Southern Gothic: SCAD’s strange connection to Georgia’s most prolific pedophile

SCAD’s Dear Leader, and proud member of the Poetter clan, would like for her legacy to be that of “America’s Arts Educator.” In light of the recent allegations that SCAD is covering up sexual assaults on campus, she may be remembered for something more.

On a recent radio interview with Wild Man Johnny B (KSMT Radio morning host), Dear Leader gleefully recounted how her first book, Johnny on the Porch with Grandpa provided her the seed money she needed when she and May Poetter founded the Savannah College of Art and Design.

SCAD’s origin story has been untarnished and pristine for the past 34 years. Untarnished that is until recently, when a group of miscreant investigators uncovered what may turn out to be a much darker and uglier story of where the seed for SCAD’s business plan MAY have originated.

This story begins with a man some call “Georgia’s most prolific pedophile,” but whom Dear Leader refers to as “Kin.”

The business model for a private school, run by one family, carefully guarded with a hand-picked, well paid board of directors has been a lucrative formula for Dear Leader’s family for over 50 years. The architect for such a model may have been none other than Louis J. ’Doc’ Poetter.

Below is a short timeline of alleged events that would make V. C. Andrews, Dear Leader’s favorite author, blush.  (see end of post for Atlanta Journal article full text)

1962:  Doc Poetter founds Anneewakee (Cherokee for “Land of Friendly People”) as an adolescent psychiatric care institution specializing in “wilderness therapy” for troubled youth. Family makes up a large body of administrative personnel.

1970:  Doc Poetter is removed as administrator of the facility following a state Department of Human Resources (DHR) investigation of alleged sexual misconduct with male patients. The investigation is not made public and Doc Poetter remains executive director.

1970—July 1986: Doc Poetter is accused of molesting boys in his care, as well as transporting boys to his property in Mexico for similar purposes. Court documents reveal that Doc Poetter subscribed to a theory that boys “had to have a homosexual experience in order to work through their homosexual fear.”

Psychologists and other staff who worked with Doc Poetter at the Anneewakee school testified that the Doctor encouraged sex between faculty members and the boys, as well as participating himself.

September 1970: Dear Leader pens her first best seller, The Clogs they are a Changing, and other South Georgian Meditations.

From as early as 1970, members of Doc Poetter’s family are employed by the school and receive property lease payments from the school in excess of 100k per year while Doc Potter continues to ‘oversee’ operations at the school.

1978: Independently of Doc Poetter, May Poetter, (former trustee of SCAD) flush with cash, co-founds the Savannah College of Art and Design with Dear Leader.

The Savannah College of Art and Design sets up an organizational structure that some claim is eerily similar to the Anneewakee school (family are employed as administrators, a close-knit and easily controlled board is established, money begins to roll in).

January 1980: Dear Leader retires from the Southern Clog Dancing circuit after huge win in Tijuana.  Dear Leader sets her focus to the day-to-day operations of the university while raising her two gifted children in the attic of a ramshackle house at The Landings.

October 1986: six victims of alleged physical and sexual abuse from Anneewakee file suit charging facility officials, including Doc Poetter and Moore, with racketeering to defraud and abuse patients.

Doc Poetter charged by Douglas Sheriff Earl Lee with three counts of sodomy, one count of cruelty to children and one count of simple battery. At the time, Poetter is believed to be in Mexico City with a group of underage boys in his care. Carl Maxwell Moore, Poetter’s chauffeur, is charged with sodomy.

Psychologists and other staff who worked with the Poetters at Anneewakee testifiy that Doc Poetter encouraged sex between staff members and the boys, as well as participating himself.

Doc Poetter is also charged with stealing $29,500 in Anneewakee funds to buy land for “personal use” in Mexico.

Later that year Dear Leader cancels plans for student clog dancing exchange program in Tijuana. Citing lack of adequate accommodations in host city.

November 1986: Nine young women, ages 19 to 24, sue Anneewakee, charging the hospital with racketeering and conspiracy to abuse them sexually and physically, and defraud them financially. Doc. Poetter released after five weeks in the Douglas County Jail when friends and supporters raise his $1 million bond.

