TCB July 6, 2017 — Hogwashed II

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point July 6 – 12, 2017 triad-city-beat.com

FREE

Mead!

PAGE 17 Murals!

PAGE 19 ’Merica!

PAGES 5, 6, 10 & 22

HOGWASHED PART

2

What happens when 9.2 million hogs and the environment collide?

Part II of III in our series on Big Pork in North Carolina, in collaboration with Indy Week

by KEN FINE and ERICA HELLERSTEIN

PAGE 11

July 6 – 12, 2017

experience...emf 56 Seasons of Music Excellence

THURSDAY & FRIDAY, JULY 6-28 8 P.M. Young Artists Orchestras

Dana Auditorium, Guilford College SATURDAY, JULY 8 8 P.M. Russian Tableaux

Dana Auditorium, Guilford College

Violinist Midori and Saxophonist Hunter Bockes with Eastern Festival Orchestra.

MONDAY, JULY 10, 17, 24 8 P.M. Chamber Music @ UNCG

Recital Hall, UNCG College of Visual and Performing Arts TUESDAY, JULY 11, 25 8 P.M. Chamber Music @ Guilford College Dana Auditorium, Guilford College WEDNESDAY, JULY 12 8 P.M. EMF & Greensboro Opera Present: Shave and a Haircut

Temple Emanuel, Greensboro

Selections from The Barber of Seville, Sweeney Todd, Hairspray and South Pacific, among others.

SUMMER 2017

Thanks to our sponsors:

JUNE 24 – JULY 29

Ticket information & Sales: 336-272-0160

2

EASTERNMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG All programs, dates, artists, venues, and prices are subject to change.

Midori Playing July 8

Why Thursdays

This week marks a seismic shift in the Triad City Beat flow.

As a workaround to the Fourth of July this week, we opted to hit the

by Brian Clarey streets on Thursday instead of Wednesday. And we liked the idea so much we decided to stick with Thursdays from now on.

We have our reasons.

As a Wednesday paper, we have been becoming increasingly frustrated at the accelerated pace of the news cycle: News often breaks after we put the paper to bed on Tuesday afternoon, and more stuff drops on Wednesdays that might be stale by the time the next paper comes out. It will change the way we handle elections — for more than a decade our editors have scrambled to put the results in a fresh paper on Wednesday; now we will have a full day to digest each race.

From a financial standpoint, Thursday is much more significant than Wednesday: It’s the day most people decide how they

will spend their time and money over the weekend. That’s why, back in the days of network television, all the best shows aired on Thursday nights.

The move enables us to take a Monday off once in a while — or, in the case of this week, Tuesday. And because our core deadlines remain the same (hear that, freelancers?), it enables us to spread the week’s content out over the course of a few days, instead if the usual Wednesday news dump. Triad-city-beat.com will be getting a lot more love as a result.

Speaking of the site, we’ve tuned up the server and cleaned up the code, finally solving a flash-of-unstyled-content problem that’s been nagging us, literally, for years. I’d explain, but it’s the sort of thing that if you don’t already know what it is, you probably don’t care. Suffice to say that load times are much faster. And it looks great on a phone.

The Thursday switch is simple to implement, and though it doesn’t change the amount of days in a week, it creates the illusion among staff of a rare luxury in the news business: Time. And we could always use more of that.

triad-city-beat.com

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

I saw about a dozen lagoons under water, and probably another 10 poultry facilities where the barns were underwater,” says Graves, the recently retired Lower Neuse riverkeeper.

“Even if the lagoons weren’t breached, you could see that they had been completely flushed. All of that ended up right in the Neuse River.

— Travis Graves, retired Lower Neuse riverkeeper, in the Cover, page 11

BUSINESS PUBLISHER/EXECUTIVE EDITOR Brian Clarey brian@triad-city-beat.com

PUBLISHER EMERITUS Allen Broach allen@triad-city-beat.com

EDITORIAL MANAGING EDITOR Eric Ginsburg eric@triad-city-beat.com

SENIOR EDITOR Jordan Green

1451 S. Elm-Eugene St. Box 24, Greensboro, NC 27406 Office: 336-256-9320 ART ART DIRECTOR Jorge Maturino jorge@triad-city-beat.com

SALES SALES/DIGITAL MARKETING SPECIALIST Regina Curry regina@triad-city-beat.com

SALES EXECUTIVE Cheryl Green cheryl@triad-city-beat.com

CONTRIBUTORS Carolyn de Berry Kat Bodrie Spencer KM Brown

Jelisa Castrodale Matt Jones Joel Sronce

Cover photography by Alex Boerner

jordan@triad-city-beat.com

EDITORIAL INTERNS Lauren Barber & Eric Hairston intern@triad-city-beat.com

TCB IN A FLASH DAILY @ triad-city-beat.com First copy is free, all additional copies are $1.00. ©2017 Beat Media Inc.

3

July 6 – 12, 2017

EVENTS Thursday, July 6 @ 8pm

Open Mic Night

Friday, July 7 @ 8pm

CITY LIFE July 6 – 12

by Eric Hairston

FRIDAY

Viva La Muerte

Saturday, July 8 @ 8pm

Entangled Dreams Monday, July 10 @ 7pm

Mystery Movie Monday

602 S Elam Ave • Greensboro

(336) 698-3888 SPREADING JOY ONE PINT AT A TIME

Natural building & intentional living @ Stoney Hill Circle Community Garden (GSO), 9:30 a.m.

This workshop instructs attendees about natural building and cooperative economics. Participants will use their hands and feet to mold and sculpt clay, straw, water and sand. For more information, visit the garden’s Facebook event page.

Gallery hop @ downtown Winston-Salem (W-S), 7 p.m.

Winston-Salem’s First Friday gallery hop features live music, food trucks and plenty of open galleries to explore. For more information, visit downtownws. com.

First Fridays @ downtown Greensboro (GSO), 6 p.m.

Greensboro’s First Friday is a free event full of live music, street performances, local art gallery exhibits and more. For more information, visit artsgreensboro. org.

SATURDAY

Monday Geeks Who Drink Pub Quiz 7:30 Tuesday Live music with Piedmont Old Time Society Old Time music and Bluegrass 7:30 Wednesday Live music with J Timber and Joel Henry with special guests 8:30

Thursday Joymongers Band aka Levon Zevon aka Average Height Band 8:30pm Friday, Saturday, Sunday BEER

4

joymongers.com | 336-763-5255 576 N. Eugene St. | Greensboro

Phil Cook & the Guitarheels @ Barber Park (GSO), 6 p.m.

The sixth show in the Levitt AMP Greensboro Music concert series, singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook & the Guitarheels perform in Barber Park. Food trucks will be on site. For more information, visit artsgreensboro.org.

Custom textures with photo polymer plates workshop @ Sawtooth (W-S), 10 a.m.

Participants learn how to turn artwork, signatures and text into custom plates for use with clay. This skill is especially useful to capture a loved one’s handwriting or a child’s artwork. For more information, visit sawtooth.org.

Old Salem family day camp @ Old Salem (W-S), 9 a.m.

Participants will work with a pottery wheel and cook in a historic kitchen using 18th Century recipes as well as write with a quill pen. This event is for grades 3-8. For more information, visit oldsalem.org.

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers @ On Pop of the World Studios (GSO), 8 p.m.

National recording artist Sarah Shook & the Disarmers perform live along with special guests.

This concert also includes performances by GSO and Sugar Meat.. Limited tickets available.

For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Roman Holiday film screening @ Bailey Park (W-S), 7:30 p.m.

Innovation & Cinema presents the classic Roman Holiday starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. The event is free and leashed dogs are allowed. For details, visit baileyparkws.com.

triad-city-beat.com

The White House’s insidious voter suppression campaign

by Lauren Barber

Trivia every Tuesday at 8 gift card for winning team

Thursday

Grilled Cantaloupe Gose Randall First Friday

Cheese Flight Pairing

Opinion

Sunday

Pints & Pilates at 11

Free! Bring a mat and towel.

preyerbrewing.com

Cover Story

for voter suppression and privacy rights.

North Carolina will send currently public information to Washington but withhold information like Social Security numbers.

The White House’s request for such a broad swath of voter information is unprecedented, but limiting access to the ballot is an American tradition. We should make no mistake: These are the rumblings of a calculated effort to limit voter access.

Disturbing as it is, the scale and aggression of this plan signal the desperation of a party wrestling with inner turmoil as it attempts to maintain an electoral stronghold ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections. As courts return more and more “guilty” verdicts to states engaged in racial and partisan gerrymandering, the GOP is mounting an unapologetic attack on voting rights, and they are counting on our apathy.

News

Liberties Union has sued the Advisory Commission’s vice chairman — Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — four times for voting rights-related abuses of power. His once widely adopted Interstate Crosscheck program led to wildly misrepresentative findings on the prevalence of double voting and resulted in removing thousands of citizens from voting rolls. Heritage Foundation fellow Hans von Spakovsky’s presence on the commission should quell any doubts that the administration plans to purge voter rolls. As Ari Berman reported for the Nation, “When von Spakovsky was nominated to the Federal Elections Commission, six former lawyers in the voting section called him ‘the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.’”

According to the Hill, at least 27 states are refusing to cooperate with the commission’s request, citing concerns

Up Front

Last week, Republicans tucked a provision into the House Financial Services Appropriation Bill that would defund the modest, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission that tests and certifies the reliability and security of US voting systems. This was despite intelligence officials’ reports that Russia interfered with voting machines in 21 states during the 2016 election. And it fell within the same news cycle as the Trump administration’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity asking all 50 states to turn over voter registration information, including the last four digits of Social Security numbers and dates of birth.

The White House continues to suggest that widespread voter fraud accounts for Trump’s more than 3 million popular-vote loss with disregard to overwhelming consensus that voter fraud is a next to non-existent issue, as ProPublica has documented. The American Civil

Culture

‘The Keepers’

by Jordan Green

Crossword Triaditude Adjustment

were students at Keough in the late 1960s and early ’70s, allege that Maskell raped them and orchestrated sexual abuse by other men. Maskell died in 2001. The documentary series focuses on the dogged efforts of two Keough alumni — Gemma Hoskins and Abbie Fitzgerald Schaub, who anchor the years-long investigation — to uncover the truth. It provides an important reminder of the evil of institutions when their authority goes unchecked.

