TCB June 28, 2017 — Hogwashed

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point June 28 – July 5, 2017 triad-city-beat.com

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Part 1 of a three-part series

Hogwashed A powerful special interest. Shameless politicians. Failed regulations.

An in-depth look at Big Pork in North Carolina.

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by KEN FINE and ERICA HELLERSTEIN

PAGE 11

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June 28 – July 5, 2017

In the dunk tank

In the dunk tank, edged on the precipice, and a charcoal cloud passes across the sun which has just started warming the edges off a

by Brian Clarey cool morning.

I give a shiver; I’ve already been dropped in the big drink a good five times and I’m only 10 minutes into my 30-minute stretch as the stooge. So far I’ve learned this: A dunk tank is not a pool; it’s just water in there, seasoned by whomever happened to be the stooge before you.

And though it’s possible to keep your mouth shut upon impact, almost nothing short of nose clips, which I do not own, can stop the rush of water into the sinus cavity — save for just standing up, because the dunk tank is really only 3 or 4 feet deep, and it’s not necessary to become completely submerged upon a strike of the target, but I like to give the people what they pay for.

Another thing: Every time the button triggers and I’m dropped into the cool water, it comes as a complete surprise — even when I know it’s about to happen.

It’s for charity, of course — I’m donating my proceeds to Fellowship Hall — which is why I dragged myself out to the Hops & Shop at the Foothills Brewery parking lot on a Sunday afternoon, and also because

Kristin Schollander asked me to, and she’s a nice lady. Regret did not kick in until just before I ascended the platform.

If I was a real carny, I’d be shouting insults to the passers-by, enticing them to wipe the smirk off my smug, smug face with a drop into the tank. But I’m hoping my shift in the dunk tank sort of stalls out when the little girl steps right up and pays her money.

She’s small, maybe 4 years old, in a tiny pink sundress and hair so blonde it’s practically white. She accepts her first softball, turns to the target and then weighs the missile in her left hand. Lefties are always trouble; I prepare for the worst.

True enough, she drops me with her first throw. I’m still sputtering on the platform when she nails me again with her third throw, the best performance of the day so far. Then she loses interest and wanders off with her parents towards the food trucks.

She comes back two more times before my shift is through. By now I can’t take my eyes off her, and I involuntarily cringe every time she releases the ball. Before she’s through, she’s sent me four more times into the sauce.

I catch her afterwards, running through the fairgrounds with her parents, her white-blonde hair flouncing in the sunlight. She smiles and waves as she walks past, looking nothing at all like the sniper she is.

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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

This is environmental racism. This is my family land. And I’m sure race played a part when they decided they wanted to develop this area. We’ve been asked many times, ‘Why don’t you just move?’ Move and go where? I don’t want to move. I never knew my grandfather, but I know he walked on this ground. And his family.

— Elsie Herring, 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

CONTRIBUTORS Carolyn de Berry Kat Bodrie Spencer KM Brown

Jelisa Castrodale Matt Jones Joel Sronce

Cover illustration by Shan Stumpf

cheryl@triad-city-beat.com

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.

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June 28 – July 5, 2017

CITY LIFE June 28 – July 5

by Eric Hairston

WEDNESDAY Yoga @ Bailey Park (W-S), 6 p.m.

Inovation Quarter hosts a free community yoga session taught by Elliot Watlington at Bailey Park. The event features craft brews provided by Hoots brewery, and food trucks will be onsite. For more information, visit innovationquarter.com.

Mussels, wine & music @ Print Works Bistro (GSO), 7 p.m.

Every Wednesday, Print Works Bistro hosts live acoustic music perfomances from local artists and serves gourmet mussels and wine pairings. For more information, visit printworksbistro.com.

THURSDAY

Mead making workshop @ City Beverage (W-S), 7 p.m.

Colony Urban Farm and City Beverage host a series of fermentation and brewing workshops, where participants learn how to make mead from experiecnced winemaker Justin Sizemore. For more information, find the Facebook event page.

Cameron Floyd @ Wise Man Brewing (W-S), 8 p.m.

This event includes a live performance by Cameron Floyd and craft beers provided

by Wise Many Brewing. For more information, visit wisemanbrewing.com.

SATURDAY

North Carolina glass artist exhibit @ Greenhill (GSO), noon Greenhill Art Gallery hosts an exhibit showcasing the works of artists affliated with the North Carolina Glass Center.

Guests experience handmade glasswork and have the opportunity to purchase oneof-a-kind pieces. For more information, visit greenhillnc.org.

First anniversary party @ Joymongers (GSO), noon Joymongers celebrates its first anniversary with live music performances from various artists. This event is famly friendly and food trucks will be on site. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Trading Souls Over Crossroads exhibit @ The Artist Bloc (GSO), 2 p.m.

The Artist Bloc features sculptures and illustrations from Micah James and Rebecca Bischoff. Guests have opportunity to talk with the artists and listen to live music.

For more information, find the Facebook event page.

FRIDAY

Single-Channel Catalyst 2 exhibit @ Weatherspoon Art Museum (GSO), 10 a.m.

Mexican artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda presents a collection of his works featuring video, paintings, drawings and prints.

For more information, visit weatherspoon. uncg.edu.

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JULY 4

July 4th vintage sale @ Revision Vintage (GSO), July 4, noon Revision Vintage hosts a July 4th sale featuring vintage clothing and home décor marked down to make room for the new store’s fall collection. For more information, find the Facebook event page.

Friday, June 30: Cuzco, Basement Life, Swartzwelder Saturday, July 1: Pencil Fight, Tin Foil Hat, Away Msg, DOG Monday, July 3: Vive le Vox, the Zoo Peculiar, the Ringos, Red 7 & the Donettes Wednesday, July 5: Pinche Gringo, Plastic Pinks, the Old One Two Friday, July 7: Sarah Shook & the Disarmers onpopstudios.com • 336.383.9332 • 1333 Grove St, Greensboro

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Nitro coffee

by Brian Clarey

I’ve been trying to keep my intake down to three or four a week. I got my last one just this morning at Krankies: a 16-ounce, with no ice.

I set it on the table and watched the layered sifting of the body, appreciated the creamy head. I added a dollop of half-andhalf that bloomed down to the bottom of the cup and slowly rose against the settling of the coffee.

It was beautiful.

The taste is everything I need it to be: cold and smooth, with enough body that it demands to be sipped or even slurped and hypercharged with enough caffeine to get me through whatever it is that comes next.

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It pours like a Guinness or a Boddington’s or something, blasted with a nitrogen charge that runs through the tap system and arguably makes nitro coffee what it is.

And what it is, is a cup full of cool, smooth happiness.

Nitro coffee is new — new to the Triad anyway, though people have been enjoying it in bigger cities since 2015 or so. It’s basically cold-brew coffee, kegged like beer and run through a tap system pressurized by nitrogen, so that its infused with tiny bubbles that add texture and, they say, amplify the effects of the caffeine.

As far as I know, you can get it at just three places in the Triad: at Krankies Coffee in Winston-Salem and, in Greensboro, Green Joe’s and the Starbucks just a few blocks away on Battleground Avenue — it is the only Starbucks in the Triad pouring nitro coffee right now.

Culture

ESPN doesn’t care about the WNBA

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Triaditude Adjustment

Deep into the mega-hyped 2017 NBA playoff season, Showcasing a game here or there won’t build a bridge, the league produced a commercial featuring stars of the let alone a brand. The NBA’s success is rooted in the men’s game testifying to the excitement and rigor of systematic development of player personalities and drawomen’s basketball. matized team narratives. The players, in turn, benefit from The 30-second spot reeked of an attempt to exploit national marketing campaigns aimed at capitalizing on the WNBA as a “cause,” and to position already well loved their personas. It’s not as though these women are without players as the “good guys.” stories; most of us just don’t know them yet.

This wouldn’t be half as frustrating if the network If ESPN sent a qualified sports journalist for consistent backed up its overtures with meaningful support for the courtside coverage, the rapport they’d build with players women’s league. Out of a dozen games being played this would translate with viewers and facilitate our emotional week, ESPN2 will broadcast just one. This year, Twitter investment. It’s an easy fix, and a worthwhile one. is picking up some of the slack, livesLet’s face it: WNBA play is more aggrestreaming 20 games as opposed to the sive, technical and methodical; players get Livestream 20 free the ball low and score the deuces. When 16 regular-season games ESPN will host across mostly ESPN2 and ESPN3. they don’t? Let’s just say three-time OlymWNBA games at But it doesn’t need to be this way. pic gold medalist Sylvia Fowles could show wnba.twitter.com.

We’re entering a known lull in the world Kevin Love a thing or two about competof US sports coverage — nothing but itive rebounding under pressure, and then baseball and the WNBA are running, with some scattered remind ourselves that she earns one one-hundredth of his tennis and golf — and the talking heads and CNN-style salary. news desks are going to gossip about the impact of the I’m happy for my money to directly benefit WNBA talNBA Draft until football practice starts. The broadcasting ent, so I’m buying this season’s $17 league pass. Let’s show space and capacity to offer substantive analysis exists if the networks we’ll watch. the network chooses to help us parrot some talking points at work the next morning.

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June 28 – July 5, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment

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NEWS

Newcomers and incumbents flock to city council election

by Jordan Green

Greensboro voters will choose the first city council to serve a four-year term in the upcoming general election on Nov. 7.

A sudden retirement and a returning veteran. A cohort of progressive newcomers. A mayoral race perhaps still developing. With filing more than a week out, the contours of this year’s Greensboro City Council election are gradually taking shape.

Several newcomers have signaled plans to run, while most but not all incumbents have indicated they will seek re-election in the upcoming contest, with filing opening on July 7. The next council, which takes office in December, will be the first in Greensboro to serve four-year instead of two-year terms.

Jamal Fox, who has held the District 2 seat since 2013, is the one incumbent who has announced he will not seek reelection. Fox did not give a reason for his decision in post on Facebook on June 22, but said he was making the announcement “with great sadness.” He added that he plans on “supporting a candidate in the very near future who I believe will and can keep us on the right path to greater opportunities.”

Jim Kee, a former council member and bitter rival whom Fox unseated in 2013, announced a couple days later that he plans to run for the District 2 seat, according to a report in the News & Record. The news about Kee, a developer, elicited an excited tweet from former Mayor Robbie Perkins: “Good news for economic development in Greensboro!”

