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September 2017 FEATURES
63 Dear Sylvia Poetry by Cathryn Hankla 64 Paradise Reclaimed By Grant Britt
From a dozen hidden springs comes fabled Buffalo Creek, a once-troubled waterway along which generations of Greensboro folks have played ball, pitched woo, made their morning run or evening walk. A meandering story of love and rebirth
68 The Secret Life of William Sydney Porter By Bill Case How the master of the short story became O.Henry
74 The Soul of an Urban Farmer By Maria Johnson
Innovative Aussie gardner, Stephen Johnson, makes his mark on Greensboro’s Lindley Park neighborhood Next objective: the city at large
80 A Walk in the Garden By Ross Howell Jr. A long and vibrant life, and memories of a beloved white peony
82 A Slice of Heaven By Jim Dodson
Joe and Liz Kelleher keep the home fires burning in their hidden Green Valley ranch
91 September Almanac By Ash Alder Apple harnest season calls for apple butter
DEPARTMENTS 17 Simple Life By Jim Dodson 22 Short Stories 25 Doodad By Ogi Overman 26 Life’s Funny By Maria Johnson 29 Omnivorous Reader By Stephen Smith 32 Scuppernong Bookshelf 35 Papadaddy’s Mindfield By Clyde Edgerton
37 True South By Susan Kelly 38 The Pleaures of Life Dept. By Grant Britt 41 A Writer’s Life By Wiley Cash
45 Gate City Icons By Sam Froelich 49 Evolving Species By Cynthia Adams 53 In The Spirit By Tony Cross 57 Birdwatch By Susan Campbell 59 Wandering Billy By Billy Eye 92 Arts Calendar 113 GreenScene 119 Accidental Astrologer By Astrid Stellanova 120 O.Henry Ending By Lynne Brandon
Cover Photograph by Mark Wagoner Photograph this page by Amy Freeman
8 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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M A G A Z I N E
Volume 7, No. 9 “I have a fancy that every city has a voice.” 336.617.0090 1848 Banking Street, Greensboro, NC 27408 www.ohenrymag.com Jim Dodson, Editor • jim@thepilot.com Andie Stuart Rose, Art Director • andie@thepilot.com Nancy Oakley, Senior Editor • nancy@ohenrymag.com Lauren M. Coffey, Graphic Designer Alyssa Rocherolle, Graphic Designer CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Cynthia Adams, David Claude Bailey, Harry Blair, Maria Johnson CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Lynn Donovan, Amy Freeman, Sam Froelich, John Gessner, Bert VanderVeen, Mark Wagoner CONTRIBUTORS
Ash Alder, Jane Borden, Grant Britt, Susan Campbell, Wiley Cash, Clyde Edgerton, Billy Eye, Ross Howell Jr., Billy Ingram, Sara King, Susan Kelly, Brian Lampkin, D.G. Martin, Meridith Martens, Ogi Overman, Romey Petite, Stephen Smith, Astrid Stellanova
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Lisa Bobbitt, Advertising Assistant 336.617.0090, ohenryadvertising@thepilot.com Brad Beard, Graphic Designer Lisa Allen, 336.210.6921 • lisa@ohenrymag.com Amy Grove, 336.456.0827 • amy@ohenrymag.com Allison Shore, 336.698.6374 • allison@ohenrymag.com CIRCULATION
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©Copyright 2017. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. O.Henry Magazine is published by The Pilot LLC
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12 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Simple Life
Old No. 7
Two aging road warriors strike out in search of the American past
By Jim Dodson
As summer’s end approached, I hit the road for research on a new book, though I wasn’t sure how far I might get — or where I might end up.
The start of any book project brings with it a humbling sense of vertigo, a feeling that the road ahead will be challenging and possibly full of wrong turns and maddening dead ends. But this particular project held special meaning because it’s a book I’ve been thinking about, in one form or another, for almost 40 years. It’s a book about a road. But not just any road — the Great Wagon Road. You may or may not have heard of it. But if you happen to be a Southerner with deep roots in the region, you may well be here because of it. The Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, as it was called early on, became the most traveled road in Colonial America. It ran from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia, and was the road that opened the American South to exploration and settlement and pushed back the western frontier. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the road was the way to a new life for tens of thousands of Scots-Irish, German and English settlers — Amish, Moravians, Quakers and Presbyterians — who landed on our shores seeking a fresh start in a new world. Daniel Boone hunted along the road, and Thomas Jefferson’s daddy named and surveyed it. A young captain named George Washington served as an Indian scout along the GWR and no less than three major wars, the French and Indian, American Revolution and Civil War — four if you care to count the Whiskey Rebellion — were fought along it’s meandering way. Fittingly, the ingenious Conestoga wagon that carried later generations of settlers across the Great Plains to settle the Far West was created by German artisans by the Conestoga River near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Both wings of my family came down the GWR in the mid-18th and early 19th centuries respectively. My pretty blond mama’s sprawling German clan (the Kessells), hopped off around Hagerstown, Maryland and settled along the south branch of the Potomac River on the West Virginia side in the early 1800s. Half a century earlier, my daddy’s Scottish and English forebears (the Tates and the Dodsons ) filtered down the road over the Dan River through Walnut Cove before settling in the Hawfields near Mebane, where they formed churches and grist mills and made furniture. A few of them even went The Art & Soul of Greensboro
on down to Wilmington and the Cape Fear region. I first heard about the Great Wagon Road four decades ago when a pretty girl named Rebecca Robinson and I stayed out all night on a date and wound up attending the sunrise service at God’s Acre in Old Salem. The Moravians originated the service in 1732 in Saxony. While standing among the ancient gravestones of that famous Moravian — men separated from women, a democracy of death, as has been described — we struck up a conversation with an older gent who turned out to be a professor of history at nearby Salem College. When I happened to mention my family name, he smiled and commented that my forbears, like his, probably “came down the Great Wagon Road about the same time” in the late 1700s. He explained that the GWR subsumed the remains of the so-called Great Indian Warrior Trading Path used by the Iroquois tribes such as the Cherokee, and other nations, including the Catawba and Tuscarora Indians until the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744 opened the western frontier to European settlement, pushing the native peoples farther into the mountains. Cities such as Lancaster and York in Pennsylvania; Winchester, Roanoke and Lexington in Virginia; (Winston-)Salem, Salisbury, and Charlotte in North Carolina, and Camden in South Carolina, began either as trading post river fords or market towns that owe their origins directly to the Great Wagon Road. Thirty-five years after that sunrise service, during the year I served as the Writer in Residence at Hollins University (which happened to lie along the GWR in a vale just north called “Big Lick,” now Roanoke), my fascination with the road was powerfully rekindled. I began moseying along Virginia’s winding and beautiful U.S. Route 11 and found all sorts of surviving references to the Great Wagon Road in various forms — place names of inns, family farms, townships, churches, battlefields and no shortage historical roadside standards. On my trips home to Maine up Interstate 81, I realized that I was, in fact, traveling the same path my forebears had followed once upon a time in America, on the Great Wagon Road. By the end of my time at Hollins, I’d resolved to someday drive the Great Wagon Road’s 700 miles in order to investigate how a young nation was born and how my native South grew up along what may be the most historic road in the land.
m
Someday finally arrived when I loaded up my own Great Wagon and set off for Philadelphia just after dawn one morning in late July. September 2017
O.Henry 17
Simple Life
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18 O.Henry
September 2017
My Great Wagon happens to be a vintage 1996 Buick Roadmaster Estate wagon, an iconic American road car that automotive historians consider the last true production American station wagon built before Detroit switched to making SUVs. Almost on a lark — or was it the sweet hand of Providence? — I bought it a decade ago from a nice lady in Pinehurst whose widowed papa had recently given up driving and had to “let go of his baby.” Well-maintained Roadmasters, I soon learned, can fetch a tidy sum and are greatly in demand among collectors of vintage automobiles. This one turned out to be a gem. Its odometer had only 59,000 miles on it. The lovely fellow who’d owned it actually kept velvet on the dash. The seats were comfy and roomy, like leather La-Z-Boy recliners. It’s famous Dynaride suspension system made the vehicle glide over the road like a dream, and a 350-horsepower V-8 engine was the same one Chevy put in its Corvettes. The air conditioning system could have cooled a deli meat locker and the killer cassette audio system had the acoustics of a concert hall. True, there were a few tiny dents and peeling paint in its fake wood grain side panels — but hey, there were in mine, too. We were perfect for each other. I bought the car an hour after driving it. Our four kids were amused and maybe a little embarrassed when they laid eyes on my newly acquired land yacht that Christmas. “It’s so, well . . . big,” said one son with a wary chuckle. You should give it a nickname,” suggested another, the family comedian. “How about The Beast?” I didn’t care for The Beast. The car was nothing if not an iconic work of American automotive art, an aged beauty whose name said it all — Master of the Road. One ride in it, however, and they all changed their tunes. Three of the four asked to take the car to college. Not on your life, I said, though I did consent to let them drive it whenever they were in residence. My work colleagues were also amused. The publisher of this magazine suggested I call her the “Dirty Pearl,” as if my beloved land yacht were an old pirate ship. That nickname was cute but never seemed quite right to me. While researching the Roadmaster’s distinguished automotive history — it’s the car that basically helped Buick survive the Great Depression and became the symbol of 1950s suburban America — I discovered a website that listed the Roadmaster Estate wagon among “Top Ten Best The Art & Soul of Greensboro
D M I T R Y S I T KOV E T S KY, M U S I C D I R E C TO R THE 2017 / 2018 SEASON
THE DOO WOP PROJECT
POPS
Five Jersey Boys alums who sing classics from the Frankie Valli era, as well as “Doo Wop-ifying” modern songs by Jason Mraz, Adele, Maroon 5 and more, join the GSO for opening night.
BROADWAY TO HOLLYWOOD
PIANO MEN: THE MUSIC OF ELTON AND BILLY
LET'S GROOVE TONIGHT
DEC 30, ����
FEB 16, ����
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Spend your New Year’s Eve weekend with the Greensboro Symphony for a multimedia tribute to cinema classics and the Great White Way, featuring award-winning pianist Rick Glazier and singer Michael Andrew.
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M A ST E RWO R K S
NOT SO CLASSICAL
A world-premiere film/live concert experience featuring video clips of local celebrities, including Hollywood star, Ken Jeong!
Dmitry Sitkovetsky, violin HAYDN / MOZART CHOPIN / BORODIN SEP ��/ ��, ����
The POPS season closes with a bang! as we span the eras with classics from The Music of Earth Wind & Fire, Blood Sweat & Tears and Chicago.
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Simple Life Vehicles for the End of the World,” capable of handling “nuclear winter, economic collapse or a zombie takeover.” My 1996 Roadmaster was No. 7 on the list. The photograph was even identical to my Great Wagon — “The Modern American Power Wagon Exemplar,” noted the editor of Popular Mechanics, in effect the Conestoga Wagon of Vacationing America. I finally had the perfect nickname. My Great Wagon, after all, had survived the lives of two large and rambunctious American families, three teen drivers and decades of moving everything from entire households to countless garden shrubs, not to mention made dozens of beach trips and backcountry camping expeditions with a large canoe lashed on her roof. My Great Wagon was nothing if not a proven survivor. So this summer, after 21 years of life and 159,000 miles, following a tune-up from Clark the mechanic who has faithfully looked after the old gal for years, we set off together up the Great Wagon Road to begin the first leg of our long journey from Market Square in Colonial Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia. Old No. 7 handled Philly’s congested tourist traffic like a summer breeze off the Delaware and cruised west on the Lincoln Highway as if she were right off of the showroom floor. After Philadelphia, where I walked in the footsteps of our founders and boned up on my heroes Jefferson and Franklin, the Old No. 7 led me to an expert on Colonial furniture making and allowed me to dine with a historian of Amish life. Among other things, I dropped by America’s oldest farmer’s market (1745), explored four famous battlefields, hiked in a state park, visited the nation’s first commercial pretzel maker, learned about the birth of the Conestoga wagon and watched the sun rise on Cemetery Hill where Lincoln gave his deeply moving Gettsyburg Address on a November afternoon in 1863. My notebook runneth over. After five days out, we came home to rest a bit before resuming the next leg of the long road from Winchester to Old Salem later this autumn. The Road’s original travelers sometimes took four or five months to reach their new homes in the Southern Wilderness. Old No. 7 and I hoped to finish our travels in about the same amount of time. According to her odometer, we covered 179 miles of the Great Wagon Road, which by my reckoning means there are many more miles of great discoveries to come. OH Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
226 S. ELM STREET GREENSBORO, NC 336 333 2993 OscarOglethorpe.com
September 2017
O.Henry 21
Short Stories Out of this World
Last year, filmgoers were captivated with Hidden Figures, the story of math prodigies — all of them black women — whose calculations helped NASA launch astronauts into space in the 1960s. On September 18, at 11 a.m. Katherine Moore, the youngest daughter of Hidden Figures’s protagonist Katherine Johnson, will address the Greensboro History Museum Guild (130 Summit Avenue) and recount stories about her mother’s experiences at NASA. On September 28, as a part of Greensboro Public Library’s One City, One Book initiative, Margot Lee Shetterly will speak at Dana Auditorium (5800 West Friendly Avenue) at 7 p.m. The author of the book that inspired the film, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Shetterly wsill discuss her work with the Human Computer Project, which recovers the names and accomplishments of all of the women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers at the NACA and NASA from the 1930’s through the 1980’s. Info: greensborohistory.org; beth.sheffield@greensboro-nc.gov.
Magnificent Magnolia
Readers of this magazine might remember a story from the February/March issue in 2012 (issuu.com/ohenrymag/docs/ohenry_ february_2012/60), about a grande dame’s transformation: the restoration of the Magnolia House Motel. Once a successful lodging for black entertainers, business and civic leaders, the Gorrell Street beauty fell on hard times, only to be nurtured back to life by a one Sam Pass, who saw past the ravages of time and admired the lady’s character and soul. Well, five-and-a-half years, and a lot of community love later, The Historic Magnolia House blooms again. Last month her doors officially opened as an event space, and she was honored with a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. So if you’re looking for just the right ambiance for a special occasion — a wedding, shower or graduation — or somewhere to rally your employees or hold a fundraiser, consider the Magnolia in moonlight . . . now that she’s once again taken her place in the sun. Info: (336) 617-3382 or thehistoricmagnoliahouse.com.