Let’s pray that Catherine Cesnik and the girls she tried to protect receive the full measure of justice. As for my dad and his siblings, I can only thank God they shook the dust off their feet and left that town.

Shot in the Triad

My dad had no reservations about telling the reason why he left the faith. I was probably 10 when he told me about how a nun in junior high had told him to stop crying after he had been called to the office for being involved in a fight.

He said he was never able to cry after that. He also told me about a priest who was known to molest boys. The Catholic boys would take turns sleeping over at the priest’s house. My dad was savvy enough to come up with an excuse for not staying over with the priest. It would be a well over a decade before the Boston Globe brought recognition of the widespread nature of sexual abuse by priests and the church’s systematic cover-up of the crimes.

It appears that my dad and, more significantly, his two younger sisters were fortunate. Three years after the family’s departure for Urbana, a horrific saga unfolded at Archbishop Keough High School, an all-girls parochial school. In November 1969, a nun who had formerly taught at Keough named Catherine Cesnik was murdered, as told in “The Keepers.” The seven-part series strongly suggests that Cesnik was murdered to prevent her from exposing Father Joseph Maskell. Multiple women, who

Sportsball

I have a strange relationship with the city of Baltimore because my dad, who died in a tractor accident in 1992, came of age there in the mid-1960s. He came to revere the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and volunteered in a campaign against housing segregation there. He first smoked pot there. He rebelled against his parents.

By 1966, his family had moved to Urbana, Ill. because my grandfather, who taught English at Johns Hopkins University, accepted a position at the University of Illinois.

My dad split for San Francisco; there was little reason to maintain ties with Baltimore.

Baltimore was and is a heavily Catholic city, as the new Netflix documentary series, “The Keepers,” observes. My dad’s family was Catholic, too; my grandfather had studied to be a Jesuit priest at one point. As far back as I can remember, my dad always identified as a lapsed Catholic.

He only came to the Disciples of Christ church — where my mom, my sister and I attended — for fellowship dinners, and then only after the worship service had concluded. In his later years, he attended Sufi dance ceremonies.

The only remnant of his Catholic faith was our subscription to the Catholic Worker, the radical anarchist-pacifist newspaper founded by Dorothy Day.

5

July 6 – 12, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

6

NEWS

Family of woman in sanctuary seeks July 4 meeting with Tillis

by Jordan Green

While Juana Luz Tobar Ortega, an undocumented woman taking sanctuary in Greensboro, seeks protection from deportation, Sen. Thom Tillis is preoccupied with giving the US Border Patrol more personnel and equipment.

About 40 North Carolinians held a Fourth of July cookout in front of US Sen. Thom Tillis’ High Point office, but the guest of honor was a no-show.

A card table covered in a red-checked cloth bequeathed a pie decorated with two small American flags. Hotdogs cooked on an industrial-strength grill.

And a small sound system pumped out a mix ranging from Latin dance music to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” After fielding questions from a trio of television reporters, Lesvi Molina, Juana Luz Tobar Ortega’s daughter, pulled out her cell phone and dialed the number for Sen. Tillis’ Washington DC office.

“We gave you an invitation a week ago for a cookout we’re holding at your office,” Molina said. “We’re sorry that we missed you. It’s so unfortunate that you didn’t come. We did hope to see you here, and you didn’t come, but we’re here outside the High Point office.

We hope to hear from you soon, and hopefully you do take the time to meet up with our family.”

Tobar Ortega came to the United States from Guatemala in 1992 after armed anti-government rebels threatened her life, Molina has said. Later, after visiting Guatemala to care for Molina — who was ill and staying with her grandparents — Tobar Ortega obtained a fraudulent visa to return

Nikki Marin Baena sets up a table in front of Sen. Thom Tillis’ High Point office on July 4.

to the United States. She raised four children in Asheboro and worked at a contract sewing factory in High Point.

In 2011, Tobar Ortega was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but ultimately spared deportation because she fell outside the Obama administration’s priority for removing criminal immigrants. That changed this year, when ICE ordered her to leave the country at the end of May. Instead, she took sanctuary in St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in northwest Greensboro.

Lesvi Molina has said that her mother’s two youngest children, including a 15-year-old who is still in high school, need her here in North Carolina.

Since Tobar Ortega went into sanctuary on May 28, her daughter said Tillis has yet to meet with them or respond.

“We’re basically saying, ‘We’re here,

rattle + hum

We’ll change your oil, not your radio station.

Automotive

894 N. Liberty Street, Winston-Salem, NC 27101

336.293.7312 • #wsnc rattleandhumautomotive.com

JORDAN GREEN

we’re not going to go anywhere, we want to meet with you and just answer our questions,’” Molina told supporters in front of Tillis’ office on July 4. “‘Do you think our mother should be deported? Do we deserve this? Does her family deserve to be separated?’ That’s why we are here today, and that’s why we brought the cookout here to his office.

Because we have not had any concrete answers from his staff.”

Ginny Hultquist, a volunteer with the nonprofit Faith Action, said Tobar Ortega’s supporters are targeting Tillis — the junior senator from North Carolina — as opposed to Sen. Richard Burr or Rep. Mark Walker because of Tillis’ membership on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“He is the only person who can go to ICE and request a stay of removal,”

Hultquist said. “Who are we in this country if we can’t show mercy?”

Molina said the lack of action on her mother’s case has caused frustration.

“We are very concerned about what’s going to happen next,” she said. “Time is going by and we’re not getting anywhere. We have to be patient.”

Sen. Tillis’ office provided the following statement to Triad City Beat: “While in this particular instance our office worked to do everything we could have done within the confines of our legal system, the case is now out of our jurisdiction.” Tillis’ office didn’t respond to a query about whether the senator has asked ICE to grant a stay of removal.

A Republican, Tillis has attempted to position himself as a moderate on immigration, but has insisted that border enforcement and strengthening interior enforcement must take place before the needs of the undocumented population in the United States can be addressed.

“I think we need to dispense with the ‘We don’t need borders, we need bridges’ discussion at one end of the spectrum, and the other end of the spectrum that says we need to build a structure that can be viewed from outer space,” Tillis said, addressing Carla Provost, deputy chief of the Border Patrol, during a June 21 hearing on the transnational criminal organization MS-13. “There is a happy medium that the experts on the ground there [at the border] have said through people, technology and infrastructure convinced you can be made more safe.”

Provost agreed.

Recipes fRom the old city of

JERUSALEM

Up Front News Opinion

DINE IN TO GO

CaTErING markET plaCE “You Will Be Pleased”

310 South Elm Street • Greensboro, NC 27401 336.279.7025 | Mon-Sat 11am-9pm | www.jerusalemarket.com

Cover Story

political violence — some of it caused by US military intervention — that drives immigration by compelling people like Tobar Ortega to risk their lives crossing the border to seek refuge, or more recently to flee gang violence in Central America. Instead, Tillis focused on MS-13’s victimization of undocumented people.

“Here’s the sad part about what we’re talking about,” Tillis said. “If they’re guilty of murder or rape, hopefully [criminal immigrants will] be prosecuted and incarcerated. If they’re guilty of crimes that are just below a threshold, they can be released back into a community. And the community that they’re most likely to be most violent against are the illegally present communities in these cities. They’re victimizing their own population.”

But for Juana Luz Tobar Ortega, the prospect of her family being broken up by and ICE deportation order looms as a larger threat than gang violence.

Molina said she holds out hope that Tillis will eventually agree to meet with her family, and maybe even meet her mother.

“We’ve seen support from him for immigration before,” she said. “We know he has a heart. We have confidence he’ll use good judgment. My mother is here just trying to make a living, not harming anyone.”

triad-city-beat.com

“That type of support for our frontline men and women would help reduce the risk to them and their security, [and] help them do their jobs even better than they already do,” she said.

Yet Provost acknowledged during the hearing that as the United States has ramped up personnel and equipment over the past couple decades, illegal crossings are now “trending downward,” but the border has become increasingly violent, with “assaults against Border Patrol agents on the rise.”

“Certainly as we tighten down on border security our experience over the years as we do a better job, unfortunately the violence against our men and women rises as it becomes more difficult to cross the borders,” Provost told him.

Rather than de-militarizing the border, Tillis is proposing escalation of border enforcement.

“It would seem to me that to the extent that we put people, technology and infrastructure on the border, we’re not only addressing a national security problem, but we may also be addressing a humanitarian element in terms of limiting the amount of human smuggling that’s occurring that ultimately get into drug trafficking, prostitution and other things that occur that create the currency that MS-13 uses to run their organization,” Tillis said.

The senator didn’t address the poverty and

Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

7

July 6 – 12, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

8

Panel recommends folding police review into new commission

by Jordan Green

The Greensboro Human Relations Commission is recommending that its police complaint review component be folded in to a new Criminal Justice Advisory Commission.

Roughly a year after the formation of the Police Community Review Board, the Greensboro Human Relations Commission is recommending the panel be scrapped and folded into a new body known as the Criminal Justice Advisory Commission.

“People who are looking at the PCRB from the community have seen things skewed towards the police — that the PCRB is seen as favoring the police,” said David Sevier, a human relations commissioner who chaired the ad hoc committee to revamp the process.

“When we interviewed officers on the street we’ve gotten a sense that the police see the PCRB as a body that is really out to get them, if you will.

There’s that perspective.”

Sevier added that members of the review board themselves are divided.

One of the board’s members, Lindy Garnette, was removed earlier this year by the chair of the human relations commission on the advice of City Attorney Tom Carruthers, after Garnette spoke publicly about a case in which the board disagreed with the police professional standards division.

Soon afterwards two other members resigned. During a contentious May 15 meeting, the human relations commission voted 7-6 to reinstate Garnette to the board, but the city attorney ruled that the action was non-binding because Chairman Zac Engle had sole discretion to appoint members. At that meeting, a commissioner also made a motion to remove Engle as chair of the commission, but the motion did not go forward because Carruthers provided the opinion that there was not a cause for action. Commissioners also voted unanimously to issue an apology to Tamara Figueroa for their handling of her complaint about how police officers treated her son during an altercation at the Fun Fourth Festival in downtown Greensboro in 2016.