One year later, 1987, Doc Poetter is indicted in Douglas County on 22 more sodomy counts dating from 1971. His wife, Mable and his son-in-law James Henry Evans are charged with failure to report child abuse.

By the end of 1987 there are 10 criminal defendants in the case.

April, 1988: Doc Poetter pleads guilty to 19 counts of sodomy with former patients.  He is sentenced to eight years in prison, 12 years probation. He Appeals this conviction in 1999 seeking to Overturn Sodomy Conviction in Anneewakee Attacks.

1989: After 10-week trial, Fulton Superior Court jury awards $5.2 million to three young women made to work as construction laborers.

1990: Dear Leader begins work on statue to commemorate her service to Savannah.  SCAD sculpture department closes soon after.

The Poetter Fortune?
How much money was siphoned from the Anneewakee school by the Poetter family is not clear from the court documents, however, in 1982, court records show that the private school paid over $230,000 in salaries to Doc. Poetter, his wife, two daughters and two sons-in-law, and the school had a surplus of about $2.9 million at year’s end.

Dear Leader claims that her series of Johnny on the Porch with Grandpa books where a runaway success—bringing in “more than enough money to found an art school.”  She also claims that the sale of her yellow VW bug to ‘Cooter’, a southern mechanic par excellence, helped cover SCAD’s first year operating expenses (apparently yellow bugs fetch high prices in Savannah).

Some investigators are not convinced. With rumors swirling of Dear Leader’s imminent retirement, growing financial crises at the art school, and the upcoming release of her anticipated memoir and coloring book— D.L.—Porch Talks with America’s Arts Educator, tensions are running high at SCAD.

“These stories about deviant sexual behavior in Dear Leader’s Family history are total poppycock!” declared SCAD’s Director of Public Pronouncements, Hyacinth Bucket. “And the idea that any of Dear Leader’s Family—educators to the core—would ever consider profits over students…is an insult to every artist who teaches at SCAD for very little money and no job security. We do it because we love the kids.”

From her porch at the Landings, Dear Leader encouraged members of the SCAD community to celebrate the great outdoors stating: “the highest and best use of a front porch is to enable and encourage the art of conversation. We entertain ourselves with stories on the porch. We invite people in. We sit. We visit.”

All stories on www.SCADSECRETS.com are parodies. All content on www.SCADSECRETS.com is fictionalized and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This site and the content contained within are not affiliated with the Savannah College of Art & Design, a University of creative careers founded by Ms. Paula Wallace who is practically perfect in every way.

 

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OBITUARIES: T.M. Jim Parham, Carter aide, social reformer

BYLINE: By Kelleigh Scott STAFF WRITER

DATE: 12-15-1996

PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

EDITION:

SECTION: Newspapers_&_Newswires

PAGE: G10

The memorial service for T.M. Jim Parham, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter and three Georgia governors, will be held at 3 p.m. Tuesday at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Atlanta.

Mr. Parham died Friday of complications from a stroke at St. Joseph’s Hospital. He was 69 and lived in Decatur.

The body was donated to the Emory School of Medicine.

Mr. Parham grew up in an impoverished family in one of Atlanta’s company-owned cotton mill neighborhoods, said his wife, Dorothy Spears Butler of Decatur. “He didn’t know he was poor until he moved out of the cotton mill village,” she said.

Mr. Parham’s humble beginnings had a profound effect, Mrs. Parham said. Throughout his life, she said, he served as an advocate for social reform, particularly pertaining to children.

In 1977, Carter selected Mr. Parham to be a White House special assistant for intergovernment relations. He later moved to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Human Development Services.

“He was a man of enormous passion,” said Jack Watson, who served as White House chief of staff during the Carter Administration. “His passion was reflected in his works for underprivileged people of every age and every circumstance.

“He was one of the most practical, compassionate and eloquent men I’ve ever known,” Mr. Watson said.

Gov. Carl Sanders named Mr. Parham to head the state’s then-new Division for Children and Youth in 1963. In 1971 he was appointed Director of the Department of Family and Children’s Services. And in 1975 he was named commissioner of human resources by Gov. George Busbee.

“There was no such thing as a lost cause or person. Jim never gave up,” said Bill Jamison, a close friend and former colleague at the Georgia Department of Human Resources.

