After college at Georgia Tech, Mehlinger went to work for Winn-Dixie, the supermarket chain. He began as a meat cutter trainee, and worked his way up through the ranks as a stocker of produce and dairy, store manager, and eventually district manager. That’s when he heard about Thriftown.
It was 1990, and Thriftown, a privately owned grocery store in the Clarkston Shopping Center, was up for sale. Mehlinger and a fellow Winn-Dixie employee wanted to be their own bosses and thought they knew enough about the grocery business to run a store at a profit. They paid nearly a half million dollars for the store—most of it borrowed from a bank. It was risky to take on so much debt to buy a supermarket in a middle- to low-income neighborhood of Atlanta, but Mehlinger thought the place could make money if he just worked hard enough.
At the time, Thriftown’s customer base was roughly half white and half black. The store sold “all-American stuff,” Mehlinger said—Jif peanut butter, Bama jelly, Campbell’s soups, gallons of milk, and loaves of sliced white bread. The meat department sold steaks, chicken, and pork chops. The store did okay. But within a couple years, Clarkston began to change. The incoming refugees—from Southeast Asia, eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East—and had little interest in Mehlinger’s traditional southern- and middle-American fare. And soon, Mehlinger’s American customers began to move away. Business began to suffer, at first gradually, then precipitously. Mehlinger’s partner bailed out, and Mehlinger himself fell behind on his payments to the bank. Eventually, as he fell deeper into debt, the bank issued an ultimatum: Come up with ten thousand dollars in ten days, or face foreclosure. Mehlinger borrowed the money from his father, but it was a temporary fix: he didn’t see his way out of the bigger problem.
“Our sales were just going south,” he said. “And I owed the bank an awful lot of money.”
It was during that dark time when one of Mehlinger’s employees, a teenage Vietnamese refugee named Hong Diep Vo, came to him with an idea. Hong was concerned for her boss, who had been understanding about her poor English and who let her keep flexible hours to accommodate her schedule as a student. At the same time, Hong knew that the nearest market offering Vietnamese food was a thirty-minute drive from Clarkston.
“Business was way down—big-time,” Hong recalled. “I thought I wanted to help him by bringing people to his store. And I thought, ‘Why don’t we have the opportunity for these people to get their food close by instead of so far away?’”
Mehlinger had nothing to lose, so he got in a van with Hong and drove across town to the store that carried Vietnamese food. There, Hong showed him the sorts of things he should carry—fifty-pound bags of Asian rice, hot sauces, coconut drinks, and fish sauce, which Mehlinger described as “the most awful-smelling stuff you’ve ever smelled in your life.”
Nevertheless, Mehlinger loaded up his van and stocked the goods on his shelves. Hong spread the word to Clarkston’s community of Vietnamese and Laotian refugees, and pretty soon the shelves were bare. Mehlinger quickly set about trying to fill them up again.
“I drove around in my van picking up stuff here and there, found suppliers—even called embassies to get suggestions,” he said. Hong served as a culinary consultant, urging Mehlinger to buy more of this and less of that, and when she wasn’t around, Mehlinger himself would spend time wandering the aisles of that Asian specialty store on the other side of town, noting the buying habits of customers. The food kept selling, and Thriftown’s bottom line began to improve.
“Within six months I was making enough to make my payments to the bank,” Mehlinger said. “Things picked up from there.”
With each new wave of resettled refugees into Clarkston, Mehlinger had new opportunities and new challenges. Bosnian refugees liked certain types of chocolates that were hard to find. African refugees wanted cassava powder to make foofoo. Refugees from the Middle East had no interest in pork—pork sales declined—but couldn’t get enough whole lamb and goat. And each culture had its own preferred type of rice, which Mehlinger began to stock by the pallet, in huge burlap and plastic sacks. Mehlinger has become a wizard at ferreting out suppliers for hard-to-find culinary offerings from around the world. And he eventually hired members of each new ethnic group that arrived in Clarkston to work not just as stockers or clerks but as food consultants for each group’s cuisine. These days, thirty-five of Thriftown’s forty-three employees are resettled refugees, from twenty different nations.
