ATLANTA— Wynette Cook may have set some sort of local record recently when she joined the First Baptist Church of Vidalia for the third time.

The first time was soon after the Hogansville native graduated from Bessie Tift College and came to Vidalia to teach school. The second was after she went to Thomasville to teach and then returned to teach again in Vidalia. The third time was after her third husband died and she returned to reside in Vidalia, where two of her five children also reside.

The first of the three husbands she outlived was longtime Vidalia pharmacist and pharmacy owner Lamar Bobbitt, by whom she had her children. The second was Allan Dodson, a widower who had been her childhood "sweetheart" in Hogansville and who for many years late in life was a columnist for the Hogansville newspaper. The third was Richard Cook, also a widower and a Milledgeville resident who was a renowned organist and church music director.

In a recent piece on debutantes with Vidalia-are connections, I wondered out loud why Augusta -- unlike Macon and Savannah, the two other metropolitan cities nearest to Vidalia -- had never had a Vidalia-connected debutante that came to my attention. Now, thanks to Dr. Lamar A. Brown of Vidalia, I know of three.

All are his granddaughter. The offspring of his son Ace Brown, a Vidalia native who has been a resident of Augusta for most of his adult life, the ex-debs are JoAnne Brown (Mrs. Sam) Maguire of Atlanta, Summer Brown (Mrs. Kelly) Pharr of Charlotte and Autumn Brown, a student at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. Incidentally, JoAnne's other given name is Spring, and if there had been a fourth daughter, there's no word on whether Ace and wife Jeanette would have considered naming her Winter.

The three sisters all made their debuts at Augusta Symphony cotillions, Dr. Brown said by e-mail. "My late wife (Lessie) and I were able to attend two of the presentations and had a wonderful time experiencing the excitement of the participants," he added.

For more than 30 years, I have been what I consider close friends with Martha Thompson of Pearl Price Florist in Vidalia, yet there were several things bout her I didn't know until I read that double-truck (two facing pages) tribute to her in this paper recently.

I didn't know, for example, that she had played the organ at the Fox Theater and at The Temple synagogue, two of Atlanta's most famous landmarks.

How magnificent the tribute was, and how deserved.

Before the introduction of color in newspaper printing, black and white appeared normal and quite all right. But when a problem at its printing plant forced The Advance to print a few consecutive issues without any color at all back in April, the papers seemed unbelievably drab, archaic, unimaginative and, well, colorless.

E-mail: raytapley@juno.com

The Advance, Wednesday, May 31, 2006, page 7L.