Sevier said members of the review board were “divided about training, divided about the mission of the PCRB, divided about how the go about making decisions, divided about what they can speak about, even though they didn’t all agree that they needed to be under the veil of confidentiality. So the PCRB

Commissioner David Sevier (left) makes a point to fellow members of the Greensboro Human Relations Commission.

itself is divided and have a number of negative perceptions about their work.

“And then the complainants, when we’ve talked to them we’ve gotten a clear sense that nobody is satisfied with the complaint process,” Sevier added, “primarily because they couldn’t speak, they couldn’t appear — or at least the perception was they couldn’t appear before the PCRB — that changed a little bit here recently. But also that essentially their complaint went into a black hole and that some weeks or months later they received a written letter, and that letter just said we agree with the internal affairs adjudication or we don’t. There was no sense of real relief in that.”

During a special meeting on June 29, the human relations commission unanimously voted to create a Greensboro Criminal Justice Advisory Commission, which would hold a wide range of responsibilities, from advising the police department to monitoring complaints and critical incidents, and issuing regular reports with trend data.

As a stand-alone commission appointed by city council, the new criminal justice advisory commission would absorb the current police community review board.

“In my view, this will be a dramatic opportunity to enhance public trust, transparency and accountability,” Sevier said. “It’s going to look at data rather than only review a small number of cases. It’s going to look at, are there individual police officers that are up time and time again for complaints? This information is going to be put out in a public report.”

The human relations commission is requesting a meeting with city council at its next work session to discuss the requested changes. Sevier said he has

JORDAN GREEN

spoken with all members of city council, except Councilman Jamal Fox, who is resigning his seat on July 18. He said he also spoke with City Manager Jim Westmoreland. Sevier said the city council members and city manager responded positively to the idea of establishing a criminal justice advisory commission, which is based on monitoring/advisory model. City council will have final say over whether the proposed changes take effect.

Ed Cobbler, a retired officer who chairs the current police community review board, did not attend the meeting on Thursday. On May 15, he expressed disagreement with Sevier’s contention that the board was in need of an overhaul, although he served on the ad hoc committee to review the board.

Sevier’s committee found that the small number of cases reviewed by the current police community review board is not sufficient to draw conclusions about patterns of behavior by individual officers or by the department as a whole.

“A remarkably small number of cases referred to the PCRB result in different findings than that of the Greensboro Police Department [professional standards division],” a study produced by Sevier’s committee found, “yet these few cases frequently contributed to a significant lack of community trust — which cannot be then addressed publicly by the PCRB.” Out of 217,735 calls for service in 2016, only 186 — or 0.06 percent — generated citizen complaints for inquiries, the study found. Of that number, only six were forwarded from the police department’s professional standards division to the police community review board for review. In only one

case did the police community review board disagree with the findings of the police’s internal investigation. In other words, only 0.0003 percent of all calls for service resulted in a finding where the community review board found fault with a police officer.

Some commissioners expressed confusion about how far the proposed overhaul went towards addressing one of the key frustrations of complainants — whether they had the right to address the review board and call witnesses.

“We still don’t have any clarity on what is the ability of the complainant to speak to the PCRB or not, and we don’t have any clarity on whether they can bring a witness,” Garnette said.

Sevier said after the vote that the city manager would be consulted on whether complainants could address the review panel or call witnesses to testify.

Sevier said the new board will not hold subpoena power — a tool long sought by police reform advocates — since at least 2000, when city council rejected it in a vote along racial lines.

Commissioners on June 29 discussed the meaning of “ample authority,” described in the study as “necessary component” for “advisory oversight.”

By way of explanation, Sevier said he expected command-level staff to provide forthright answers to commissioners’ questions. In the absence of subpoena power, he expressed confidence that the police would cooperate with the commission to avoid bad publicity.

Sevier also said the city might need to appeal to the state General Assembly to clarify the law on individual citizen complaints, which was written specifically for Greensboro through session laws in 2001 and 2005.

The findings in the study by Sevier’s committee point to “restrictions and challenges associated with the current police complaint process within the city of Greensboro, severely limiting its usefulness.”

Yet the challenges would likely apply to the complaint review component within the proposed criminal justice advisory commission as well.

“General Assembly of NC Sessions Laws (2001, 2005) restrain meaningful review of individual citizen complaints, and, specifically prohibit public reports of findings that suggest concerns with an individual police officer’s behavior in an incident,” the study found.

triad-city-beat.com

Up Front

News

Opinion

Cover Story

Culture

Sportsball

Crossword

Shot in the Triad

Triaditude Adjustment

9

July 6 – 12, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

10

OPINION

EDITORIAL

Sen. Trudy Wade delivers a body-slam to local newspapers As a news outlet, we must recognize the open hostility and disdain shown by state Sen. Trudy Wade (R-Guilford) in her strike against our industry, as embodied in her bill, SB 343, which languishes in the finance committee, having passed the Senate and its first reading in the House, awaiting ratification and the governor’s signature to become law.

It’s designed to hurt newspapers — specifically Guilford County newspapers, as Guilford is the only county in the state this bill would affect — by stripping a requirement that legal notices be published in paid-circulation newspapers and allowing for a county website to handle the task.

John Owensby, publisher of the Kernersville News, told the Winston-Salem Journal that his community weekly would not survive without the $250,000 a year in government legal notices he currently bills.

The real victims are the dailies — the News & Record and the High Point Enterprise, which have been covering Wade going back to her days on the Guilford County Commission and Greensboro City Council. The lost revenue stream delivers a solid blow to their bottom lines.

Proponents of the bill say that government spending is propping up the industry with what amounts to a subsidy.

Our own opinion is… nuanced.

By current North Carolina law, Triad City Beat is ineligible for legal notices: Our paper is free, an automatic disqualifier. From where we’re sitting, the guaranteed cash stream does seem to give an undue advantage to our competitors, going by Owensby’s estimate.

And the fact is, the haters have a point: Traditional newspapers don’t have the penetration they once did, and even they post everything they do online, just like everybody else. Fears that the county might bury these notices deep in their labyrinthine website fall to the realization that within minutes of the creation of the page, it will be indexed by search engines and accessible to digital-savvy citizens within hours. There are no secrets on the internet. And everyone who relies on the foreclosure notices, auction dates and other government information for their livelihood will adapt.

The long game is more troubling. Our society relies on reporters — the more the better — and the outlets that publish the kind of news that someone, somewhere, does not want to be printed. Lost revenues at the dailies certainly means fewer notebooks and cameras out on the streets. And for that, everyone — everyone in Guilford County anyway — will suffer.

CITIZEN GREEN

This country belongs to us, too

Treated as a given rather than recount in their 2011 book News for All the People: The a conscious choice, patriotism Epic Story of Race and the American Media, a group of is easy to espouse: With the prominent whites broke into the post office in Charlesexception of members of the ton, SC in 1835, and seized copies of abolitionist pamtransnational super-rich class phlets and newspapers and burned them on the grounds flitting from Sochi to Dubai and of the Citadel before a cheering mob of 2,000 people.

Manhattan, most of us spend all Sadly, the press — the only profession explicitly

by Jordan Green or the vast majority of our lives protected in the Constitution — has not always upheld in one country. We love and invest our concern in the its duty to report the truth and defend the rights of people with whom we share a country, a state, a city, a all Americans to be secure in their homes and earn a community. We’re patriots. living. Since the early 19th Century, the white press has It’s only when demagogues create a mystique out of fomented violence against blacks, Indians, Mexicans and patriotism and define it through exclusionary claims that Chinese, most infamously with Josephus Daniels’ use of cleave true believers from the arbitrarily defined others the Raleigh News & Observer to incite violence against that it becomes harmful and dangerous. the multiracial city government in Wilmington. Notably, For people of color, the rights guaranteed under the the first act in the 1898 coup was a white mob’s arson of Constitution — to speak freely, assemble and petition for the city’s only black newspaper, the Record. redress of grievances, to bear arms, to be secure in one’s As González and Torres show in News for All the Peoperson and home — have always been conditional, and ple, journalism committed by people of color has always largely elusive. Still, with apologies to played a critical role in defending Frederick Douglass, I am celebrating the rights of non-white Americans On the stairs I smoke the Fourth of July precisely to raise when the white press manufactured the implications of what liberty means a cigarette alone/ The false outrages or otherwise distorted to all those Americans who have the facts. In one telling passage, the encountered systematically disenfran- Mexican kids are shootauthors recount how white militia chisement. For those who are tired of members destroyed the first Chering fireworks below/ hearing about the grievances of the newspaper even after the tribe Hey, baby, it’s the Fourth okee disenfranchised, the only other choice had largely acceded to the Jackson of July/ Hey, baby, it’s is revolution, and that, too, is a core administration’s demand for removal.

González and Torres write that American value. the Fourth of July.

Cherokee Chief John Ross decided What is the right to bear arms — Dave Alvin, “Fourth of to move the Phoenix newspaper if Philando Castille cannot carry a July” to Cherokee land in present-day firearm without it being considered a Tennessee. “Tragically, the Georgia pretext and a provocation to murder Guard intercepted the wagon train that was carrying the by a police officer who subjectively feels that a black man newspaper’s equipment, seized the press at gunpoint, is a threat? and dumped its lead type into a well,” the authors write, What is the pursuit of happiness if Eddie Wise, a black “and so ended the extraordinary saga of the world’s first son of sharecroppers and Army veteran — whose story Indian newspaper.” is masterfully told in the latest episode of “Reveal,” the With immigrant families being torn apart, mosques radio show and podcast co-produced by the Center for withstanding an unending stream of threats and attacks, Investigative Journalism and PRX — is robbed of his and the number of fatal attacks on transgender people farm near Rocky Mount because of discriminatory loan at an all-time high, these stories don’t seem all that far practices by the federal government? removed from contemporary American life.

And what is the honor of military service if undocuIf we’re going to celebrate freedom, then let’s be mented veterans are denied the opportunity to become free — black, white, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern and citizens and are even subjected to deportation?

