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DASH of Spirit Revitalizing Hometown
When Ricky Wolfe retired at age 48, he returned to his LaGrange, Ga., roots and his boyhood memories of sipping milk shakes at Smith's Rexall Pharmacy and sacking quarterbacks for the hometown Grangers.
by what he saw when he returned to LaGrange in 1999. Children no longer cruised on bikes down Brownwood. Elderly residents on South Lee were afraid to stand on their own front porches as crime rates soared.
Ricky Wolfe works to refurbish his boyhood neighborhood
"I must have eaten meals at nine out of 10 kitchen tables as a mill village kid," says Wolfe, IM 71.
Wolfe is good at building things. As a partner in ClarkSchwebel Inc., he helped build the electronics company into a three-continent, 4,000-employee corporation.
By Taylor Bruce
He left home for Georgia Tech on a football scholarship, then kicked off his business career. While he was gone, the mills were sold and the sunny neighborhoods of his youth faded. Wolfe says he was grieved
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Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Winter 2006
His success allowed him to retire young and fill his hours with volunteer work. In early 2000, Wolfe joined the local Habitat for
Humanity board of directors and confronted the housing problems burdening his hometown. "Of the 11,000 housing units in LaGrange, 3,000 were below standards," Wolfe says. "We found that the problem went deeper than bricks and mortar." Only 47 percent of citizens in LaGrange owned homes, compared to the national average of 66 percent, Wolfe says. In the 275-acre Hillside neighborhood, only 32 percent of residents wrote mortgage checks. "People had no skin in the game, no vested interest in the community long term."