RH Factor
That would be Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Broadway duo that produced some of the best-loved musicals of all time. One of them, South Pacific, comes to Triad Stage (September 17– October 8) to start the theater company’s 2017–18 season. Set on a Polynesian island during World War II, the show centers on a romance between Midwestern nurse and a French plantation owner, with a subplot involving the relationship between a young Navy lieutenant and an island girl. Both stories are lessons in tolerance told with unabashedly romantic songs, such as “Some Enchanted Evening,” and “Younger than Springtime,” amid the comic hijinks of the American sailors in the chorus. So H’ai thee to Bali H’ai and be swept away. Tickets: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.
22 O.Henry
September 2017
Worth The Drive To Winston-Salem
Calling all mad gardeners! If you want to hear some of the pre-eminent authorities on American gardens and see some of the finest examples of the art of growing things, then sign up for the 21st Conference on Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscapes (September 21–23) at Old Salem. Titled “Gardening in the Golden Age: Southern Gardens & Landscapes of the Early 20th Century,” the three-day event includes a roster of speakers who will lecture on topics such as garden photography, soil restoration, garden design and a trolley tour some of the finest local examples of gardens created by the likes of Buckenham & Miller and Thomas W. Sears, among others. Self-guided tours of Reynolda House Museum of American Art, plus the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), are included in the program. Tickets: (800) 441-5305 or oldsalem.org/landscapeconference. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Morris Towns
A mountain woman who dispensed folk remedies and political opinions. A psychic who worked the case of a 19-year-old’s disappearance. A Mennonite man who sought a court-ordered injunction after the church shunned him, leading to his wife’s refusal to sleep with him. These are just a few characters in American Berserk: A Cub Reporter, a Small-Town Daily, the Schizo ’70s (Sunbury Press). It’s recently been published by Bill Morris, author of three novels and a former columnist and reporter for Greensboro’s News & Record, and author of three novels. Morris, who now lives and works in New York City, will read from Berserk at Greensboro’s Scuppernong Books (304 South Elm Street) on Saturday, September 30 at 7 p.m. with music from The Difficulties. The autobiography covers Morris’s days as fledgling writer for the daily newspaper Public Opinion in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, but the story starts and ends in Greensboro, where he worked at the Record Bar in Friendly Center in 1976 — and where he returned to work for newspapers at the News & Record a few years later. — M.J.
Vogue One
Make that “Vogue Three,” as in the third year of Greensboro Fashion Week (September 20–24). Jeansboro Day in LeBauer Park downtown kicks off the events, which will include a national brands showcase, a young designers competition, a show of outerwear courtesy of Kriegsman and Mack & Mack, and the highlight: a celebration of Wrangler’s 70th anniversary as a brand —with a show featuring a recreation of designer Peter Max’s 1970 denim line. All shows will be held at the Elm Street Center (203 South Elm Street). Tickets: greensborofashionweek.com.
Noteflix
To open its season, Greensboro Symphony Orchestra is doing something a little different this year. The first concert of the Tanger Outlets Masterworks Series on September 28 and 30 at the Carolina Theatre (310 South Greene Street) is more than a concert. Sure, Dmitry Sitkovetsky will make the strings on his violin sing. And yes, the program includes Haydn’s Overture Lo speziale, Mozart’s Volin Concerto in G Major, Chopin’s Prelude No. 15 for string orchestra in D flat major and Borodin’s Symphony No. 2. But each of these will be interspersed with video vignettes featuring Greensboro musicians and conductors, civic and business leaders and Gate City native and Page High alum Ken Jeong (of the television show Community and The Hangover movie franchise). The combined vignettes, produced by filmmaker David Donnelly, will tell a story alongside the music, in what GSO is billing as a “Not So Classical World Premiere.” So come on out to the red carpet and pose for the paparazzi — but save your best smiles for the program that awaits. Tickets: (336) 335-5456, ext. 224 or greensborosymphony.org.
Ogi Sez Ogi Overman Most of the September Songs the past two years have been sung at the National Folk Festival, and this year is no exception. Believe me, I am not complaining, but my task is to remind you that there are 27 more days this month and that music will fill the air for most of them. Here are the top picks for kicks.
• September 1, Blind Tiger: The month gets off to a running start with Michael Franti and Spearhead. Mixing social activism with brilliantly crafted world music, he has become the voice for the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, while still making you want to dance. No mean feat. Just feet. • September 9, White Oak
Amphitheatre: Speaking of dancing, break out your best two-toned dogs for Morris Day and The Time. This might be the outdoor party of the summer. No word on whether Jay and Silent Bob will be in attendance.
• September 10, Cone Denim
Entertainment Center: After playing the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 2010, one scribe called Lettuce “the funkiest band on the planet.” And that came after a gig with the best of the best in NOLA, the funk capital of the world.
• September 22, Carolina
Blue Period
And we’re not talking Picasso but good ole American denim made right here in the Gate City. See how the fabric, most of it manufactured at Cone Denim’s White Oak Plant and donated by Wrangler, is used as an artistic medium at 50 Shades of Blue, an exhibition that opened last month and continues through October 13 at the Greensboro Cultural Center (200 North Davie Street). Among the 80 works by 27 artists, you’ll find visual pieces, wearable and decorative art, sculpture and works defying categorization. Wrangler donated the material scraps as a part of its commitment to sustainability. And what better purpose for repurposing than art? Info: (336) 373-2712 or greensboro-nc.gov
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
TOPS ‘N’ BOTTOMS BY ALEXIS LAVINE, IS PART OF THE “50 SHADES OF BLUE” EXHIBIT
Theatre: One of the last members who can rightly claim a direct lineage to the Temptations, Bo Henderson is keeping their magical legacy alive. He sang with the Temps from 1995 to 2001 and his Temptations Revue is the closest you’ll ever get to the real thing.
• September 26, Blind Tiger: I hate to double-dip the BT, but this is too huge to omit. The Chris Robinson Brotherhood might be the finest rock ensemble not playing arenas today. Oh, he’s played in plenty — as cofounder of the Black Crowes. I rest my case. September 2017
O.Henry 23
autumn in
old salem september 5 – october 31, 2o17
Spectacular colors. Harvest-time tastes. Hands-on activities.
Autumn in Old Salem. A season for the senses. October 13–14 mesda fall seminar: good, better, best: collecting for the 21st century October 14 harvest day at old salem Fall foods, hands-on activities, Homowo Heritage Festival (African American food tasting), and more
October 27, 28 legends and lanterns tours October 28, 29 pumpkin carving, trick or treat For a full list of events, classes & concerts, visit oldsalem.org or call 336-721-735o
old salem museums & gardens, winston-salem, north carolina plan your visit to winston-salem and book an autumn in old salem hotel package. Package includes tickets to Old Salem and accommodations at either the Brookstown Inn or the Kimpton Cardinal Hotel. Find out more at oldsalem.org/autumn
Doodad
Dean of the Dobro
N
Alex McKinney is a professional sideman — and more
ext time you see Jerry Douglas in concert, thank him for creating Alex McKinney. Wait, that has misleading connotations; rather, thank him for teaming up with guitarist Russ Barenberg and bassist Edgar Meyer and releasing the landmark album Skip, Hop & Wobble in 1993. That is the album that rocked McKinney’s world and altered the course of his career forever. By the time McKinney was handed that album by a friend, a couple of years after its release, he already had an enviable 10-year track record. As bassist for Atlantic recording artists Athenaeum, generally considered the finest alt-rock band Greensboro has ever produced, McKinney was also a professional-level guitarist and banjoist. But he immediately went out and bought a Dobro, aka resophonic guitar, and began woodshedding. He got to break it out on a tune Athenaeum recorded for a benefit CD, a cover of Randy Travis’s “Forever and Ever, Amen,” but by and large McKinney remained a bassist/guitarist. After Athenaeum broke up in 2004, he did a stint with local legend Patrick Rock, while easing into his new acoustic role with banjo wizard Andy Eversole. He soon became a sideman for N.C. twang legend, Caleb Caudle, before getting the call from revered singer-songwriter Laurelyn Dossett to join her and multi-instrumentalist Scott Manring. “I had actually taken banjo lessons from Scott as a kid,” says McKinney,” so to actually play alongside him onstage was a huge thrill.” These days McKinney gets calls from any number of top-shelf artists needing a top-shelf Dobroist, both as a session man and sideman. As if playing four instruments — and playing them well —weren’t enough, he has also picked up the lap steel and pedal steel, playing them on songstress Carri Smithey’s new CD. He and singer-songwriter Alan Peterson have formed a duo, and he also plays occasional shows with guitar god Sam Frazier and percussionist Eddie Walker, in addition to sitting in with Dossett and Molly McGinn. The gig that has McKinney most excited these days is with Martha Bassett’s new six-piece group. They just finished a CD, set for release in September, and launched the act at a sold-out show at The Crown. Maybe playing with a half-dozen acts simultaneously isn’t enough to keep the boyishly handsome 42-year-old busy; he also works full-time as a web developer and designer at Bluezoom. “When I picked up the Dobro I had all this experience already and knew the language of music,” McKinney notes, adding, “I love putting Dobro in situations and genres where you normally wouldn’t find it.” Given that he’s the most in-demand sideman east of Nashville, that shouldn’t be hard to do.
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Migrating monarch butterflies return to our seaside gardens each fall. Join us for a getaway at the coast; and dine outdoors, surrounded by these graceful & elegant guests. Reservations: 910.256.2251
— Ogi Overman The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
O.Henry 25
Life’s Funny
Scenes from
Married Li
fe
It doesn’t count until someone other than your spouse says it By Maria Johnson
Scene I: When Heads Are Harder than Concrete
Her: What do you think? Him: About what? Her: About that front walkway, where the concrete has settled? It’s a tripping hazard. Him: I think we should call the concrete guy and get an estimate for pouring a new slab. Her: Really? Him: Yes, really. Her: Hmm. Him: What does that mean? Her: It means I think we should get an estimate for a walkway made from pavers. Wouldn’t that be nice? Him: Yeah, nice. And a lot more expensive, I bet. Her: I think it would be nice. Him: What’s wrong with concrete? It’s been concrete for 20 years. Her: I think stone would look better. It’s time for a change. Him: I think concrete is fine. A week later: Her: Sue was here today. I was showing her the walkway, and she said it wouldn’t cost very much to pour a new slab. I think I’ll call the concrete guy and get an estimate. Him: “Are you kidding me? That’s what I said last week, and you said it was time for a change. Her: Did I? Him: Yes, you did. Her: Well, it’s time for another. Scene Two: Just Because the Shoe Fits, You Don’t Have to Wear the Sandals. Him: I really like these new shoes. I walked four miles today, and my plantar fasciitis doesn’t hurt. Her: That’s awesome. Him: This brand makes different styles. I think I’m going to get some more. Her: Cool. Him: (pecking at laptop) Looks like they have sandals, too. I might get some for summer. Look. (Turns screen to her and points to sandals) What do you think of those? Her: Oh, yuck.
26 O.Henry
September 2017
Him: Really? Her: Yes, really. Yuck. Big time. Him: Why? Her: Because negative heel sandals are dorky. Him: Why? Her: They just are. It’s well known. They make you look like you’re walking uphill all the time. It’s exhausting, just watching someone walk in them. Him: Even with shorts? Her: Stop. I beg of you. Him: I’m ordering them. Her: If you wear those sandals, people will know you can do math, and you’ll be besieged. People in restaurants will be asking you to figure their tips without using a calculator. You’re gonna regret this. Him: I don’t care. Her: (Groans) Whatever. College-age son walks into room. Him: “Hey, Tom, what do you think of these?” Son: (Looks at picture, shakes head “no”) Him: Really? Son: (Nods) Him: Yeah, they are kinda clunky, aren’t they? Son: (Nods vigorously). Her: (Jaw drops to floor, much like a Looney Tunes character) Him: I don’t really like them either. Her: (Eyeballs leave her head, on springs) Scene Three: Acting a Little Dippy Him: After golf, we stopped to have a beer at that Mediterranean place, and I ordered pita bread with this dip that the waitress recommended. It was really good. Her: What was it? Him: I can’t remember. Some exotic-sounding name. Her: Hummus? Him: No. I know hummus. Her: Baba ganoush? Him: That’s it. Her: You ate baba ganoush? Him: Yeah, why? Her: I ordered baba ganoush at that same restaurant a few years ago and tried to get you to taste it, and you said, “No way.” Him: I did? Her: Yes! You said, “What is it?” and I said, “Mashed up eggplant with spices,” The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Life’s Funny and you said it looked like dog urp. Him: I did? Her: Yes, you did! Him: Well, it didn’t look like that tonight. Her: What did it look like tonight? Him: Not like that. Her: So I guess they make baba ganoush differently now. Him: I guess so. Her: After hundreds of years, baba ganoush is reinvented in Greensboro in 2017. Him: Must be. Scene Four: Ports Of . . . Call Me Crazy, but Didn’t I Just Say That? Her: I was thinking it might be nice to go on a cruise next year. Him: A cruise? You’ve never wanted to go on a cruise. Her: I know. Him: You’ve always said you’d feel claustrophobic and bored, being on a ship. Her: True. Him: What happened? Her: I was talking to Charles. He and Beth just went on a cruise, and he said it was fantastic. He said they stopped at different ports every day, and you could get off the ship and go exploring all day if you want. Him: I’ve been telling you that for years. Her: Not really. Not the way Charles did. Him: How did Charles say it? Her: I dunno. He made it sound so . . . breezy. Him: Breezy? Her: Yeah, like carefree and interesting. When you talked about it, you said, “Oh, yeah, they let you off the boat so you can walk around.” Him: How’s that different? Her: It’s way different. I mean (slows her voice to crawl), “Let’s gooooo wahhhh-king arrrround the porrrrrrt. Oh, looooook. It’s a connnnntainnnnner shhhhhip,” versus, “Hey! Let’s go explore the island! Maybe we’ll find a new species of butterfly!” Him: Charles said that? He said they went exploring for butterflies? Her: Absolutely. I mean, not in so many words. But that was the feeling he conveyed. Him: Butterfly exploration? Her: Yes. Pretty much. Butterflies instead of container ships. Him: (Stares into space, unblinking) Her: There’s a big difference, honey. Big difference. OH All Hallows’ Eve is right around the corner. Contact Maria Johnson (ohenrymaria@gmail.com) with your most hilarious and true Halloween stories. If we use your story, we’ll send you a frightfully cool O.Henry hat. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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September 2017
O.Henry 27
The Omnivorous Reader
Revolutionary Scars A revealing look at the cost of civil strife
By Stephen E. Smith
They’re called
“uncle books,” popular histories you gift to your Uncle Leo so he can kick back in his easy chair and read about political and military luminaries such as Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton. These lengthy narrative histories, which are generally revisionist in intent and convey idealized portraits of their subjects, have done much to shape our beliefs about the founding of the Republic. What they haven’t done is examine the plight of ordinary Patriots, Loyalists, British and Continental soldiers, African-Americans, Native Americans and German auxiliaries, the brave, long-suffering souls who did most of the fighting and dying during the Revolutionary War.
In Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, Holger Hoock attempts to set the record straight by revealing the brutality of our first civil war, and describing in graphic detail the torments endured by ordinary soldiers and innocent noncombatants on both sides of the Revolution. Hoock writes: “For two centuries this topic has been subject to whitewashing and selective remembering and forgetting. While contemporaries experienced the Revolution as frightening, messy, and divisive, its pervasive violence and terror have since yielded to romanticized notions of the nation’s birth.” Hoock supports this thesis with statistics that suggest there was suffering aplenty. Per capita, 10 times as many Americans died in the Revolutionary
28 O.Henry
September 2017
War as in World War I and five times as many as died in World War II. Among prisoners of war, the death rate was the highest in American history. Between 16,000 to 19,000 Continentals died while confined by the British. And Hoock argues convincingly that Loyalist noncombatants routinely suffered imprisonment and torture at the hands of Patriots. Hoock offers as an example the experience of Edward Huntington, who was convicted of being a traitor to the Patriot cause and was sentenced to spend “the rest of his life sixty to eighty feet underground in a dark, damp, claustrophobic tomb.” Huntington was transported to an infamous copper mine in Simsbury, Connecticut, and was lowered deep into a dismal cavern where he could not stand upright. He shared his incarceration with “violent criminals serving sentences from one year to life for horse thievery, aggravated burglary, highway robbery, sexual assault, and accessory to murder.” The subterranean chambers had no natural light, limited air circulation, constant dampness and employed a communal tub as a toilet, a breeding ground for “fevers, influenza, respiratory problems, dysentery and typhoid.” Patriots employed arson, rape, confiscation and public shaming against their Loyalist neighbors, but tarring and feathering was the preferred punishment. The case of John Malcom, a Boston customs official, is cited as typical. After having hot tar and feathers applied to his naked body, Malcom spent two months in bedridden agony before fleeing to England, where he petitioned Parliament for monetary redress by sending pieces of his skin as proof of his loyalty. When such punishments failed to satisfy Patriot vengeance, many Loyalists were “killed by mobs or at the hands of marauding bands, hanged by order of councils of safety or assemblies of various states, or executed following court-martial.” Hoock gives British atrocities, including Banastre Tarleton’s dishonorable conduct at Waxhaw, passing mention, but his primary focus is on lesser known campaigns, such as Washington’s genocidal response to Iroquois raids in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. Washington’s objective in punishing the Six Nations was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Reader sex as possible.” To that end, the Continental Army destroyed 45 towns and all of the Native Americans’ crops and food stores, plunging the tribes into starvation. Iroquois retaliated by torturing and mutilating Continental soldiers. Patriot Lt. Thomas Hubley recorded the barbarity in his diary that “their heads Cut off, and the flesh of Lt. Boyds head was intirely taken of and his eyes punched out. . . his fingers and Toe nails was bruised of, and the Dog had eat part of the Shoulders away likewise a knife Sticking in Lt. Boyds body.” The fate of African-American combatants is, as one might expect, particularly disturbing. In most cases, slaves were promised their freedom by the government for which they fought, but their treatment was at best exploitive and their well-being of little concern to those who tendered assurances. Many slaves who served the Revolutionary cause found that promises weren’t kept, and the British treated African-American soldiers as disposable laborers, abandoning thousands to die of disease, before transporting the survivors to Nova Scotia, or Jamaica and other West Indian islands. The bitterness occasioned by the Revolution lingered long after Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, and acts of vengeance and retaliation took the form of physical violence and executions. Hoock recounts the 1782 hanging of Joshua Huddy, commander of a New Jersey Patriot militia, and the Patriots’ retaliation — known as the “The Asgill Affair” — in which Gen. Washington ordered that a British officer, Capt.Charles Asgill, be executed. Eventually, Asgill was released, but a generation of brutal warfare had habituated Americans to a thirst for revenge that no treaty could assuage. Although Scars of Independence isn’t a pleasant read, it makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Revolution, and it’s another reminder that brutality is the norm in war, especially in civil wars. The question for readers is this: Are we obligated to acknowledge the abominations committed by our forefathers? As Maxim Gorky, a man who knew something of the horrors occasioned by civil strife, wrote: “I have no desire to make anyone miserable, but one must not be sentimental, nor hide the grim truth with the motley words of beautiful lies. Let us face life as it is. All that is good and human in our hearts needs renewing.” OH Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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September 2017
O.Henry 29
Piedmont Opera HanesBrands Inc.present present thePulitzer Pulitzer Prize-winning production Piedmont Piedmont Opera Opera &&HanesBrands & HanesBrands Inc. Inc. present the the Pulitzer Prize-winning Prize-winning production production
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Scuppernong Bookshelf
Tick-ing Time Bomb September’s new reads includes an environmental dystopia by Greensboro’s Holly Goddard Jones
By Brian L ampkin
September is a great month for new
books, and especially so this year in Greensboro. Novelist Holly Goddard Jones is a Greensboro resident (on the faculty at UNCG) and her third work of fiction, The Salt Line (Putnam’s, $26), is set to release on September 5. The novel reveals a nightmarish future in which the divide between the classes has become physical, and the authoritarian rule of the new powers is driven by an environmental fear.
The “salt line” demarcates the place where people are no longer safe from this very familiar and now deadly nemesis: the tick. Jones invents something called “Shreve’s disease,” which the miner tick transmits after the female “drills into your skin” with its “corkscrew shaped horn” and releases pinprick sized eggs that eventually erupt from your skin by the hundreds. But that’s not the bad part: Within 48 hours of infestation “blurry vision, nausea and loss of feeling in the limbs” will lead to total paralysis and death. Furthermore, this all plays out in the country between Greensboro and the Tennessee border—a land responsible for dozens of my own tick encounters. It’s all too familiar. And it’s all convincing as political parable, as well as a frightening encounter with the natural world. Jones’s work has always been astute about class and gender/power dynamics (her previous novel The Next Time You See Me and story collection Girl Trouble are both set in rural Kentucky and bring nuance and character to the same terrain that the much-overpraised Hillbilly Elegy sensationalizes and in many ways this novel is similar to Don DeLillo’s latest book, Zero K. Both are set among dystopian environments that arise from openly classist policies but Holly Goddard Jones’s novel has more heart. You’ll care for these characters — even for the more despicable ones — and that care makes for a powerful reading experience, even as you realize you’re The Art & Soul of Greensboro
reading a possible future that looks mighty bleak.
Other September Releases:
Believe Me: My Battle with the Invisible Disability of Lyme Disease, by Yolanda Hadid (St. Martin’s Press, $26.99). In early 2011, Yolanda was struck by mysterious symptoms including brain fog, severe exhaustion, migraines and more. After much misdiagnosis, Lyme Disease was revealed to be the culprit. The dystopian future might be closer than we think! Love and Other Consolation Prizes, by Jamie Ford (Ballantine, $28) “Only Jamie Ford could take a snippet of a true story about a child offered as a raffle prize at the 1909 Seattle World’s Fair and spin it into a dazzling tale of love and family and ultimately hope,” says writer Ann Hood. By the author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. How to Fight, by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press, $9.95). The latest in an elegant series of books by the Zen master. Learn how to relax the bonds of anger, attachment, and delusion through mindfulness and kindness toward ourselves and others. The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home, by Denise Kiernan (Touchstone, $28). The story of Asheville’s Biltmore spans World Wars, the Jazz Age, the Depression and generations of the famous Vanderbilt family, and features a captivating cast of real-life characters including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Teddy Roosevelt, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, Henry James and Edith Wharton. The Last Castle is the unique American story of how the largest house in America has flourished, faltered and ultimately endured to this day. Complete Stories, by Kurt Vonnegut (Seven Stories Press, $45). Here for the first time is the complete short fiction of one of the 20th century’s most popular writers. Curated and introduced by longtime Vonnegut friend Dan Wakefield and Vonnegut scholar Jerome Klinkowitz, the Complete Stories puts Vonnegut’s great wit, humor and humanity on full display. OH Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books. September 2017
O.Henry 31
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Willows Pop Up Boutique will be open:
A pop-up boutique featuring new and gently-used name brands at Goodwill prices! WillowsByGoodwill.com Facebook.com/WillowsByGoodwill
32 O.Henry
September 2017
Friday, October 13 Friday, November 3 Friday, December 1 6:00pm - 9:00pm
At the Elm Street Center (203 S. Elm Street)
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Papadaddy’s Mindfield
A Jarring Truth Grandma knows best
By Clyde Edgerton
A dad is at home,
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY BLAIR
talking on his smartphone with his 13-year-old son, Grayson, who is across the state at Grandma’s for a week. This is Grayson’s second day.
“How’s it going?” asks Dad. “Fine. Grandma is, ah, putting zucchinis in jars. She’s been at it all day.” “You mean cucumbers. She’s making pickles. She does that every year. She’s ‘canning.’” “No, Dad. It’s jars. Not cans.” “You use jars for canning,” says Dad. “Then why don’t they call it ‘jarring’?” “Don’t know. Hadn’t thought about that. Have y’all been in the garden?” “She has.” “How about you?” “I’ve been inside. It’s hot out there.” “OK. But — “ “I told her I could look up some YouTube videos on gardening. She talked about her garden all morning. Her tomatoes and stuff.” “It’s very important to her.” “I found some videos on how to grow tomatoes and stuff, but she — ” “Son, she’s been growing tomatoes for over 50 years.” “Yeah, but like she’s never seen any YouTube videos on growing them. She didn’t even know what YouTube was, Dad.” “I don’t think — ” “I found a bunch of videos but she didn’t —” “You should have gone out and helped her pick those cucumbers, Son. You should be helping her. Have you done anything this morning except stare into that phone?” “Dad, I can learn everything she knows about growing tomatoes in about 15 minutes — with like, say, three five-minute videos. I found one that shows — ” “Put up your phone and go help your grandma.” “Da-ad.”
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
“Do it. And call me back in one hour, or you lose your phone for a half-day when you get back home.” “A half-day!? “ “That’s right.” “OK.” One hour, four minutes later: “OK, Dad, I helped her. You won’t believe it. I’m so glad Mother buys pickles already made.” “Why?” “For one thing, you have to have all this equipment — these tongs and jars and funnels. And before you get going, the cucumbers have to sit in this water that has all this vinegar and stuff in it for like 12 hours before you even do anything, and then she has to boil all this water and do all this crazy stuff with steaming rags and a hot stove, and then she has to wait another 24 hours for the cucumbers to sit there in jars full of hot water that cools off and while it’s cooling the jars pop which means they sealed. So the jars like sit for one day and one night. All that for some pickles that she could buy at the
grocery store.” “Let me speak to her.” “OK.” Grandma speaks. “Hello, Son.” “Mom? How’s it going? Making some pickles, huh?” “That’s right.” “I’m sorry you didn’t get much help from Grayson.” “Hang on one second. I’m going to step out onto the back porch here . . . OK, he can’t hear me now. I’m going to be helping out Grayson after he goes to sleep tonight.” “How’s that?” “When he wakes up in the morning that tiny TV of his will be in the middle of a jar of cucumbers: all boiled, pickled, sealed and out of sight.” OH Clyde Edgerton is the author of 10 novels, a memoir and most recently, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW. September 2017
O.Henry 33
campus sports
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VillageAtBrookwood.org 34 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
True South
Sleepyhead Everyone needs a good nap
By Susan Kelly
“Do you need a nap?” is the
preferred question these days, replacing the more candid, more insulting, “You’re a crab and a grump.” Scram. I’m also occasionally asked, “Are you hungry?” which falls in the same crab/grump category, but I’m partial to the former because it implies that naps have become a socially acceptable and beneficial time-out rather than slacker behavior. Still, there are naps, and there are naps. You either take an intentional nap, or an accidental one. Intentional naps are luxury lulls: planned, often announced, and occurring generally during weekends and vacations or after what Gen Y calls a Big Night. For an intentional nap, you deliberately darken a room, lie down on a bed or hammock or sofa or beach chair, and put on a sleep mask, or the book or hat or towel over your eyes, assume a curled-up or stretched-out or otherwise comfy posture and proceed to fall asleep. A baby pillow is a fine accoutrement of the intentional nap; so is a white noise machine or app. These are the kinds of naps I’d take when I had small children, left them with a babysitter, drove the one mile to my mother’s house, retreated to the empty-nest bedrooms upstairs, and dove into dreamland. Maybe it’s genetic: My father came home every day at lunchtime to “take a lay-down.” Mid-afternoon, my Walnut Cove grandmother pulled down her bedroom window shades (with those marvelous ringed pulls on a string), adjusted the window units, put on a robe, of which she had about six, and retired for a nap. The kind of nap Harper Lee wrote about in the first chapter of To Kill A Mockingbird: “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
talcum.” (“Bathe”: such a lovely, archaic Southern verb.) Today, the term for an intentional nap is Power Nap, but I distrust the concept. “Power” and “nap” don’t belong in the same sentence, much less the same phrase. Napping is about giving yourself over to helplessness. And then there’s the accidental nap. Which also takes place in a hammock or beach chair or on a sofa or porch rocker — and frequently, a desk. The accidental nap has no accoutrements other than embarrassing, physical ones upon waking: the drool pool, the mouth gape, the sweaty and sunburned, the smoking-gun stigma — diamonds from the rope hammock or indentations from a candlewick bedspread like a branding on your blushing, caught-out right cheeks. Then the sudden, momentary, awkward confusion of “Where am I?” and the furtive glance to see if anyone caught you, well, napping. With practice, you can even nap on a treadmill. While walking on it, I mean. Bringing our 10-year-old daughter home from camp, my husband pulled the car to the side of the road and told her he needed to take a nap. She’d waited four weeks to get home and was not only crazed to see her friends, but horrified at his behavior. “Dad!” she said. “Dads do not do that! What am I supposed to do? You just don’t pull over on the side of the road and take a nap!” Well, yes, you do. Because the characteristic of a nap, whether intentional or accidental, is that it is — at least at that moment — absolutely vital. Be it an intentional knockout or a rainy-day doze, everyone needs a nap now and then. Even my middle son, who, when he was 2, believed himself beyond naps. So I fastened a metal hook and eye to his bedroom door so that he would understand that it was his naptime. As well as mine. At some point, naps transition from delayed fun to a goal. What happier objective can there be than this statement, uttered by a friend over his morning cereal every day of vacation? “I can’t wait for my nap today.” OH Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud new grandmother. September 2017
O.Henry 35
The Pleasures of Life Dept.
