Last night, I took a leisurely stroll from Belltown to South Lake Union to attend the Transportation Choices Coalition's annual summer party at the 415 Westlake event space. Morning Fizz fawned on US Rep. Jay Inslee's speech this morning, but the speaker I was really excited to meet was John Robert Smith, head of Transportation for America.

No offense to American Public Transit Association director William Millar, a kinetic speaker (every photo I snapped of him was a blur of arms and legs in motion) who managed to get the crowd jazzed about buses and high-speed rail: I had a personal reason for wanting to talk to Smith. From 1993 to 2009, he was the mayor of Meridian, Mississippi, where I was born and lived as a kid. A Republican, Smith is widely credited with revitalizing Meridian's downtown (dead and dull when I was there) with transit-oriented development, the renovation of the town's historic train station, and a new performing-arts center. "It's totally different than when you were there," Smith told me. "Downtown is a place people want to go now." Apparently, people even live there!

And—perhaps not surprising in a town that, while growing, still has only 38,000 residents—he knows my family, and even served in the local Rotary Club with my granddad.