American Indian, immigrant and native-born, queer and I want to take the nationalist right at its word, and hold straight, Muslim, Jewish, Christian and nonbeliever. The them to their avowed creed. rights enumerated in the Constitution can never be taken While we celebrate the ideals of the Constitution, for granted, and require us to fight every inch of the way: let’s not fetishize the founders. Beyond the hypocrisy of telling unpopular truths, getting land, earning a livelislaveholders declaring that all men are created equal, it’s hood, defending families and communities by force of instructive to remember that free speech wasn’t protectarms, if necessary. This Fourth of July, I’m going with the ed in the early days of the republic when it challenged expansive vision of America, not the narrow one. white supremacy. As Juan González and Joseph Torres

triad-city-beat.com

HOGWASHED PART

2

A powerful special interest. Shameless politicians. Failed regulations.

Part II of III in our series on Big Pork in North Carolina, in collaboration with Indy Week

by KEN FINE and ERICA HELLERSTEIN

Young hogs in pens at Butler Farms in Lillington

ALEX BOERNER

11

July 6 – 12, 2017

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second installment of a three-part investigation into North Carolina’s hog-farming industry. The first story (available at triad-city-beat.com) examined claims by lower-income African-American residents of eastern North Carolina that neighboring hog farms have polluted their properties, and efforts by lawmakers to shield pork producers from litigation. This story looks at the environmental impact hog farming has had over the last two decades, particularly on waterways such as the Neuse River. The final piece will discuss ways to make the multibillion-dollar hog industry more sustainable, both for the environment and the state’s rural population, and the political and financial reasons those steps have not been taken.

— Jeffrey Billman, editor of Indy Week

PART TWO: THE FLOOD

Cover Story

I. ‘Mother Nature will strike back’

through a slatted floo into c ontainment are under t he warehouse hog pens. The pens a cleaned regularly; th waste mixes with wa and flows into outdo pits called lagoons.

PIG WA ST E M I X E D W I T H WAT E R TO FOR M E F F LU E N T

A post with measurement marks is sunk into the bottom of the lagoon to indicate water levels and let farmers know when levels need to be reduced through spraying.

L

A

Y

TH ID W 10’

C

G E

For thousands of years, the Neuse River — which snakes more than 275 miles across North Carolina — provided fresh water and food to the indigenous people who called eastern North Carolina home. It remained unknown to English speakers until 1585,

Lagoons are an inexpensive way to deal with hog waste. The size and depth of a lagoon depends on various factors, including the number of hogs and local enviromental considerations, but the lagoons are usually eight to fifteen feet deep.

HOW A LAGO SPRAY SYST 1. Pig waste passes

D

II. ‘A goodly river called Neuse’

LAGOON CONSTRUCTION

U

ing at least 60,000 hogs and more than 100 lagoons, according to state records — 62 farms remained, housing more than 250,000 hogs and nearly 2 million chickens.

Scientists and clean-water advocates have long worried that a sequel to Floyd could once again devastate eastern North Carolina.

“I live on the Neuse River, and I’ve seen the fish die in this river,” says former Neuse Riverkeeper Rick Dove. “We’ve lost over a billion [fish] in this river due to pollution. There’s no river in the US that has suffered more fish kills than the Neuse. And let me tell you something; the laws of nature are far more powerful than the laws of men. And when you abuse nature over a long period of time, she’s very forgiving and she’s healing, but if you continue to pollute and desecrate and violate the laws of nature, she will strike back with something to stop you.”

Last fall, she struck back.

Hurricane Matthew, a Category 1 storm that rotated over North Carolina for more than 12 hours, washed out entire towns, uprooted centuries-old trees and destroyed businesses. According to the NC Pork Council, 14 waste lagoons flooded. When those waters receded, they took the contents of those lagoons with them, clean-water advocates say. What didn’t end up in the river soaked into the ground. And when water temperatures rise this summer, they argue, that waste could reveal itself in the form of fish-killing algae that has the potential to damage the state’s seafood industry.

“We don’t even know what the summer will bring,” Dove says. “But I think it’s safe to say it’s going to be another wake-up call.”

Everything you ever wanted to know about pig-waste dispo

SL

12

On Sept. 16, 1999, Hurricane Floyd, a Category 2 storm with sustained winds of 110 mph and a storm surge of nearly 10 feet, made landfall at Cape Fear.

Between 15 and 20 inches of rain pummeled eastern North Carolina. Forty-eight people died. Thousands more were displaced.

To make matters worse, just a few weeks earlier, Hurricane Dennis had brought heavy rains to the region. By the time Floyd hit, nearly every river basin in the eastern part of the state exceeded 500-year flood levels. In the end, Floyd caused nearly $7 billion in damage.

The torrential downpour unleashed something else, too: When the floodwaters saturated miles of North Carolina’s farmland, they swallowed many of the farm animals that made their homes in those fields. Tens of thousands of hogs and chickens drowned, and millions of gallons of waste — a mixture of feces, urine, blood and other fluids housed in lagoons — merged with the swollen Neuse River and its tributaries.

When those floodwaters receded and soaked into the ground, they took the contents of those lagoons with them. The pollutants entered the Neuse River basin, a waterway that begins its eastward path in Durham and feeds into the Pamlico Sound, the nation’s second-largest estuarine complex. The sound is so vast — 80 miles long and 20 miles wide — that, in 1524, Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano mistook it for the Pacific Ocean. Today it provides an estimated 90 percent of the state’s commercial fish and shellfish catches, an industry worth nearly $100 million annually.

Floyd put all that in jeopardy. Nitrogen, phosphorus and heavy metals found in the waste sat dormant in the Neuse and the sound it feeds. Months later, rising water temperatures activated the growth of algae blooms. During their ultimate decomposition, those blooms sucked the oxygen out of the water below, and hundreds of thousands of fish washed up dead on riverbanks.

These events prompted the legislature to authorize the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, which allocated $18.7 million for the voluntary buyouts of hog and chicken farms located inside the Neuse’s floodplain. But while 43 farmers shut down — represent-

INSIDE THE CES

At least one foot of compacted clay or other material should line the lagoon, forming a barrier that reduces the risk of leaks.

Many older NC l agoons are unlined and dug in sandy soil; these have a higher propensity to leak.

DI RT CONST

when a pair of explorers commissioned by Sir Walter Raleigh wrote about their escapades along “a goodly river called Neuse.”

Its recent history has been problematic. Even before Floyd, scientists say, the estuary fed by the Neuse was gasping for air.

“It seems like [the Pamlico Sound] in the summer is always on the cusp of becoming hypoxic,” says Travis Graves, who recently retired as the Lower Neuse riverkeeper. “It’s always struggling for oxygen.”

Graves’s claim is supported by research dating as far back as 1998. That year, the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Sciences published a report by ecology professor Hans Paerl and colleagues that concluded that a major rain event would result in hypoxia-induced fish kills along the Neuse River and within the Pamlico Sound. The culprit would be washed-out animal waste lagoons that would pollute the waterway. Paerl and his coauthors identified agri-

T th to im v

osal but were afraid to ask

OON/ TEM WORKS

s or eas e are he ater oor

The warehouses must be on higher ground than the lagoon since the lagoons are generally fed by gravity.

PIG WA R E HOUSE S

1

2. The waste

breaks down through a natural process over a period of months. Effluent remains at the top; sludge falls to the bottom.

2

L AG OON

3

3. Effluent is RUCT

pumped from the lagoon and sprayed on crops as fertilizer using either a sprinkler system or by h and with a spray gun.

The dirt wall surrounding he lagoon is covered in grass o help prevent erosion, mprove appearence, and provide better access.

CROPS

SOURCES: NC State, University of Missouri GRAPHIC BY SHAN STUMPF

cultural expansion and the proliferation of concentrated animal-feeding operations, or CAFOs, as the primary causes of “these troubling symptoms of eutrophication.”

Two years after Floyd, in 2001, a report by Duke University civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Borsuk noted that the Neuse was “a typical example of a stressed coastal system.” The river’s estuary was experiencing symptoms of nutrient overload, including algal blooms, low levels of dissolved oxygen, fish kills and outbreaks of toxic microorganisms, problems he blamed in part on “a growing commercial hog-farming industry.”

In October 2006, an article in the Journal of Environmental Engineering concluded that the Neuse’s estuary suffered from fecal contamination. It blamed livestock waste introduced into the waterway by “open-field manure spraying systems [and] agricultural animal manure runoff from confined animal feeding operations.”

In addition, a 2015 study by the US Geological Survey and the NC Department of Environment and Natural

Resources found that 58 percent of watersheds in the state’s coastal plain that contained industrialized animal operations had “distinct water-quality differences, reflecting swine and/or poultry CAFO manure effects” — an indication, environmentalists say, that even absent a natural disaster, an adverse environmental impact was present.

Despite two decades of evidence, however, not much has changed.

In April, the national water conservation organization American Rivers ranked the Neuse (along with Cape Fear) as the seventh most endangered river in the country, citing the harmful chemicals — nitrogen, phosphorus, blood and fecal matter — that have been making their way into the river because of nearby hog and poultry operations. Hurricane Matthew exacerbated these longstanding problems, according to the report.

“The threat these facilities and their antiquated waste operations pose to our waters will only increase as the effects of climate change become more prevalent and North Carolina is subjected to more frequent powerful storms,” the report says.

III. ‘We cannot sacrifice the environment’

Here’s how hog-waste lagoons are supposed to work: A farmer digs a pond-like basin, usually eight to 15 feet deep, next to a row of hog houses. When the pigs inside those hog houses relieve themselves, their waste falls through small slits on the slanted floor and into a concrete storage pit. That waste is then piped into the lagoon.

From there, science takes over. Solids in the wastewater separate and settle into layers of liquid on top and sludge below. Whenever the cesspool levels rise, the liquid is then pumped onto nearby spray fields as crop fertilizer. This prevents the open-air lagoon from flooding.

Hog farmers have been utilizing this practice since at least the 1970s. The hog industry has long argued that the sludge inside the lagoons creates a natural seal, preventing leakage and contamination of nearby groundwater supplies. The industry says this became especially true after the late ’80s, when lining lagoons with dense compacted clay became a best practice.

In 1993, the state’s Division of Environmental Management told lawmakers that lagoons are constructed to self-seal; two years later, Wendell Murphy, a powerful Democratic state legislator and patriarch of Murphy Family Farms, told the News & Observer that “lagoons will seal themselves” and that there’s not “one shred, not one piece of evidence anywhere in this nation that any groundwater is being contaminated by a hog lagoon.”