Mr. Parham also taught social welfare at the University of Georgia.

After retiring from the university system in 1994, he served as board president of Emmaus House, where he recently had been working on expanding the children’s programs.

“Jim was particularly disturbed by the negative impact on children which he saw as a byproduct of recent changes in the welfare system,” said Emmaus board member Panke Bradley Miller.

“I asked my husband one time what he’d like to be remembered for, and he said his work for children,” Mrs. Parham said.

Surviving in addition to his wife are two daughters, Vicki P. Deyton of Newnan and Nancy P. Buckler of Peachtree Corners; a stepdaughter, Eileen Butler Gady of Marietta; a stepson, Franklin T. Butler of Douglasville; a sister, Barbara P. Turner of Duluth; and seven grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, donations should be sent to The Emmaus House Foundation, 1017 Capitol Ave. S.W., Atlanta, Ga. 30315.

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Copyright © 2000 The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution

Chronology of Anneewakee events, 1962-89

BYLINE:

DATE: 03-20-1990

PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

EDITION:

SECTION: Newspapers_&_Newswires

PAGE: A/12

– 1962: Louis J. Poetter founds Anneewakee as an adolescent psychiatric care institution specializing in wilderness therapy.

-1970: Poetter is removed as administrator of the facility following a state Department of Human Resources (DHR) investigation of alleged sexual misconduct with male patients. The investigation is not made public, and Poetter remains executive director.

-July 1, 1986: Poetter resigns as Anneewakee board chairman, remains executive director.

-Mid-August 1986: Douglas County Sheriff’s Department and GBI begin examining allegations of patient abuse.

-Oct. 1, 1986: Poetter charged by Douglas Sheriff Earl Lee with three counts of sodomy, one count of cruelty to children and one count of simple battery. At the time, Poetter is believed to be in Mexico City. Carl Maxwell Moore, Poetter’s chauffeur, is charged with sodomy.

-Oct. 5, 1986: Poetter surrenders to authorities.

-Oct. 6, 1986: DHR begins its Anneewakee investigation.

-Oct. 9, 1986: Six victims of alleged physical and sexual abuse file suit charging facility officials, including Poetter and Moore, with racketeering to defraud and abuse patients.

-Oct. 14, 1986: Douglas deputies arrest James C. Womack, co-director of therapeutic services, and charge him with “numerous counts of sodomy.”

-Oct. 17, 1986: Daniel T. Herrera, an Anneewakee employee, charged with cruelty to children. Second group of alleged victims sues.

-Oct. 30, 1986: Poetter charged with stealing $29,500 in Anneewakee funds to buy land for personal use in Mexico.

-Nov. 3, 1986: Robert Lee Winebarger, former group leader, charged with sodomizing young male patient between January 1978 and January 1980.

-Nov. 7, 1986: Nine young women, ages 19 to 24, sue Anneewakee, charging the hospital with racketeering and conspiracy to abuse them sexually and physically, and defraud them financially. Poetter released after five weeks in the Douglas County Jail when friends and supporters raise his $1 million bond.

-Nov. 21, 1986: Twenty-two former Anneewakee patients sue the hospital, naming Poetter, board chairman Jim Parham and other current and former trustees as defendants. This is the fourth suit against the facility and the first to name Parham as a defendant.

-Jan. 25, 1987: Subsidiary of Hospital Corp. of America – HCA Psychiatric Co. -agrees to take over the day-to-day operations of the three Anneewakee facilities. Arrangement prevents the state Department of Human Resources from revoking the facility’s license.

-Feb. 27, 1987: Poetter indicted in Douglas County on 22 more sodomy counts dating from 1971.

-March 6, 1987: Poetter, his wife, Mable, and his son-in-law, James Henry Evans, charged with failure to report child abuse. By now, there are 10 criminal defendants in the case.

-March 8, 1987: HCA Psychiatric Co. signs five-year agreement to manage the camps. That same week, the parents of a former patient sue in federal court in At lanta over dispute in therapy time. Fifth civil action.

-April 8, 1988: Poetter pleads guilty to 19 counts of sodomy with former patients, sentenced to eight years in prison, 12 years probation.

-Oct. 10, 1989: First of six civil trials begins in Fulton County. To date, there are eight lawsuits, 131 plaintiffs and 31 defendants.

