Monkey Business

The Grandstand View

Twenty-eight years ago at the front end of my second career in the broader hospitality and narrower beverage alcohol distribution industries, I found myself managing a restaurant in downtown Atlanta at the mega convention hotel Marriott Marquis.  Being this type of hotel property, huge city-wides were not unusual but the 1988 Democratic Convention was in a class of its own.

Three years prior I had started my career with Marriott and to this day I have never worked for a better company. The family founded and lead corporation carried traditional Judeo-Christian family core values and principles from the top down through the entire organization and permeated the whole corporate culture. The management truly valued its human resources. In my earliest days there I spent many hours behind the bar at the Grandstand Lounge hanging in the Atrium.

 When the 1988 Democratic National Convention rolled into town I was managing Pompanos Restaurant and Oyster Bar a white table cloth seafood eatery.  Somehow I got my hands on a poster for the convention. It is a very creative piece of graphic art. It reads: Democrats in Convention -Atlanta 1988.  In all the years since, I have been under the impression that it was the official poster of the convention. In preparations for this article, I did a Google search for- 1988 Democratic Convention poster- and found everything but a representation of this poster.

I decided to pin the poster to an easel and place it at the front of the restaurant by the hostess stand with markers and invite guests to sign it. Throughout the week it became quite a conversation piece.

Without a doubt the most popular topic of  "water cooler" type conversation was the autograph in the lower right of the poster reading Gary Hart .

Senator Hart ( D Colorado) had been one of the top candidates in quest for the Presidential nomination until a picture of him with a woman- who was not his wife- on a pleasure boat to the Bahamas showed up in newspapers nationwide. The icing on the cake and irony to end all ironies was that the name of the boat was "Monkey Business"!

Other notable signatures on the poster include,  Spencer Christian, Benjamin Hooks, Bill Gibson, Bob Kerrey and Billy Graham. There are many more VIP and common folk alike but perhaps the most telling autograph of all is that of the current California Governor Jerry Brown. I'll let the readers draw their own conclusions.

The framed collector's item has hung in my residence in all the years since and it still calls for "water cooler" conversations.

Final thoughts: When the Democrats were in convention here in 1988 I was not yet married to the women (Becky) who would become mother to our two beautiful and amazing daughters, though I met her there at the Marquis. The Omni Coliseum, ground zero for the convention, was still standing. Amazingly soon they will replace the Georgia Dome that replaced the Omni! Two of our most blessed southern writers, Lewis Grizzard and Furman Bisher were still alive and making me laugh and cry. And-with a sigh- the Clintons has not completely entered the political stage.

Bradford Bosworth

July 2016