Fast backward, if you will, to somewhere near 1960 and you will find a majority of Gainesville's business people down at the old-old Atlanta City Auditorium talking chicken. Ten years later, same week in January, you could find almost all Gainesville and Cumming and Canton in the old Atlanta Civic Center (where SciTrek is now located) including Gainesville's radio stations, local newspapers, and by that time the Poultry Times ... America's poultry newspaper, which still headquarters in Gainesville.
Broilers were the economic savior of Northeast Georgia following World War 11. Up to that time cotton and the textile mills had been our economic engines, but as cotton collapsed with the erosion of the land, and as jobs leveled off and eventually declined in the textile industry, and as it became apparent there was money to be made in the chicken business, a boom-town mentality developed in Northeast Georgia. To say it was wild puts it mildly, and everybody who was already in the chicken business, and everybody who was flirting with the idea of getting in it ... which means almost all the farmers and business people in this area ... packed up their cars and trucks and headed for the poultry convention in Atlanta.
The poultry industry has matured, and this year's convention will be much more businesslike and much less boisterous ... and probably not nearly as much fun ... as in the early years. But while our poultrymen are in Atlanta one more time for the big annual convention, it seems worth while to remember that one of the major reasons we have a strong economy, and one of the reasons we have pine trees and green pastures rather than washed-away cotton fields, is because for the past half-century a zillion Northeast Georgians have made the annual trek to the January poultry convention in Atlanta.
This is Gordon Sawyer, from a window on historic Green Street.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2003/2/183250