As we prepare for All Saints’ Sunday at Glenn this week, we remember two of our beloved Glenn saints and biggest Atlanta Braves fans during their lifetimes, Patricia “Patsy” Guy and Julia Ann Griffith. They would have celebrated birthdays this same week that the Atlanta Braves won the World Series. In January 2020, as the world grieved the death of Hank Aaron, Glenn member Sally Sears interviewed and wrote down Julia Ann’s firsthand account of witnessing the moment Hank Aaron achieved the Homerun Record:

Julia Ann’s daughter Edie found tickets for the game where he might break Babe Ruth’s home run record. Julia Ann, then in Florida, drove north with her mother; three generations eager to be part of history. But the highway patrol in Perry forced a detour. Julia Ann’s eagerness put her foot a little heavy on the gas pedal. The trooper didn’t just give her a ticket. He forced her to follow him to the sheriff’s office. “He rang a buzzer for someone to open the door that led into a jail cell where he put me to wait for the sheriff. When the sheriff finally came into the enclosure…he…charged me with speeding and said I owed $72.00. I was not about to give him cash to put into his pocket… about this time the phone on the desk rang and he apologized profusely to the person on the phone saying ‘I am so sorry that happened. I have these papers right here on my desk and the next time you are in town I want to take you out for a steak dinner.’ The papers on his desk were pulled out of the trash can.” She paid with her Amoco Auto Club card and made it to Gate G before the game. Edie’s tickets were in left field.

“I went to get everybody a drink. On my way back, holding a cardboard tray full of Coke cups, watching them closely so I wouldn’t spill them, I bumped into what I first thought was a big wall. It turned out to be Maynard Jackson, the mayor of Atlanta. My face was belt high to him and I spilled Coke all down the front of him. He was gracious, just brushed himself off and accepted my apology. The capacity crowd of 53,000 was eager to get the game started, and what do you know, Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run in the fourth inning. The ball was hit to left field and we were standing there ready to catch it because it seemed to be coming right at us. It fell in the space between the field and the seats so no one caught it. We were about four rows up from where it fell and later realized that we almost were a part of the history of that day. There were two fans that ran onto the field to congratulate Hank as he was running around the bases. Of course they were arrested.” A few days later, at a family lunch on top of the Atlanta Gas Light building on Peachtree Street Julia Ann sat next to cousin Herbert Moye. He managed the Georgia Licensing Bureau, in charge of issuing fishing and hunting licenses. She told him about her time in the jail cell in Perry, Georgia. “He said he surely wished he had known it at the time because that sheriff owed him a big favor… He said ‘I was on the phone with him that same afternoon and he even offered to take me to a steak dinner the next time I was in Perry.”

From Braves’ victories to speeding tickets, family meals to everything in between, we remember the saints of our church family this week, celebrate their interesting lives and legacies, and remember that it is ordinary days that are often made of extraordinary moments. We celebrate the Braves and our saints this week!