Kee signed on as a defendant-intervenor to defend a controversial redistricting scheme promoted by state Sen. Trudy Wade to overhaul the city’s election system. Plaintiffs against the proposed change alleged that the proposed District 2 was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. A ruling by a federal judge earlier this year did not address the claim about District 2, but found that the plan as a whole violated the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee to “one person-one vote” by overpopulating Democratic leaning districts “to maximize success for Republican

Jamal Fox (seated) will not seek reelection, while Sharon Hightower, Nancy Vaughan and Nancy Hoffmann (l-r) plan to file.

candidates.” Kee and the other defendant-intervenors withdrew from the case before it went to court. Kee could not be reached for comment for this story.

CJ Brinson, who is employed as a community organizer with Greensboro Participatory Budgeting, had announced plans to run for the seat before Fox stood down. Brinson has played a prominent role in recent efforts to promote police accountability. He was among seven people arrested at Melvin Municipal Office Building in January during a civil disobedience to demand the city release of the investigative file surrounding an incident in which former police Officer Travis Cole tackled and punched resident Dejuan Yourse without provocation. Brinson has also helped publicize the case of Jose Charles, a 15-year-old who was involved in an altercation with police during the Fun Fourth Festival in 2016.

Brinson said if elected he will provide bolder leadership than Fox, but in an interview Brinson focused most of his criticism on economic development rather than policing. Brinson expressed reservations about the redevelopment of Revolution Mill — a former textile mill in District 2 that has attracted an

FILE PHOTO

upscale pizzeria and planned home base for Natty Greene’s Brewing that’s a major point of pride for Fox. Brinson, who is black, expressed concern that an influx of new residents attracted by amenities at the complex will drive up property values and displace the predominantly white retired millworkers who live in the area.

The at-large race has drawn at least two newcomers: Michelle Kennedy, the executive director of the Interactive Resource Center, and Dave Wils, a teacher employed with Guilford County Schools. Both are solid progressives who currently serve on the Greensboro Human Relations Commission, where they have grappled with contentious issues of police accountability in particular.

“I am and have been a supporter of Black Lives Matter,” said Kennedy, who is white.

“I would wager there won’t be anyone running for city council that has more experience with police officers,” she said. “I see police every day as someone who works with homeless people.

Wanting transparency for our police department is not an anti-police stance.

It’s a stance of wanting the best for our community. Without transparency, we’re

sitting on a tinderbox waiting for something to happen.”

Kennedy’s platform also includes an emphasis on safe and affordable housing, improving public transportation, addressing food insecurity, de-criminalizing poverty and raising wages for city workers to $15 per hour — the city has already committed to doing so by 2020.

Dave Wils, Kennedy’s colleague on the human relations commission, has earned the backing of District 1 Councilwoman Sharon Hightower. Like Kennedy, Wils wants to serve on council to promote safe and affordable housing, and to address food insecurity.

“As a teacher I’ve experienced all too often kids who come to school hungry” he said, “because they can’t afford food or they live in one of the food deserts.”

Wils takes a slightly more conciliatory stance on police accountability than Kennedy.

“There’s been some concerning trends among some members of the council, where they seem to be choosing from a false choice,” he said. “They are afraid to take the side of the community lest they be seen as anti-police. There are those in the community who believe that if you’re supporting the police, you don’t support them. I think that’s a false choice.”

At least two incumbents who currently hold the three at-large seats on council are planning to run for reelection.

“I think we need to revamp the police review process, and they are working on that,” said Mayor Pro Tem Yvonne Johnson, who has served on city council since 1993, including one term as mayor from 2007 to 2009 (she sat out two years from 2009 to 2011 after her unsuccessful bid for reelection as mayor). “Secondly, I really want to see a meaningful job training program in parts of the city that have high unemployment. That’s going to take some more time.”

At-large Councilwoman Marikay Abuzuaiter, who is completing her third term, said she looks forward to continuing in her role as chair of the Municipal Planning Organization, a regional transportation planning board.

Alluding to the council’s role in

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getting anything accomplished?”

Council members Sharon Hightower, Justin Outling and Nancy Hoffmann, who respectively represent districts 1, 3 and 4, said they plan to run for reelection.

Tammi Thurm, who is employed as the business administrator at the Hagan Barrett & Langley law firm, said she decided to seek the District 5 seat because the incumbent, Tony Wilkins, ran unopposed in the last election.

As a member of the Greensboro Minimum Housing Commission, Thurm said she would like to find ways to provide residents with access to more affordable housing. She also wants to improve transparency and find ways to increase employment with “quality jobs.”

“My whole career has been in small business,” Thurm said. “I think it would be helpful to have some additional business experience on the council — someone who understands how the city can help and inadvertently hinder businesses as they’re growing.”

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Tony Wilkins, who has courted speculation in the past about whether he might launch a mayoral bid, said in a text to TCB: “Most likely I will be filing to run in District 5.”

Vaughan has attracted one challenger to date — a conservative general contractor named John Brown.

“I spent my whole life in the building industry,” he said. “I’m not a politician.

In no way. This is my first time running for anything.”

He said he’ll take a close look at city spending and leverage his experience in the building trades to provide more rigorous oversight of capital improvement projects.

“If you look at the fact there’s really no leadership among any of the council members, there at one council meeting you may find total chaos and people screaming at each other, and at another one you may find a majority of the items are being pushed off,” he said.

“The ping-pong effect between the city manager and the mayor is incredible.

The mayor may say, ‘Mr. Manager, what’s your thought on things?’ He’ll say, ‘I was waiting on you.’ How’s that

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releasing information and video concerning police interactions with citizens, Abuzuaiter said, “In all cases that affect the whole city, there are going to be some people for it and some people against it. I truly believe that this council has been attentive and I will say as best as we can — given the restrictions of state law — we’ve really tried to do the right thing.”

Mike Barber, the most conservative at-large member, could not be reached for this story. Barber led the successful effort to dramatically increase pay for police and firefighters in the recent budget. As a longtime council member and former Guilford County commissioner, Barber is widely considered one of the few politicians with the name recognition and fundraising experience who could successfully challenge incumbent Mayor Nancy Vaughan, who has announced her intention to seek reelection.

Robbie Perkins, who was unseated

by Vaughan in 2013 after one term as mayor, told Triad City Beat he is “not considering running at this time.”

Conservative District 5 Councilman

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Hate crime doesn’t warrant police investigation, separate charge

by Jordan Green

A hate crime is not always prosecuted as such, as Rosalind Hoover’s experience shows.

And in her case, the allegations of racial threats of violence weren’t even investigated.

But for a chance meeting with a reporter, the barrage of racial slurs and threats of violence allegedly rained down on an African-American woman in High Point by two white brothers might not have ever been recorded as a hate crime.

An affidavit written and signed by Rosalind Hoover provides a succinct exposition of the events of March 22, when the aggravation of brothers Christopher Littlefield and Donald Tyler Littlefield revving the motors of a truck and moped throughout the day finally compelled her to plead for peace.

“About 7:45 [p.m.] I went outside and asked them: Were they going to do this all summer?” Hoover recounted.

“They said, ‘As long as no one called the police.’ I said, ‘You know they are because of the noise.’ They said they were playing with the vehicles. I said, ‘Can you not play with them as much?’ and returned into my house.

“Tyler parked in front of my walkway on his moped and continuously [revved] the motor,” Hoover’s affidavit continues.

“I came back outside where [Chris] said to me to take my black ass back to Greensboro and that he would help his brother Tyler beat my ass and tear down my mailbox. That I was a black b**** and n***as is why the killings are going on and that he (Chris) needs to kill our black asses and that is why someone killed my boyfriend.”

Brian Levin, who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in Bernardino, said the incident alleged by Hoover fits the most common category of hate crime tracked by the FBI, what the agency calls “intimidation.”

“In my review of the facts presented, speaking as both a former police officer and a Stanford-educated lawyer, I would say at least for the reporting purposes, this is a criminal threat and is a hate crime because a significant part of the alleged threat is related to the victim’s race,” Levin said.

Despite the racial dimensions of the Littlefield brothers’ reported threats,

and a thorough vetting process,” Levin said. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean that a hatecrime offense will be levied, but this sends the message to the community that this an offense that authorities take seriously.”

Levin said an officer could have easily interviewed the suspects. Chris Littlefield, who is 21, denied ever threatening Hoover in an interview with TCB. Rosalind Hoover’s white neighbors reportedly JORDAN GREEN But Chris said his younger brother, Tythreatened her with a racial slur. ler, who is 19, cursed the incident is unlikely to be counted Hoover, while not in the FBI’s annual report on hate going so far as to say that he subjected crimes because the police officer who her to racial slurs. “He would yell stuff responded to Hoover’s call declined to at her: ‘Shut up’ and cuss words, ‘F*** investigate. Instead, the officer suggested you, b****,’ and this and that,” Chris that Hoover go to the magistrate’s office Littlefield said. “He’s not all there.” and file charges. She took the officers For his part, Tyler offered a weak deadvice, and as a result the brothers each nial of Hoover’s allegation in a separate received a criminal summons for misdeinterview. “We don’t do anything wrong meanor communicating threats. to her,” he said. “We don’t cuss her ass Assistant Chief Larry Casterline has out — excuse my French.” stated to Triad City Beat that it’s standard Another admission by Chris Littlefield practice for an officer to refer a victim lends credence to Hoover’s allegations to the magistrate in misdemeanor cases about Tyler Littlefield’s conduct. During where the officer did not witness the act. the same incident when Chris allegedly “Depending on the jurisdiction, with told Hoover “he needed to kill our black regard to low-level crimes, [the police] asses,” she wrote in a separate affidavit will often say, ‘As a matter of practice that Tyler “said he bet I won’t get mail we refer people to the magistrate,’” for a couple days because he was going Levin said. “In this case, the optimal to tear my mailbox down and whoop choice would have been for the police my butt, and then he will hang his rebel to file a criminal report and then refer flag on my fence anytime he wanted to.” that report to the prosecutor. If there’s Asked about the allegation, Chris a slight silver lining, it was recommendLittlefield told TCB: “My uncle went ing that the victim go to the magistrate. over there last year and hung the rebel Particularly with sensitive crime victims, flag on her fence. He’s in and out of jail, police should really be taking more and he thinks he owns the world.” proactive stances.”