-Dec. 19, 1989: After 10-week trial, Fulton Superior Court jury awards $5.2 million to three young women made to work as construction laborers.

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Copyright © 2000 The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution

Slowly rising like a golden planet in the center of what was once Savannah’s Forsythe Park, the 3,000-foot high granite orb is officially known as “The Cenotaph for Dear Leader”.

Within five years, it will be one of the tallest and roundest structures in the world.

When announced in the summer of 2012, the sheer scale and grandeur of the Tomb proved disconcerting for some die-hard Savannah historic preservationists who resist any kind of change even when it is good for them and any memorial in honor of a Great Leader who is far greater than they will ever be and who, unlike their own sorry lives, will be remembered for all eternity

Fortunately, after their initial outcries, none of these complainers has ever been heard from again.

Local hooligans—quite possibly the mentally disturbed former SCAD administrators who promulgate false SCAD “Secrets” in the Blogosphere have spread the rumor that the vanished critics and die-hard preservationists were actually murdered in late August and buried inside Chinese terra cotta warrior figures deep beneath the rising tomb’s foundations. But their “Secrets” are universally understood to be nothing but lies, lies, lies.  “The Truth is that they would have to be faculty in good standing to be buried there,” observed the Mad Turk while chuckling, to this reporter. “Dead but in good standing.”

[leftquote] “The Truth is that they would have to be faculty in good standing to be buried there,” observed the Mad Turk while chuckling, to this reporter. “Dead but in good standing.”[/leftquote]

“It’s a well-known fact that our Cradle-to-Grave benefits program includes Warrior Entombment for all loyal faculty in the shadow of Dear Leader’s Cenotaph. If anyone were buried here, it would be SCAD’s devoted professors who die while on…or because of their jobs…for the cause of continuous teaching that Dear Leader personifies. In both life and death, we all naturally want to be near her.”

By the end of 2012, the eight million tons of Indiana limestone and Vermont Marble required for the project should be on site in the former Forsythe Park. By early January 2013, SCAD’s project leaders anticipate the first of 3,000 Egyptian stonemasons to arrive and begin the arduous process of cutting and leveraging the layers of the Cenotaph into place without the benefit of power equipment or the invention of the wheel.

“We felt that this pre-Roman technology was essential for conveying the hand-crafted perfection of everything that Dear Leader continues to accomplish while still among us,” explains Peter Humpnstump, SCAD’s Dean of Building Arts.

As the tomb rises to its 3,000-foot tip throughout the coming years, SCAD’s generous corporate sponsors will add their own respectful homages to Dear Leader. At the Orb’s very top, the Gulfstream Beacon™ will guide incoming corporate jets and helicopters bearing prominent fashion designers and corporate sponsors towards the Chik-fil-A Ceno Port™ to be located behind sliding bronze doors at the 2,000-foot level.

From here, visitors will enter Dear Leader Land™—collaboration between Disney Imagineers and SCAD’s new Themed Entertainment Design MFA program. “We believe that theming and themed design will be one of the fastest job growth areas in the 21^st century,” the Mad Turk explained. “Our Fashion Department has long worked to maintain and theme Dear Leader’s appearance for her public events…. and it only makes sense that our Themed Entertainment program should design her tomb.”

World leaders will be wowed by virtual recreations of the great events and achievements of Dear Leader’s life highlighted by the sacred moment of her discovery of SCADentology™ while on a meditation retreat in France. Spiraling down through wonders of wealth and greatness, they will arrive at the Lily Pulitzer Floral Fount™, where they will be instructed on how to make art for successful commercial applications.

Known for her modesty, Dear Leader commands a pedagogic empire that, if a country itself, would foster a GDP at #11 in the world.

From her porch at the Landings, she encouraged members of the SCAD community to avoid ostentatious displays and to enjoy life’s simpler pleasures. “The highest and best use of a front porch is to enable and encourage the art of conversation. We entertain ourselves with stories on the porch. We invite people in. We sit. We visit.”

All stories on www.SCADSECRETS.com are parodies.  All content on www.SCADSECRETS.com is fictionalized and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This site and the content contained within it are not affiliated with the Savannah College of Art & Design, a University of creative careers founded by Ms. Paula Wallace who is practically perfect in every way.