Agriculture experts disagree. Because most North

Carolina hog farms are located in five eastern counties situated in the Inner Coastal Plain, a region defined by permeable sandy soil, leakage is unavoidable, they say. And they point out that while lagoons constructed after the late ’80s were lined with clay, most of the older lagoons were never retrofitted.

In 1995, Rodney Huffman, an associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering at NC State University, conducted a study on the state’s unlined lagoons that were at least seven years old.

He and his fellow researchers found that more than half of them leaked “moderately to severely,” leaving nitrate levels in groundwater up to three times the EPA’s allowable limit. (Research has linked high nitrate levels in groundwater to potentially fatal heart defects in children.)

How much a lagoon could leak depends on the type of soil it was dug in, says John Classen, an NC State professor and an expert on agricultural waste management. Those dug closer to the center of the state, which has more clay soil, tend to leak less. But even the cesspools lined with clay can leak, he says, though not as much as the ones in more porous sandy soil. In fact, he adds, even concrete-lined lagoons could leak “on the same order of magnitude as that clay liner.”

In other words, Classen says, all lagoons have the potential to leak; the question is how much.

In 1997, two years after the publication of a Pulitzer Prize-winning N&O series looking at the environmental hazards of hog farming, the state legislature placed a moratorium on the construction of new hog farms and lagoons. But the cesspools already in use were left untouched.

The environmental implications of lagoons, however, made then-Gov. Jim Hunt nervous. A longtime industry ally, Hunt outlined a plan in April 1999 to phase out the lagoon system over 10 years.

“My views and most views have evolved to where we have to take stronger action to clear up our water and rivers,” Hunt told the New York Times. “We need a strong economy for our people, but we cannot sacrifice the environment for jobs.”

Hunt’s proposal failed to attract a single sponsor in the General Assembly. But that September, Hurricane Floyd ravaged the eastern part of the state, emptying the lagoons’ contents into waterways.

Then people began paying attention.

In 2000, then-Attorney General Mike Easley, another Democrat who would later become governor, entered into an agreement with pork giant Smithfield Foods in which the industry agreed to fund a $17 million experiment to find more environmentally sound ways to dispose of hog waste. Ultimately, the project identified five technologies that reduced odor emissions and the risk of pollution, nutrient and heavy metal contamination, and “disease-transmitting vectors and airborne pathogens.”

The problem was that these technologies were deemed economically viable only for implementa-

triad-city-beat.com

SSPOOL

13

July 6 – 12, 2017

tion on new farms.

Since no new hog farms have been constructed since the moratorium was put into place in 1997, these technologies have largely gone unused in North Carolina.

Even so, says Andy Curliss, CEO of the NC Pork Council, hog farms today operate in an environmentally responsible manner.

“Since the industry’s rapid growth in the 1980s and 1990s, there have been major, far-reaching changes in how hog farms operate and how they are regulated by the state,” he said in a statement. “Today, North Carolina has the most stringent regulations in the nation for hog farmers.”

Cover Story

IV. ‘You can write down whatever you want’

14

If scientists knew how old a lagoon was and what it was lined with, they could make an educated guess about its propensity to leak, look for potential groundwater contamination and determine how much ecological damage might have occurred, if any.

But North Carolina doesn’t maintain that information in a central database. The NC Department of Environmental Quality says that acquiring that information would require contacting the regional office that oversees each individual farm and asking if it has hard copies of that farm’s records. That wouldn’t be easy; according to the US Department of Agriculture, there are more than 2,200 hog farms in North Carolina.

In an email, DEQ spokeswoman Marla Sink acknowledges that collecting “the age of the lagoon” falls under the DEQ’s purview. But, she writes, “The age of the lagoons varies greatly and we do not have actual construction dates of most of these lagoons.”

The industry shrugs off concerns about aging liners — especially clay liners — and the potential for groundwater contamination. As Smithfield Foods wrote in an email interview, “There is no limit on the life of clay liners.… They are inspected on a regular basis by producers and by the regulators. The performance of clay liners may actually improve over time.”

Moreover, “hog farming is the most highly regulated sector in all of agriculture. Every farm is inspected by the state every year to ensure compliance with strict environmental regulations,” which include “lagoon integrity and liner conditions.”

But Tom Butler, a Lillington hog farmer who has been in the business since 1994, says those inspections have become less rigorous over the past two decades.

While he agrees that on paper the industry is among the most regulated in the state, he says the inspection process has become increasingly less comprehensive — and more and more, it relies on farmers to regulate themselves, because the inspections draw on each farmer’s own records.

State statute requires one inspection a year at every

animal operation. But 20 years ago, he says, his farm was inspected at least three times a year.

“We used to be scared to death when [the inspectors] came, because they actually went out in the spray fields,” says Butler, who is celebrated among environmental activists for covering his lagoons, which reduces odors and prevents flooding, and converting hog waste into electricity. “In the early days, it was more closely inspected. There was more touring around the farm.

We would actually go to spray fields and look at grass and the weeds and stuff. We would always check the lagoon levels. We would actually do it physically.”

Nowadays, Butler says, inspections on his farm are nothing more than a review of his records of such things as lagoon sludge levels and how much effluent was sprayed.

“They come in, they’re very friendly, we go through the inspection sheet, we go through all the items, they look at your waste management analysis, and then they look at that, make sure you got a current sample, and look at your records, and they look at your calculations of your spray system, they do all that,” he says.

“But this is paperwork. This is paperwork that you just show them. You can write down whatever you want to.

There’s nothing beyond checking these logs.”

Christine Lawson, manager of the DEQ’s concentrated animal feeding operations program, confirms that the number of annual inspections dropped from two in 2011 to one today, due to budget cuts and the elimination of what the legislature viewed as redundancy. (Lawson says she does not believe inspectors viewed the second inspection as redundant.) But she says those annual inspections consist of more than just a paper audit.

“You physically inspect the facility in addition to the audit of all the records,” she says. “You walk the lagoon, you look for weak spots, you look to make sure it’s being properly maintained, you go to the spray fields. There are many things we look for.”

Still, with limited resources, there’s only so much inspectors can do. The inspectors rely on records kept by the farmers to determine how much and how often they spray effluent onto fields and how much sludge is in their lagoons.

The Pork Council’s Andy Curliss points out that farmers must “keep detailed records that show exactly when they spray, to which section of which field, for how long, and they must record the weather conditions.”

Because of the system’s inherent self-regulation, Lawson acknowledges the possibility that bad actors could fudge the numbers. But if the DEQ caught wind of such activities, he says, the state wouldn’t hesitate to prosecute.

Lawson also confirms that farmers get a heads-up before their annual inspection — as much as a week, Butler says. Inspectors don’t randomly show up unless they’re responding to allegations of impropriety. This is done, Lawson says, to make sure someone will be there when the inspector arrives.

“But if our person is driving down the road and they see something that’s not going right, they’re driving and their vehicle gets sprayed by animal waste, they’re going to stop and deal with it right then,” Lawson says.

Butler, however, says this notification gives farms the chance to get everything in order before the inspectors come.

“We’re always notified,” he says. “If we do have any issues, we can get those cleared away because we know the inspector is coming. And to me, that’s not a good inspection.”

V. ‘A dozen lagoons under water’

Last October, Hurricane Matthew wreaked havoc across eastern North Carolina, causing $1.5 billion in damage to 100,000 homes, businesses, and government buildings, according to a state estimate.

Agricultural operations fared no better.

“I saw about a dozen lagoons under water, and probably another 10 poultry facilities where the barns were underwater,” says Graves, the recently retired Lower Neuse riverkeeper. “Even if the lagoons weren’t breached, you could see that they had been completely flushed. All of that ended up right in the Neuse River.”

The Pork Council says that 14 lagoons flooded, less than 1 percent of lagoons in the state. Smithfield Foods attributes that to the state’s buyout program after Hurricane Floyd and the “proactive steps taken on North Carolina hog farms.” The company says more serious environmental damage has been incurred by spills at municipal sewage plants.

But lagoons flooding during dramatic rain events isn’t the only concern. Leaking cesspools and seepage and runoff from spray fields also affect fish in state waterways, clean-water advocates say.

“I have seen a fish kill in the lower basin here every year since I’ve been on board as the riverkeeper,” says Graves, whose tenure as riverkeeper began in 2014. “It’s almost like clockwork. We can watch the water temperatures, wait for a rain event, and you can almost predict it to the day. I’ve seen hundreds of millions of [dead] fish.”

Those fish kills occur all along the Neuse River basin, he adds, right down to the Pamlico Sound. And large fish kills in the sound, the birthplace of much of the seafood harvested off the North Carolina coast, could be calamitous both environmentally and economically. Because of Matthew, Graves says, his fears may be realized this summer.

“After the [hurricane], and seeing so many facilities underwater, I have serious concerns over what kind of fish kill numbers we’re going to see this summer,” Graves says. “I’m anticipating it to be the worst summer for fish kills in recent history.”

Earlier this year, when the Neuse was named one

triad-city-beat.com

The Neuse River

of the most endangered rivers in America, riverkeepers began floating the idea of another voluntary buyout. The Pork Council endorsed that proposal; it’s not immediately clear whether or to what degree the legislature’s recently passed budget will fund a new buyout program.

But clean-water advocates say more drastic measures may be necessary — perhaps as drastic as replacing the entire lagoon system. After all, the pork industry ranks among the state’s most vital economic engines, pumping $2.5 billion a year into the state’s economy and accounting for more than 46,000 jobs. It’s not going anywhere. And that means that sooner or later, the state is going to have to figure out a solution to all that waste.

VI. ‘Ten thousand pigs a mile’

From the sky, in a shaky two-person airplane, you can see the paradox: vast expanses of green, lush, North Carolina beauty, zigzagging streams and rivers, all jarringly peppered with pig farms and the pink pools beside them. The perspective has a way of clarifying things. It’s an unnatural convergence between nature and manmade toxicity, and it makes the questions seem all the more urgent. How is this sustainable? Isn’t there a better way to handle this waste?

And what’s going to happen the next time a Matthew-type disaster strikes?

BEN MCKEOWN

Bob Epting, a cheery, 71-year-old pilot, zips through the clouds in his tiny white plane, pointing out the various hog operations and cesspools dotting eastern North Carolina’s otherwise pastoral landscape. They’re everywhere. Over Duplin County, Epting estimates, there are at least 50 within a 10-mile radius. Each farm has a minimum of 2,000 pigs, most far more.

