Golden Opportunity Seized at Olympics

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Alex Hodges, chief executive of Nederlander Concerts in Hollywood, lucked out on being the more decisive of four brothers – at least when it came to attending the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

His older brother had made a hefty donation to the Georgia Institute of Technology and received VIP tickets to attend the games.

“My brother called me and said, ‘I’ve got a week of tickets. You want to come to Atlanta?’” Hodges, 72, said. “And I said yes.”

Hodges, who is from Decatur, Ga., said he might have been the third phone call but he still lucked out.

“He called my oldest brother who said, ‘Let me think about it,’ and my other brother said, ‘I’ll call you back,’” Hodges said. “They both called him back, but too late – I said yes and took a week off. It was great.”

Booking Career

Tara Roth, president of the Goldhirsh Foundation, has turned her passion for service work – and for storytelling – into a fruitful career in social innovation. And the one-time tech entrepreneur is now in charge of helping the city’s most vulnerable do the same through her work at the Miracle Mile nonprofit.

“Service was something my family always did a lot of,” said Roth. “I really don’t think of it as work-life balance but work-life integration.”

One could say Roth “went pro” went she earned her master’s degree in business administration at Oxford University, where she was awarded a Skoll scholarship (funded by fellow Silicon Valley alum Jeff Skoll) in social entrepreneurship.

The written word has long had a special place in her routine outside of work. Roth, 43, was drawn to the “magic” of books, she said, especially authors such as Lois Duncan and Madeleine L’Engle. Her first foray into writing was with a poem in the Christian Science Monitor at the tender age of 11.

Since a service trip in high school, she’s been keeping a quote journal where she compiles her favorites.

“It’s interesting to see what resonated with me then,” she said. “It could be E.E. Cummings or a song lyric. It’s like a narrative scrapbook, which for me is much more evocative than images.”

Staff reporters Subrina Hudson and Kristin Marguerite Doidge contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Jonathan Diamond. He can be reached at [email protected].

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