The Georgia Aquarium is home to five beluga whales. Our weekend getaway to Atlanta for Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion performance at the Fox Theater included visits to the Margaret Mitchell House and the Georgia Aquarium.

My wife Linda and I walked from the Georgian Terrace Hotel to the Margaret Mitchell House, a pleasant walk along famous Peachtree Street. The turn–of–the– 20th–century, three-story, Tudor Revival house where

Mitchell wrote Gone with the

Wind is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Margaret (known to us writers as Peggy) was born in 1900 in Atlanta to a suffragist mother and lawyer father. She attended Smith College in 1918 but dropped out to take care of her father when her mother died. She made her debut and gained a shady reputation for performing a provocative dance at the debutante ball. Soon she was writing a weekly

Crabs in the Georgia Aquarium column in the Atlanta

Journal newspaper, the South’s largest.

Peggy’s love life was sad and sporatic. Her first lover for whom she wrote her first novel, Lost Laysen, abandoned her taking the novel with him. Her first fiance was killed in WWI. She divorced her first husband, an abusive bootlegging football player, after 18 months and married her editor, John Marsh, a year later, 1925. The couple moved into apartment #1 in the now–famous house on Peachtree Street.

As fate would have it, Peggy broke her ankle, became bedridden, and quit work. With nothing to do, she wrote the book that would become the highest–grossing film in history and win her the Pulitzer Prize.

Peggy and John moved to another apartment in Atlanta. John quit the newspaper and became her agent and money manager. Their money was directed to philanthropic causes, college scholar-ships, and WWII War Bonds which led to the construction of the U.S.S. Atlanta in 1944. Margaret Mitchell was run over at a Peachtree Street intersection and killed in 1949 by a drunken off–duty taxi driver. Her husband died a few years later.

Visi tor s to the Georgia Aquar ium walk among 120,000 sea creatures including this whale shark. The historic house was abandoned in 1978. A preservation group rallied to save it in 1985 and Mayor Andrew Young designated it as a city landmark in 1989. After it suffered fire damage in 1994, it was bought by Daimler–Benz and re-stored. It was opened to the public in 1997.

Needless to say, I could feel Peggy’s spirit in the house. I knew if my fingers could only touch the keys of her typewriter I would quickly write the next Great American Novel… but… the tour guide said, “No touching. Get away from there, old man.” “You know not what you do,” answered. “The world will surely suffer.”

The historic Margaret Mitchell house on Peachtree Street in Atlanta where Gone with the Wind was written. So we went to the Georgia Aquarium to see some fish. It was next to the World of Coca–Cola. Linda and I walked over, under, and through eight million gallons of water where 120,000 sea creatures swam. Sharks, whales, squids, octopussys, crabs, manta rays, eels, and even penguins. A few lucky people were chosen to swim with the fishes. Linda declined saying she had to get back to the hotel to get ready for Prairie Home Companion.

Next week: Where were Guy Noir, Dusty, and Lefty?

The Georgia Aquarium is the world’s largest aquarium. Funded with a $250 million donation by Home Depot it opened in 2005.

Peggy Mitchell was a lovely young girl who shocked Atlanta with a provocative dance at her debutante ball.