A Professor’s Memories of Tik Continued

In this second installment of a two-part story, we learn how Dear Tik helped to transform Chick-fil-A and SCAD into world-class brands

Once known in college as “J. P.”—SCAD’s Vice President for Institutional Advancement, Dear Tik can be “forever proud that he helped his mother and sister to move into a modern home with running water.”

So claims David Tennedide in his memoir Oh Moon of Alabama—Tales from an Academic Backwater. Recalling his decades of business teaching at the University of Alabama- Wood-fuc-a-chuck, Tennedide’s new book offers profound insights into how his young advisee, J.P. Tik grew into one of the world’s leaders in for-profit arts education.

Although a quiet and mediocre student in terms of grades and attendance, J. P. “was simply the most brilliant and insightful student I had in thirty years,” Tennedide writes. “He could speak with the southern clarity and force of a Bill Clinton to argue the opposite side of politics—that the poor got that way because they are lazy, that the lavish display of wealth is good, and that colleges should be run as for-profit family businesses in the guise of non-profit tax charities.”

Tennedide knew even then, that this diminutive kid in a Stetson hat would go on to do great things:

“Partnering with many of Wood-fuc-a-chuck’s wealthy business majors, J. P. brought the high-society glamour of polo to a campus where many students struggled to read at an eighth-grade level. He energized his wealthy peers to pool their parents’ money to take over businesses. And, he did much of this remotely from the porch of his mother ramshackle attic in a poor Georgia hamlet called ‘the Landings’.”

But, what Tennedide recalls with the greatest depth is what young Dear Tik did after business school. Most notable is his leadership in creating the Chucklet Capitol Fund with wealthy classmates to buy out and outsource companies. They began by finding small hippy operations with the seed of a business concept and moved them far to the right and into profit.

Most notable is the rebirth of Chick-fil-A, once an organic chicken stand in Middlebury, Vermont that Tik and Chucklet bought outright and transformed into a leader in drive-thru processed chicken and Right Wing political causes.

As the chicken chain grew into a global brand, Tik went on to lead Chucklet Capitol in the dissolution of regional manufacturers of paper, airplane parts, and durable goods across the country. “There is a difference between outsourcing and off-shoring,” he once explained to liberal critics who questioned the shipment of thousands of jobs to Malaysia and other developing economies.

By the time that the ravages of Chucklet’s investments hit the American economy, Tik had left the company to serve as Vice President for Institutional Advancement and Director of the Hong Kong campus for his mother’s grand vision: the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Though, today’s gold standard for couture arts education and the world’s most profitable university, SCAD was not always that way.

In many ways, Tik came to SCAD’s rescue just in time. By joining his mother, known affectionately and by mandate as “Dear Leader”, Tik enacted a series of real estate transactions, leveraged buyouts of lesser art schools, and the threat of outsourcing faculty positions to remote sites in Malaysia that transformed SCAD into a powerhouse of profit.

With SCAD’s growth in the late 1990s, Tik’s diminutive mother, Dear Leader, who founded the college almost entirely on her own while raising young Tik and his sister Kim Jul Tik in an attic, was finally able to move into a house with a real front door and running water.

Tik leveraged his connections to Chucklet Capitol to fuel SCAD’s investment in a new Center for Equestrian Studies to be run by his English-educated sister, Kim Jul. It would become the nation’s only horse farm owned and run by an arts school.

At the Equestrian Center’s opening in 2000, young Kim Jul Tik observed:

Standing here with my dear mother, our Dear Leader and my dear brother, Dear Tik, I am grateful to serve as the Center’s new director while earning the same kind of modest teacher’s salaries that they have always earned. We as a family could have pursued more enriching careers but for us and for SCAD, it’s always been about the students.

With their well-known familial talents, the Tiks continue to personally teach many of SCAD’s most popular equestrian courses. Kim Jul offers English riding and fashion instruction, Dear Tik, consummate southern gentleman and founder of the popular website, RhettButler.com, teaches the pony carriage arts, and their mother, Dear Leader, a master in all arts, Western cattle roping.