So a lowball estimate would mean 100,000 pigs in 10 miles. Ten thousand pigs a mile.

A 180-pound pig can produce 11 pounds of waste a day. That’s 110,000 pounds of waste per mile per day.

Again: What can be done with it?

Epting, a native North Carolinian who has lived in Chapel Hill since college, talks about how much he’s seen the state change — not just the proliferation of commercial farms but the state’s politics as well, from Democratic blue to ruby red. He discusses the paradoxes of Tar Heel politics, Jesse Helms, and industry buddy and former Gov, Jim Hunt, whom Epting says was pestered with a roadside billboard reading “The Feces Governor.”

Epting, a member of the state Environmental Management Commission from 1992 to 2000, began flying over the hog farms after meeting Dove, the former Neuse riverkeeper, who was documenting fish kills and the runoff of agricultural waste into the river. Epting started flying so that Dove could take aerial photos of the land. Now, he says, “I’ve been doing this for a third of my life.”

Even before joining the commission, Epting — who had a law practice in Chapel Hill — had a longstand-

ing interest in clean-air and water issues. During his time on the commission, he saw the waste production of the corporate hog producers and believed stricter regulations were needed.

“I got aggravated about what we saw every time we flew,” he says of his flights with Dove. “In the early days, you could see that, almost inevitably, hog barns and hog lagoons were right in the crook of the arm of the wetland. They were in places where the waste, if it ran off the field, was going to go directly into a stream.”

Back then, he adds, “it was not unusual at all to fly on a cloudy day right after a bad rain or even a hurricane and see pump and spray operations going on.

The spray is going up in the air and makes enormous waste, and so you can see it blow.”

After more than an hour in the sky, a gust of wind jostles the plane, and Epting swoops down, green meadows dotted with burned-out fields stretching far below. On this April morning, the water levels are higher than usual, thanks to a massive storm that washed over the state for several days before. The rain triggered flooding the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Matthew, seven months earlier. Streams and rivers appear swollen; saturated fields look like rice paddies.

Not too far away, the Neuse River flows patiently.

Today the river looks fine. But it’s hard not to think about tomorrow.

15

July 6 – 12, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball

S

ummers in Meridian, Miss. are hot. Sometimes ungodly so. The Southern city is hours from the coast, and closer to Alabama than Jackson directly east. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t fresh seafood there, or access to water.

Just about every Friday night, Jody Morphis’ family would have a shrimp boil or catfish dinner. Jody’s dad had a catfish operation, catching and selling about half his spoils nearby and bringing the rest home. Those dinners were just about the only time Jody’s whole family — including four siblings — all came together, which is part of why these childhood memories are among his favorite.

The other reason is obvious: the food.

Morphis has been a fixture in Greensboro’s restaurant scene for more than a decade. He opened Fincastles — a downtown burger joint — for nine years, working in other restaurants before that. He’s sold his sauces and Bloody Mary mix under the moniker “Seersucker Chef,” and less than two years ago he opened Blue Denim restaurant next to the storefront where Fincastles used to be.

But more than any specific project, Morphis is known for delivering the flavors of his childhood in Meridian and later New Orleans-style chef training to the Triad. Looking for a Mardi Gras menu in Greensboro? He’s the guy to see. Want a straightforward yet delicious shrimp boil? Blue Denim is the most obvious stop.

I first encountered Morphis’ shrimp boil conducted neighborhood-style last summer, set up on a table in front of a dive bar. He’d been called in by another

Triaditude Adjustment

Shot in the Triad

Crossword

CULTURE Burger burnout? This shrimp boil is a summer must

by Eric Ginsburg

16

(336) 723-7239

breakfastofcourse.com

Freshly plated, a serving from the shrimp boil waits in the kitchen at Blue Denim before being consumed.

ERIC GINSBURG

& Noble that he couldn’t afford at the time. downtown restaurant for a staff appreciation event, and Mor“S*** man, I still have to do that,” Archer said, in a tone that phis swilled a beer while standing behind his spread, offering could’ve been taken as a joke or a serious lament. me and a friend some of the surplus when the workers had A pot as big as Morphis’ torso stood next to the shrimp boil their fill. on the stove, a chicken andouille gumbo cooking inside it.

But trying his shrimp, potatoes, corn and sausage doesn’t Archer and Morphis took turns minding both as a couple other require a personal connection or lining Morphis up for a catering gig. He’s offering a half-pound full every Wednesday night cooks worked diligently and quietly in an adjacent part of the small kitchen, mostly out of sight. Dinner service hadn’t begun until Aug. 16.

It might’ve been his dad who brought home the catfish and yet, and preparations moved at a steady-yet-casual clip, at least with a reporter trying not to stand in the way. shrimp, but Morphis said he learned to cook from his mother The shrimp boil didn’t take long to before apprenticing under someone for three years in the Big Easy. prep. Once he dumped the potatoes in, the corncobs didn’t need to long, and it Morphis recounted his trajectory as Visit Blue Denim at 217 S. Elm. he worked in the Blue Denim kitchtook less time to boil the shrimp than St. (GSO) on Wednesday nights to plate it. After adding the andouille en — a signature light purple bandana for the shrimp boil until Aug. sausage, some house cocktail sauce on tied around his neck and a Brown Truck 16. See bluedenimgso.com for the side and a piece of bread Archer Brewery shirt visible underneath his grilled, the plate was ready. black apron— with Ethan Archer chopmore information. ping away at a rack of ribs to Morphis’ Cookouts are undoubtedly one of right. Archer’s basically been at Blue the greatest parts of summer. But that Denim since it opened, and is recognizspirit shouldn’t just be restricted to the Fourth of July, or burgers, or even backyards. It should blosable through the slit window into the kitchen at Corner Slice som into restaurants, especially ones with a live band playing up the street as well. inside. And while pulled pork barbecue is certainly our state’s As Morphis dumped mustard seed, coriander seeds, black signature food, cookout-style or otherwise, the Cajun, Creole and white pepper, bay leaves, cayenne pepper, garlic and red pepper flakes into a bubbling pot that would soon hold the and Southern cooking that Morphis provides is one of those quintessential summer experiences that can’t be missed. potatoes, he added that he also gleaned his culinary education from reading vociferously, thumbing through books at Barnes

triad-city-beat.com

T

Making nectar of the gods

KAVA BAR

Escape

Up Front

Kava, Kratom, Cacao, Yerba Mate, CBDs

News

OPEN 365 DAYS, NOON TO 2 A.M. Ages 18 and up

Opinion

kravekava.com •

Krave Greensboro

Cover Story

202 Exchange Place, Greensboro • 919-408-9596

Culture

Take charge of your mind, body and spirit

Crossword

Test pH balance, allergies, hormones Balance diet, lifestyle and emotions Create a personalized health and nutrition plan

Sportsball Shot in the Triad

(336) 456-4743

3723 West Market Street, Unit–B, Greensboro, NC 27403 jillclarey3@gmail.com www.thenaturalpathwithjillclarey.com

Triaditude Adjustment

en workshop participants gathered beneath a white tent in the parking lot of Winston-Salem’s City Beverage to learn how to make mead. Usually made with water, honey and yeast, mead has a long history in many cultures

by Kat Bodrie around the world. There are numerous variations depending on what else is added and the type of honey and yeast used. “[Making it is] a little like wine, a little like beer and a little its own thing,” said Justin Sizemore, the workshop’s leader who’s been making mead for seven years and wine for 10.

Only one participant on June 29 had made mead before, but several had tasted it. I’ve had tej, Ethiopia’s version, at restaurants in Greensboro and Washington, DC. It’s sweet and a little syrupy, but it doesn’t have to be.

As we tasted five different types, Sizemore explained that the amount of sugar added in the brewing process KAT BODRIE Workshop participants learn how to use results in more alcohol, just like in winemaking; less a hydrometer to determine the right balance of sugar sugar equals less alcohol. and honey in mead.

Two commercial meads represented this difference; nutrients to help the yeast along. The tricky part is Fox Hill Meadery, based in western North Carolina, measuring the Brix and specific gravity with a hydromproduces a traditional, 13 percent alcohol mead that eter to make sure the end product will have the desired has a rich, woody flavor, while B. Nektar’s Slice of Life alcohol content. Sizemore gave workshop participants — only 5.5 percent — tasted like a doctored 7-Up, with a handout listing materials, steps and troubleshootlemon, ginger and light carbonation. True to science, B. ing advice, and City Beverage sells the equipment and Nektar was significantly less sweet than Fox Hill. ingredients, too.

Sizemore brought some of his own homebrew for Later this month, workshop comparison. His spiced apple participants will check on the mead — SAM for short — uses mead to remove sediment and apples, ginger, allspice, cloves Visit City Beverage at 915 Burke see if more yeast or nutrients and other spices, resulting in St. (W-S) and Colony Urban Farm need to be added. In August, “a mulled wine you just have they’ll try different honeys at to heat up,” he said.

Store at 1100 Reynolda Rd. (W-S) the Colony Urban Farm Store He’d also brought a bottle or find them on Facebook. in Winston-Salem. of SAM from 2009, which he’d In the end, mead — also made with orange peel, ginger called honey wine, ambrosia and allspice. Bottle aging lent it a deeper flavor. and nectar of the gods — is like Josh Pietrafeso from The crowd favorite, though, was his pear and honey Colony described: “It’s different but just as good as mead that he called Peary Night. Another traditional grape wine.” mead, it was sweet like juice thanks to pear concentrate.

Sizemore led the group through the steps to make Kat loves red wine, Milan Kundera, and the Shins. She Peary Night and a simple batch of plain honey mead. wears scarves at katbodrie.com.

Using propane heaters that Spencer Davis of City Beverage utilizes to brew beer, Sizemore boiled two large pots of water and added Holly Honey from Florida to Pick of the Week each, with a ratio of two to three pounds of honey per gallon of water.