Farewell to Folk
Ten must-see acts for the final installment of The National Folk Festival
Strictly Strings
It’s just folks out there.
But there’s nothing ordinary or about this gathering of them. Called “the Noah’s ark of living traditions” by ArtsGreensboro’s President & CEO Tom Philion, The National Folk Festival, Greensboro’s best-ever street party, returns for its final, three-day run this year September 8–10 (nationalfolkfestival.com). And as the word spreads, people are discovering new meaning of “folk,” an allinclusive term for a plethora of styles and genres, from a lot of artists and acts you may not have known existed until they came to visit. What makes it even better is that it’s free, and better than that, unlike most big festivals, the performers here are on stage multiple times. It’s a daunting task to pick favorites, even with a program and a plan.
36 O.Henry
September 2017
Just wandering the streets and listening till something snags your ear and pulls you in works pretty well, but if you’re more of the organized persuasion, or strapped for time, here are some tidbits to get started.
Alash, practitioners of Tuvan throat singing, is a heckuva warmup for festivalgoers. This vocal technique from Tuva, a remote region in Siberia, simultaneously produces a rumbling bass and an eerie falsetto, whistling overtone. Bluesman Paul Pena, composer of Steve Miller’s “Big Old Jet Airliner,” helped popularize the technique in this country with the 1999 documentary Genghis Blues, (youtube.com/watch?v=OO2QgNdqvXg), chronicling his fascination and mastery of the technique by listening to shortwave radio from Moscow, then finding a rare recording. The blind musician also taught himself Tuvan. You’ll be wanting to try this at home, to the great consternation of your family, neighbors and most assuredly your dog, who’ll undoubtedly take up refuge underneath the bed. For a more soothing message, become part of the congregation gathered around The Fairfield Four. The Memphis a capella gospel group has a hundredyear history of glorious, jubilee-style harmony. “Whether it be gospel or jazz, I think it all started out with the old traditional hymns,” says tenor Bobbye Sherrell. “People in the plantation or the fields started a lot of the call and reThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
PHOTOGRPAPH BY MARTIN CHURCH
By Grant Britt
The Pleausres of Life Dept.
sponse type of music and songs we have today. The roots of it always came back to the beginning, which I thought was spiritual.” If you’re a fan of space travel, check out the Sun Ra Arkestra. Free jazz is the label that marketers Alash have tried to attach to it, but that doesn’t even get close to how far out this stuff is. Founder/leader Sun Ra believed he was from Saturn and was just visiting here. “That’s what he said, and that’s the way he acted, like he was from somewhere else,” bandleader/saxophonist Marshal Allen said in a 2008 interview. “He always had these bright ideas, and we respected his word, ’cause he would foresee things and tell you.” The music is atonal at times, but ethereal. Immerse yourself in it for few minutes and you can feel the Earth’s gravitational pull lessening while you drift upward toward the Sun. Space is the place, Ra said, and this music will get you there. Sri Lankan Dance Academy of New York is otherworldly as well. An explosion of sound, color and motion, the dancers, ranging in ages from 17 to 27, deliver a Cirque du Soleil–style presentation that showcases Kandyan dance, from Sri Lanka. The large Sri Lankan population of Staten Island led to the formation of a dance school there in 1992. The steps and movements were only performed in Buddhist temples until 1944, when the first Kandyan school of dance was founded. The stunning costumes and vibrant, sternum-rattling drum propulsion draws you in and amps you up, tickling places you won’t usually mention in mixed company. If you pass them in the street, you’ll want to pay them the ultimate compliment: “You guys sound so good I wish I were dead.” The Treme Brass Band doesn’t play too many funerals anymore, but you can hear them every Tuesday night at New Orleans’ live-music club, d.b.a., cranking up some stuff from the graveyard days but mostly brash, brassy fare fit for marching and strutting round the barroom floor. You can also find the band in the streets during Carnival season, and leading the second line for Satchmo SummerFest. Founder Benny Jones still wields the bass drum mallet and occasionally sits in on snare, while the band blasts out thumpers like “I Got A Big Fat Woman” and “Food Stamp Blues.” “Conjunto is original music from San Antonio that combines the accordion and the bajatesta, which is a 12-string guitar,” says Flaco Jimenéz of Los Texmaniacs. “It was introduced and created by my father, Santiago Jimenez Sr., in 1936.” European musicians brought that sound to Brownsville, about 15 miles from San Antonio. Flaco and the other TexManiacs threw in a change-up, modernizing the sound. “We added country, or country rock, or even rock ’n’ roll, things that include the accordion, which is a versatile instrument for this type of music, the lead instrument,” Texmaniacs’ founder Max Baca explains. His nephew Josh Baca’s accordion prowess pulls people’s feet right out from under them, propelling them in directions they never dreamed of, but Max’s 12-stringed thrumming on the bajo sexto hits you right in the heart. Cajun Bruce Daigrepont keeps it simply traditional. No rock ’n’ roll, no blues, The Fairfield Four just strictly Cajun. But that’s The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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8/11/17 37 12:01 PM O.Henry
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Two days of learning, networking and industry collaboration for manufacturing professionals. ncmep.org/mfgcon
38 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Pleausres of Life Dept. Sri Lankan Dance Academy of New York
enough to keep feet and sweat flyin’ when he punches out rollicking rhythms from his Cajun stronghold birthplace, Avovelles Parish, on his squeezebox. With just a drum kit, fiddle and bassist, and maybe a rubboard or triangle, Daigrepont keep the heat turned up as hot as a Louisiana summer. Brice Chapman doesn’t play an instrument or sing or dance. What he does do is literally rope you in with a lasso. But Chapman doesn’t just stand around flat-footed and twirl pretty curlicues. He’s got help from Sooner, a red Border Colllie, who also leads Chapman’s horse Crossfire onto the showgrounds with his halter in his teeth. Crossfire is an acrobat helper as well, standing at attention while Chapman stands on his back doing some fancy rope twirling. Chapman has upgraded his act over the years, which now includes daughter Grace’s rope tricks as well as some serious behemoths, two massive Percheron draft horses who parade around, hauling a vintage 1920s wagon. Lurrie Bell spent his formative years in church, but when he crossed over, he rode hard on the devil’s coattails. Although battles with substance abuse sidetracked Bell for almost a decade, when he got back to serious business in the late ’90s, he was stronger than ever, playing with the staggering intensity of Son Seals. His 2004 release, Second Nature, an acoustic duet with his dad harpist Carey, was nominated for a WC Handy Award Acoustic Record of the Year. It’s an astounding record, Lurrie’s crisp, clean fingerpicking underscoring Carey’s crisp interpretations of blues classics like “Key To the Highway” and “Rock Me.” Bell’s immaculate acoustic fingerpicking is also the perfect counterpoint to his crusty world-weary vocal. Expect a mix of secular and blues that’ll have you on your knees repenting one minute and on your feet dancing like the devil the next. Listen, enjoy, and partake, but be careful and stay hydrated. It’s hot out there, and these folks don’t have any intention of cooling things down. OH Grant Britt will enlist the services of the Treme Brass Band, should he overexert himself dancing like the devil at this year’s National Folk Festival. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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O.Henry 39
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40 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
A Writer’s Life
The Next Frontier
Listening for voices of characters I have not yet created
By Wiley Cash
Jill McCorkle, my friend and fellow
ILLUSTRATION BY ROMEY PETITE
writer, has said on more than one occasion that she knows it is time to let go of one novel when the next one reveals itself. I imagine this is like swinging through the jungle on vines: It’s not wise to let go of one vine until you’re certain that another is in reach. I feel the same way; even if my eyes are closed as I reach for the vine, I’m certain it’s there, waiting for me if I’m brave enough to grasp it and keep swinging along.
But I cannot help but pause and hover in mid-air. I need to give my hands a rest before they grasp another project, before my body can agree to be carried through the jungle of novel-writing with only the most tenuous connections to the trees above me to keep me from tumbling to the forest floor. For me, writing a novel is hard, and it takes a long time, and over the course of writing three novels I have adjusted my approach to letting one go before taking up another. I began writing my first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, which is about the fallout in the community after a young boy is smothered during a healing service in the mountains of North Carolina, in the spring of 2004, and I thought I had finished it in the fall of 2008 when a New York agent agreed to represent it, but I was wrong. Although she and I worked on revisions of the novel over the next year and a half, she was never able to sell it to a publisher, and we ended up parting ways in early 2010. I had a failed novel on my hands, and I had lost an agent. The chance to publish had slipped through my fingers. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Although I felt defeated, I had already begun thinking about writing a second novel, although I had no idea how to begin. I had lived with the story of my first novel for five years, and I knew the characters intimately — their history, landscape and emotional terrain — and I could not imagine forgoing these people for a new cast of individuals that would be born in my mind and live on my screen for some indeterminate time. Slowly, characters for a new novel and the circumstances that would animate them began to come to me: two young sisters in foster care; a wayward father who is also a washed-up baseball player; stolen money; a bounty hunter with a years’ old vendetta. Although the characters and plot were revealing themselves, I was hesitant to put pen to paper until I knew for certain that my first novel had failed. I’m glad I waited. In the spring of 2010 I began working with a new agent. Over the course of the next few months, he and I worked on revisions of A Land More Kind Than Home. In late October, he called me and told me that the book was ready to go out to editors in the hope one of them would want to publish it. He asked if I had another novel in mind. He wanted us to go for a two-book deal. I told him the story of a washed-up minor league baseball player who kidnaps his two daughters from a foster home and goes on the run with a bag of stolen money. I had not written a word of the novel yet, but I had lived with it for the better part of a year. My agent sold the manuscript of A Land More Kind Than Home, as well as a synopsis of what would become This Dark Road to Mercy, to the first editor who read it. I suddenly found myself with a two-book deal. Over the next few months, my new editor and I went back to A Land More Kind Than Home, and I wrote a new draft of the novel, and I also spent a lot of time on pre-publication tasks: writing essays that would appear online and in magazines; giving interviews; attending trade shows; and traveling to New York to meet the publishing team. Although the synopsis of This Dark Road to Mercy sold in late 2010, I did not write a word of the novel until the summer of 2011. September 2017
O.Henry 41
A Writer’s Life treating every patient
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42 O.Henry
September 2017
I was very fortunate to be accepted to artists’ retreats at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and, later that summer, at MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The first time I sat down to write at Yaddo in June 2011, I wrote the entire first chapter of This Dark Road to Mercy. It literally poured itself onto the page because I had been living with it in my mind for so long. By the end of the summer I almost had a complete draft. My first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, was published in April 2012, and I submitted the final manuscript of This Dark Road to Mercy to my editor a year later. One day, he and I were on the phone talking about the novel and the ways in which it would be promoted and sold. He said, “I know you just turned in the manuscript, but I’m wondering if you’ve got any ideas about a new novel.” I did. For a few years I’d been considering writing about the Loray Mill and the violent textile strike that engulfed my hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina, in the summer of 1929. I told my editor that, in secret, I had begun working on a novel based on the life and tragic murder of Ella May Wiggins, a young single mother who joined the union only to be killed after becoming the face of the strike. He said the story sounded interesting. We got off the phone, and I did not think anything more about our conversation until later that afternoon, when my agent called. My editor had just offered us another two-book deal. For the past five years I have been clinging to the vine that is now titled The Last Ballad, living in a 1929 world of cotton mill shacks, country clubs, segregated railroad cars, and labor organizers with communist sympathies. Everything I know about the craft of writing and the history, culture and politics of America, especially the American South, has gone into this novel. I literally feel as if I have been wrung dry, and I cannot imagine writing another book, even though I know I will sooner than later. But even in this state of exhaustion, there is a story percolating in my brain where the voices of characters I have not yet created are speaking in whispers. I feel the hot breath of a novel on my neck even as I sit here. There is a vine somewhere out there in the jungle, if only I’ll reach out, open my hand, and grasp it. It’s not going anywhere. I’m not either. OH Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington with his wife and their two daughters. His forthcoming novel The Last Ballad is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Another Step in the Right Direction
(front row – left to right)
Christopher T. Barbee, CFP® Vice President/Investments
Jacqueline T. Wieland, AIF® First Vice President/Investments
J. Scott, CFP®
Senior Vice President/Investments (middle row – left to right)
Paul A. Vidovich
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Gregory E. Gonzales, AIF®
Senior Vice President/Investments
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Senior Vice President/Investments Portfolio Manager – Solutions Program
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September 2017
O.Henry 43
Country Sausage
Sausage Dip
Sausage Pinwheels
1 lb. Hot Neese’s Sausage 2 cups all purpose flour 1 Tbsp. baking powder 1 tsp. salt
1 lb. Neese Sausage (hot or mild) 1 pkg. (8 oz.) cream cheese 1 can Ro-tel Tomatoes and Chilies
1/4 cup shortening 2/3 cup milk grated cheese (optional)
DireCtionS: Combine flour, baking powder and salt. Cut in shortening and add milk. Turn dough out onto floured surface. Roll dough into 18″ x 12″ rectangle. Spread uncooked sausage over dough. Spread grated cheese on top of sausage. Roll dough into jelly-roll fashion starting with the longest side. Cover and refrigerate one hour. Slice dough into 1/4 inch slices. Back at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Makes 3 1/2 dozen.
DireCtionS: Brown sausage, drain and crumble. Add cream cheese and Ro-tel. Heat and stir until cream cheese has melted and all ingredients are mixed well. Serve with tortilla chips.
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44 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Gate City Icons
Where Everyone Knows Your Name
For Generations, Irving Park’s beloved Brown-Gardener Drugs has anchored a community and served up more than a great grilled cheese sandwich
Story & Photographs by Sam Froelich
I hear my name three times before I
can find a stool at the question mark — shaped counter. It makes me feel like Norm from Cheers, minus the potbelly and hollow leg. Sara knows my order already but is polite enough to ask anyway. “Three eggs with cheese, bacon and a grilled biscuit?” That reminds me, I need to refill my cholesterol medicine. Luckily, my pharmacist is only 60 feet away.
