William Niall Mitchell of Atlanta died on March 14 at the age of 90 in New Orleans. Born on February 26, 1933, at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta to Ethel Niall Mitchell and Walter Mitchell, Sr., he was the second of three boys. Known to lifelong friends as “Billy,” he grew up in Brookwood Hills and recalled riding his bicycle along Peachtree Street to the nearby soda fountain by the age of five. He attended E. Rivers Elementary School, Fritz Orr Summer Camp (where he developed a mean right hook) and North Fulton High School where he was a star of both the varsity football and basketball teams and one of the original “Buckhead Boys.” He also worked summers with his older brother, Walter, Jr., servicing looms at the cotton mills under their father’s management, often bunking under the machines at night. Like his father before him and his younger brother Wade, he attended the Georgia Institute of Technology. A member of Tech’s class of 1955, he won a football scholarship with the Yellow Jackets but left the demands of college athletics in favor of a raft of club memberships and leadership positions. He majored in Industrial Management and pledged Phi Delta Theta fraternity.
Upon graduation, he sold movable office partitions–honing his sales skills at a time when cubicles were taking over modern office spaces. He was in this line of work in 1959, when Life Magazine profiled him for a photo essay: “The Blessings of Bachelorhood.” The lead photo was of Billy in khaki pants, feet outstretched in sneakers, sporting his unmistakable grin, riding backwards as a friend steered a motor scooter down Peachtree Street. But, fortunately, his bachelor days were waning even then: he had already met Margaret Tyler of Macon and they married in 1963.
Ever the modern executive, Billy worked for the IBM Corporation (he remembered being sent home once for not wearing a hat to work) and later entered banking with the National Bank of Georgia. After the births of two daughters, Billy and Margaret moved to Tallahassee, Florida in 1976 where he worked for Capital City Bank as Executive Vice President and then President of Capital City Services. He was dedicated to his adopted community, serving as Chairman of the Downtown Improvement Authority, President of Tallahassee Community College Foundation Board, President of the Board of Directors of Goodwill Industries of the Big Bend, on the board of Alfred B. Maclay School, and as a member of the Rotary Club. Though a Georgia boy, Billy greatly appreciated the natural surroundings of Florida–the canopy roads and the rustic beaches of the Gulf Coast–and was unbothered by the alligators who escorted his canoe through the swamps.
Billy and Margaret moved back to Atlanta in retirement. Billy pursued his hobbies of reading the newspaper, walking, expertly navigating his hometown by car without GPS, filling bankers’ binders with the family accounting, driving Margaret to the mountains, and lunching with lifelong friends. After the death of his beloved wife of 60 years in 2022, Billy lived with his daughters in New Orleans where he watched his only grandson paint the corners with his fastball and hit shots from beyond the arc. He is survived by his daughters Margaret Tyler Mitchell (Meg), Mary Niall Mitchell (Molly) and their spouses Scott Pentzer and Jon Pult, and grandson and namesake, William Louis Pult (Willie), all of New Orleans; brother Wade Mitchell and his wife Mary Lu of Atlanta; brother-in-law Richard Tyler of Dothan, Alabama; niece Lee Darter and her husband Robert of Cochran, GA, and great nephew Mason Benedict of Anna Maria Island, Florida; and nieces and nephews David Mitchell of Silver Spring, MD, Wright Mitchell and Catherine Jaxson of Atlanta, and their children, his great nieces and nephews.
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