Charles McKenzie “Mack” Taylor, 78, a real estate mogul who helped shape Atlanta’s ritzy Buckhead neighborhood, died Saturday at his home in the neighborhood he helped create. He had battled Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade.
Novelist Tom Wolfe credits Taylor as the reason he wrote his 1998 book “A Man in Full,” though the author says he did not base the book’s main character, Charlie Croker, on Taylor. He dedicated the book to Taylor and his wife, Mary Rose, who were good friends with the novelist.
The novel about a 60-year-old success-driven Atlanta developer with a trophy wife caused a stir among Atlanta’s leaders.
During the 1970s and ’80s, Taylor was one of Atlanta’s leading commercial real estate developers with his late partner, Harvey Mathis. Their firm, Taylor & Mathis, developed Buckhead Plaza, a skyscraper that sits at the center of the upscale neighborhood and was one of the area’s first tall buildings.
Taylor was born in Opelika, Ala., and graduated from Auburn University in 1951. He served in the U.S. Navy and Navy Reserve after college. He started his career as a cotton broker in Opelika but moved to Atlanta in 1967 and helped launch the real estate boom.
Glenn W. Ferguson, 78, a former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, the president or chancellor of three universities and, for a brief time in the 1980s, the president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, died of prostate cancer at his home in Santa Fe on Dec. 20, said his wife, Patricia.
In May 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Ferguson ambassador to Kenya, a post he held for three years. Ferguson returned to the United States in 1969 and held leadership positions at Long Island University, Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and the University of Connecticut.
He then began a five-year term as chief executive of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the government-financed network created during the Cold War that broadcast news in 21 languages to an estimated 18 million listeners a day.
In 1983, Ferguson, who had not applied for the job, was named president of Lincoln Center. He had been recommended by several members of the board. But the primarily administrative nature of the job did not suit him, and nine months later he announced his resignation.
