has a monument in his honor at the former site of St. Phillip’s Church across from the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Art Museum (see below). There is also a portrait of him hanging in the State Capitol.

Savannah has had many great sculptors that have produced works for Savannah. Daniel Chester French (Lincoln Memorial), Felix de Weldon (Iwo Jima Monument), and Alexander Doyle (Confederate General’s monuments for Lee, Johnston, and Beauregard in New Orleans) are examples of sculptors who have work in Savannah. But John Walz was probably the greatest sculptor that called Savannah home. Walz was born in Wuttemberg, Germany on August 31, 1844. His parents died when he was thirteen and he moved to Philadelphia to be with his sister. He worked in various stone quarries in Philadelphia before deciding he wanted to learn to sculpt. He went to study in Paris and Vienna.

It was in Vienna that fate was to bring him to Savannah. He was studying with Oskar Victor Tilgner when the new and first director of the Telfair Museum Carl Brandt came to Tilgner’s studio to commission four statues for the new art museum. Brand wanted statues of iconic artists to stand outside the Telfair Museum of Art. It is believed as was custom of students in studios Walz with and for Tilgner worked on the Phidias, Michaelangelo, and Rembrandt statues. The Raphael statue was the work of Walz alone. Walz would accompany the statues to Savannah from Vienna to ensure their proper set up. Once here he would make Savannah his home.

From his studio in Savannah Walz made a national reputation through his fine workmanship. Museums would collect his work. He would exhibit his work 1886 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia where he won a prestigious award. Savannah would be infused with his work throughout. Savannah’s cemeteries especially become the homes of his various sculptures. Bonaventure Cemetery has over eighty of his works there. The most famous is his legendary statue ‘Little Gracie’.  Little Gracie Watson was the only child of her parents. Her father was manager of the Pulaski Hotels. She was a beautiful and charming little girl who captured the hearts of all the guests. Two days before Easter, in April 1889, Gracie died of pneumonia at the age of six. In 1890, Walz, carved from a photograph of her a life-sized, delicately detailed marble statue.

Walz studio would have too much work for one man and he brought on Antonio Alliffi who would carve pieces for the ceiling in the Lucas Theater among other things. Many Savannahians have pieces of his work in their private collections. Walz died in November 24, 1922. He is buried in Bonaventure Cemetery. Oddly there is no headstone at his gravesite, yet his work can be found throughout the Cemetery.

Despite the absence of a marker the cemetery made a John Walz Memorial Garden in 2001. Today after a refurbishing of the garden in 2011 the 4,000 square foot garden features 80 different plants. The studio where he once created his masterpieces on Liberty Street is now a vacation rental. As we travel around Savannah John Walz works surround us and act as a gravestone of an artist that once called Savannah home.
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Most people know of the Boston Sons of Liberty. They made their mark on American history for staging the Boston Tea Party. But many people do not know most of the port cities had a group called the Sons of Liberty. They were responsible for helping to ensure boycotts were enforced and fomenting a spirit of revolution in the colonies. So it should be no surprise that Savannah had a group of the Sons of Liberty here. They were also known as the Liberty Boys.
 
The unique thing about or Sons of Liberty of Savannah were they represented a generational divide. As Noble Wimberly Jones, Joseph Habersham and others were patriots, their fathers were Loyalists. Other members were Archibald Bulloch, John Houston, George Walton, Peter Tondee, Edward Telfair, John Milledge, Joseph Clay, William Gibbons and Mordecai Sheftall. Because we were the youngest colony many of the first generation of settlers still felt a need for a connection and a protection from the motherland: England. But the American bug for liberty had captured the second generation and they created Savannah’s Sons of Liberty. 
 
On August 10, 1774, a historic meeting was held at Tondee's Tavern in Savannah. There were thirty men present. They debated their role in what was fast becoming an American Revolution. It had been nine months since the Boston Tea Party. The English, in response, had closed the Boston Harbor. There had been a clarion call for a meeting of the colonies so they could have a united front as more and more intolerable acts were undertaken by England. Although the Savannah Liberty Boys did not like taxation without representation and other British laws, they would not send a representative to the first Continental Congress. The young men were not quite ready to force rebellion on their fathers.


However when the news of the battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts came, they could no longer withhold their rebellious spirits. They broke into the powder magazine in Savannah on May 11, 1775, and divided the powder with the South Carolina revolutionaries and sent some to Boston, the center of the Revolution at the time (After the war, when Savannah citizens were unable to support themselves by shipping Southern cotton, the generous people of Boston returned the favor, and shipped food and supplies to save the people of Savannah).
 
 Later in January Joseph Habersham, at the ripe age of eighteen, entered the royal governor’s mansion, interrupting a dinner, and placed Governor Wright under house arrest. Colonel Lachlan McIntosh (famed for his fatal duel which took the life of Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence) took over the charge of the defense of the city for the patriots. In response a British fleet blocked the Savannah River. What took place next has been called the Battle of the Rice Boats on March 2-3, 1776.  The British warships were not looking for battle but seized rice-laden merchant ships in the Savannah harbor. Royal Governor Wright and his chief councilors managed to hitch a ride to leave for England.

The Liberty Boys of Savannah left their mark with their various acts of bravery during the Revolution. Today Liberty Square, divided by a street named in their honor,sits right across from the Chatham County Courthouse and Jail. It was laid out in 1799. The only monument in Liberty Square is the American Legion Flame of Freedom. The Liberty Boys’ names can now be found in our street names and institutions.
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