Triad Craft Beer Week @ various locations (GSO, The type of honey used in mead matters, as “differW-S, HP), July 9, 10 a.m. ent floral sources give you different flavors,” Sizemore Triad Craft Beer Week 2017 kicks off July 9 with said. He cautioned against honey from Asia, which events throughout the Triad at local breweries. Parcombines honey sourced from different regions and ticipants will have the opportunity to sample many may contain “horrible” pesticides and corn syrup. varieties of local beer at many different events The process for making mead is so simple, it seems throughout the week, all leading up to the 13th like an easier step before trying brewing beer. Once annual Summertime Brews Festival on July 15. For you cool the honey water by adding more water and more information, visit triadcraftbeerweek.com. putting the pot in a bucket of ice water, add yeast and

17

July 6 – 12, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story

T

he rain fell hard from the gunmetal sky, scattering the weekend crowds to hide out in bars and restaurants. The night’s hope for music vanished early in the afternoon.

But as the summer rains waned, the clouds broke, pushing across the sky as the sunlight angled through the city. One by one, the crowd began to form. Lawn chairs opened and filled the sidewalks and streets. And by the time the night’s opener Andy Squint took the stage, the allotted city block was filled with hundreds of fans for the Summer on Liberty music series. As Squint slid his bottleneck slide across the metal stings, his guitar wailed from the covered stage, and a different kind of storm broke across the waiting fans.

Originally from Baton Rouge, La., Squint began his career as guitarist for acclaimed blues band Swamp Cats, leading him to eventually play alongside such Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame members as Oscar Davis and Slim Harpo’s guitarist, James Johnson. In 2010, Squint relocated to High Point, bringing his blues talents to the local stage.

As the evening sun lowered in the

Triaditude Adjustment

Shot in the Triad

Crossword

Sportsball

Culture

CULTURE Luxuriant Sedans sing the blues for outdoor festival

by Spencer KM Brown

18

Pick of the Week Tacos & Turntables @ Hoots brewery (W-S), July 10 6 p.m.

Hoots brewery hosts a night of music and with food provided by one of the city’s best food trucks — Taqueria Luciano’s. Relax inside or on the cozy patio while DJSK and DJ Eighty Four spin some tracks. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

west on July 1 on Liberty Street in downtown Winston-Salem, Squint warmed up the crowd with a mix of original songs, featuring his use of slide guitar and harmonica. Although he got his start in Louisiana, Squint’s music echoes back to such greats as Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James. Laying down a wailing set of Louisiana blues and zydeco, the crowd sat listening with appreciation, yet with a fervor for the night’s headliners.

With a lengthy and somewhat jarring pause in the show as amps were set up and guitars tuned, Luxuriant Sedans finally made it to the stage. And what momentum might have been lost in the change was immediately forgotten and the Sedans slid into their set.

The five-member band made up of veteran musicians showed their expertise of live performance, bringing forth a burst of applauding hands and tapping feet with only the first few chords.

And after just the first two songs, lead singer and harmonica player Mike “Wezo” Wesolowski broke the crowd free from their lawn chairs, calling the audience forth to the dance floor. As the band laid into a Bruce Springsteen cover, couples walked hand in hand to Hundreds enthusiastically enjoy Luxuriant Sedans’ groove at SPENCER KM BROWN the front. All throughout the vast sea of Summer on Liberty. bodies, people rose from their seats like variety of fans and age groups, from teenagers and families blooming flowers, and there began an eruption of dancing. with kids to older music lovers.

Luxuriant Sedans features members who have played in Luxuriant Sedans’ music rests on a level of easily accessible prominent local and national bands such as Sneakers, Peter original songs with a sound that calls to mind ZZ Top and Rival May & the Rough Band, the Allisons and Kingfish. But while Sons, having something in the melodies for nearly everyone their individual résumés earn them respect, this collective has in attendance. The heavy, in-the-pocket drumming of Bob a dedicated following all their own. Throughout the crowd, Tarleton and the technical precision of lead guitarist Rob hundreds of audience members were adorned in Luxuriant Slater laid the foundation for Mike Wesolowski’s bluesy vocals Sedan merchandise — such popularity seemingly reserved only and wailing harmonica. Altogether, the band was impressively for world-renowned acts. But it’s a testament to these musitight, flowing from one song to the next with professional cians’ decades of impact on the Triad, skill. Any rancor or boredom was both individually and collectively nonexistent during the show, and since their start in 2015. smiles were present on the faces of The next concert of Summer on Though people most often tend the band and audience alike.

Liberty (W-S) will be on July 8, to come and go during an outdoor As the sun settled behind the festival, only stopping to listen for city skyline, the crowd danced and featuring the Jill Goodson Band. a moment before moving on to the the music didn’t let up. Happiness Details at downtownws.com/munext thing, this audience was only flourished, conjured into the summer sic/summer-on-liberty/ augmented throughout the night. air by the night’s music. The only The outdoor concert was fourth moments of feeling blue came as the event in the 20th anniversary of Music music ended and chairs were folded on Liberty, part of the Downtown Winston-Salem’s Partnerup and the streets grew slowly vacant of dancing feet. And ship’s Summer Music Series. Featuring an array of acclaimed while a craving for great music might appear insatiable, it’s local acts, the series in held each Saturday during the summer, antidote lies only a week away for the next concert of Summer running until its finale on Aug. 26. The response and attenon Liberty. dance to the show last weekend proved a common love and need for music in Winston-Salem. It brought together a wide

A

Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad

Memberships start at $50/month.

• Comfy community spaces

collab.cobot.me/

• FREE Biscuitville coffee

Triaditude Adjustment

Bookmarks grand opening @ Bookmarks (W-S), Saturday 10 a.m.

The grand opening of Bookmarks — located at 251 N. Spruce St. — begins with a ribbon cutting and an inaugural storytime with Mayor Allen Joines. This event also includes an appearance by Bolt from the Winston-Salem Dash. Kona Ice will be on site. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Downtown Greensboro’s entrepreneurial community.

Opinion

Pick of the Week

• Floor-to-ceiling dry erase board walls

News

Mentoring | Networking | Collaboration

Up Front

longside three other social justice luminaries, a continued. “Her defiance golden-haloed Bree Newsome smiles knowingly from is incredible.” the new mural in the People’s Perk, a coffeeshop in Though this is the Greensboro’s College Hill neighborhood. Newsome, Greensboro Mural Proja Charlotte-born filmmaker and activist is best known for ect’s first mural within removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State a private business, May House grounds. said it was “a no-brainThe impetus for the mural came earlier this year, when café er”; for two years, the owner Karen Archia reached out to Alyzza May, co-founder Mural Project has been of the Greensboro Mural Project, about spurring a communiholding its meetings at ty-driven project for Women’s History Month. the People’s Perk.

“I wanted [the mural] to focus on a variety of women, “We knew what Karen including trans women,” Archia said. “I like celebrating the is committed to, and in a diversity of humanity, recognizing that every person should lot of ways we saw alignbe treated with dignity and respect. I think people deserve ment in belief systems,” that, especially if their experience is different or if they inhabit May said. “I don’t think a different identity that we need to work towards accepting. it brought up any of the Not just tolerance — acceptance.” concerns that might The piece, “Wonderful Women and Fabulous Femmes” by otherwise have come Terri Jones and Gloria Williams, venerates significant womup when working with a en and femmes of color like Miss Major Griffin-Gracey, an private business.” elder transgender woman activist and community organizer Still, the mural’s place- Muralist Terri Jones paints the “Wonderful Women and LAUREN BARBER Fabulous Femmes” mural inside the People’s Perk. who took part in the 1969 Stonewall uprising. ment in a quasi-private “All four of the people featured are black women and space marks a diverbetween Bradford and Miss Major, who femmes who live in the South, [and] all of the people included gence from the project’s is in her seventies. are women or femmes of color whether they be First Nation, defining mission, though May added that the group has also Intern Vera Weinfield also contributed Palestinian or black,” May said. created art inside three elementary schools. to the lower half of the mural.

The silhouette figures of Juliana Huxtable, Leila Khaled, In February, the Perk invited the public to nominate subjects “She did a wonderful job bringing out Sister Rosetta Tharp, Buffy St. Marie, Cynthia Brown, Michelle for the mural during an open-mic Kickstarter event. Archia the vibrancy of the colors so it’s not Howard, Dorothy Brown and Greensboro’s Joyce Johnson also then encouraged patrons to vote among of the most-nomisomething people look at in just one dignify the wall. nated finalists over the following weeks. spot,” Williams said.

“If you look at mainstream historical accounts, often wom“Wonderful Women and Fabulous Femmes” also marks Williams commended Jones’ creative en of color are left out,” Archia said. “It’s an important goal the first time the Greensboro Mural Project slotted two lead solution for incorporating permanent for me as a woman of color to help artists. wall fixtures into knobs on a turntable, honor and reveal those stories.”

Williams rendered the likenesses eliciting a three-dimensional effect.

By Newsome’s side is another of Barber and Micky Bradford, a black Attend the mural unveiling on July “I’m really happy with all the eleactivist, Jessie Barber, whose cause transgender femme best known for 9 from 1 to 3 p.m. at the People’s ments,” Archia said. “It’s balanced, colis police brutality. When she was “voguing” in front of then-Gov. Pat Perk, 551 S. Mendenhall St. (GSO). orful and I like the painterly details like served papers for a defamation suit McCrory’s residence while protesting Michelle Howard’s military badge and after a sheriff’s deputy killed her son, HB 2 last year. She works with Southphrases from [the regional and local Gilbert, in 2001, she set fire to them erners on New Ground and the Trans legends]. I love coming in and looking at in front of the Greensboro Police Department headquarters, Law Center on HIV/AIDS prevention and supporting LGBTQ it every day.” according to May. homeless youth. Jones instilled nobility and vitality in NewAs the project manifested, May said the planning process some and Major’s visages. opened her eyes to several previously overlooked activists and “It’s cool to have history-makers. In this way, the mural serves as a site for pubthat intergenera• Gigabit speed internet lic learning, truth-telling and cultural preservation, too. tional piece also “It’s only in the last year that I’ve learned more about Ms. woven in,” May • Private and semi-private Major and how committed she’s been to [LBGTQ and ansaid, referencing meeting spaces ti-incarceration] movement work throughout her life,” May the 50-year gap

triad-city-beat.com

CULTURE In new mural, haloed activists grace wall of People’s Perk

by Lauren Barber

• Valuable programming and connections

19

July 6 – 12, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword

SPORTSBALL

A mother and son share lives in the ring

B

his mother behind, Hood chose to stay local and pursue boxing instead.