Knowing the patrons by name, and often by what they’ll order, is more the rule than the exception at Brown-Gardiner, Irving Park’s almost 50-yearold neighborhood restaurant/drugstore that Bill Brown and Paul Gardiner started after moving down Elm Street from a smaller pharmacy across from Cone Hospital. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
It’s the kind of place where 10 or 12 of Gavin Ray’s extended family happily crowd around a table for eight every single Saturday at noon. Where Wanda once served your toddler son grilled cheese and now her daughter Sam makes him an orange-ade when he’s home from college. Where there’s a poster board in the corner displaying a smattering of customer’s old Christmas cards under the headline “Where Are They Now?” At the counter, you can often find Kay Chesnutt sitting beside her son Xan Tisdale and his two young children, Finn and Reece. Three generations on four stools is a wonderfully common sight here. It’s also a place where you can go in alone for lunch when you’re feeling down and leave with your spirits buoyed after impromptu conversations with Ellen Worth about the city swim meets, and with Howard Arbuckle about little-known Davidson baseball history. Brown-Gardiner is woven into the fabric of Irving Park and each supports the other. Indeed, a crisp white paper bag sitting on your doorstep containing your prescriptions can make you smile much more than any 24-hour drive-thru ever could. When an Eckerd’s drugstore opened directly across the street a decade or so ago, many outside observers predicted Brown-Gardiner’s demise. However, the neighborhood responded and sales went up. Within six years it September 2017
O.Henry 45
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46 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
was the Eckerd’s that closed its doors. The beauty and importance of a Brown-Gardiner, or say a Smith Street Diner, a Bernie’s BBQ, or any of the many cherished gathering places in neighborhoods across Greensboro comes from a mixture of time and place that isn’t evident with a quick glance. These are the places that for decades have endured the encroachment of cookie-cutter chain stores with their hollow, corporate-mandated “Welcome To . . .”s and their walls covered in “nostalgic” signs that are pre-distressed in a Chinese factory. The kind of places that value serving a sturdy, well-made meal over chasing every artisanal, free-range, gluten-free trend, and where conversation often precedes ordering and can sometimes be just as important as the food. By virtue of their permanence in one location for long periods of time, they foster the connections between friends and families, and through and across generations, which strengthen neighborhoods and ultimately lead to a better city. Such places as Brown-Gardiner aren’t ones that rely on the amount of stars in a Yelp review or golden skillets in some newspaper column for their longevity. A word-of-mouth recommendation holds more sway here. Like that given 20 years ago to a young father new to Greensboro and in need of a Saturday breakfast spot to take his son and grant his exhausted wife just one morning of uninterrupted sleep. Two decades and two more children later and I’ve always been welcomed back with a smile. Whether it’s by Nancy or Holt or Hilaire, who rings your order up at the same counter where she was once weighed on a vegetable scale as an infant. Nowhere else were countless lunches only eaten completely due to promises of trips to the candy aisle. Whether those lunches were prepared then by Imogene “Nanny” Sells and now by her granddaughter Kendra. And, of course, where else would I, Andy and Mary, and so many others have gotten a small glacier’s worth of the “good” ice over the years? While the ice may be resplendent, it is the people, past and present; in the kitchen or at the counter; serving food or dispensing prescriptions; that are truly special and they make Brown-Gardiner one of Greensboro’s neighborhood icons. OH Sam Froelich is from High Point, lives in Greensboro, and occasionally drinks in Winston. He should have bought his own ice machine years ago. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
O.Henry 47
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48 O.Henry
September 2017
7/25/2017 11:05:04 AM
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Evolving Species
Tale of a Lazy Tongue Or, how a Southern wine lover blindly found her proper place at a glamorous Napa wine event
By Cynthia Adams
As California was
flogged by epic February rains and winds, I headed straight into the storm, determined to join some of the wine industry’s finest at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley. My first stop was in Lodi, home of zinfandels. Wine expert Stephanie Bolton was suffering with flu, too ill to meet me as planned, to reveal her insider’s view of my favorite wine.
Stephanie is a home girl, Carolina-raised. She and I had clinked many a glass together while she earned her Ph.D. in research at the University of Georgia. She cheered me on as I dreamed of writing about vineyards, bud break, harvests under full moons, barrel samples and the romantic world of the grape. This symposium was to be a launching pad into this dream. But I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. What did I really learn? I’ve learned that even though I have never written a bestseller like Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, I am the Fannie Flagg of wine writing: meaning, Southern and overly polite. And although as a writer I’ve been told I have a distinct and winning voice, I’ve discovered in California that I lack a tongue. How Southern am I? Swishing and spitting used to draw the ire of my parents and got my sassy self sent directly to my room without supper. Spitting, according to my Carolina Mama, was the equivalent of biting the person seated beside you. Now, I wince whenever I must spit out perfectly good wine, and dread letting even an understanding fellow Southerner see me do it. And that was just my first obstacle. Turns out, I have an olfactory disability. My brother was born with a lazy eye, and had surgery when he was a lad of 5. But I’ve apparently inherited an infuriatingly lazy sense of taste. There is no surgery that can help me. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
You see, before this humiliating realization, I wasn’t going for Fannie Flagg. Nooo. I wanted to be the M. F. K. Fisher of fine wine and food. I envisioned prose about molten rubies in the glass, or waxing poetic at the first sight of shapely “legs” streaming down the inner contours of a delicate Riedel glass. Well, no. We were privy to some of the finest wines, ones that had never left the estate libraries until the symposium. Turns out, the only thing I could correctly capture were my streaming sinuses with a wad of tissues. I am also asthmatic and allergic (thanks to an early spring, my sinuses were deeply offended) missing most of the “notes” my comrades were rhapsodically describing whenever they pushed their noses deep inside a glass. The symposium fellows had segued from lecture to lecture, morning until evening, with most of the slated events featuring wines that we were to study. One lecturer had even written the frigging bible of wine. (Swear to God, Karen MacNeil was there with an updated, second edition of her Wine Bible.) By day three, I was slurping, chewing and spitting at Greystone, the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, revered mecca of food and wine knowledge, in a lecture hall where Julia Child had once held forth. My teeth grew black with red wine stain. Lesson No. 1: Even if you spit, after sampling 50-plus wines, you get slightly drunk. And start channeling more Flagg than Fisher. But that wasn’t the worst of it: My smart-aleck mouth harbors stubbornas-hell taste buds. After about six wines had been swished and swirled, my tongue was deadening, like a hunting dog that cannot, will not, get the scent. With an array of Napa’s finest juice in front of me, I became even more challenged. My mouth was almost immediately addled, overtaxed, overcome; the oral equivalent of hysterical blindness. First my tongue went numb along the sides, then the undersides. The deadening spread as I powered on with my classmates, continuing along the top, creeping across the entire roof of my mouth. I feared drooling, which would make my humiliation complete, and checked my reflection in an empty glass, hoping none of the luminaries in the class notice me swabbing my nose, eyes and even (so help me) my tongue. My sinuses swelled and closed, with my nose giving off little porcine snorts as I approached the glass. So I gave my tongue a pep talk: Yes, you can! Yes, you can! September 2017
O.Henry 49
The Evolving Species
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50 O.Henry
September 2017
Meanwhile, my colleagues were detecting all sorts of notes: pine, chocolate, cherries and huckleberries. Seated beside Richard Bradley, editor of Worth, I shouted out that I was getting “notes of leather” from a 1974 Charles Krug cab. He swiveled and gave me an incredulous look. I dabbed at my blocked nose and sank deeper into my seat. Next up, a 1975 Beaulieu Vineyard Private Reserve, which elicited coos of praise and claims of different smells, but none quite as creative as leather. By day four, I contemplated the final challenge: an auspicious blind tasting held in St. Helena for Premier Napa, where we were dispatched to taste Hall Wines. Conveniently, they provided, right next to our tasting glasses, containers of complimentary toothbrushes for our wine-blackened teeth. So I grabbed one of each. Initial hiccup: I could not figure how one approaches so many stellar wines. Was I to guess at every single one of them? I was at a racetrack without a program. A wine jockey without a saddle. And there before me were 81 vital, athletic, utterly staggering thoroughbreds. The tables were set with three vintages of 13 red wines, and 14 white wines, waiting to be swirled and spat, with experts circling around the tables, squinting in earnest concentration, notepads out. The room was intense, the mood all business — and I stumbled out of the gate, desperately hoping my palate would spring into action. My lazy, lazy taste buds, I reproached. Wake the hell up! It was now 10 a.m. As my Southern grandmother, Mama Patty, maker of scuppernong wines that would curl the teeth of a grown man would have reproached, “And there you are, Cynthia Anne, drinking in broad daylight!” Now, I had learned that some people are morning tasters. (Forgive me, those of you whom I previously assumed were hopeless alcoholics.) My tongue, when it could be lashed into service, was only working third shift. Coming off a Meadowood dinner the prior night, one featuring wines that were premier, cult-status fine, my tongue had signaled further trouble. It began to loll around, declaring that it had no further work to do. (Wine God Kevin Zraly of Windows on the World fame had warned us that taste buds are extreme slackers by age 32. Thereafter, they either work part time or die. Mine had left the building.) By now, Hall was crawling with millionaire oenophiles who had arrived in Teslas (car of choice after Ferraris), padding around in Zegna togs and Tod’s loafers. These cats looked casual but they were most certainly not. And, they were carrying white paper spit cups. Where I was born, spit cups are for chewing tobacco, not priceless wines. There were spit buckets at the tables, but with so many wines to be tested, they threatened overflowThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Evolving Species
ing. There is an unspoken etiquette to spit bucket use. “Do not spray,” a friend hissed. “You’ll get yelled at. I know, because I did.” With buckets filled, we used white cups after we chewed and swished. The place swarmed with growers, winemakers and vineyard owners, who knew what they were about and set to doing it. Then there was me, openmouthed, feeling very much like Lucille Ball at the candy factory. These were unimaginably promising wines. I grabbed a spit cup. I wanted to taste them all! When I saw my pal Irene Moore looking rapturously into a glass, I did my best imitation: I, too, narrowed my eyes, addressed the wine, swirled it with my hand cupping the top of the glass, and tasted. I chewed and swished and allowed the wine to roll to the back of my tongue. The first sensation was an ecstasy of flavor. So good I didn’t want to spit. But spit I did, then drank some water, and soldiered on to another. The next taste exploded in my mouth, the finish strong and the wine young and wrestling to the top of my palate. I closed my eyes, smiling. Then I advanced to the third. It was another rapturous red; if it met its promise, it was going to be a Stradivarius of wines. As I squinted and puckered, waiting for my tongue to curl like a Persian carpet, it began. Before I could spit, my damned tongue began withering. My sinuses swelled and my wastrel taste buds were atrophying. I could now taste little and smell less. Gasping, I spat, ran to the bathroom to gargle and swab the telltale stains from my teeth. I stared at my tongue in the mirror. It was probably going to leave me altogether, buds and all, and move to another ZIP code. Run off with Little Debbie, or maybe, Mrs. Smith. It didn’t care — it had no standards. Returning to the fray, I tried to resume. But, the tongue was done. Hell, it wasn’t even mine anymore. Perhaps I swallowed a chunk of it; I scarcely recall. The takeaway from Premier Napa? My problems may be rooted in my Southerness, and I can overcome the spitting thing. But think of the biological imperative. Can a tongue be tamed? Maybe our biology is our destiny. Rethink cellaring those special bottles if you are over, say, age 33. Some of us have tongues that will not be overruled. They’re like doomed wines: underachievers, stalled, peaking too young. Some people, some unlucky ones, are not morning tasters. Our mouths prefer wines at dusk, in the cover of darkness, with our histamines and convention in check. And yet, I fight. If I can keep my incorrigible tongue from sliding out the corners of my mouth, decamping for less challenging opportunities, I’m opening a 2005 Rubicon tonight. OH Cindy Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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September 2017
O.Henry 51
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52 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
In the Spirit
Bar Staples Don’t come home without ’em
By Tony Cross
PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CROSS
This Month,
I couldn’t resist sharing what I keep in my personal liquor cabinet — my home bar staples. I may be biased, but I’d say it’s pretty gratifying when you get that quiet nod of approval from your guests when they inspect your liquor cabinet. Now, for those of you who are lacking in liquor, I assure you creating an impressive spread does not have to be a daunting process. Some couples or singles will throw “Stock the Bar” parties when they move into a new apartment or home, and that’s a great way to have a little liquor inventory on your hands. But what if you’re not moving anytime soon, or worse, your friends have lousy taste in spirits? This is an easily remedied problem. Here are some of my home essentials; if any of these are foreign to you, then give it a shot. Pun intended. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Orange Bitters
Let’s start with the smallest ingredient that will go into your cocktail. I’m talking about bitters: the salt and pepper of your drink. Admittedly, Angostura Aromatic bitters is the obvious choice to have on hand; there is none better. However, having the right blend of orange bitters can take your old-fashioned to the next level. I say “blend” because after taking notes from other bartending books years back, I’ve learned that I like my orange bitters as follows: equal parts Regan’s Orange and Angostura Orange Bitters. Gary Regan’s formula is more bitter and tastes more like an orange peel to me, while the Angostura has a sweet, almost candy-like aesthetic to it. Put them together, and you get, well, the best of both worlds. The next time you’re making an old-fashioned, add a few dashes (in combination with Angostura Aromatic bitters), and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
TOPO Organic Vodka
Disclaimer: Tito’s vodka isn’t bad. I’ve enjoyed it plenty. But it’s getting a bit cumbersome having to hear people maraud their two cents into conversations about how it’s “the best vodka out there.” Nonsense. If Tito’s was made in Turkey, and not Texas, no one would care about it. Don’t believe me? Try Chapel Hill’s own TOPO vodka side by side with the Lone Star State’s beloved spirit. What intrigued me on first taste was its touch of sweetness. (Is it from the “organic, soft red Carolina wheat” they use when distilling it? I don’t know. I asked TOPO spirit guide, Esteban, one night September 2017
O.Henry 53
In the Spirit
yOu drEAM it... LEt uS BuiLd it
over a round of drinks, and in Tony fashion, forgot.) Anyhow, I firmly believe it trumps other vodkas on the market. Buy a bottle and try it for yourself. If anything, you’ll have supported a local distillery that graciously supports the community. I’ve always enjoyed TOPO vodka as follows:
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Build in a rocks glass: Large ice cube 2 ounces TOPO Vodka 2 ounces fresh-squeezed organic grapefruit juice (That’s all. And boy, is it delicious.)