Notwithstanding the horse center’s success and SCAD’s fame for its merit-based hiring practices, there remain a few dark clouds on its horizon. Over the last several years, Tennedide recounts in his memoir how Dear Tik and his mother have struggled with pampered faculty seeking to unionize and their complaints about ever-increasing classroom schedules. There has also been the occasional threat of disaffected and mentally disturbed former administrators impugning the SCAD vision in publications and on the Internet.

Elevating SCAD almost to a business case study in his memoir, Tennedide explains how Dear Tik is applying the advanced the accounting practices that he learned in college. The memoir recounts how Tik has guided SCAD’s administrators in the tracking and an monitoring of potential “enemies”—many of whom are the mentally-disturbed former administrators who continue to propagate false SCAD “secrets” in the blogosphere.

Another recent challenge is unfounded allegations of discrimination and Homophobia at the global chicken outlet, Chick-fil-A.

Still run by many of Tik’s former classmates at Chucklet Capitol, Chick-fil-A maintains an active alliance with SCAD in which the company receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in free design advice from SCAD students who pay SCAD tuition fees for the privilege of doing so.

The recent gay “kiss-ins” in front of the very Chick-fil-A stores that SCAD students are redesigning might prove embarrassing for most universities. But not for Dear Tik and not for SCAD. “Tik just stated the obvious,” Tennedide says admiringly. “He was not working any longer for Chucklet when the chicken outfit, Chick-fil-A became bigoted. The fact that he still holds majority interest in Chucklet Capitol is only incidental.”

From their neighboring porches at The Landings, Dear Leader and her son, Dear Tik expressed their pride in SCAD’s history of corporate sponsorship.  Dear Leader encouraged all members of the SCAD community to visit Chick-fil-A. “The highest and best use of a front porch is to enable and encourage the art of conversation. We entertain ourselves with stories on the porch. We invite people in. We sit. We visit.”

All stories on www.SCADSECRETS.com are parodies.  All content on www.SCADSECRETS.com is fictionalized and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This site and the content contained within it are not affiliated with the Savannah College of Art & Design, a University of creative careers founded by Ms. Paula Wallace who is practically perfect in every way.

Exciting New Revelations about Dear Tik’s Business Education

A recent memoir by a celebrated business professor confirms Dear Tik’s talents as a college student in rural Alabama. He was only 20 years old, yet raised by a brilliant mother in the attic of a ramshackle house in The Landings, Tik was already a luminary when in college.

David Tennedide’s new memoir: Oh Moon of Alabama—Tales from an Academic Backwater documents how the seeds of Tik’s genius proved transformative for his classmates and even his professors.

“I spent my career at the University of Alabama-Wood-chuck-a-fuc, three hours north of Montgomery and decades away from the 20^th century,” the memoir begins. “When I started teaching we had neither minorities nor electricity on the campus. Today, we have electricity and, in some buildings, the Internet,”

Although students and staff at UA-Wood-chuck-a-fuc are still all white, Tennedide remembers a handful of his students who stood out for their brilliance. And here, of course, is where Dear Tik enters the story.

“Back in his student days, he went by ‘J.P.’ and wore a Stetson,” Tennedide recalls.

“I have this enduring memory of him sitting in the back of the lecture hall spitting chew into a Dr. Pepper can. In one lecture during a business ethics course, I asked how the modern corporation might help the poor to move upward in society…and from the back to the hall, I heard J.P, I mean Tik, spit loudly and exclaimed, ‘Well they could invent a cure for laziness!’”

Tennedide pauses here, becoming teary before this reporter. “And all the students laughed. I felt so humiliated. But deep down I knew Tik was right…that my elite liberal views would never solve a thing.”

That epiphany was the first time that Tennedide realized that he might just have a student star on his hands. And, as the years passed, Oh Moon of Alabama recounts how this old radical came to embrace Supply Side economics, tax cuts for the rich, and educational vouchers. All because of Tik:

I knew that my old New Deal ways had to change…that the business of business was wealth. And here was this kid…who never turned in papers, who nearly flunked out f every course he took, and whose high school transcript was missing…here was this kid who saw through everything. Was he some kind of savant? A visionary?

One day after class, as we were all walking toward the student center, I asked J. P…I mean Tik, ‘How did you ever get in here? I mean you never seem to have gotten anything more than a C….’

