I came to Georgia as a (yankee) transplant in 1978, when my family moved to follow my dad’s manufacturing job.
HUGE transition from a small midwestern city to rural Northeast Georgia. It didn’t help when the HBO movie we watched at the motel that first night was ‘Deliverance’, filmed in the county we were moving to. (Picture a thirteen-year-old catholic boy seeing the “squeal like a pig” scene, and thinking, “We’re going THERE???”)
Jumping to the point: I became a Georgia Tech fan after the hundredth time I heard “How ‘bout them dawgs!”—which is to say, I became a GT fan by mid-morning of my first day at Rabun County High School.
The really neat bit in all this is that, a few years later when I enrolled at Tech, my mom explained to me that her dad (who died a decade before I was born) was a working-class guy and a HUGE Georgia Tech fan (this would have been in the 40s and 50s) who would come home at night rip-roaring drunk, singing the “Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”.