Hoover said the brothers have repeatLevin noted an additional reason why edly threatened to drape a Confederate misdemeanor crimes with an element flag over her fence, but she was unaware of alleged bias should be investigated by that one of the family members had the police. actually done so. Shortly after speaking “If we’re going to err, I think we have with TCB, Chris Littlefield notified the to err on the side of a full investigation newspaper that he was going to hire a

lawyer. At the brothers’ second court hearing on June 15, the prosecutor granted them a continuance until July 27 to allow them time to retain counsel.

When alleged offenses involve an element of bias, prosecutors are faced with a difficult decision as to whether they should supplement the underlying offense with an additional charge.

North Carolina law allows prosecutors to levy a charge of “ethnic intimidation” for threatening to assault someone or damage property because of race, color, nationality, or country of origin.

Ethnic intimidation, like communicating threats, is classified as a Class 1 misdemeanor, the second most serious type.

“Most hate crimes are not prosecuted under hate-crimes statutes,” Levin said.

“A prosecutor has to exercise discretion by looking at the weight of admissible evidence, as well as the statutory requirements.... What often happens is a community’s desire for redress is balanced against the real prosecutorial concerns of being able to establish the facts beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Assistant District Attorney Howard Neumann said he was not familiar with the Littlefield incident, but expressed doubt that the prosecutor would supplement the charges. “What you would call our hate-crime statute — ‘ethnic intimidation’ — doesn’t really add a lot to the punishment someone can get for committing an offense,” he said.

“It basically increases the class of the misdemeanor by one degree.”

The district attorney’s office has yet to contact Hoover. Neumann said that’s because the prosecutor doesn’t want to inconvenience victims by asking them to come to court when their cases are likely to be continued. He said Hoover will receive a subpoena to appear in court the day the district attorney is ready to resolve the case, and a prosecutor will speak with her before her case is called.

Levin said it’s important that the underlying offense against Hoover is being prosecuted, even if the bias element is not. “The process is as important as the outcome,” he said. “I think the community will be much better served when you’re assured that even in the absence of a hate-crime charge that the case was fully investigated and adjudicated.”

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OPINION

EDITORIAL

Growing pains on Eugene Street An outsider might find it unusual that the city of Greensboro has a ribbon-cutting of sorts scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at 4, the moment that the 400 block of Eugene Street reopens.

Like waving to the train as it passes through town, it does seem a little bit provincial to hold a photo op for the reopening of one block of a street. But it’s been nearly three months now that Eugene Street has been closed due to serious infrastructure upgrades on the 400 block and, a little further north, the installation of the Downtown Greenway. And there are only so many ways to get to the LoFi district from the center of downtown.

The proliferation of orange cones — which stretches back more than a year if we include the work on the 600 block — has hurt the businesses on that stretch of Eugene and, behind it, the short spur of Battleground Avenue that connects with Smith Street. It has never been so easy to find a parking spot in front of Smith Street Diner or in the Deep Roots Market parking lot.

The ceremony is as much for these businesses as it is for the thousands of cars and pedestrians that have been caught in this snarl.

But the fact is that there hasn’t been this much construction — and projects of this magnitude — in downtown Greensboro since the ballpark was built in 2004, a marvelous disruption that changed the trajectory of a downtown resurgence that was starting to wane.

The businesses along that corridor notwithstanding, the construction on Eugene has already had a positive effect on traffic, slowing rushing motorists in part by adding much-needed parking in several places. As the new hotel rises on its western flank, downtown becomes more of a grid than a strip, which is all part of the plan. And the Downtown Greenway itself will add a layer of connectivity to the entire piece.

But tell that to the business owners in the dead zone.

In this context, the opening ceremony makes sense: an acknowledgement of the pain felt by the entire neighborhood and everyone who needs to drive through it, but also a celebration that another wave of the pain necessary for growth has passed and an invitation to use what we’ve built.

Even an outsider can understand that.

CITIZEN GREEN

The last North Carolina political moderate As North Carolina’s previous governor, Pat McCrory was a disaster. He ran as a pro-business moderate Republican, and then swerved hard to the right.

Confronted with conservative Republican supermajorities in both

by Jordan Green chambers of the General Assembly bent on restricting access to abortion, punishing transgender people, restricting voting rights and curbing the power of local government, McCrory jumped on the bandwagon and pretended to be the driver. His whimpering protest that he lost his reelection bid because of massive voter fraud was pathetic and tantamount to slander.

Yet if McCrory’s disgraceful legacy holds one redeeming feature, it’s that he appointed Mark Martin to fill the vacancy for state Supreme Court chief justice in 2014. Martin was already running for the seat and may well have won without the benefit of incumbency, but in making the appointment, McCrory chose a political moderate and true public servant of the mold that many voters expected of the governor himself. In an era of deep cynicism when political heroes seem to have vanished from the scene, maybe we should take a moment to hold up Chief Justice Martin as a public servant to admire and emulate.

A year after taking office as chief justice, Martin convened the NC Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice, whose final report in March includes recommendations that range from revamping the state court system’s website and launching a speakers bureau to promote civics education to encouraging lawyers to provide pro bono services to indigent criminal defendants. Most significantly, the commission recommended raising the age of adult jurisdiction from 16 to 18. When New York State discontinued the practice earlier this year, North Carolina became the only remaining state in the union to prosecute 16-year-olds as adults.

The initiative might have seemed like the hopeless pet project of progressive criminal justice reformers. Indeed, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which once provided a legal defense for the North Carolina Latin Kings and prevented the reopening of the White Street Landfill in Greensboro, took up “raise the age” as a cause. Progressive city councils passed resolutions urging the General Assembly to implement the reform.

It must be credited to the respect commanded by Chief Justice Martin that the state budget passed last week included the “raise the age” initiative, along with the funds necessary for implementation.

Addressing the NC Bar Association on June 24, Martin made the kind of bipartisan appeal for reform that has virtually disappeared from the public discourse in our exceedingly divided state.

The current system “puts young people in our state at

a huge competitive disadvantage compared with young people from the rest of the country because we know we are living in the midst of a global marketplace,” Martin said.

“While juvenile proceedings are confidential, adult criminal proceedings and their consequences are a matter of public record, and a criminal record can affect eligibility for employment, for military service and even for college financial aid, among other things.”

There was the left hook, and then came the knockout from the right.

“The good news is that we can avoid these negative consequences while also reducing crime,” he added. “National data suggests that recidivism rates among 16- and 17-year-olds whose cases are handled by the adult criminal justice system are more than twice as high as cases that are handled in our juvenile courts.”

With a major criminal justice reform practically in the pocket, Chief Justice Martin is making another audacious proposal — to take politics out of the way we select our judges.

It’s a good idea. Virtually every consequential piece of legislation passed by the General Assembly winds up getting litigated in the state courts. The inevitable result is an expensive battle by special interests to determine the partisan balance of the nominally nonpartisan Supreme Court. Outside groups spent $2.9 million on the race won

by Justice Paul Newby in 2012 that tilted the court in the Republicans’ favor, according to the Institute for Southern Studies’ “Facing South” website. Almost as much was spent on the 2016 contest won by Justice Michael Morgan, which flipped the court back to the Democrats. Donations to Morgan’s conservative opponent included $1,000 from Thomas Farr, a lawyer who successfully defended the state’s 2011 redistricting maps against claims of racial discrimination before the court.

Under the system proposed by Chief Justice Martin, a panel appointed by both the governor and General Assembly would rate judicial candidates as well qualified, qualified or not qualified, and an “appropriate governmental authority” would make appointments, but retention elections would be held periodically to ensure voters retained confidence in their judges. Yes, there is the possibility that a governor or powerful lawmaker in the pocket of an industry with a vested interest could put someone on the panel to appoint a friendly judge, but that has to be better than the corrupt arrangement currently in place.

“What the people of our state need the most is a qualified and independent judiciary,” Martin said in Asheville. “So today I’m calling on the General Assembly to let the people of North Carolina decide whether to amend the state constitution to change how our judges are selected.”

Let’s do this.

triad-city-beat.com

Hogwashed

A powerful special interest. Shameless politicians. Failed regulations.

An in-depth look at Big Pork in North Carolina.

by KEN FINE and ERICA HELLERSTEIN photos by ALEX BOERNER

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a three-part investigation into North Carolina’s hog-farming industry. This story will examine claims by lower-income, African-American residents of eastern North Carolina that neighboring hog farms have polluted their properties as well as efforts by lawmakers to shield pork producers from litigation. The second story will look at the environmental impacts 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 hog industry more sustainable, both for the environment and the state’s rural population, and the political and financial reasons those steps haven’t been taken.

— Jeffrey Billman, editor in chief of Indy Week

PART ONE: THE STENCH I. ‘Nobody else will ever live on this land’ Rene Miller pokes a lavender-frocked leg out of her front door and grimaces. It’s a bright April afternoon, and the 66-year-old Miller, with a stoic expression and a dark crop of curls, braces herself for the walk ahead.

Her destination isn’t far away — just a half-mile down a narrow country road, flanked by sprawling green meadows, modest homes, and agricultural operations — but the journey takes a toll. Because as she ambles down the two-lane street, stepping over pebbles and sprouts of grass, the stench takes hold, an odor so noxious that it makes her eyes burn and her nose run. Miller likens it to “death” or “decomposition,” to being surrounded by spoiled meat.

As bad as it is today, she says, it’s nothing compared to the way it is on a muggy afternoon in August, when the stink hovering in the stagnant, humid air can nearly “knock you off your feet.”

Still, Miller makes this trip often to honor her family and pay her respects. She points ahead to her family cemetery, which sits just off Veachs Mill Road in Warsaw, a couple

hours’ drive east from the Triad. It’s a stone’s throw from her one-story, white-walled house, part of a tract of land her great-grandmother inherited as part of a post-slavery land grant. When she gets to the cemetery, she stops in front of her nephew’s grave, recalling his life and his death to cancer. Purple and yellow wildflowers nip at its edges; nearby, a Steelers flag rustles in the wind.

“How long have we lived here? Always,” she says, gazing at her grandmother’s headstone. “And we always will. Nobody else will ever live on this land.”

