With the truck, he said, “I could go move around, make $200, $300 in a day, and then go lay down at home.”
In 2010, the Atlanta Housing Authority demolished Herndon Homes.
He took the truck through Herndon Homes, before they were knocked down,
and rolled daily among the new apartments — clean, brick, rectilinear, blandly handsome — where Techwood Homes used to be.
“When times change,” he said, “you’ve got to change with the times.”
He grew up in Herndon Homes, another public housing complex nearby, in a neighborhood that had gone from white to black by midcentury.
ATLANTA — It is 3 in the afternoon, and Anthony Palmer, 62, is behind the wheel of the beat-up, retrofitted
and rebranded bread truck that is Anthony’s Rolling Store.
In 2006, Mr. Palmer took the money the city had paid him for the game room and paid $5,000 for the old bread truck.
“Kids,” a woman cries, “the rolling store’s here!”
The little ones come out in their school uniforms, twirling braids, choosing carefully from the bags of salty junk
on display, hands reaching up to put their money up on the ledge of the little window by the back wheels.