And in his distinct way, I saw him straighten up (the Stetson made him taller) and clear his throat.

‘Whah, professor Sir, mah Mom is a Big Wheel in the for-profit art school world. She makes big money and her university makes big money. You got a lib-er-al problem with that?’

It was obvious that he didn’t even know my name even though we were now two months into the semester. But this young man who would eventually become Dear Tik showed a confidence that was unforgettable…

Tik also stood out in the Wood-chuck-a-fuc social scene. He was a founder of the elite fraternity of business majors known as Alpha Prepo Chucklo—informally known as “the Chucklets.”

Students and faculty recall some of the hilarious hi-jinks that young Tik and his polo-playing peers brought to campus in the late 1990s.

“They refused to let any class begin without a prayer,” Tennedide writes. “And then they started to make up their own prayers usually culminating in a homily in praise of ‘wealth creators’.”

With assistance from Dear Tik’s sister, the celebrated equestrienne, Kim Jul Tik, the Chucklets imported a string of polo ponies to the main quad of the Wood-chuck-a-fuc campus. “They paid for a miniature version of Churchill Downs and surrounded the campus with white picket fences and viewing tents…. It was screamingly funny for everyone except, of course, their parents when the credit card bills showed up!” Tennedide adds.

“Imagine having a polo team on our little campus when many of our surrounding farmers still used plow horses.”

From these early days, the roguish yet refined Chucklets fanned out to create wealth for themselves and investors. Most notable is Chick-Fil-a, the highly-respected and patriotic fast food chicken chain.

“The Chucklets found a business opportunity and they ran with it,” Tennedide says of his greatest alumni success story:

They found this struggling organic chicken stand in Middlebury, Vermont that made these just delicious breaded recipes. The only problem was that the owner was an old hippie who supported a raft of liberal causes and saw himself as the next Ben & Jerry. But, by using their parents’ capital for leverage, the Chucklets were able borrow heavily, rebrand Chick-fil-a as a force for right wing Christian causes, and substitute processed chicken parts for the original organic secret recipes. The rest is history…..

The Chucklets also applied lessons from their Wood-chuck-a-fuc polo team experiment to help Dear Tik’s sister, the celebrated equestrienne, Kim Jul Tik, to fund and develop a new center for the study of horses at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Although a struggling and poor art college at the time, young Tik and his fraternity mates leveraged their business training to stabilize the college and to finally move Kim Jul and Dear Tik’s mother out of the ramshackle attic in The Landings where she had raised them.

“Tik told me several years later that the proudest moment of his life was when he was able to give his humble teacher mother a home with running water,” Tennedide recounted in a recent phone interview.

 Next week, in Part Two, we will learn how Dear Tik, his sister, and their intrepid mother, Dear Leader, built SCAD into the national treasure that it is today. We will also explore how Tik’s early business school connections with Chick-fil-a became the foundation for SCAD’s powerful design alliance with this global brand.

All stories on www.SCADSECRETS.com are parodies.  All content on www.SCADSECRETS.com is fictionalized and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This site and the content contained within it are not affiliated with the Savannah College of Art & Design, a University of creative careers founded by Ms. Paula Wallace who is practically perfect in every way.

Last week, the London Review of Books (LRB) revealed that our Dear Leader is the likely author of the celebrated series of Doppelganger novels that began with the seminal classic, Decorating the Dome. Since 1981, this legacy of inspiring novels has chronicled the challenged, yet ultimately triumphant lives of a southern family who overcame hardship to return to their aristocratic roots.

Written under the pen name, R. J. Williams, the Doppelganger series is considered by critics as one of the finest examples of Southern Gothic noir ever created. Rivaling the Harry Potter series in sales and vastly more advanced in their character development, the true creator of this oeuvre has long bedeviled literary historians who suspected authorship ranging from the late Gore Vidal to even President Obama.

But it was a placemat from the Gryphondor Tea Room at the Savannah College of Art and Design recently uncovered in the British Museum that pointed to Doppelganger’s origins in the low country of Georgia.