The odor isn’t just her problem. It’s ubiquitous across parts of eastern North Carolina. It’s the smell of hog country, of millions of pigs and even more tons of their feces. For years, their waste and its stink have been the subject of litigation, investigations, legislation and regulation. A growing body of research has documented the industry’s health and environmental risks. The issue has been well examined in the media, too. The New York Times and the Washington Post covered it.

So have “Dateline” and “60 Minutes.” The News & Observer

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June 28 – July 5, 2017

earned a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on it in 1995.

Nonetheless, the stench — and its consequences, both for the lower-income, largely African-American neighbors of the hog farms and the state’s environment — lingers. The obvious question — why? — has been at the heart of a months-long investigation that has led reporters to raucous legislative hearings, a tiny airplane and stories about death threats shared over a glass of sweet tea. This series will explore what Indy Week and Triad City Beat learned — and what can be done to solve North Carolina’s pervasive hog-waste problem.

Cover Story

II. ‘Recognized as environmental racism’

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To understand Rene Miller’s predicament, you have to start with the pigs.

Their population in North Carolina has skyrocketed in recent decades. In 1986, North Carolina ranked seventh in the country in pork production; 30 years later, it’s second only to Iowa, with an estimated 9.2 million pigs on 2,217 hog farms, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s quarterly hog survey and the most recent US Census of Agriculture. The pigs have ushered in a $2.9 billion-a-year industry that employs more than 46,000 people in North Carolina, but those hogs also produce millions of tons of feces. In one year alone, an estimated 7.5 million hogs in five eastern North Carolina counties produced more than 15.5 million tons of feces, according to a 2008 report by the federal General Accounting Office.

Nowhere are the impacts more profound than in Duplin County, where Miller and about 2.3 million hogs live — more than anywhere else in the state, according to the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization.

A recent analysis of county and satellite data by the organization found that roughly 160,000 North Carolinians live within a half-mile of a pig or poultry farm; in Duplin, nearly 12,500 people — more than 20 percent of its residents — live within that range. If you extend the radius to three miles, as many as 960,000 North Carolinians fall into that category. That’s nearly 10 percent of the state’s population — more than Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem combined.

For Miller, these numbers aren’t abstractions.

They’re her life.

“That scent is so bad,” she says. “You can’t go outside. You can’t go outside and cook anything because the flies and mosquitos take over.”

Within a mile of her property, Murphy-Brown LLC — a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, the largest hog producer in the world — owns 5,280 hogs, according to the NC Department of Environmental Quality. Within two miles, there are more than 80,000 Murphy-Brown-owned hogs at seven different farms, according to a lawsuit she filed in 2014.

Fifty yards from Miller’s family graveyard is a massive, open-air cesspool storing the pigs’ waste — a stagnant pool containing their feces, urine, blood and other bodily fluids — often referred to as a “lagoon,” one of about 3,300 lagoons across the state. When the cesspool reaches its capacity, its contents are liquefied and sprayed into a field across the street from Miller’s house via a large, sprinkler-like apparatus. The sprayer releases a mist of waste onto the field, which, according to court documents, is about 200 feet from Miller’s home at its closest rotation.

That system prevents the cesspool from overflowing, but Miller says it also makes her life miserable.

It’s more than just the smell, she says. The liquefied waste mist drifts onto her property, and “dead boxes” filled with rotting hogs sit near her family’s cemetery, attracting buzzards, gnats and swarms of large, black flies. After spending time outside, she says, her eyes burn and her nose waters. She says she also suffers from asthma, which she began to develop shortly after she returned to her childhood home from New Jersey in the late eighties to care for her ailing mother.

Research published by the late Steven Wing, a professor of epidemiology at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, linked similar health concerns to proximity to hog farms.

Wing, who passed away in November, described his research in a 2013 TED Talk: “In 1995, I began to meet neighbors of industrial hog operations,” he said. “I saw how close some neighborhoods are to hog operations. People told me about contaminated wells, the stench from hog operations that woke them at night and children who were mocked at school for smelling like hog waste.

I studied the medical literature and learned about the allergens, gases, bacteria and viruses released by these facilities — all of them capable of making people sick.”

Wing’s research showed a correlation between air pollution from hog farms and higher rates of nausea, increases in blood pressure, respiratory issues such as wheezing and increased asthma symptoms for children, and overall diminished quality of life for people living nearby.

“Air pollutants from the routine operation of confinement houses, cesspools and waste sprayers affect nearby neighborhoods where they cause disruption of activities of daily living, stress, anxiety, mucous membrane irritation, respiratory conditions, reduced lung function and acute blood pressure elevation,” Wing and fellow UNC researcher Jill Johnston wrote in a 2014 study.

They also found that the state’s industrial hog operations disproportionately affect African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. That pattern, they concluded, “is generally recognized as environmental racism.”

Three years ago, Miller and more than 500

Rene Miller

other NC residents, mostly poor and African American, filed 26 federal lawsuits against Murphy-Brown, alleging its behavior adversely affects their health and quality of life. The lawsuits argue that Murphy-Brown’s parent company, Smithfield — which was purchased by the multinational Chinese corporation WH Group in 2013 for an estimated $4.7 billion — has the financial resources to manage the pigs’ waste in a way that minimizes the odor and nuisance to nearby property owners.

The industry dismisses these claims.

“North Carolina’s hog farmers are under a coordinated attack by predatory lawyers, anti-farm activists, and their allies,” Smithfield Foods said in an email. “The lawsuits are about one thing and one thing only: a money grab.”

Smithfield points to the fact that between 2012 and 2016, the DEQ only received 25 odor complaints, and of those, none resulted in fines or notices of violations.

“More than 80 percent of hog farms are owned and operated by families,” Smithfield argues. “They produce good products, they do it the right way, and they strive to be good neighbors.”

Other industry advocates have also alleged that greed is at the heart of these claims. The NC Pork Council, a trade group funded by commercial hog operations, has blamed the lawsuits on avaricious attorneys who “like to sue farmers for as much money as possible,” according to a pork council statement. (The council did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

In an email, Mark Anderson, an attorney representing Murphy-Brown, says the company “is aggressively contesting the plaintiffs’ claims. After careful study, we concluded that the claims are not valid and have no merit.”

But Miller says she knows what she’s experienced — and that life on Veachs Mill Road has deteriorated since the hog houses came.

“Right now,” she says, “my life is the worst it’s ever been.”

The cases are pending in federal court. No trial dates have been set.

Miller’s family cemetary in Warsaw

III. ‘Boss Hog’s crown jewel’ North Carolina’s pork production industry has shifted dramatically since the mid-’80s. Today’s industrial farms, often called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, raise pigs and other livestock in confinement until they are ready for slaughter. The hogs generally live in cramped quarters; Michelle B. Nowlin, supervising attorney of Duke’s Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, estimates they typically get seven or eight square feet of space each.

When they have to relieve themselves, slatted, slanted floors filter their waste into pits that feed into open-air cesspools that sit just behind the hog houses. These pools, known as lagoons, come in muted tones of brown and sometimes Pepto-Bismol pink, courtesy of a cocktail of chemicals and pig waste.

The move from small family farm to massive commercial operation didn’t happen overnight.

Starting in the 1980s and early 1990s, a new method of pig farming began to take hold as corporate hog producers and CAFOs began replacing independent, family-owned farms. In an arrangement known as contract farming, many larger companies bought family farms or merged with them by providing pigs in exchange for land and waste management services.

As the state gravitated toward a corporate production model — one already in place for the poultry industry — thousands of independent farmers left the business. According to Census data, the number of farms in the state fell from more than 11,000 in 1982 to 2,217 in 2012.

Nobody was more influential in reshaping the industry than Wendell Murphy, a powerful Demo-

cratic state legislator and the subject of the N&O’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Boss Hog” series. Murphy, a high school agriculture teacher turned farmer from Rose Hill, grew to become the nation’s top hog producer during his tenure in the General Assembly from 1982 to ’93. While in office, he backed legislation to provide poultry and hog farmers with tax breaks and exemptions from environmental regulation, helping “pass laws worth millions of dollars to his company and his industry,” the N&O reported.

This included the 1991 “Murphy Amendment,” which exempted poultry and animal operations from stricter regulations on air and water pollution, and a 1991 bill that barred counties from imposing zoning restrictions on hog farms. In 1986, he voted in favor of a bill that eliminated sales taxes on hog and poultry operations.

By 1995, Duplin County was home to more than 1 million hogs, more than six times the number it had when Murphy was first elected. Most of them, the N&O reported, belonged to none other than Murphy Family Farms, Boss Hog’s crown jewel. Five years later, Murphy Family Farms was acquired by Smithfield, and its name was changed to Murphy-Brown LLC. With the acquisition, Smithfield became the world’s largest hog producer.

IV. ‘Heaven 4 Hogs, Hell 4 Humans’ To an outsider, it might seem like business as usual. Murphy played politics and his company came out for the better. But for Don Webb, a living history book on all things related to hog farming, something was amiss.

A former hog farmer, Webb bore witness to the industry’s explosive growth firsthand. He grew

Throughout the debate over HB 467, the arguments proffered by state Rep. Jimmy Dixon and other supporters centered on “hardworking farm families” besieged by “frivolous lawsuits” filed by greedy, out-ofstate attorneys.

“You do know that the original lawyers were banned from North Carolina,” Dixon said, while shrugging off the plaintiffs’ claims about the stench associated with hog farms as “exaggerations.”

Mark Anderson, an attorney representing Murphy-Brown LLC, brought up the same point in an email: “You should know that the original claims were filed by out-of-state lawyers who went door to door, actively recruiting plaintiffs and promising them large sums of money if they joined the lawsuits. The lawyers’ conduct led to them being thrown out of the cases because of ethics violations.”

The out-of-state-lawyers claim is a go-to for the bill’s champions, and for good reason: It’s entirely accurate.

The Salisbury-based Wallace & Graham is now handling the plaintiffs’ 26 federal nuisance lawsuits against Murphy-Brown, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, but that wasn’t always the case. The suits were initially filed in Wake County Superior Court in 2013 by two out-of-state firms, whose lawyers recruited clients in North Carolina without a state license and signed hundreds of clients to contracts requiring them to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for work performed on their behalf, even if the attorneys decided to drop the case, as the News & Observer previously reported.

