Obituaries
Obituaries
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Eleanor “Elke” Bauer-Whitfield
Mrs. Bauer-Whitfield, a Helen resident since 1959 and the longtime first-row alto of the Helen Festhalle pickup orchestra, passed peacefully at home Tuesday morning. Born to a Bavarian-American family in upstate New York, she moved to Helen with her husband Karl in the year of the town’s original Bavarian-conversion vote. She is survived by three children, seven grandchildren, and a personal collection of seventeen cuckoo clocks, the disposition of which is detailed in her will. Services are Saturday at the Sautee Methodist Church.
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Mr. Robert (‘Bob’) Stansfield
Mr. Stansfield, the original owner-operator of Stansfield’s Pretzel Cart on Bruckenstrasse from 1971 through 1983 and the man who, by family account, sold the cart to Gunter’s uncle in the spring of 1983, passed at Habersham Medical Center after a brief illness. He is survived by his wife Linda of 54 years, two daughters, and the original cart receipt, which the family will offer for display at the Helen Welcome Center.
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Ms. Margaret O’Reilly
Ms. O’Reilly, the visitor-services associate at the Helen Welcome Center from 1992 through 2024 and the institutional memory holder for the Welcome Center’s standing rotation of brochure-rack contents, passed at home. She was, per a 2017 Welcome Center self-study, the single highest-tenured employee in the Welcome Center’s recorded operating history. She is survived by her brother in Toccoa.
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Mr. Heinrich “Hank” Voigt-Sterzing
Mr. Voigt-Sterzing, a fixture of the Helen-area cuckoo-clock retail sector for forty-eight years and a longtime Bruckenstrasse Cuckoo Clock Specialists employee, passed Tuesday at his cabin on the Chattahoochee. He is survived by his wife Erika of 56 years, three children, and a personal collection of twenty-two cuckoo clocks, all of which were, per his will, hand-disassembled and the parts redistributed to the seven downtown cuckoo-clock-specialty retailers. Services are private.
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Mrs. Doris Pemberton-Holcomb
Mrs. Pemberton-Holcomb, the senior matriarch of one of White County’s longest-standing families and the last surviving witness to the original 1969 Helen Bavarian-conversion vote, passed at her home in Cleveland. She was, in life, a vocal opponent of the 1969 vote (which she characterized in a 1979 ‘Cleveland Times-Courier’ letter to the editor as ‘a mistake from which we will not recover for decades’). She is survived by four children, eleven grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and an extensively annotated personal copy of the original 1971 architectural-overlay ordinance.
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Mr. Lothar Eisinger
Mr. Eisinger, the longtime hot-glass artist at the Bruckenstrasse Glass Studio, has not in fact passed. The Bavarian Brainrot newsroom apologizes for an editing error in the previous monthly compilation that briefly suggested otherwise. Mr. Eisinger is alive, well, and at the bench. The fictional treatment of him in our recent short story (“The Last Glassblower of Main Street”) is fictional. We regret any concern.