Researchers noted a chapter outline written in a Mont Blanc fountain pen ink that, throughout the 1980s, could only have been purchased at the Gilded Age pen shop on Madison Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Further research pointed to Dear Leader’s secret authorship.” Literary investigators, using American Express card spending histories and, of course, the tea room name on the placemat itself, traced the elite ink buyer to a Platinum (now Black Card) holder, Dear Leader.

“I am thunderstruck by this rumor,” said Dear Tik, the son of SCAD’s Dear Leader. “But given the hopeful and artistic way that my sister and I were raised by mom in an attic of a ramshackle house at the Landings, I can believe it just might be true. My sister and I grew up on a teacher’s income but we were open to the world.”

Mr. Glen Angora, a former SCAD interior design student and now a long-time ‘partner’ of Dear Leader is also a possible believer. “It is highly typical of Dear Leader to write with such brilliance and to never take the credit for herself.” Indeed, this much-honored president of the world’s largest and most profitable arts university has long been considered a pedagogical visionary who limited her writings to SCADentolology™, the mystic path to artistic success and wealth that she discovered during a meditation retreat in France during her youth.

Dear Leader has published a few popular books on the fashion industry and on the social life of southern porches. But, her purported authorship of the Doppelganger series has shaken the literary world. It is rumored that the millions of dollars in royalties have been returned directly to SCAD and its new storefront outlet brand, SCADlite™.

The SCAD administration did not respond to reporters’ phone calls concerning the authorship question. But, off the record, many top administrators were not surprised by the connection between literary genius and the modesty of anonymity—implying that they have seen such wonders from Dear Leader many times over the years.

From her porch at The Landings, Dear Leader said that she had never read the Doppelganger series but was flattered that critics might somehow connect it with her.  She encouraged all members of the SCAD community to read books. “The highest and best use of a front porch is to enable and encourage the art of conversation. We entertain ourselves with stories on the porch. We invite people in. We sit. We visit.”

All stories on www.SCADSECRETS.com are parodies.  All content on www.SCADSECRETS.com is fictionalized and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This site and the content contained within it are not affiliated with the Savannah College of Art & Design, a University of creative careers founded by Ms. Paula Wallace who is practically perfect in every way.

 

 

 

At the urging of her son and Appointed Successor, Tik, our Dear Leader recently took up golf. “With the immense burdens of her leadership, many of us in the family and top leadership felt that she needed a break,” Dear Tik observed. And, not surprisingly, she played like an old pro. “It was just amazing, her first time out and she hit eight holes-in-one and two-shot everything else,” said Dear Tik—once known at prep school as “Woody”—admiringly of his Mother, Dear Leader.

But then, why should we be surprised by the inspired perfection of Dear Leader’s first try at golf? Bolstered by the serenity and power of  SCADentology, the science that she discovered and perfected many years ago, just about anything is possible for her. Old timers at SCAD recall fondly how Dear Leader single-handedly saved our beloved school from bankruptcy twenty years ago when she sacrificed an entire fall of Sundays to serve as starting quarterback for the Miami Dolphins.

“She not only won the Super Bowl for them, but she also brought home her $40 million salary to keep SCAD alive,” recalls The Mad Turk, SCAD’s Chief Financial Officer, who was only just a star-struck boy then. Even Dear Leader’s security team was amazed by Dear Leader’s prowess on the course. “She hit balls so far that we barely had time to get an advance team forward to set up parking cones for her golf cart,” marvels Kojak, SCAD’s Director of Security.

[rightquote]She hit balls so far that we barely had time to get an advance team forward to set up parking cones for her golf cart,” marvels Kojak, SCAD’s Director of Security.[/rightquote]

But with her usual modesty, Dear Leader put everyone at ease by pausing after her stunning shots to wait for Dear Tik to catch up and to chat with awed fellow golfers and her coterie.

From her porch in the Landings, Dear Leader encouraged all members of the SCAD community to take up golf. “The highest and best use of a front porch is to enable and encourage the art of conversation. We entertain ourselves with stories on the porch. We invite people in. We sit. We visit.”

All stories on www.SCADSECRETS.com are parodies.  All content on www.SCADSECRETS.com is fictionalized and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This site and the content contained within it are not affiliated with the Savannah College of Art & Design, a University of creative careers founded by Ms. Paula Wallace who is practically perfect in every way.