In hearings, Judge Donald Stephens admonished the firms for their behavior and, after the contracts were rewritten, required that they partner with a North Carolina firm, which ended up being Wallace & Graham.

About two months after the firms teamed up, Wallace & Graham’s attorneys told Stephens they could no longer work with the out-of-towners. Stephens then took away the out-of-state lawyers’ privilege to practice in his court and said he didn’t “ever want to see them again or hear from them again.”

Wallace & Graham refiled the lawsuits in federal court, but the behavior of the attorneys booted from the case has left its mark, giving the industry’s defenders ammunition with which to accuse the Murphy-Brown plaintiffs or their attorneys of cupidity.

In a statement, Smithfield Foods called the lawsuits a “cash grab.” At a House committee meeting in April, Dixon accused the plaintiffs’ current lawyers of manipulating their clients: “When the final chapter is written on these cases, we’ll see the people being represented are being prostituted for money.”

In a statement, Wallace & Graham said that, “until the trial is over, we choose to make no further comment on the cases.”

triad-city-beat.com

Out-of-Towners

13

June 28 – July 5, 2017 Cover Story

Don Webb

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up on a farm in Stantonsburg and cropped tobacco and picked corn with his bare hands. His father sold pigs right off the family farm. After a brief stint as a PE teacher, Webb started a successful hog farm in Northampton County in the mid-’70s. But after an up-close experience with pig waste management, Webb has since become a thorn in the industry’s side.

Webb, now 76 years old, has a thick drawl and is prone to impassioned rants. Next to a chair inside his house, he sets an otherwise unassuming leather briefcase decorated with bumper stickers bearing such slogans as “Welcome to North Carolina: Heaven 4 Hogs, Hell 4 Humans.”

“They say they love America, but they really love somethin’ else,” he scoffs. “It’s green. How many hog pens have you found next to a country club?”

Webb’s transition from hog farmer to fuming activist was years in the making. He got into hog farming at the urging of a friend. At his farm’s peak, he had about 4,000 hogs — a small number by today’s standards, but enough to turn a handsome profit. He managed the pig waste similarly to how today’s farms do it. The slanted floors of his farm’s hog house filtered the waste into cesspools. When those filled up, they sprayed it elsewhere.

It was a matter of conscience that charted his current path, he says. Several of his neighbors told him that the stench from his farm was making their lives miserable. They grumbled about being quarantined indoors on sweltering summer evenings, unable to go outside on account of the pungent, fly-infested air.

“I said, ‘Suppose that was my mama and daddy back there,’” he says. “‘How would I feel?’ I hit the brakes on that truck.”

In 1979, after about five years in the business, Webb sold his hogs and relocated to Cape Hatteras, where “the air was fresh.” When he returned to Duplin County six years later, however, he was greeted once again by that stench. That’s what ultimately turned

State Rep. Jimmy Dixon

him into an activist, he says.

“These are human beings,” Webb says. “They’ve worked their whole lives and are tryin’ to have a clean home and a decent place to live, and they can’t go on their front porch and take a deep breath.”

While legal, hog farms’ longstanding practice of disposing of excess waste by spraying it as mist onto nearby fields has proven controversial. Farms’ neighbors have complained that the system literally brings excrement to their doorsteps, allowing the liquefied waste to ride the wind to their property. In May, Shane Rogers, a former EPA and USDA environmental engineer, published a report that concluded that this is exactly what happens.

The study, which was filed in court documents on behalf of plaintiffs suing Murphy-Brown, relied on both air and physical samples collected from the exteriors of homes located near Murphy-Brown hog fields.

The homes were selected randomly, and “at every visit and every home, I experienced offensive and sustained swine manure odors to varying intensity, from moderate to very strong,” Rogers wrote.

To test for the presence of pig-manure DNA, Rogers and his team collected DNA swab samples from the exterior walls of homes and from the air itself. In total, they collected 31 samples from the outside walls of 17 homes and submitted them for DNA testing; 14 of 17 homes tested positive.

Additionally, all six of the dust samples taken from the air “contained tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of hog feces DNA particles,” Rogers wrote, “demonstrating exposure to hog feces bioaerosols for clients who breathe in the air at their homes. Considering the facts, it is far more likely than not that hog feces also gets inside clients’ homes where they live and where they eat.”

Anderson, Murphy-Brown’s attorney, disputes the notion that the company’s farms and contractors disrupt their neighbors’ quality of life.

“Murphy-Brown requires all of its company farms to operate properly and in compliance with strict state regulatory requirements,” he wrote in an email. “We expect the same of all contract growers. Even more, we expect all farmers to be good neighbors. If any neighbor has a problem with a farm, tell us and we will do our best to fix it.”

V. ‘Promised a pie in the sky’ In an interview, state Rep. Jimmy Dixon (R-Duplin, Wayne), a former poultry farmer and a Duplin County Republican who is perhaps the hog industry’s most outspoken ally in the General Assembly, makes three fundamental beliefs abundantly clear.

First, he believes the Murphy-Brown plaintiffs’ claims are “at best exaggerations, at worst misrepresentations,” and they’re being “recruited” by greedy lawyers who have “promised a pie in the sky” (see sidebar).

“For people to say they can’t go outside, ‘I can’t barbecue, I can’t invite my neighbors over,’ those are exaggerations,” Dixon says.

Second, he doesn’t buy studies that point to hazards associated with hog farms because “a lot of these studies, a lot of them, begin with the end product in mind, and then they construct it for the outcome.”

And third, he doesn’t think any additional regulations are necessary. What’s more, he’s frustrated that critics don’t acknowledge the industry’s waste-management improvements over the last 40 years, which he calls “unbelievable.”

He’s been no less forthcoming in his public comments.

On April 5, Dixon stepped past dozens of protesters into a crowded committee meeting inside the legislature. He was there to defend his controversial pet project, HB 467, which would cap the amount of money

Elsie Herring

VI. ‘Everything has gone downhill’

If you Google “hog farms and North Carolina,” you’ll see one name pop up again and again: Elsie Herring.

A copper-haired 69-year-old, Herring lives on the same property that her mother — the daughter of a slave — lived on for 99 years. Herring’s childhood memories are built around her family’s land in Wallace — of growing and farming tobacco, cucumbers, soybeans, strawberries and peanuts; of canning food; of smoking and curing meat. Even though those were Jim Crow days, she remembers it as a “happier, healthier time. Everything was segregated, but we still got along.

But now, after these hogs came in, everything has gone downhill.”

Herring’s home is adjacent to a farm that contracts with Murphy-Brown to raise 1,180 of its pigs, according to Department of Environmental Quality records and a lawsuit she filed. The lawsuit contends that the hog facility began spraying liquefied waste in the mid’90s and planting trees between their properties to act as a buffer, which proved ineffective.

Herring says her grandfather purchased the property in the 1880s from his aunt, who was white and, while she was a slave, mistress to the landowner. Herring’s parents built the home she now lives in; her mother, father, brother and sister all lived on the land until they

passed away. Herring came back to Wallace from New York in 1993 to look after her elderly mother and her brother, who had Down syndrome. About two years after she moved back, the spraying began, Herring says. She vividly remembers the first time it happened — an otherwise uneventful Saturday evening.

“We were just sitting here having our Saturday evening like we usually do, enjoying,” she recalls. “And in a short time, we heard this bursting sound, and then all of a sudden it started stinking like nothing you’ve experienced.”

Herring felt like she was going to be sick, so she went back inside.

“If you would have stayed out there,” she says, “you would have probably had to end up going to the hospital because this stuff was being released and you’re breathing it in.”

After that, Herring says, the spraying happened “all day, every day.”

The stench became so unbearable that Herring eventually contacted the Duplin County Sheriff ’s Office, the Duplin County Department of Health and the state Department of Environmental and Natural Resources for help — all to no avail, she says. She linked up with local activist networks, joining the NC Environmental Justice Network and the Warsaw-based organization Rural Empowerment and Community Health, or REACH. In 2007, her activism took her to the lawn outside the General Assembly, where she joined other REACH members to protest the effects of hog farming for more than 50 consecutive hours. According to her lawsuit, Herring “called or wrote letters, or both, to the governor, the state and local health departments, the attorney general of North Carolina, the United States Justice Department, DENR, the local sheriff and police departments, the county commissioners, the federal EPA, her congressman, and the owner of the hogs [Murphy-Brown].”

Though the spraying has subsided over the past few months — perhaps as a result of the lawsuits, Herring says, though she can’t be sure — life is still “no picnic.” She ticks off a list of issues she believes the stink and the spraying have brought: flies, mosquitoes, mice, poisonous snakes. To avoid the odor, she stays indoors.

“It’s like living in prison,” she says.

HB 467 came as a surprise, she says. But, to her, its motives were transparent. Like many of her fellow activists, she’s all too aware of the racial dynamics at play.

“This is environmental racism,” she says. “This is my family land. And I’m sure race played a part when they decided they wanted to develop this area.” Herring sighs. “We’ve been asked many times, ‘Why don’t you just move?’ Move and go where? I don’t want to move. I never knew my grandfather, but I know he walked on this ground. And his family.”

She pauses and looks at her house.

“It’s my land.”

triad-city-beat.com

that property owners living near “agriculture and forestry operations,” including hog farms, could collect in nuisance lawsuits.

Under HB 467, people could only collect damages equal to the reduction in their property’s fair market value — which critics argue is already low thanks to the presence of the nearby farms. One Democratic representative estimated that if Dixon’s bill passed, property owners could only recoup around $7,000 over three years.

Importantly, the bill didn’t just seek to limit future nuisance lawsuits. It would also have negated the 26 pending claims against Murphy-Brown.

Introducing the bill, Dixon said it “seeks to promote farming by clarifying and adjusting the maximum compensatory damages that can be awarded.”

Throughout the 40-minute committee discussion, Dixon’s arguments were met by an admixture of support, anger and skepticism. Rep. Amos Quick III (D-Guilford) questioned Dixon about the bill’s discriminatory impact, “because the plaintiffs are predominantly African American.”

Mark Dorosin of the UNC Center for Civil Rights drilled down on that point during public comments, citing research showing that the proportions of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans living within three miles of industrial hog operations are 1.5, 1.39, and 2.18 times higher, respectively, than the proportion of white residents.

A few days later, following heightened media scrutiny, the bill’s opponents scored a victory. The contentious provision invalidating the pending lawsuits against Murphy-Brown was stripped from the bill.