Campari
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September 2017
Ah, yes. I would have never imagined years ago that if Campari ran out in my quaint bachelor’s pad, I would mutter, or scream, depending on the day. As a matter of fact, one of my first bartending gigs was at a little restaurant, and they carried the Amaro. No one ever ordered it, and the bottle was always three-quarters full. That is, until one night when a lady stopped over to have a Campari and soda. She rambled about how she “only drinks Campari” and how “it’s so sophisticated,” and blah, blah, blah. I looked at her like she was hallucinating and stopped listening. But damn, she was right. My first time trying Campari was in a Negroni, and I thought, “This is awful!” Things change, and over time, so have my taste buds. Just as I’ve grown to love certain vegetables and herbs, I’ve changed my tune over certain types of beer, wine and spirits/liqueurs. Another reason that I probably stared at my first Negroni with disgust is because I made it and totally butchered the job. A few months later, it clicked. I had it before dinner, and it was the perfect complement. I was just discussing Amaro the other day with someone who said, “The older I get, the more bitter I like my flavors.” I couldn’t agree more. Lately, I’ve been making passionate love to the Boulevardier; think Negroni, but with whiskey instead of gin. It’s the bomb, and I’m not ashamed to say it.
Build in a rocks glass: Large ice cube 1 1/4 ounces rye whiskey (Wild Turkey for the win) 3/4 ounce Campari 3/4 ounce sweet vermouth (please try Dopo Teatro Cocchi Vermouth, it’s bitter too) Stir for 15 seconds, and then express lemon peel lemon oils over the glass before dropping the peel in. From my liquor cabinet to yours, cheers! OH Tony Cross is a bartender who runs cocktail catering company Reverie Cocktails in Southern Pines.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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September 2017
8/9/17 2:08 PM
O.Henry 55
DINNER
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September 2017
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Birdwatch
Haunting Call of Summer’s End The plaintive song of the mourning dove
By Susan Campbell
Doves are very much taken for granted, though
they are almost everywhere we look. Their cryptic coloration and still habits make them easy to overlook, but they are nothing short of beautiful. Mourning doves are the most familiar members of the group statewide. Of course, we have plenty of rock doves (aka pigeons) and a rapidly increasing number of Eurasian collared doves as well. However, it is the mourning dove that is my favorite — and garners the most attention.
The species has a sleek, medium-sized, light brown body with distinctive wings that are splotched with black. But it’s the bird’s small head and eye ring, accented with a pale bluish crown, that make the mourning dove one of America’s prettiest species. At close range, a rosy sheen can be seen on the breast feathers of the males. The mourning dove’s name originates from its plaintive song. Its mournful hooting is almost haunting and has been known to fool people into thinking they are hearing an owl. By late summer as crops ripen doves are flocking in large numbers in and around big fields. They feed busily on the ground, swallowing a variety of seeds as they fatten up prior to migration. All doves will consume large amounts of whole seeds in their crop. This means they need to perch in a safe spot to digest their gorging. Where and how far they fly depends on weather and food availability. Most do not move long distances but rather seek out areas that will
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
hold a diversity of grains for weeks at a time. Flocks of hundreds of birds can be found perched on wires or in snags adjacent to good foraging habitat. Young birds blend in well with the adults very soon after fledging. Their tails may not be quite as long, nor will their heads be as distinctly patterned, but these are field marks that are only visible at very close range. Three to five clutches of two are not unusual in a season. With a moderate climate here in North Carolina, especially along our coast, mourning doves have been found breeding in every month of the year. There is no better time for individual mourning doves to seek safety in numbers than early September. Labor Day weekend marks the beginning of hunting season and doves are the first game on the calendar. Their robust population seems to handle the harvest throughout the state and nationwide. This is at least due in part to their fast and erratic flight behavior, which makes the birds challenging targets. Dove hunting has a rich cultural history here in the South. It is a time to bond with family and friends, enjoy the waning days of summer afield and perhaps even bring home enough plump breasts for a hearty meal. Scouting out the right spot is the key. Hunters will survey known locations looking for the best variety of seed-bearing cover crops, strategic perching sites and hopefully at least a few doves hanging around. For those who do not have access to suitable private land for hunting doves, the State Game Lands (Sandhills, Caswell, Jordan and others) offer opportunities. Both private and public lands manage habitat specifically for mourning doves year round. And if you don’t hunt, take some time and seek out these attractive birds: no ammo or binoculars are required! OH Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by email at susan@ncaves.com. September 2017
O.Henry 57
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w w w. r a n d y m c m a n u s d e s i g n s . c o m 58 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Wandering Billy
Rites of Passage Remembering old friends and places, and welcoming a new life to the Gate City
By Billy Eye “I know he’s a gentleman because I saw him come out of a room that said so.” — Dean Martin
How is it I’d never been to Col-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAM FROELICH
lege Place Methodist on Spring Garden until recently? I must pass it several times a day. It’s a charming place with some of the most impressive stained glass windows found anywhere. The chapel was constructed at the turn of the last century with a spectacular Gothic Revivalstyled addition facing Tate Street that will celebrate its centennial in just a few months.
I was there for what will surely be the first of many funerals for former classmates. Ever been to a memorial service where it’s obvious the pastor didn’t know the person they were eulogizing? That certainly was not the case for Russell Teague Copeland’s sendoff. Rev. Robert Smith, now in his 80s, had known Russell since he was a child in the church pageants and, along with Rev. Jason Harvey, delivered one of the most touching memorial services I’ve attended. I really looked up to Russell and his twin brother, Ruffin. And not just because they were taller than I was. It just seemed that they shared some mystic knowledge between themselves that I was never going to be privy to. I was somewhat intimidated — they were smarter than I was, more athletic, better looking. Russ and I were cutups in chorus (boy, that teacher hated me), he had a full-on bushy ’stache in high school. When I sported a mustache in the 12th grade musical, it had to be spirit-gummed to my face. Bigger, better, badder. That was the Copeland boys to this gawky teenager. If Russ and I were in a room together, there would always be laughter, each trying to top the other, or he’d be ridiculing me for some doofus move on my part. Just three years ago, at a Page High reunion, I got to see the Copeland brothers again and it was a genuine thrill. I mean, we weren’t great friends; we didn’t
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
hang out much as I recall. In reality, I hardly knew Russell Copeland. Didn’t know he pursued his life’s dream to become a captain for Delta Air Lines, that he raised four children in Gainesville, Florida, with his devoted wife of 32 years, Lisa, or that, three months before he died, doctor’s discovered he had stage 4 cancer. Online, fellow pilot Tom O’Neill testified to his commanding presence: “Russ had the best PA voice ever. Sam Elliott was jealous of Russ’s voice.” He was one of the good guys at a time when we need all the good guys we can get. I confess to being in a somewhat embarrassing situation just before the service. Without thinking I accidentally walked into the family room where I met Russell’s mother, who was as lovely and charming as I would have imagined. How dumb I felt! I was headed to the chapel, this obviously wasn’t the chapel, so why did I mindlessly wander into a place I had no business being? And this sweet lady, in a moment of unimaginable grief, being so kind and as diplomatic as possible to someone blundering into this most private of moments. I have no ready explanation to this lapse in judgment, I only know Russ would have pointed out my misfortune and laughed his ass off.
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Completely out of the blue, I stumbled into discovering who the perpetrators of the Eastern Guilford High School fire were back in 2006. That’s a story for another venue but it reminds me of another fire that led to a somewhat devastating consequence. The O.Henry Hotel opened in the summer of 1919 as one of the finest resorts in the South, an eight-storied wonder that curved around North Elm onto Bellemeade. Our Fabergé Egg, a self-contained universe with 300 rooms augmented by a world-class barber shop, hair salon, shoe shine parlor, pharmacy, cigar stand, newsstand, coffee shop, elegant dining room, second floor ballroom, speakeasy poolhall, and the area’s No. 1 radio station broadcasting from a glass booth in the sub-lobby. The main lobby was incredibly impressive, with delicately tiled floors and soaring marble, oak and white plaster columns rounding as they merged into a two-story high ceiling. The effect was that of a Romanesque palace by way of the antebellum South. In Greensboro, this is where the ’20s roared. Where the ’50s got nifty. Competition from motels and the high-rise Hilton on West Market (where Elvis slept) attracted most of the business travelers in the ’60s. In the spring of 1975, the Alsonett hotel chain closed the O.Henry after 56 years of service. September 2017
O.Henry 59
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Wandering Billy
Among the reasons given were the astronomical utility bills. A few months later, on lease from Alsonett, the O.Henry reopened as a residency hotel and became the go-to spot for recently separated husbands and old folks. Assisted living, 1970s-style. It was a short-lived experiment. In the early morning hours of January 15, 1976, an elderly tenant, smoking in bed, ignited a corner of the fifth floor and was killed. Fifty-seven people escaped to spend the rest of the night in the lobby, bundled under blankets. Although three rooms and a hallway were gutted (these were pre-sprinkler days), fire inspectors would have allowed the hotel to remain open, but broken water pipes discovered in the investigation is what ultimately shut the place down. That grandiose building was demolished in 1979 for a parking structure. The very similar Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel in our state capital was converted into apartments in the 1970s. It’s a real shame the O.Henry couldn’t have been rehabilitated in the same way. It was a beautiful place.
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Capitalizing on the fact that the bottom two floors of the Kress building are vacant, Wrangler has installed a nifty graphic timeline of their famous jeans in the former retailer’s dual showcase picture windows. It depicts 70 years of innovation and clever promotions like sponsoring bronc-busting legend Jim Shoulders, a 59-year partnership, and country western stars including a young George Strait. Did you know Gilligan cavorted around that sandy atoll he was shipwrecked on in a pair of Wranglers? What I want to know is — how can I get one of their new retro Peter Max denim jackets?
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And finally, here’s Emery Isabella Stringer because who doesn’t like photos of adorable newborns? OH Billy Eye is finishing his new book, Greensboro Babylon, wherein he will reveal all the dirty little secrets of this town. If you’d like to be left out of it, please mail a cashier’s check for $1,500 c/o the O.Henry offices.
60 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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O.Henry 61
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September 2017 Dear Sylvia I wait for you here with my coffee cup and newspaper, and I watch the sea. The dolphins head up the beach, and in the evening scallop down. The force of their numbers through surf pushes toward the condo village, past the gnashing mongrels gathered on shore. The dogs collect every morning to stalk grackles, whose molting feathers stick out like charred trash or timbers. Even if these grackles were crash sites, only dogs would investigate. Sylvia, I watch the dolphins skimming by undulating, their splendid continuum unbroken, water like silk shedding from their slick gray backs. Sylvia, I am still waiting for you to notice me, turn toward my shining skin. — Cathryn Hankla
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
O.Henry 63
Paradise Reclaimed
From a dozen hidden springs comes fabled Buffalo Creek, a once-troubled waterway along which generations of Greensboro folks have played ball, pitched woo, made their morning run or evening walk. A meandering story of love and rebirth By Grant Britt • Photograph by Mark Wagoner • Illustrations by Robin Sutton Anders
64 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
F
or those lucky enough to live in its proximity, it’s a pathway to pleasure, a ribbon of water that positively impacts their daily lives. Meandering through town at a leisurely pace, Greensboro’s Buffalo Creek supports a raft of stuff that’s good for what ails you. It’s a wildlife habitat, a stress-relieving space that can be stared at or galloped alongside on foot or bicycle, and a wild if short- lived thrillseeker’s passageway if approached and mounted after a downpour. Like many waterways in urban environments, the mighty Buffalo has had its share of woes, including circulation problems restricting its mobility, breathing difficulties, and general health and well-being, as well as having harmful stuff dumped down its throat by man and nature. “I remember when we first bought this house here, I could get a running start and jump across Buffalo Creek,” says retired EMT Larry York, who has lived in the Westerwood subdivision on Hillcrest Drive since the late 1960s. “At that time they had cleared everything out; there was no vegetation growing there, and the erosion that was occurring was just off the tracks.” York and buddy Ben Matkins went to the city and suggested that they stop dredging the creek and let the trees grow up around it to act as a buffer. “The city thought we were crazy,” York says. “The city engineer said, ‘Well, we need to get the water out of here as fast as we can.’” York says the two of them tried to reason with the engineer: “‘Look, you have partial dams on the creek when it gets flooded. They’re called bridges. And there’s only so much water that’s going to go underneath those bridges.’ It made you understand that engineers didn’t understand the theory of water rolling downhill and gravity sucking. We played on that creek for years.” It wasn’t all play, however. Ben Matkins, who passed away in ’96, was an avid environmentalist, a Sierra Club member and former president of the Audubon Society. He was also a political gadfly. Matkins and York started their political careers together, fueled by civic fervor, a few beers and a love of Buffalo Creek. “We both ran for city council back in 1980,” York says. “We were sitting up in Ham’s one night; we were drinking, talking about how screwed up the city was. And I said, ‘Ben why don’t you run? I’ll support you any way I can. At least you’ll get one or two votes.’ And he said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll run if you will. We’re gonna turn so many heads they’re gonna wonder what’s happened to ’em.’ And it did.” Both candidates lost, but they did get some attention, and their continued, concerted efforts, with the help of other close friends and neighbors and the Audubon Society, gradually brought about important changes for Buffalo Creek.
The Source
When you look at a topographical map of North Carolina, there are a plethora of squiggly lines spread across the state like varicose veins, quite a few with some version of Buffalo in their names. But while Greensboro’s Buff does originate in the state, it doesn’t trickle off any other tributary or wean itself from any mightier flow by nefarious meanderings. “Buffalo Creek and all its little tributaries start up along Spring Garden Street,” says former UNCG chemistry professor Jack Jezorek, current cochair of the T. Gilbert Pearson Chapter of the Audubon Society. “The name Spring Garden Street says it all. The railroad runs along what’s now Gate City Boulevard on one side, Spring Garden Street on the other side.” The railroad, he explains, runs along a ridgeline. “The railroad always is built on the highest ground. Lot of roads are that way too. There are lots of little springs and seepages along the north side of the railroad along Spring Garden Street.” Jezorek goes on to say that when UNCG’s Weatherspoon Art Museum was built 25 years ago, problems developed, “because they dug down, and lo and behold, there were a whole bunch of springs on Spring Garden Street.” He laughs. “So all these little tributaries you see around town, they all start right around Spring Garden Street.”
