'Buckhead Boys' to Gather Monday for Annual Meeting

“It’s likely my youth will walk/Inside me like a king,” James Dickey wrote in his famous poem “Looking for the Buckhead Boys.”

The Buckhead Boys will gather again Monday night for their annual December meeting, to share their memories of the youthful days Dickey celebrated.

Dickey read his poem 42 years ago at the first gathering of the men who grew up in Buckhead. As in the poem, they recall long ago high school football games and hangouts like Wender and Roberts' Drugstore and Tyree’s Pool Hall. 

Once again, the Buckhead Boys on Monday night will return to those places in their shared recollections, finding their youths, still walking like kings.

“That’s what we do, yak, yak, yak about old times,” Tom Archbold, who serves as the group’s moderator, said jokingly.

As they have for the past 15 years or so, the Buckhead Boys will meet at the , the historic site of old North Fulton High School, another touchstone in Dickey’s poem. Along with North Fulton, the Buckhead Boys attended schools like Northside High, now the site of and

The group, as it does every year, will honor two Buckhead Boys for their community contributions. The criteria, Archbold said, is “doing good. And being a Buckhead Boy.”

The honorees this year are Buckhead Heritage Society President Wright Mitchell, a younger generation Buckhead Boy, and Ed Jones of the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.

Mitchell will be following a family tradition; both his father, Wade, and uncle, Walter, were honorees.

Along with Dickey, the Buckhead Boys include Buckhead business icon and philanthropist Charlie Louidermilk, a former honoree, and Jack Davis, the noted Mad magazine artist known for designing program covers for University of Georgia homecoming games. Davis’ Buckhead Boys design was used as a model for the Bucks on the Street fund-raising project of the Buckhead Business Association

The group’s annual meeting raises money for Children’s HealthCare of Atlanta, Archbold said. Over the years, the group has raised $85,000 for the hospital.

On the first Monday in December, the Buckhead Boys once more will meet as if the passing years don’t matter, in the spirit of Dickey’s poem.

“The Buckhead Boys. If I can find them, even one/ I’m home.”