A statue has never been erected to honor a critic.
-- Jean Sibelius
As this week's visitors could probably tell you, Augusta is not a big statue town.
In past years, we showed off the bronzed images of several past Masters Tournament winners, but this year we put them under wraps in a secret warehouse.
City founder James Oglethorpe has a statue on the Augusta Common, where he stands all wigged out and watching the more popular James Brown statue about 50 yards away on Broad Street.
There's a Telfair Street statue of Patrick Walsh, an editor of The Chronicle, which appears to be in a minimum-security lockup after the feds put a fence around him and their courthouse. We also have some old generals in front of the News Building.
Then there's the statue of James Ryder Randall.
I sometimes forget about Randall's white marble image with its head bowed in front of Sacred Heart Cultural Center, but I shouldn't. Not only was he a teacher and poet but he also wrote for The Chronicle .
He's more famous back in his home state, where he wrote Maryland, My Maryland, the song played every year during the Preakness.
They even named a public school after him in Clinton, Md., where James Ryder Randall Elementary School, I'm proud to say, is located at 5410 Kirby Road.
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MORE FAVORITES: We asked readers to share their favorite Augusta places, and Carolyn Wilde Cunningham responded.
"My favorite places pertain to Richard Henry Wilde (a distant relative)," she wrote.
"Not only a well-known poet of his day (in the first half of the 1800s), he also was Augusta's mayor and John Barrow's predecessor as a U.S. congressman (likewise, a Democrat). R.H. Wilde also was the first attorney general of Georgia."
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CALL ME WILLARD SCOTT: Julie Inglett writes that Margurite Stoughton, a very close friend, turns 100 today. Well, congratulations. It's nice to wish a happy birthday to someone older than the Masters.
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TODAY'S JOKE: Charlie Williams shares this one. It seems a tough, old cowboy from South Dakota counseled his grandson that if he wanted to live a long life, the secret was to sprinkle a pinch of gunpowder on his oatmeal every morning.
The grandson did this religiously to the age of 103. When he died, he left behind 14 children, 30 grandchildren, 45 great-grandchildren, 20 great-great-grandchildren and a 15-foot hole where the crematorium used to be.
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