With it gone, HB 467 cleared the House easily, then the Senate.

On May 5 — the same day Rogers’s study showing the presence of pig fecal matter on the exteriors of homes near hog farms was filed in court — Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill, saying he opposed “special protection for one industry.”

The hog industry fought back. In addition to its eight registered lobbyists, Smithfield enlisted the services of Tom Apodaca, a former state senator from Hendersonville. Its efforts paid off. On May 10, the House voted 74–40, mostly along party lines, to override Cooper’s veto. The following day, the Senate followed suit.

HB 467 became law.

Deep financial ties exist between the bill’s backers and the hog industry. Cumulatively, House Republicans who supported HB 467 have received more than $272,000 in campaign contributions from the industry throughout their careers, according to an analysis of campaign finance records. Dixon has received $115,000, including $36,250 from individuals associated with Murphy-Brown and $9,500 from the NC Pork Council. House Speaker Tim Moore has garnered $44,650. Sen. Brent Jackson, who sponsored the Senate companion bill to HB 467, has received more than $130,000 from industry associates.

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June 28 – July 5, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story

W

e eased into a parking spot directly in front of the new ice cream shop, awash in the bright light flooding out into the dark summer night that illuminated a throng of people inside.

It was after 9 p.m. on a Saturday night, not long after the rolled ice cream spot quietly opened at a strip mall on northwest Greensboro alongside Organix Juice Bar and Melt’s second location. But despite the quietude of the far-flung shopping area and the parking lot’s emptiness, it appears that the New Garden Road set have discovered the region’s hippest new dessertery en masse.

As I held the door open for a woman while she exited before we walked in she ominously said, “It’s worth the wait.”

Inside Ice Scraperz, it took my girlfriend and I second to calibrate the scene in front of us. What looked like a doubled back line to order was actually a crowd of people watching their ice cream being made, tapping their feet

SPREADING JOY ONE PINT AT A TIME

Shot in the Triad

Crossword

Sportsball

Culture

CULTURE Rolled ice cream craze lands in time for summer

by Eric Ginsburg

Anniversary Party July 1st | Noon-Midnight

Triaditude Adjustment

Food Trucks & Live Music

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JT & Joel, Alan Peterson, Molly McGinn and Wurlitzer Prize, The Ends, & Nate Hall w/ Special Guest joymongers.com | 336-763-5255 576 N. Eugene St. | Greensboro

and twitching with mild irritation at the wait. A tall man standing at my shoulder offered unsolicited information — he’d been waiting for his order for 40 minutes already.

Rolled ice cream is one of the country’s biggest dessert trends right now, and visually it’s exactly what it sounds like. Liquid ice cream is poured on a freezing griddle — it’s 30 degrees below zero, according to a sign up at Ice Scraperz — and after toppings or flavors are mixed in, it’s pressed flat and then rolled up into tight spirals that are served standing up in a cup.

Picture curled pieces of paper made of ice cream, creating an almost floral arrangement as they poke up from the cup.

Rolled ice cream traces its roots to Thai street food, and the culinary tradition ERIC GINSBURG Rolled ice cream — a Thai street food that’s found mass appeal started hitting the mainstream in the in the United States — arrived in the Triad this month.

United States two years ago. Now it’s spread to the Triad, not unlike the DIY froUnicorn, with its purple and sprinkled wedge of bark, or the yo places that took Greensboro by storm several years prior. more straightforward Strawberry Cheesecake. Namely, avoid But for now, Ice Scraperz is the Triad’s lone pioneer. toppings like a chocolate chip cookie or whipped cream that Behind the counter, a legion of what looked like mostly will obscure the top of the rolled ice cream — the rolls are the high schoolers working summer jobs pounded out an inceswhole point! sant rhythm as they worked the griddles, sort of like a more Several teens snacked on the S’mores option, with a leaning involved version of what the staff does at Cold Stone. Despite tower of marshmallow atop graham crackers and chocolate. being thoroughly staffed, there wasn’t anything the kids could Instead try a more colorful ice cream like the Very Berry with do to speed up the process; they had to literally watch the ice strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and lemon zest and add cream freeze. your own varied toppings: maybe pretzels, unicorn bark and Most of the creations let you pick three toppings of your sprinkles for color and crunch. own. But after the warnings from two customers, we both And good news — orders come with a color-changing spoon, chose pre-selected options for speed, choosing a cake batter adding to this dessert’s photogenic nature. special with whipped cream, Pocky (chocolate coated sticks) If you’re going, try to avoid peak hours, but plan to wait a and sprinkles and a sweet & salty special with chocolate ice little regardless. Stand in front of the glass and watch your cream, pretzels, caramel and whipped cream. We could’ve order take form (without crowding those poor kids), and scout been more adventurous and chosen variations with “unicorn the menu on Ice Scraperz website so you have a rough sense of bark,” Pop Rocks, cotton candy or Nutella, but we intentionalwhat you want beforehand. ly moved with speed.

It would be easy to add rolled ice cream to the list of novelty And it paid off. dessert trends that already exist here, especially over-the-top Moments after we ordered, a long line reaching out the milkshakes at places like Burger Batch in Winston-Salem or door materialized. We’d come at a relative lull, our orders Burger Warfare in Greensboro. The real question is whether it only taking 30 minutes. Compared to the weary man who has staying power and will spread or whether this is more of a warned us when we walked in — who waited for almost 15 one-off sort of experience. more minutes on top of his estimated 40 before his cup was Will it catch on, similar to the spate of fro-yo topping bars ready — and the rush that came after us, around the city, and if it does will it it appears we got off easy. knock off the nearby Feeney’s in the proWhile rolled ice cream is made differcess? It’s hard to predict trends — the Visit Ice Scraperz at 1941 New ently than the normal ice-cream shop food/service industry is tricky enough as Garden Road, Suite 106 (GSO) experience, the real appeal is aesthetic is, and somehow a solid, independent or at icescraperz.com. rather than material. Any difference in ice cream shop doesn’t seem to be able taste proved negligible — the chocolate to make it downtown, with almost zero seemed a little icier and maybe lighter options citywide unless you include than a usual cup, but otherwise we didn’t notice anything out gelato, frozen yogurt, a couple chains or Blue Bell. of the norm. There’s an adventure factor, but the best apEven a national craze like rolled ice cream (or raw cookie proach is to accept ahead of time that you’re doing it for the dough at Tart Sweets in Winston-Salem) might not hold on ’gram. long. But at the very least, Ice Scraperz is the flavor of the And that’s why you should order something like the week, if not summer ’17.

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Covering the classics at After Hours Tavern

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$5 Wine Every Wednesday Thursday

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EVENTS Wednesday, June 28 @ 8pm

The Singer & The Songwriter Thursday, June 29 @ 8pm

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’d only heard of After Hours Tavern Nonetheless, this particular band, the interestingly named in High Point because I made a point Shmack Daniels, was rocking. With each cover in their own to seek out bars in the Triad’s smallstyle, classic and popular songs like “Cars,” “Moves Like est city. It didn’t sound like the kind Jagger” and even “California Love” became pierced, tattooed, of place I’d normally frequent, made bearded versions of themselves, much like lead singer Lee clear by college nights and $4 Fireball Myers. The band’s strong stage presence and the impressive, shots, but I wanted to find some worthprofessional light show added to the effect. while venues in the Furniture City.

Friday night karaoke apparently draws a larger crowd,

by Kat Bodrie My husband and I were immediately although I can’t see why. A whiteboard by the door advertises set at ease when a warm, friendly woman greeted us at the the upcoming Saturday night band lineup, which is also posted door. We filled out membership forms and on Facebook; genres range from country/ paid the $5 cover charge for the band playrockabilly to heavy metal, psychedelic blues ing that night. and 80s hair metal.

Visit After Hours Tavern The main area, housing the bar and four Some might find the drink options at pool tables, stood mostly empty since the After Hours limited, and nearby venues like at 1614 N. Main St. (HP) band, Shmack Daniels, was about to play the Garage in Winston-Salem and Blind or find it on Facebook. in the next room. With no menu to go by, I Tiger in Greensboro offer original tunes. eyed the modest liquor collection and the But if you’re looking for entertainment and stand-up fridge by the back wall, containing a classic bar in High Point, After Hours is a bottles of Red Oak, Sweetwater 420 and a few Big Beer opworthy contender. tions like Shock Top, plus wine like Sutter Home. The bartendKat loves red wine, Milan Kundera, and the Shins. She wears er motioned to a separate fridge underneath the bar where scarves at katbodrie.com.

Bud Lights were stashed. A sign suggested several specials, including $2.25 Bud Lights and $5.25 Long Island Iced Teas.

Pick of the Week I expected a lack of craft beer but was happy to find one local bottled option, Foothills Jade IPA. The bartender offered Meal prep workshop @ Deep Roots Market (GSO), Satura cold glass, and I happily obliged. My husband chose Aviator day, 10 a.m. on draft, one of only three beers on tap.

The B Squad hosts a workshop on how to prep healthy and The music underway, we snagged a candlelit table under nutritious meals for an entire week. This event also includes LED icicles. Each Saturday hosts a different local band. After a tour of the store and a guide to healthy food alternatives.

Hours typically chooses cover bands; they’re more popular For more information, visit thebsquadtraining.com. with audiences.

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he crowd stretched across the green grass, laying out blankets and opening lawn chairs. The warm summer breeze carried the smell of picnics and grass in the air, and riding along with it came the soothing picking from Laney Jones’ banjo.

Taking the stage alone for the first few songs, Jones excitedly skipped onto the stage, a smile stretched across her face. The crowd stared down from the various levels of the ascending outdoor venue, watching the happy-go-lucky artist perform. Opening with a cover of Fleet Foxes’ “Sun Giant,” her voice carried boldly and pleasingly into the warm air, settling the crowd into their grassy seats.

As Jones plucked into her songs, her presence radiated the clear joy she felt while performing, bouncing on her toes, smiling, her entire body moving to the music she made. With vocals that brims with sweet and innocent tones, Jones’ contains a voice that is reminiscent of Sylvan Esso blended with Gillian Welch.