“When I returned home… it was just him and I basically,” Ewell said. “I had to depend on him and he had to depend on me. His whole attitude about life just changed.”

Hood began working out at Triad Boxing twice a day.

Aside from physically sparring, Ewell became involved in every aspect of her son’s training, including cardio exercises and basic boxing regimens.

While she strives to improve her son’s future as a boxer, it’s his dedication that has carried her through a challenging time.

“With this ankle injury, it has been very tiresome for me physically and at same time mentally — to not JOEL SRONCE Edward Hood Jr. and his trainer, get back into what I know: Being in shape, doing what Carlette “The Truth” Ewell, who is also his mom.

I love, working with other fighters,” Ewell said. “I’ve watched him on the heavy bag, I’ve watched him spar, her personal rehabilitation might allow her to return and I’ve watched him against [other boxers]. He’s the to the ring by late spring. Regardless of where their baby of the crew, and to see him put forth that effort is boxing careers take them, Hood and Ewell have found inspiration for me.” strength and success in depending on one another.

Not surprisingly, the feeling goes both ways. Ewell spoke of the admiration that her son has expressed to Pick of the Week her. He reminded her of nights that he would hear her cry, and he told his mother that making the effort to Greensboro Running Club pub run @ CharBar No. do what she wanted him to do allowed him to feel as 7 (GSO), July 11, 6:30 p.m. though he had already won a world title.

The Greensboro Running Club hosts a pub run to Hood carried the inspiration into the ring on July 1. local bars and breweries.

The event is free. For more DWSP_Music17_TriadCityBeat_7-7-17_7-8-17.pdf 1 6/21/17 10:59 AM “He watched me; he knew I was hurting Saturday,” information, visit greensbororunningclub.webs.com.

Ewell explained. “He said, ‘There’s no way I could be out there and disappoint you.’”

After an even first round, Hood’s body shots wore down his opponent in the second. Partway through the third, his opponent exhausted, Hood hooked once off the jab and then threw another short left hook. His opponent ultimately got back up, but not in time for the count.

Hood won by TKO. Ewell sees the potential in her son’s chance to contend as a boxer, and

y the second round, Edward “EJ” Hood Jr. started breaking down his opponent’s body. Hood’s endurance, evidence of the intense dedication he’s recommitted to the sport of boxing since April, began to govern the contest.

by Joel Sronce As his eyes fixed on each flinch and feign of his competitor, Hood listened for the lead trainer in his corner.

“Relax — you’re too tense…. Double jab…. Break down the body, then go for the head....”

Hood knew to trust the advised combinations that came from decades of boxing savvy, from a heavyweight title winner, from a member of the Boxing Legends Hall of Fame.

From his mother.

Carlette “The Truth” Ewell commanded her son’s corner during his heavyweight boxing Pro Debut on July 1 at the Bee Hive Center in Greensboro. Since winning her own professional debut in the Gate City in 2002, Ewell has won five boxing titles, and she currently holds the crowns of Universal Boxing Council female cruiserweight and Universal National Boxing Council female heavyweight champion.

In the months ahead of the fight, she trained Hood at the Triad Boxing & Fitness Club in their hometown of Winston-Salem. Ewell introduced her son to boxing at a young age, but his renewed pursuit originated from the horrifying circumstances of his mother’s most recent match in the ring.

Ewell, 45, faced Alejandra Jiménez, 29, for the World Boxing Council’s female heavyweight title in front of thousands of fans in Mexico City on April 1. Less than a minute into the first round, Ewell suffered a crushed right fibula, ending the fight in a technical knockout (TKO) in favor of Jiménez. Ewell was carried out of the ring in a stretcher. When she returned to Winston-Salem, she couldn’t walk.

“I had been waiting about 10 years for that title,” Ewell said in an interview. “It’s been a mental challenge for me to be able to hang in there.”

The 23-year-old Hood played semi-pro football before his mother’s world championship fight, but her injury kept him at home while she recovered. Not wanting to travel outside of Winston-Salem and leave

C

M

Y

CM

MY

PIZZERIA

Triaditude Adjustment

Shot in the Triad

L’ITALIANO

20

Large 1-topping pizza

11

$

Monday – Thursday

WE !

DELIVER

4-cheese pizza

10

99 Good through 7/12/17 $

CY

99

Order online at pizzerialitaliano.net

every Tuesday, all day

219 S Elm Street, Greensboro • 336-274-4810

CMY

K

DOWNTOWN JAZZ

SUMMER ON LIBERTY

F RIDAYS F ROM 6 -9 PM AT CORPENING PLAZA

SATURDAYS FROM 7-10 PM AT 6 TH & LIBERTY

JULY 7 JEANETTE HARRIS (Opening Act - Sandra Crenshaw)

JULY 8 JILL GOODSON BAND (Rock & Roll)

triad-city-beat.com

CROSSWORD ‘Bo Knows’ so, do you know five Bos?

by Matt Jones

Up Front News Opinion

Playing July 7 – 12

“Twin Peaks: The Return”

TV CLUB: See the episode that will forever change the way we think of Television 8 p.m. Sunday, July 9. ALL NEW EPISODE at 9 p.m.! Free admission with Drink Purchase!

Playing July 6 – 7

Cover Story

Friday Night Standup Presents

Ryan Higgins & Friends!

8:30 p.m. Friday, July 7th. Tickets $10

Culture

--OTHER EVENTS & SCREENINGS--

Board Game Night FEATURING ALL NEW GAMES! 7 p.m. Friday, July 7th. More than 100 BOARD GAMES -- FREE TO PLAY!

Sportsball

Saturday Morning Cartoons BRAND NEW LINEUP 10 a.m. & 12 p.m. Saturday, July 8th. FREE ADMISSION!

TV Club: Fear the Walking Dead 9 p.m. Sunday, July 9th. Free admission with drink purhcase!

Double KO Video Games Game and Hang Sesh!

6 p.m. Monday, July 10th. Free admission with drink purhcase!

336-355-7180

2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro idiotboxers.com • 336-274-2699

gatecityvineyard.com

336.323.1288

204 S. Westgate Dr., Greensboro

Triaditude Adjustment

Sunday Service @ 10:30am

Shot in the Triad

Totally Rad Trivia $3 buy-in! Cash prize! 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 11th.

Drink n’ Draw 6 p.m. Wednesday, July 12th Beer! Wine! Amazing Coffee!

2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro geeksboro.com •

OTHER SHOWS Open Mic 8:30 p.m. Thurs., July 6th. $5 tickets!

Friday Night Open Mic 10 p.m. Fri., July 8th. $5 tickets!

Family Improv 4 p.m. Sat., July 8th. $6 Tickets!

Saturday Night Improv 8:30 p.m. & 10 pm. Sat., July 8th. $10 tickets!

Discount tickets available @ Ibcomedy.yapsody.com

Crossword

Across 1 Std. tee size 4 Mild cheddar cheese 9 “Cheers” and “The Good Place” network 12 Uru. neighbor 13 When some night owls go to bed 15 Dove noise 16 Overly 17 First Family of the 1980s 18 Tails do it 19 Musical subgenre for Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard 22 German magazine, with “Der” 23 Restaurant reviewer’s website 26 “___ la vie” 27 2000 World Series MVP 32 Pianist Rubenstein 34 Gillette razor brand ©2017 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) 35 “That can’t be right!”

36 Exhibitions seen through a small hole 40 “Washboard” muscles 43 Conspire 44 Daytime programming, once 48 Gene Chandler doo-wop hit that starts with a solo bass voice 52 Ball of thread (whose name lent itself to a word meaning “hint”) 53 Cookbook instruction 54 “The House at Pooh Corner” author 56 “Running on Empty” singer 61 “Shine On ___ Crazy Diamond” 63 Beryl ___, head cook on “Downton Abbey” 64 Nibble on 65 Nightmarish street Answers from previous publication.

66 Park, Fifth, and Q, e.g.

29 Numerical suffix 67 Coldplay’s label 30 Marvel shapeshifting supervillain, leader of the 68 Rally feature Deviants 69 Santa ___, Calif.

31 1975 Spielberg hit 70 Barbie’s on-again, off-again boyfriend 33 Defaulter’s risk 37 Middle Earth being Down 38 Rue Morgue chronicler 1 Sardou drama on which a Puccini opera is 39 Economic start based 40 Halftime fodder 2 Another word for sea bass 41 “Everything ___ the kitchen sink” 3 Self-absorbed person 42 Winter Olympics structure 4 Sank your teeth into 45 Frequently over an extended time, maybe 5 Divine counselor 46 Robert Galbraith, e.g.

6 Company that’s built brick by brick?

47 Jodie of “Full House” 7 Jeff Bridges’s brother 49 “It’s the end of an ___!”

8 “Life of Pi” author Martel 50 Expired 9 “Treasure Island” illustrator, 1911 51 California’s ___ Tar Pits 10 Flamboyant scarf 55 G.I. rations 11 Gear tooth 57 H&R Block worker 13 “Hamlet” genre, for short 58 Intoxicating Polynesian beverage that rhymes 14 Clock setting in most of AZ with something flowing out of a volcano 20 Abate 59 WWII submachine gun 21 Swirly bread variety 60 Defunct sci-fi magazine 24 Spider-Man co-creator Stan 61 Nope’s opposite 25 Get leverage, in a way 62 “Bravissimo!”

28 Reggae Sunsplash attendee, maybe

21

July 6 – 12, 2017

South Elm Street, Greensboro

Triaditude Adjustment

Shot in the Triad

Crossword

Sportsball

Culture

Cover Story

Opinion

News

Up Front

SHOT IN THE TRIAD

22

Kellie Melinda and Bill Osterholt on the Fourth of July.

PHOTO BY CAROLYN DE BERRY

The Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship... connect your business to success.

336-379-5001

www.nussbaumcfe.com

Culture Sportsball Crossword

Call Regina Curry at 336.613.7387

Cover Story

* Ads must be used by the end of July. Minimum two-ad buy. Not applicable for political advertising. No back-page ads.

Opinion

$600 full-page ads June–July*

Fire up your business this summer with a brandnew, shiny, full-page ad!

News

MUST GO!

Up Front

EVERYTHING

triad-city-beat.com

Summer Sale!

or

to place your ad today!

Shot in the Triad

Brian Clarey at 336.681.0704

Triaditude Adjustment

23