As a result, the shelves at Thriftown are a mélange of exotic breads, grains, candies, and produce. In the meat department, whole lamb and goat have displaced beef as a favorite, and most fish is sold whole. Mehlinger ultimately had to separate his pork section from the rest of the meats to avoid offending Muslim customers.
The clientele reflects the diversity on the shelves. There are African women in colorful gowns, Middle Eastern women in hijabs and black chadors, and Bosnian men in blue jeans and white sneakers. Many arrive and leave on foot, and carry their groceries back to their apartments in the complexes nearby, piled high on the handlebars of old bicycles or even, in the case of some African refugees, on women’s heads.
Thriftown’s clientele is mostly poor, and Mehlinger has had to price his groceries accordingly, at low margins. Even so, the store is a thriving business again. Mehlinger has kept up with his payments and repaired the store’s standing with the bank enough to establish a line of credit that helps him buy whole New Zealand lambs by the truckload, to the tune of seventy thousand dollars per order. Since Mehlinger changed his business to accommodate the refugees, a Publix and a Kroger have opened nearby. The stores cater to his old American clientele and could have easily undercut him with cheaper prices and a broader selection that surely would have put Thriftown out of business.
“If it wasn’t for the refugees knowing us and knowing we go out of our way for them, we’d be gone,” Mehlinger said. “I’d be working at Publix.”
Hong Diep Vo stayed at Thriftown for nearly nine years, working part-time as she studied. She graduated from high school, and eventually college. Nowadays, Hong is the director of accounting for a large Atlanta-area real estate firm and oversees thirteen employees. She speaks perfect English, her Vietnamese accent now flecked with a Southern twang. She still shops at Thriftown, and sees Mehlinger often.
“Without Bill, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “He was one of the people who helped.”
Mehlinger feels the same way about Hong, who he says taught him a valuable lesson about running his store—and life.
“If you don’t change,” Mehlinger said, “you’re gone.”
ACROSS THE RAILROAD tracks from Thriftown, there was another dramatic example of reinvention and embrace of change—at the old Clarkston Baptist Church, the center of Clarkston’s spiritual life since its founding in 1883. As refugees moved to Clarkston in the 1990s, many members of the church’s white congregation became so uncomfortable with their changing surroundings that they decided to move away. In the course of a decade, membership in the church plummeted from around seven hundred to just over a hundred. On Sundays, the pews sat mostly empty, and the church was on the verge of going broke. It was then that a group of church elders met to discuss the congregation’s future. They looked to the Bible for guidance, and read a passage in which Jesus described heaven as a place for people of all nations. Some of the elders, including a former army lieutenant colonel and longtime Clarkston resident named William Perrin, argued that the words were a sign that the church should change and open its doors to the newcomers who were moving into Clarkston’s apartment complexes.
“We realized that what the Lord had in store for that old Clarkston Baptist Church was to transition into a truly international church and to help minister to all these ethnic groups moving into the county,” he said.
Perrin was an unlikely advocate for a multiethnic congregation. He was a staunch conservative who voted twice for George W. Bush and whose faith in God was matched only by his deep distrust of liberals and
the news media. As someone who’d grown up in Clarkston, Perrin admits that he had absorbed local prejudices against blacks. But as he witnessed the slow-motion death of his church, Perrin began to believe that God was punishing the congregation for not living by the ways Jesus had prescribed. If the church changed, Perrin was convinced, God had great plans for it. The solution, he argued, was that the church remake itself as an explicitly international congregation that reflected the diversity outside its doors. It would have to make changes in its services, particularly with music, to accommodate a broad array of worship styles, and it would have to reach out to the small congregations of Liberian, Sudanese, and Ethiopian Christians and others who were meeting around Clarkston in borrowed spaces.
