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people will enjoy it at least as long as we're around here and that it'll be worth passing on to somebody else. "It's important to us to be hospitable. And to be able to make it easy for someone else to just rest when they come home. Because most of these people have had other things going on. They've been busy looking for a house, or they've been trying to adjust to a new job or we have someone there now who needed a safer place to live – herself and her young child. And, so, it's important to us just to let people have a space where they can collect themselves." SUSAN: "We moved downtown 17 years ago, and did not have any expectations that we would end up doing what we've done. But, we've acquired three houses since." FRANK: "Our labor at least has been because we love Macon. And, quite honestly, it has helped the neighborhood a lot. We've been kind of an inspiration to a lot of other people. We've renovated five plus the garage apartment." SUSAN: "It's something we find that we can do together. We don't usually do something side-by-side. More often, we do something in the vicinity of each other. And a lot of people say, 'Oh, our marriage would never survive this.' And, we say, 'Well, ours does.'" FRANK: "We've been married for 44 years and never had an argument." SUSAN: "We committed to try to make them look as much like they did to start off with. Probably the most interesting thing that we have found is that when we took the walls out of the back of the house, we found that the exterior siding was inside the sheetrock walls and that there were doors and a window inside of the house that didn't show. Well, we've kept them. We're leaving that because we want people to see what that was like before." FRANK: "For the last 20 years, I have been the executive director for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I'm like a bishop, except we don't use that term. So, I deal with people all day. I deal with congregations. I deal with everything from good to bad to ugly. I deal with conflict, division. It's just a changing world. ... So, when I come home at night, it is a real joy to work on something that can be made right, can be fixed. People are wonderful, but they often cannot be fixed easily." SUSAN: "For me, it's sort of enough to have done the best I've done with what I have. I want it to live on, but I'm not tied up with controlling what happens to it. I get a lot of satisfaction just knowing that RIVERSIDE DRIVE STORE 3720 Riverside Dr., Macon FORSYTH ROAD STORE 4433 Forsyth Rd., Macon HIGHWAY 96 STORE 5220 GA 96, Jeffersonville BOLINGBROKE STORE 5969 US 41, Bolingbroke OCMULGEE EAST STORE 4900 Ocmulgee East Blvd., Macon HIGHWAY 49 STORE 717 GA 49 N, Macon DRIVEN BY PRODUCTIVITY, FUELED BY CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SINCE 1952 Serving Central Georgia with six locally-owned retail locations focused on the highest standards of cleanliness, service, and efficiency See full stories at: themaconites.com e Maconites tell our story. is project originally was funded by e Downtown Challenge Fund of the Community Foundation of Central Georgia, created to implement the Macon Action Plan. To read the Macon Action Plan, visit MaconActionPlan.com. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 2017 96 maconmagazine.com | FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021