From Staff Reports

Academy-Award winning actress and former Marietta resident Joanne Woodward took a trip on the "information superhighway" for a good cause.

In this 1993 photograph, Joanne Woodward sits in a Brumby Rocker at the Marietta High School Foundation banquet celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the city school system.

Miss Woodward, who attended school in Marietta from the second grade to her junior year at Marietta High School, faxed a $5,000 bid 2,000 miles from her Westport, Conn., home for a Brumby Rocker at an auction in Crested Butte, Colo., to benefit the Atlanta project.

The Saturday auction was part of a celebrity ski trip, hosted annually by former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, and sponsored by the Carter Center.

According to Carter Center officials, Ms. Woodward planned to be at the auction in person, along with her Academy-Award winning husband Paul Newman, but couldn't attend.

The Crested Butte auction raised $234,000 including $108,000 for three hand-written poems by President Carter from his book of poetry, "Always A Reckoning."

Marietta-based Brumby Chair Co. owners Otis and Martha Lee Brumby donate a rocker each year to the auction. The Marietta couple has donated three since reopening the chair factory in 1992.

In 1993, a Connecticut couple, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore R. Stanley, paid $25,000 for a Brumby Rocker at the auction that benefits The Atlanta Project, a non-profit project to help alleviate inner-city ills such as teen pregnancy, crime, poverty, and homelessness.