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
That takes care of the birthing of the North Buffalo. The South Buff is born from more seepage, down south a ways. “You know the term Sandy Ridge Road? That’s another ridgeline,” Jezorek says. “If you go west of Sandy Ridge Road, you’re now in the Deep River drainage — Deep River, Oak Hollow Lake, down to High Point. On the east side, you’re in the Buffalo Creek drainage. So there’s North Buffalo Creek, which runs through Westerwood here at Lake Daniel Park, and South Buffalo, and they join out near McLeansville to become just Buffalo Creek.” Farther downstream, he says, they join up with Reedy Fork Creek. “And it’s Reedy Creek which joins the Haw over towards Burlington.” Matkins didn’t get to see his vision of the Buffalo realized, but his efforts encouraged others, and finally the city took notice. The natural buffers that he and York and Jezorek and County Commissioner Joe Wood and Westerwood neighbors advocated came to fruition in the early ’90s’ with the help of former Mayor Carolyn Allen with a project she dubbed StreamGreen. “We took a Greensboro city map, glued it to some poster board, and we drew with a blue magic marker all of these little creeks that you see all over town,” Jezorek says. “We’re right at the headwaters of this Buffalo creek system, and it is amazing. Every little dip in the road on Friendly, on Market, any other street in town, every time the road dips down, you can bet there’s a creek down there. A lot ’em are piped when they were small, a spiderweb of creeks.” Almost every little hillside in town has a little seep, and down at the bottom of the hill there’s a little creek, a little drainage. “They’re all over town, which is nice because it means it’s pretty clean water,” Jezorek says. “We’re fortunate we’re at the very headwaters of the Cape Fear. Cape Fear is formed from the Haw and the Deep. When they join below Jordan Lake dam, that’s where the Cape Fear starts. So we’re in the Cape Fear drainage, and we’re lucky because our water’s pretty clean up here, nobody else uses it but us.” With that comes an obligation, he says, “to take care of that water so that the folks downstream don’t have crappy water, and that was one of the points of the StreamGreen project, to take care of these creeks, keep their banks from collapsing with vegetation, roots holding banks in place.”
Mythical Beasts
It might make a good argument to claim the mighty Buffalo was named for a shaggy creature who might have denuded those banks in a quest for a grazing paradise. Nice try, county historian James G. W. MacLamroc informed Greensborians in a ’72 News & Record Hot Line response asking about the creek’s namesake. His research indicated that Buffalo were rare around these parts when early settlers moved here in the mid-1700s, so it’s unlikely the beasts donated their name to the stream. More likely, whoever laid the name on the waterway just chose it because the mighty bison projects a strong American image for a creek, a robe or a nickel. In his 1709 travelogue, surveyor John Lawson presents an in-depth scrutiny of North Carolina’s climate, waterways, wildlife and botany, with help from his Indian guides. Despite his jaw-breaking title, A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together September 2017
O.Henry 65
with the Present State Thereof. And a Journal of a Thousand Miles, Travel’d Thro’ Several Nations of Indians. Giving a Particular Account of Their Customs, Manners, & c., Lawson’s account is fun to read. In those days, beasts were apparently quite abundant, and a partial listing of Carolina’s wild denizens included the “Buffelo,” or “wild Beef,” as well as “Cat-a Mount, Tyger, Polcat, Bever and Bearmouse.” Despite his inclusion of the shaggy behemoths in his Carolina zoology, a bit later in his accounts he admits that the “buffelo” seldom roam the Carolinas, preferring for some reason the wilds of “Messiasippi.” “The Buffelo is a wild Beast of America, which has a Bunch on his Back, as the Cattle of St. Laurence are said to have,” Lawson wrote. “He seldom appears amongst the English Inhabitants, his chief Haunt being in the Land of Messiasippi, which is, for the most part, a plain Country; yet I have known some kill’d on the Hilly Part of Cape-Fair-River, they passing the Ledges of vast Mountains from the said Messiasippie, before they can come near us. These Monsters are found to weigh (as I am informed by a Traveller of Credit) from 1600 to 2400 Weight.” So with a bit of creative license, we might be able to postulate that an escaped “Messiasippi Buffelo” could have wandered down Spring Garden street a while back and been spotted by a scribe with pencil and paper at hand to document the occasion and honor the seepage with its namesake, but it’s a bit of a stretch.
The Buffalo Creek Canoe Club
There is, however, a trait that both beast and creek share that’s not much of an honor. Unfortunately for some of its neighbors, the creek, like its namesake, has at times given off a pungent reek that repels environmentalists and pleasure seekers alike. At one point, the pollution was so bad that Greensboro Record staff writer (and longtime O.Henry contributor) Jim Schlosser reported in 1971 that alleged sightings of minnows in the creek were so unlikely that “to anyone familiar with the stream, Martians in Jefferson Square would seem more believable.” He goes on to describe the creek as “long considered one of the State’s most wretchedly polluted waterways.” The cause he says, was Greensboro’s growing population and its effluents. Up until the ’40s, the mighty Buff was a popular and prolific fishing spot. But the South Buffalo Waste Treatment plant introduced its product to the stream, resulting in pollution and stagnation, virtually eliminating the former finned denizens. By the late ’60s, summertime pollution levels were so high that the stream’s oxygen content was measured at zero. The Buffalo released a mighty stench to go along with its oxygen starvation program, causing residents to berate city officials about cleaning up the creek, and in ’69, efforts started on what would become a decades-long journey to give the creek a cleanup and makeover. Matkins and York got some attention to the cause back in 1980 with their city council bids. “Neither one of us got elected, but we did make a lot of changes. They had to pay attention to us,” York says. “The establishment was telling us we were radical and irresponsible. Ben and I watched the creek a lot because we were always around it and we would detect fish kills. We found syringes from Wesley Long hospital in the creek. There was a place out on Spring Garden Street on the other side of Holden — there was a chemical plant there — and they were dumping chemicals into Buffalo Creek, and it caused several fish kills, and we finally got that stopped.” The duo got even more attention in the mid-1970s when they took a staff writer for the Greensboro paper, Bill Lee, on a canoe trip down the mighty Buff at storm surge tide all the way to the other side of Revolution Mills from their Hillcrest Drive home. But the attention came not from riding the scenic surge Lee documented with photos as well as text, but from a concerned citizen who thought the canoeing environmentalists were reckless as well as radical. “At the risk of sounding like a fuddy dud, I am compelled to comment on Bill Lee’s ‘Canoeist Careens on Buffalo Creek,’ an account of three youths canoe-
66 O.Henry
September 2017
ing the Buffalo in flooded stage,” Tom Berry wrote in on the Public Pulse section of the letters to the Record editor in July of ’75. Berry’s Fudd impulse was triggered by the callous youths’ alleged dare-demon attitudes. “I am afraid the article may well have put the idea into young heads who even now may be waiting for the rains to come,” he fussed. “While recognizing the need for youth to frolic and the unquestioned appeal of an opportunity in their own backyard, the flooded North Buffalo is no place for a canoe ride. Statistics of canoe fatalities are top heavy with just such innocent looking adventures occasioned by familiar shallow streams suddenly full of water.” He might just as well have added a harrumph or two for good measure. “I hope your youthful readers will not be induced to do so,” he wrote. “On the other hand, river canoeing can be a safe and sane recreation if approached reasonably, with the opportunity for as much excitement as one wants (and then some) when one has the skills for it.” York’s wife, Suzanne, jumps to her husband’s defense, citing their expert handling shooting the tricky part under Revolution Mill where caissons await the careless and reckless, unfuddy canoers. “The caissons are going like this, and the water is going like this, and if you didn’t know what you were doing you’d run right into a caisson,” she says. “But they were experienced canoers.” But even the inexperienced can and did shoot by them unscathed, if guided by pros. Matkins called this writer house one day just after a summer thunderstorm and said, “Let’s go canoeing.” And even though I told him I had no expertise in matters canoe, he said not to worry. He came and got me, and we set out down Buffalo Creek with a case of beer. It was pouring down rain. “Where are we going?” I asked. He said, “We’ll know when we get there.” So we just floated down the mighty Buffalo, sodden, but serene. Turns out I wasn’t the only beneficiary of the beer and Buffalo smorgasbord. “One afternoon we were up at Ham’s and it was pouring rain and we were drinking and Ben said ‘I bet we could paddle Buffalo Creek right now, the water’s so high,’ says former city commissioner Joe Wood, a neighbor and friend of Matkins. “So we all got bundled up, went out, creek was up, got down near Cone Mills. Only one place we had to get out because of a pipe and that was down by Wesley Long Hospital.” After a brisk sojourn down the Buff, the sodden sailors, York included, retreated back to their watering hole and decided to give the outing’s participants a formal title for their watery shenanigans. “Ben christened it the Buffalo Creek Rainy Day Canoeing, Drinking, And Social Club,” Wood recalls. Matkins’ daughter Brandye (Patterson) also navigated the Buffalo’s waters, but under different, and more sober circumstances. “When I was 8, my dad gave me a 10-foot Mohawk canoe for my birthday, and I remember paddling down Buffalo Creek,” she recalls. “We probably put in by the playground there at Lake Daniel Park. And I remember him holding on to the painter line as I paddled down the creek. He had custom-made a paddle for me, ’cause they were all too long. And he cut it down for me, put the paddle back on it, and it was just perfect.” Brandye has a piece of memorabilia from her dad’s wilder Buff excursions. “I still have a homemade piece of art someone painted, I’m not sure who did it, of a Buffalo in canoe and it says the Buffalo Creek Canoe Club,” she says. She also has vague memories of her dad working to establish a pocket park on the Buffalo over by Cone Hospital when she was small. “I don’t know specifics, my memories of that are being on that spot of land as a child and just hanging around while they were building a trail. I know there’s a picture of me and my dad looking out over that area, the caption talks about how this area is a work in progress, getting this area converted into the natural area it is now.” Jezorek is able to provide more details. “It’s called the T. Gilbert Pearson Audubon Natural Area,” he says. “We’re still working on that. We’ve developed a system of trails.” Sometime in the late ’70s or early ’80s, an 11-acre tract owned by Cone Hospital was leased to the city of Greensboro for 99 years as The Art & Soul of Greensboro
a natural park. “We somehow got wind of that,” Jezorek says. “I don’t know whether it was Ben or who found that out, but we said ‘Hey, let us, Audubon, manage it for the city.’ So we have a contractual signed agreement with the City of Greensboro that Audubon will manage that natural area.” The society has built a system of trails in the area over the years, installed picnic tables and benches, and is trying to remove invasive species as well as adding more native species. The Greenway, the work in progress that has made a maze out of downtown streets recently, will eventually meet up with it. “The trail that runs through Lake Daniel and Latham Park, which now ends at Elm Street is now to be extended along Tankersley Drive — that’s the street that runs between Elm and Church — on the south side of Tankersley where there’s a sidewalk,” Jezorek explains. He says the trail will continue “through the natural area, either over Church Street or under, following the creek over to Revolution Mill, then out to the northeast part of the city, hopefully in our lifetime.” The society uses the natural area for educational and recreational purposes, and sponsors the Great American Cleanup the first of April, with volunteers and members going down in the creek and pulling out trash. It’s been a long process. Matkins, York, Wood and Jezorek, as well as many of their neighbors along the waterway lobbied the city for years to let the creek be more natural. “We had the notion that they shouldn’t be mowing the banks and all the vegetation around the creek for a whole lot of reasons,” Jezorek says. For one thing, vegetation shades the water, keeping it cooler. “We had a lot of fish kills in those days — the city mowed everything,” Jezorek says. “There was not a tree, not a shrub, nothing.” He calls it a “a biological desert,” because in shallow creeks in the summertime, the temperature goes way up and the oxygen gets depleted. That, not pollution, was killing the fish. Shading is a simple and effective solution. The efforts of former Mayor Allen, The Audubon Society and the Westerwood neighborhood, finally brought progress in reviving the Buffalo in the early ’90s. The groups studied the programs of four forward-looking states — Colorado, Florida, Maryland and Oregon — that had taken steps to care for their waterways and introduced similar programs and policies to Greensboro. “The city manager was Ed Kitchen, a really good guy, still involved with Action Greensboro, and Carolyn was mayor, so it was the best of circumstances,” Jezorek says. “We set up with the city and with Westerwood a pilot project to let the banks grow up, did some work putting some rocks and things in the creek to provide some ripples and get some oxygenation going.” It took a decade or more, he says, but finally, “bowed out and the city actually came up with a policy of its own. Our effort predated the city’s storm water division.” The project made tree-huggers out of a bunch of Buffalo denizens. “Now, if anyone wants to remove a tree in the buffer along the creek, the neighborhood gets up in arms. We did all kinds of education presentations in the neighborhood. It’s become part of the community as it is all over town. That postdated Ben, but he planted the seeds in a bunch of our minds.”
Princess Whitewater Lives
Another seed that Matkins planted resulted in a raucous pageant and free-for-all that made cross-dressers of Greensboro’s straightest citizens under the guise of raising money for charity with a Buffalo-themed annual ball crowning Princess Whitewater. “Again, it involves drinkin’,” says Wood, who had Matkins for his campaign manager. A bunch of friends had gathered on Matkins’ back patio just after the Greensboro Debutante Ball had just taken place at Blandwood. “And we said, by Gawd, why don’t we have a neighborhood party for all our daughters who are never gonna be invited to be Debutantes and
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
have a party for ourselves and our daughters, introduce them to society? So we thought on it a little more and drank a little more, and said ‘Why don’t we have a men’s beauty pageant? And why don’t we do it for charity?’” That twisted logic sounded pretty good at the time, but proved to be a hard sell in the sober light of day. “Nobody wanted to dress up in women’s clothes at that time, which was 1980,” Wood says. But the group forged ahead, renting Blandwood, hiring a band, inviting around 600 people, getting several local bars to sponsor them. There wasn’t a pageant the first year, but the affair got an unexpected boost from an impromptu parade for the occasion. “Bill Eckard agreed to play the role of Princess Whitewater, put on a pink shift and a Minnie Pearl hat, put a canoe on top of Ben’s van, and we all gathered in front of Tiajuana Fats, on Federal Place. Had the Buffalo Creek Marching Kazoo band, and Bill Eckard was the princess on top of the float,” Wood says. From then on, people got in line to be a Princess Whitewater contestant. “We started doing it the next year, ’81, which was the second Princess Whitewater — had about 10 or 12 bars in Greensboro to sponsor candidates, Faye Nelson from the Ritz [Costumes] helped everybody get costumes. It was raunchy — helped to have some stomach and some facial hair.” Wood estimates a crowd of 500 showed up, paying about $8 for admission and a chance to gape at local celebrities in drag. “I remember Forest Campbell, head of the County Commissioners, was there, in a tuxedo jacket and a pair of those boxer shorts with the Valentine hearts on ’em, and was on roller skates. Everybody, from millworkers to CEOs of big corporations in Greensboro, was there. We raised about $2,000 and donated it to charity. I have no idea what the first charity was but the nine years we actually had a pageant we raised about $25,000 for charity.” Beneficiaries included the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Friends of the Carolina Theatre and the Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation. Princess Whitewater crown-wearers included Stan Swofford from the Daily News, the first Princess Whitewater when a pageant was held. “Kent Hoffman from the Costume Shop downtown was a princess, I was a princess. When we had the final Princess Whitewater in 1989, we had the Princess of the Decade and Bill Eckard who was the original princess won the thing. Lots of incriminating photos. Ogi Overman was a Princess Whitewater, Harry Murr. That’s as much as I can tell you without telling you all the trash.”