But the thing that separates Jones’

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CULTURE Laney Jones serenades crowd at High Point University

by Spencer KM Brown

All Showtimes @ 9:00pm unless specified differently

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songs from her contemporaries lies in her blending folk and Americana with pop-rock, giving her songs a round and marketable tone.

Laney Jones and the Spirits’ performance at High Point University was the second concert in the High Point Arts Council’s Art Splash, an outdoor, summer concert series that runs on Sundays until Aug. 13. The event brought out a large audience of primarily families. Jones’ songs mixed neatly with the warm evening on Sunday, providing a gentle touch to a lazy summer day.

With the release of her first EP Beyond the Blue in 2012 and a full-length album Golden Road in 2013, Jones has made a name for herself in the indie-folk genre.

Shortly after the release of Golden Road, she was invited to perform for a masterclass at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC that was featured on an episode of PBS’s “Great Performances” alongside Alison Krauss, Sara Bareilles, Ben Folds, Josh Groban and Renee Fleming.

Even with her success in the music industry, a Southern charm and small-town simplicity rings through in her performances. As SPENCER KM Laney Jones & the Spirits lay down a set of folk-rock in High Point. her full band joined her on stage BROWN and she changed from banjo to guitar, Jones spoke about the with a pure and simple effect of raising your spirits. Moving small goat farm she lives on in Florida. While her songwritfrom banjo to ukulele to guitar and harmonica, Jones showed ing and voice ring most true while her chops as a multi-instrumentalshe performed alone on stage, her ist and her command over songbacking band added a welcomed writing.

The next Art Splash concert will be layer to the music, delivering a full Some of her set featured songs on July 9 at Oak Hollow Festival Park and driving sound behind Jones’ soft from her self-titled 2016 album that voice.

(HP) feat. New Breed Brass Band. landed in the spot of more cliché, Remaining an unsigned artist, popular and mass-market music — Jones has earned her place in the neatly crafted songs that seemed current indie scene, playing such more formulaic in their dimensions and left more passionate famous venues as New York’s Lincoln Center. The charm and songwriting behind.

Such songs were the low point of Jones’ liveliness with which Jones performs draws your attention, set, though even with her more pop-rock tunes, she managed to come right back with a poetic and captivating melody in the Pick of the Week next song.

A truly vivacious and cheerful performer, Jones’ perforBell Biv DeVoe @ Greensboro Coliseum, Saturday, 7:30 mance neatly uplifted the lacking music scene in High Point. p.m.

Though this concert series features a mix of both touring and This event also features live performances by SWV and local acts, this series is a promising step forward for music in Blackstreet. For tickets and information, visit greensborothe Triad, drawing the community together to share in the coliseum.com. beauty of music.

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ithe branches floated over the heads of The Sky Game’s audience as the children’s faces beamed with wonder.

The play’s main characters, too, gazed upward toward the sound of wind chimes, hearts soaring in harmony with ethereal soundscapes as they visited their imagined “Level of the Clouds” on June 23.

More than 30 people sat atop a semicircle of folding risers — an imagined grassy hillside — and overlooked a magical tree at the edge of an elite public school’s property as they learned about The Sky Game’s four levels: the Roots, the Bark, the Leaves and the Clouds.

Each level bears a lesson, reflecting layers of the increasingly tumultuous inner worlds of four neighborhood misfits — Mari, Lola, Banjo and Jane — as they attempt to navigate their changing environment in eastern Winston-Salem. Jane’s upper-class family moves in as gentrification pushes Lola’s family out; Banjo dreams of the safety and comfort of large lake houses while Mari focuses on the sanctuary of the newly discovered tree, where they’ve been playing all summer.

Two visiting University of Texas at Austin MFA candidates, Hannah Wolf and Kimberly Belflower, directed and penned the play aimed at children for Kaleideum’s Peppercorn Theatre.

The theater is currently in residence at the Delta Arts Center, an art gallery and cultural center located on New Walkertown Road.

Equally endearing and grating, the actors’ explosive energy brought the bare-bones production to life. They persuasively embodied the emotional landscapes of elementary-age children grappling with motifs of betrayal, memory, empathy and Kathryn Olsen, Ramon Perez, Maria Ortiz and Simon Pommells (l-r) star in DAN SIMONSON, HEARTS AND vulnerability.

The Sky Game at Delta Arts Center in Winston-Salem.

ARROWS PHOTOGRAPHY Whether the play acknowledged or reinforced racial and gender stereotypes – such as Lola’s portrayal as the “angry and recommends the play for ages 6 “From my perspective, I liked the message of the story,” black girl”– will fall in the eyes of the beholder, but the show and older.

Harper said. “For my kids, I liked that they could both come. did shine a light on emotional violence rooted in privilege.

That said, Miles, also 4, took a mesIt was interactive; it was easy for them to watch and appreci(“You don’t look like the kind of kid who would read the sage from the play. “It’s like… you have ate. They were eager to participate and it was kid-friendly and grown-up version of Jane Eyre,” Jane said to Mari.) It is just as the power!” he said. accessible for a lot of different ages.” much a play about creativity and naviThematic elements tying individual Excited to see an event catered to gating friendships as it is about economic and collective power to the ability to younger children, Dianne Caesar brought displacement in a hyperlocal context.

The Sky Game runs at the exact change will strike a chord for her granddaughter, Rozzi, to the show.

At its core, The Sky Game works bethose invested in community and move“I thought the actors were very good,” Delta Arts Center (W-S) cause of its participatory nature. By the ment-building work. said Caesar, previously the decade-long through July 2. end of the show, actors referred to audiAs Mari imparts, “Some things are executive director of the arts center. ence members as fellow “ground enforcworth trouble.”

“There were some stereotypes in it… but ers,” those who help protect the magical I’m sure I’m looking at it at a different tree, and asked them to leave messages for future ground level. The kids, it held their attention and they enjoyed it.” enforcers on their “trophy” objects chosen upon arrival.

Despite the actors’ passion, the attention of younger chilIn a particularly moving scene, the four misfits declare dren tended to fade in and out. Caesar noted that 4-year-old they will harness the transformative power of their stories to Rozzi became restless by the end of the hour-long production, resist the forces that seek to destroy the tree. Upon divulging their most cherished secrets, Mari and her friends reveal the Pick of the Week inherent power of vulnerability and, to the children’s delight, attendees amplified that power when invited to place their Escape the Museum: Central Africa @ Wake Forest Uniobjects on the tree as well. Many lingered, in awe, to cradle versity (W-S), Saturday, 10 a.m. trophies central to the plot. Parents, too, enjoyed the production.

The Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology pres“I thought the set was beautiful, did a lot with a little and ents an exhibit that explores the traditional art of Central brought the world to life,” said Beth Harper of Winston-Salem.

African people. The exhibit features pieces from the Kuba, Harper brought her sons Miles, 4, and Charlie, 7, to the June Kongo, Mbuti, Shoowa and Fang cultures. For more infor23 afternoon showing. All three recommend the play. mation, visit wfu.edu.

triad-city-beat.com

CULTURE The tree’s the thing at The Sky Game

by Lauren Barber

19

June 28 – July 5, 2017 Up Front News Opinion

A week of sports, literature and resistance

B

y mid-February, though the 45th president had only been in the White House a few (eternal) weeks, his wretched arrival had long galvanized a reaction within the sports world. Spurred by athletes’ political response, two

by Joel Sronce friends and I sent a panel proposal to the Sport Literature Association four months ahead of its annual conference.

Our theme: “#Resist: Sport Literature in Trump’s America.”

Angry, resolute and mobilized, the three of us — a PhD candidate, a professor and journalist — contended that our jobs, academic pursuits and positions of privilege should apply knowledge and experience to the task of resistance. At last week’s association conference in West Virginia, each of us argued that those involved in sport literature can and should speak to the political urgency of our troubling times.

And we weren’t the only ones. Many of the presentations echoed the fact that the world of sports now frequents the front page, much like other collisions of culture and politics.

This year marked the Sport Literature Association’s 34th annual conference. Dozens of professors, poets, graduate students, novelists and even others in my DWSP_Music17_TriadCityBeat_7-1-17.pdf 1 6/21/17 boat — defined, generously, as “independent schol-

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tion, my co-panelist and Springfield College professor ars” — met at West Liberty University for four days of Kyle Belanger launched into his fascinating study on presentations. how the New England Patriots — infamously associatThe association is an international organization deded with Trump yet coupled with a handful of proicated to the study of sport in literature and culture, gressive African-American players — unintentionally bending the definitions of sport and literature along volunteered as the nation’s fractured self-identity. the way. (Fly fishing, bullfighting and ultra-running Then our colleague Matt Tettleton, a PhD candidate make almost annual appearances, and last year, someat the University of Colorado-Boulder, used Ralph Ellihow, they permitted me to present: “Sport as Freedom son’s novel Invisible Man to examine how the reaction and Metaphor in Calvin and Hobbes, or: The Anarchy to the protest of Colin Kaepernick — then the quarof Calvinball.”) terback for the San Francisco 49ers — This time around, early on the perpetuated racialized surveillance. morning of June 21, I began our panel Overlapping political issues surround — in fact, the whole conference — by I’ve encountered us in sports. Through presenting those discussing how the world of sports rethree approaches intersections, academics, journalists, flects the oppression and injustice that and participants can use many face, as well as the connection for bringing import- spectators sports to encourage inclusion and chaland support that participants strive to find. ant political issues lenge injustice. Sports can and do break down walls that divide us.

For almost six months I’ve served to light through For my first-ever sports piece, I as sports columnist at Triad City Beat, covered the Greensboro women’s striving to cover sports in a progressive sportswriting. arm-wrestling league and its event way. Through the guidance and inspiracalled Battle of the Stars, featuring tion of brave athletes around the Triad, dueling supporters of Star Trek and Star I’ve encountered three approaches for Wars. bringing important political issues to light.

“We need this,” one of the contestants said in an The first method features the dynamic sports interview a couple of weeks after Trump’s inauguraaround us, ones that encourage individuals whose tion. “It’s awesome, with everything going on, that we aspirations often don’t conform with the status quo.