Perrin’s proposal divided his already weakened church. Some, like Brenda and Robert White, members of the Clarkston Baptist Church for more than twenty years, left in protest.
“I know it’s the twenty-first century and we have to change and do things differently,” Brenda White said. “But I don’t think it’s fair that we had to cater to the foreign people rather than them trying to change to our way of doing things.
“It just wasn’t a Baptist church anymore,” she added.
Ultimately, Perrin’s plan was adopted, and to reflect its new identity, the Clarkston Baptist Church renamed itself after 125 years: it’s now the Clarkston International Bible Church. On Sundays, separate congregations of Liberians, Ethiopians, French-speaking West Africans, and Sudanese meet at various times throughout the day to worship in their native styles, and a bigger, come-one, come-all service takes place in the main sanctuary in English. In the main service, immigrants and refugees from Togo, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Sudan, some in colorful native garb, worship alongside silver-haired white southern women in their Sunday best. Since making the change, the church has become reinvigorated. Pews in the sanctuary, once nearly empty on Sunday mornings, are now near capacity, and membership has grown to over five hundred.
Phil Kitchin, the current pastor, said a multinational congregation presents all sorts of problems that a more homogenous church would not. There are disputes over the style of music that should be played during services, and there is a fear among the various ethnic groups that by joining the main congregation they might also give up elements of their own worship styles, and by extension ties to their old countries and cultures. But Kitchin believes these occasional headaches are a small price to pay for creating a church community that fulfills the teachings of Jesus.
“Jesus said heaven is a place for people of all nations,” Kitchin likes to say. “So if you don’t like Clarkston, you won’t like heaven.”
As head of an international church, Kitchin, who ministered to refugees in Belgium before taking the job as pastor, said he frequently hears complaints from people who long for the time when life in Clarkston was simpler.
“I tell people, ‘America is changing,’” Kitchin said. “‘Get over it.’”
THE CLARKSTON INTERNATIONAL Bible Church was only a few doors down from City Hall on Church Street. But there was another example of a less fearful approach toward Clarkston’s diversity in even closer proximity to Mayor Swaney—just outside the doorway of his office in City Hall, in the warren occupied by Clarkston’s new police chief, Tony J. Scipio.
Scipio, a black man of Trinidadian descent with an imposing upright frame and a broad, disarming smile, had been hired by Swaney to replace the recently retired Charlie Nelson, the old-school police chief whose office had borne the Barney Fife poster and who had hired Timothy Jordan, the problem officer who would beat Chike Chime. Scipio was working for the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Department when he heard about the opening in Clarkston, and he went online to research the town. Scipio immediately grasped the challenge: a cultural maelstrom of more than a hundred nationalities in an area slightly larger than one square mile, poverty, and a haphazard layout—sprawling apartment complexes with countless dark corners and wooded thickets where drug dealers could hide or dispose of weapons or stash—that put criminals at an advantage. Scipio, though, was ambitious; he hoped someday to run for sheriff of the entire county. The Clarkston job offered an opportunity to establish his bona fides as a reformer.
A reform-minded chief fit into Mayor Swaney’s ambitions as well. He had taken a political hit from Chief Nelson’s sometimes ham-fisted methods, and Nelson’s apparent lack of empathy for refugees had come to weigh on Swaney himself.
“We had our task force putting pressure on a lot of people, and a lot of it wasn’t in the way that it should have been,” Swaney said. “They were being … I guess you’d call it mean.”
Hiring a black police chief intent on shaking up the Clarkston Police Department was an uncharacteristic act of boldness on Swaney’s part, and another indication that perhaps attitudes in Clarkston were not fixed but fluid.
Scipio accepted the job, but on a condition. He told Swaney he wanted two weeks before his hiring was announced to spend time anonymously in Clarkston, speaking to residents and gauging their relationship and attitudes toward the police. He eschewed his uniform for blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt, and made his way around town in his old Ford 150 pickup truck, talking to longtime residents and new arrivals alike. He heard about all the traffic tickets refugees had been receiving, the verbal abuse from officers, and complaints about the way police seemed to react with extreme aggression at the slightest provocation. His incognito tour only confirmed his hunches about what was going on in Clarkston.
