Julia Emmons
Midtown resident + former Executive Director of the Atlanta Track Club
My name is Julia Emmons. Like Colony Square, I too have been in Atlanta for 50 years. I arrived in 1968 from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was a research librarian at Harvard. I followed my then husband down to Emory, where I taught Library Science for 15 years, picking up a PHD in History along the way.
In 1985, I tossed my tenured Emory professorship aside and became the Executive Director of the Atlanta Track Club and, as such, also Director of the then 25,000-runner Peachtree Road Race. This was a career move that still has close friends shaking their heads. Though I still love Emory, and presently serve on the Emory Alumni Board, I have never regretted the unorthodox swerve. I quickly became involved with USA Track and Field, the sport’s governing body, which led to the privilege of serving as Director of the Men’s and Women’s Olympic marathons for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and, in 2004, as a staff member of the US Track and Field team at the Athens Olympics.
Amid all this, and for reasons as baroque as those leading me to give up tenure, I successively ran for an at-large post on the Atlanta City Council, where I served from 1998-2002. One joyous outcome of this adventure was that I got to learn about Colony Square’s Hanover House when longtime resident Marge McDonald hosted me for a fundraiser at her Condo. With that one visit was hooked: I loved the architecture, the locale, the people, the ambiance. Though a happy resident of Morningside for 20 years, I jumped at the chance to move into Hanover House in late 2006. As I continue to savor the arts across the street (I am now a docent at the High), the ease of taking MARTA, and ever-changing, ever-bustling street life, I beam with delight at living in Midtown: I would live nowhere else. – Julia Emmons, Midtown resident + former Executive Director of the Atlanta Track Club