10:59 AM women’s football, for example. The next centers have these women. It feels good to have fun in light of Think everything.” the progressive beliefs of For those who might not have ever discovered and athletes themselves, who reveled in community through sport, they found camaare powerful voices in our raderie that night. society. Often their poThe following week, still less than a month after litical ideas aren’t sought Inauguration Day, I wrote a piece about how sports out or reported on, or and politics intersect in a time of racial tension — an they’re silenced by those article that featured the views of the co-chair of comnot interested in stirring munications for Black Lives Matter Greensboro and her up contentious yet urgent nephew’s basketball coach. The contention surrounddebate. Finally, the lives ing political stances in professional sports raises an of those who have been important discussion about the position of influence marginalized, specifically held by athletes. refugee and immigrant Earlier this month, I covered the Restaurant League families, have reached a at the Winston-Salem Sportsplex, late-night games new depth of uncertainty for restaurant workers that transcend the uncertainty and fear since Trump has that limits their lives. taken office. Though their Encountering the sports world through a political decades-long struggles lens has allowed some at the Sport Literature Associahave always been weighttion to support the causes that inevitably match their ed with persecution, own resistance. For my part, I will endeavor to lift up the need for respite and the under-explored stories throughout the Triad that community — through illuminate the struggle for change. sport or other means — has become stronger than ever.

Following my presenta-

Pick of the Week July 4th at the ballpark @ BB&T Ballpark (W-S), July 4, 6:30 p.m.

The annual fireworks show returns to BB&T Ballpark after the Dash take on the Down East Ducks. For more information, visit wsdash.com.

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CROSSWORD ‘Parts on Back-Order’ it is humanly elbissop.

by Matt Jones

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Across 1 South Beach, e.g.

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14 “The Book of Mormon” location 15 Impractical 17 1999 Drew Barrymore rom-com (and James Franco’s film debut) 19 Kind of board at a nail salon 20 Passover feast 21 Some laptops 22 Have the appearance of 24 Bit of bitters 26 Protection for goalies 28 “You ___ awesome!”

32 Tomato on some pizzas 36 Mo. with both National Beer Day and National Pretzel Day 37 His first public jump in 1965 was over rattlesnakes and two ©2017 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) mountain lions 39 Sewing kit staple 41 Nintendo’s ___ Sports 42 “Fidelio,” for one 43 Star of “The Birds” and grandmother of Dakota Johnson 46 Cup lip 47 Effortlessness 48 “Awake and Sing!” playwright Clifford 49 Bi- times four 50 Mitch’s husband on “Modern Family” 52 Tickle Me Elmo toymaker 54 Org. in “Concussion” 57 “Wheel of Fortune” host since 1981 61 Actress Woodard of “St. Elsewhere” 64 “Enough already!”

67 Constitutional amendment that established Prohibition Answers from previous publication.

68 WWE wrestler John 69 “The Bone Garden” writer Gerritsen 31 Avoid, as an issue 70 Online magazine once owned by Microsoft 33 How some daytime daters meet 71 Shoe brand with the old slogan “They feel good” 34 Reason for a scout’s badge 35 Fictional beer on “King of the Hill” Down 37 Wallace of “Stargate Universe” or Wallach of 1 Frank Herbert sci-fi series “The Magnificent Seven” 2 “Big ticket” thing 38 Charged particle 3 Listens in 40 Gp. that includes Nigeria and Iraq 4 “___ the door ...”

44 Respectful tributes 5 New reporter 45 Suffix denoting the ultimate 6 Washington bills 49 Time-based contraction 7 For ___ (not pro bono) 51 “I don’t want to break up ___” 8 Put in the mail 53 Ex-NBA star Ming 9 Accepts, as responsibility 54 No, to Putin 10 “Pretty sneaky, ___” (Connect Four ad line) 55 Pate de ___ gras 11 1/2 of a fl. oz.

56 Carries with effort 12 He has a recurring role as The Donald 58 “Community” star McHale 13 “___ Are Burning” (Midnight Oil hit) 59 Tolstoy’s “___ Karenina” 16 Apple voice assistant 60 Etta of bygone comics pages 18 Deli sandwich option 62 Kentucky senator ___ Paul 23 Dallas pro baller, for short 63 Geological time spans 25 Get ready, slangily 65 Bygone TV taping abbr.

26 Kindergarten glop 66 Definite article 27 Via ___ (famous Italian road) 29 Got hitched again 30 Say “comfortable” or “Worcestershire,” maybe

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slightly lopsided breasts. “Careful,” she said, removing could’ve done to deserve this. I narrowed it down to a damp sock and flicking it toward the floor. “That’s a cheating at bingo during Vacation Bible School or buying fresh scar.” She pointed to a pink line unevenly traversing conventional, non-organic bananas at Whole Foods. the top of her foot like an odd-numbered interstate on “Do you have a trash can?” she asked, standing up and an unfolded map. looking around the store.

“What happened?” I asked, knowing that the answer I hadn’t had time to make words or even ask what had would be disgusting. just happened when she said, “I just knew I had a tick on “Well,” she said, dropping her damaged foot directly me.” into the palm of my hand. “I had a touch of the ganA tick. A TICK, one of nature’s nastiest creatures, the greem.” Yeah, she pronounced it as gan-GREEM, giving it kind usually found feasting on the underside of a mule the same mmm-sound found in phrases like “Mmmake deer or a stray dog or your ex-boyfriend who always goes this day end” or “Mmmaybe no one will to Bonnaroo. Their habitat shouldn’t exnotice if I throw myself through this tend to a suburban shoe store, especially plate glass window.” not this one, not when I’m here getting ‘Well,’ she said, She leaned over and poked the top of eight bones an hour to deal with it. dropping her damher other foot with two swollen fingers.

I had no idea how to respond, other “It feels like it’s done spread to this one, than throwing up into my now-ganaged foot directly too.” greem-infested palm and hoping to god into the palm of my I honestly thought gangrene was an — to ALL the gods — that she wasn’t already-eradicated illness that once hand. ‘I had a touch going to dislodge a tapeworm before my attacked sailors or feudal serfs or one shift ended, too. of the gangreem.’ or two of the weaker family members “Hang on,” I told her, unsure what in “Oregon Trail,” but no, it’s a modcorporate policy was on disposal of a ern-day affliction that was resting in my customer’s parasites. right hand. Fantastic.

I walked to the back, with the intention of making a Lady Gangreem stared at me while I debated whether biohazard bin out of an empty Reebok box, but found I’d need to strap two Brannock devices (that foot-meamyself heading straight to the exit. I pushed open the surement thing you remember from back-to-school door with the uneven “Employees Only” stencil, got in shopping at Thom McAnn) together to accommodate my car to go disinfect my hands or maybe set them on one of her feet, a brick of discolored flesh the size and fire, because wasn’t the Velveteen Rabbit incinerated for volume of a hotel ice bucket. less?

“I just need to take a couple of measurements,” I told I left, and before I pulled out of the parking lot, I saw her. her still sitting on the bench talking to one of my co“No you don’t,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I’m a workers, possibly asking if he could mind her fresh scar. size 7.” Sure you are. And I’m a seahorse.

I crammed her left foot into the Brannock ­— she was Jelisa Castrodale is a freelance writer who lives in a 12 wide — and before I could get to the other one, she Winston-Salem. She enjoys pizza, obscure power-pop started violently scratching her calf, digging and scraping records and will probably die alone. Follow her on Twitter at her skin. “Dammit,” she shouted. “I almost had it.” @gordonshumway.

She picked at her skin and I stared dumbly at her lower leg until my vision blurred, wondering what I possibly

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love my job. I do. But freelancing is also the kind of job that makes you spend large chunks of every night staring at the darkest corners of the ceiling, wondering how long it’s going to be before you’re frantically trying to remember your LinkedIn

by Jelisa Castrodale password and making another round of Facebook posts about how you’re looking for work again. As far as job security goes, it’s somewhere between being named the oldest woman in the world and a Trump-era FBI director.

But this morning, Facebook’s On This Day feature reminded me that, even in its most cuticle-chewing moments, this career is what I’ve always wanted, what I’ve figuratively clawed and scratched for — and it also reminded me how different things were a decade ago. (“Haven’t you already used this as a framing device for this column?” you’re wondering aloud right now. Yes, yes I have. NOW LAY OFF, SUSAN.) Anyway, 9 years ago today, I was working retail, selling running shoes for eight hours a day while I worked to build a portfolio and sent writing samples out to random website editors. (And, holy cow, if you’ve never worked in retail, then please take a moment to thank the people who do. If you have — and if you do, currently — I appreciate your long days, your hard work and your eternal patience when you have to deal with dummies like me.)

ANYWAY, AGAIN. On this day in 2008, I’d had a slow morning in the store and was spending most of my time teaching myself how to juggle with the inflatable boobs from the sports bra display. I casually tossed the A-cups around, while a bland-looking man carefully examined a pair of white socks and a ponytailed woman came in to ask what kind of marathon would be good for a 10-yearold. (Um, that would be none of them.)

I didn’t see anyone else for an hour, until a wild-eyed woman came in, collapsed on one of the shoe fitting benches and waved me over. She had her shoes off before I’d given the nearest mannequin a small pair of

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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28 8 P.M. The Glory of Brass – Baroque and Beyond First Presbyterian Church, Greensboro Organist John Alexander and EMF Brass Faculty.

THURSDAY, JUNE 29 8 P.M. In Recital: Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg Dana Auditorium, Guilford College Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg with EMF String Fellows.

FRIDAY, JUNE 30 8 P.M. Orchestra Gala Eastern Festival Orchestra & EMF Young Artists Orchestras Dana Auditorium, Guilford College Gerard Schwarz, conducting; Jeffrey Multer, violin.

SATURDAY, JULY 1 8 P.M. Titans: Copland, Beethoven and Mahler Dana Auditorium, Guilford College Eastern Festival Orchestra with pianist Horacio Gutiérrez, the Burlington Boys Choir and the North Carolina Boys Choir. Gerard Schwarz, conducting.

SUNDAY, JULY 2 3 P.M. Eastern Chamber Players Dana Auditorium, Guilford College MONDAY, JULY 3 8 P.M. Eastern Chamber Players Recital Hall, UNCG College of Visual and Performing Arts WEDNESDAY, JULY 5 8 P.M. In Recital: Pianist William Wolfram Recital Hall, UNCG College of Visual and Performing Arts

Thanks to our sponsors:

Tickets available at EasternMusicFestival.org or at EMF Ticket Office at Triad Stage at 336-272-0160

Alan G. Benaroya

EASTERNMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg Playing June 29