“I found out I had my work cut out for me,” Scipio said. “There wasn’t a lot of public trust when it came down to the police department here.”
When Scipio was finally announced as the new chief, he moved into Nelson’s old office in City Hall next door to Swaney’s. Upon arriving, Scipio issued a mandate that his officers should follow a simple code he called CPR—“courtesy, professionalism, respect”—and began to ask anyone who filed complaints against his officers if they had been treated according to the code.
“If any one of those three elements is missing,” Scipio said, “then there’s a problem.”
Scipio instituted diversity training, and established a policy that allowed any Clarkston resident who asked to ride along in police squad cars. He went on patrol with his officers and watched the way they interacted with the public. More than once, he was taken aback by what he witnessed. At the sight of a Middle Eastern man whose car was broken down on the side of the road, one officer remarked that the man was probably more adept at riding camels than fixing cars. Scipio wrote him up for a violation of department policy. Another officer used a slur against homosexuals: Scipio wrote him up as well. Another used the phrase “you people” when referring to a group of refugees; it wasn’t courteous, Scipio said: violation. Over the course of the next few months, nearly every member of the force was written up for some sort of department violation.
“There were some times that I felt that I could have easily become a victim because they didn’t know who I was,” Scipio said of his own officers, referring to those days when he roamed Clarkston undercover in civilian clothes. “So I approached all officers and asked them certain things, and they didn’t like that.”
Indeed they didn’t. Three officers quit by the end of Scipio’s first week on the job. By the end of the first month, four more were gone.
One incident sticks out in Scipio’s mind as encapsulating the problems he found between refugees and his officers. Soon after he’d taken over the force, Scipio was walking the beat near the center of town when he spotted a group of African immigrants, talking excitedly into a cell phone they were passing among themselves. A short distance from the men, a Clarkston police officer watched from his squad car, Scipio recalled. The group, it turned out, was waiting for the arrival of a long-lost cousin from Gambia, who was on his way from the Atlanta airport to Clarkston to reunite with his transplanted family. The cousin was in a rental car, and the family was giving him directio
ns to Clarkston via cell phone.
“They’re telling me how excited their cousin is to get here,” Scipio said of the family members. “And they’re talking to him, telling him how to get off the interstate, what exit number to take, where to turn left and right, and he’s only a few minutes away from here. They haven’t seen him in ten, fifteen years, and now here he is in America! And he can’t wait to get to Clarkston, because this is where everybody is.”
Soon, the just-arrived relative pulled up in his car, and at the sight of his long-lost family, stopped the vehicle in a fire lane before jumping out to embrace them. Scipio was touched by the scene of reunification.
“He’s so excited. Everyone’s speaking in their native language. Everybody’s jumping, and they’re happy,” he said.
But as the family celebrated, the Clarkston police officer got out of his car and approached them. The cousin had parked his car in a fire lane, and the officer began to write him up for the violation. When the cop walked over to hand the cousin the traffic ticket, the man mistook the ticket for some kind of gift, and went to hug the officer, who freaked out.
“He takes the officer and hugs him because he thinks the officer loves him,” Scipio said. “And the officer wants to arrest him for assault and battery because the man hugs him!”
Scipio eventually intervened, but the incident pointed up the ease with which routine interactions could get out of hand, and also to his mind showed the need for the authority figures in Clarkston to take a more forgiving approach to situations that arose out of misunderstandings as opposed to blatant disregard for the law. It was no mystery, he argued, that refugees didn’t yet fully grasp every nuance of the American judicial system, or understand every last bit of local traffic code. They’d just arrived. Most didn’t speak English. They had no money and little education. And they’d been through hell. Why not, Scipio asked, cut them some slack?
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