A Creek Reborn
These days, just like the folks who shared their memories with us, the Buffalo is all grown up. “Best thing that happened to that park is those trees coming up in there,” York says. “That’s attracted a lot more wildlife. I’ve got some neighbors here who tell me that deer won’t come into the city. I tell ’em ‘Do you think deer stop at the city limits sign and turn around and walk off?’” There have been deer sightings at the Pearson park tempting some to invite the shy animals to dinner — as the main course. “There was a big write-up in the paper about a bear being down there,” York continues. “And we’ve seen herons down here, and they have hawks and ducks, the mallard ducks, falcons,” Suzanne York adds. There have also been reports of groundhogs, muskrats and beaver. But the elephant in the room is the mighty buffalo — still no signs of the scruffy, unruly, but noble creature that lent its image and in days past, its aroma to the creek. It’s wandered on, back to the Messiasippi perhaps, or parts unknown. But its spirit lives on, wild, wooly and wondrous, in the creek that proudly bears it name. OH From his hilltop home, Grant Britt gazes longingly at the mighty Buff on stormy September 2017
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The Secret Life of
William Sydney Porter How the master of the short story became O.Henry
W
ith his life in shambles, Will Porter — later to become known as O.Henry — boarded International & Great Northern Railroad at the Austin, Texas, depot on April 22, 1898, heading to prison in faraway Columbus, Ohio, to serve a five-year sentence for embezzlement. But that was not the only difficulty that the 35-year-old former bank teller and talented, though relatively unknown, writer and cartoonist confronted. Athol, the young Austin woman whom he married in 1887, had died the previous summer of tuberculosis — the same disease that had taken her father and Porter’s mother. This meant Porter’s 8-year-old daughter Margaret would have no parent at her side for the foreseeable future. With Deputy Marshal Musgrave alongside guarding him, Porter had ample time during the three-day journey north to reflect upon the events beginning in 1882 that had led him from home in Greensboro to Texas
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and now to prison. While employed as a drugstore clerk in the downtown Greensboro pharmacy operated by his uncle Clark Porter, William Sydney Porter had developed an incessant, racking cough. At the time, the drugstore was a popular meeting place for city businessmen to gather and kibitz about goings-on in the community. One frequenter was Dr. James Hall, who took note of 19-year-old Porter’s persistent cough. Alarmed that the young man might be in danger of contracting tuberculosis, Hall urged Porter to accompany him during the doctor’s upcoming Texas vacation to visit two sons, Lee, a celebrated Texas Ranger, and Dick. The Hall brothers managed a 250,000-acre livestock ranch in south Texas. Dr. Hall reckoned a sojourn on the ranch would rid Porter of his hacking cough. Porter agreed to give Texas a try. The doctor was right. Once on the Hall ranch, Porter’s health was rejuvenated. For the next two years, he immersed himself in the ranch’s work, relishing his role as a hand for the Halls, riding horses, sheepherding and The Art & Soul of Greensboro
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF GREENSBORO HISTORY MUSEUM
By Bill Case
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER AT THE AUSTIN PUBLIC LIBRARY
fixing fences. But inevitably longing for more social interaction, particularly with members of the opposite sex, 21-year-old Porter decided to forego the prairie and try city life in Austin. Once there, he cycled through several jobs: drugstore clerk, real estate company bookkeeper and draftsman for the government land office. The social Porter became a man-about-town, contributing his tenor voice to the “Hill City Quartet,” and hobnobbing with Austin’s younger set in the city’s saloons and gambling parlors. He courted several women, but it was Athol who caught his eye, and they married in 1887. It was she who now encouraged him to embrace his budding literary talent. Porter began composing short vignettes of Texas life and selling them to Eastern newspapers for modest sums. But during his Austin days, Porter’s writing income couldn’t support a family — which by 1889 included Margaret. So when in 1891, an opening occurred for a teller at the First National Bank of Austin, Porter applied and landed the job. His lenient bosses at the bank let Porter continue moonlighting with his writing. Looking for an outlet for his talent, he purchased a failing Austin weekly newspaper, The Iconoclast, in 1895. Rechristening it The Rolling Stone, Porter served as a one-man band for the rag, responsible for writing, editing and drawing cartoons. Soon, he received recognition in local circles for his chatty jocular stories that often spoofed local figures. After a short period of being an attentive husband, Porter renewed what would become a lifelong habit of whiling away the nights in saloons and back alleys. He rationalized his behavior to Athol by claiming Austin’s diverse cast of characters provided fodder for his stories. Porter cared little for his work at First National. It was simply a means to an end. His involvement with the newspaper he acquired, The Rolling Stone, constituted his real passion. Sensing he was on the threshold of self-sufficiency, he quit the bank in October 1894 to devote full time to the publication. But despite its artistic success, the paper capsized in a sea of red ink in April 1895 and Porter was left adrift without gainful employment. In October, the editor of the Houston Post offered the struggling Porter a life raft: a position as a “special writer” at the modest rate of $15 a week. With no other prospects, Porter pulled up stakes and relocated to Houston. Athol and Margaret temporarily remained in Austin with Athol’s mother and stepfather, Mr. and Mrs. P.G. Roach, until The Post upped Porter’s pay. But upon finally arriving in Houston, Athol began to suffer the early symptoms of her tubercular condition. Ultimately, she and Margaret returned to Austin. Meanwhile, a gathering storm forced Porter to take a leave of absence from The Post. Prompted by relentless Federal Bank Examiner B.F. Gray, a grand jury had handed down a four-count indictment in February 1896 against Porter, claiming he had embezzled a total of $4,702.94 while employed as First National’s teller. To those familiar with First National’s loose banking practices, it seemed unfair for the government to target Porter for the shortages. Routinely, the bank’s officers dipped into the till themselves, withdrawing cash without leaving IOUs. Bank policy had permitted overThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
drafts to these same officers. While Porter had been sloppy, too trusting of the bank officials and oft distracted by his duties at The Rolling Stone, his friends could not fathom he would be consciously dishonest. As Will Porter reflected on these matters while riding the rails to the Ohio Penitentiary, he undoubtedly recalled the inexplicable decision he made on another fateful railroad journey two years before. On June 22, 1896, he was aboard an evening train steaming out of Houston to Austin for the start of his federal criminal trial. At some point after boarding the train, Porter changed directions and fled from justice. He disembarked the train in Hempstead 50 miles out of Houston and boarded another to New Orleans, where he would live as a fugitive for six months, picking up occasional assignments from local newspapers under the assumed name of “Shirley Worth.” In December, Porter grew concerned that authorities might be getting wind of his whereabouts, so he hightailed it to Honduras, a country having no extradition treaty with the United States. Will Porter’s many biographers have offered an assortment of views as to why Porter fled — especially when it seemed he had a defensible case. One observer opined that Porter chose exile because he figured his bosses, who were well-known in the community, would be accusing him of wrongdoing to avoid being charged themselves. Another offered that Porter “could not measure up to the overpowering strain upon his sensitive nature.” A perhaps overly sympathetic writer asserted that “it was not cowardice that motivated his actions. . . It was the call of a new start in life, the challenge of a novel and romantic career.” Other historians say Porter believed (misguidedly) that if he successfully evaded prosecution by remaining outside the country for three years, the statute of limitations would protect him from conviction. With her tubercular symptoms temporarily in remission, the loyal Athol enrolled in an Austin business school, arming herself with employable skills. But after her condition suddenly, and gravely, worsened, the Roaches contacted Porter, who came back to Austin, where he voluntarily appeared in court. Federal prosecutor R. U. Culberson harbored misgivings about the strength of his case against Porter. But unceasing pressure from zealous Bank Examiner Gray had forced the prosecutor to press forward. Culberson did agree to a lengthy postponement, allowing Porter to attend to his wife during her final months. Athol died on July 25th at age 29. To escape his grief and the interminable agony of waiting for trial, Porter turned to his writing. Working in a room above the Roaches’s Sixth Street store, he wrote “An Afternoon Miracle,” which he sold to the S.S. McClure Syndicate. This first freelance sale of a short story was the one sliver of good news Will Porter received while awaiting his reckoning in federal court. By the time the trial finally commenced on February 15, 1898, the charges had been pared down to two transactions involving a missing $554.08. But Porter’s chances of escaping conviction were marred by his detachment from the proceedings. He declined to review the bank statements with his lawyers. Perhaps feeling he was ruined regardless of the jury’s verdict, Porter September 2017
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She is my most precious possession.” And Margaret reciprocated this affection. Long after her father’s death, she fondly recalled that their relationship “was never that of father and daughter, but of two good friends . . . We were inseparable playmates and companions until my eighth year and the death of my mother.” Porter helped plant an idealized vision of himself by going to great lengths to keep Margaret from knowing about his imprisonment. That was going to take some doing since Margaret, an intelligent girl, would most certainly be exposed to gossip concerning her father at school and elsewhere in Austin. So Porter convinced Mrs. Roach to move Margaret to the Nashville, Tennessee, farm of his mother-in-law’s brother, “Uncle Bud.” Margaret was told that her father would be away from home for a prolonged time on business. Checked into the penitentiary as prisoner number 30664, Porter initially wallowed in despair. It appears he toyed with taking his own life. In letters, he mentioned that “suicides are as common as picnics here.” The chief physician of the prison reported that in his experience he had “never known a man who was so deeply humiliated.” In spite of his mental anguish, Porter considered his relationship with Margaret a vital lifeline, and he did his best to preserve it, writing her frequently. He apologized for abruptly leaving in his first prison letter to her: “I am so sorry I couldn’t come to tell you goodbye when I left Austin. You know I would have if I could have. I think it’s a shame some men folks have The Art & Soul of Greensboro
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF GREENSBORO HISTORY MUSEUM, AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER AT THE AUSTIN PUBLIC LIBRARY
sat listlessly at the defense table, seemingly indifferent to the damning testimony being offered. Porter urged his friends not to attend. He failed to testify in his own behalf, thereby leaving unrebutted the prosecution’s insinuations that Porter had used ill-gotten money from First National to fund his fancy clothes, nighttime revelries and to prop up The Rolling Stone. Still, many historians have concluded Porter likely would have escaped the jury’s forthcoming guilty verdict had he not fled. Porter himself acknowledged later that by doing so, he had “made one fateful mistake at the supreme crisis of . . . [my life], a mistake from which . . . [I] could not recover.” Notwithstanding the verdict, Porter steadfastly maintained his innocence in correspondence with friends. He wrote Mrs. Roach that “I am absolutely innocent of wrongdoing.” To another friend, he complained that “[t]he guilty man [presumably a bank higher-up], if charged, would take the stand and call me a liar. He is not, as I thought, a man of honor, or he would have kept his word to me and straightened the matter out when I left Texas and the bank.” To another, Porter confided a concern he would be considered an accessory by not reporting another bank official’s wrongful conduct. But now, as the steel gate of the penitentiary awaited, a paramount concern for Porter was how he was going to support Margaret, now 8, and under the care of the Roaches. While Will Porter may not have been the most dutiful of fathers, there is no doubt he adored Margaret. He would write: “Now I have a daughter, a child of my own blood, bone of my bone.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GREENSBORO HISTORY MUSEUM
to go away from home to work and stay away so long — don’t you?” Much of his correspondence sought to reprise the rollicking tomfoolery the father and daughter had experienced while together during better times. “Don’t you remember me?” he teased. “I’m a Brownie, and my name is Aldibirontiphostiphornikophokos.” In another bit of whimsy, he wrote, “If you see a star shoot and say my name seventeen times before it goes out, you will find a diamond ring in the back of the first cow’s foot you see go down the road in a snowstorm while the red roses are blooming on the tomato vines.” He would pen other silliness, asserting in one missive that Easter eggs did not come from rabbits but from eggplants. Porter would promise Margaret that one day soon, he would have the pleasure of reading “Uncle Remus” to her once more. Meantime, Porter adjusted to prison life. He renewed an acquaintance with train robber Al Jennings, a drinking buddy when both were hiding in Honduras. Jennings became his best friend in the pen. Porter also managed to snag the position of night druggist at the prison hospital. In the course of his four years of drugstore clerking in Greensboro, he had become licensed as a North Carolina pharmacist. That background had come in handy in helping Porter land one of the prison’s least backbreaking jobs. He subsequently earned the thankfulness of the warden when he saved his life by speedily mixing a potion that relieved the effects of an overdose of arsenic that had been inadvertently prescribed by the The Art & Soul of Greensboro
prison’s doctor. The warden’s gratitude helped Porter obtain a position outside the penitentiary walls as the prison steward’s secretary responsible for nighttime bookkeeping. In this capacity, Porter was allowed to walk the streets of Columbus when not on duty, sleeping in quarters outside the prison with several other lucky “trusties,” including Al Jennings. He and his roommates formed what they termed the “Recluse Club.” Porter would scrounge together enough food in his daily wanderings that he and his fellow “Recluses” were able to dine surreptitiously but sumptuously on Sunday nights — white shirts required! In better spirits and having more free time, Porter delved back into his writing with a newfound, previously untapped discipline. The prison years proved vital to Porter’s subsequent success as it was during his incarceration that he mastered the short story genre and developed his personal trademark of unexpected story endings. Biographer Gerald Langford in his book Alias O.Henry notes that many of his subject’s 14 prison stories involve, “the vindication of a character who has in some way forfeited his claim of respectability or even integrity.” Through an elaborate conduit designed to hide the fact he was writing from prison, Porter began peddling his pieces under the name “Sydney Porter” (his given name was William Sidney Porter) — a rather thin alias for someone trying to hide his past. Porter then tried other names on for size, but O.Henry was the one that ultimately stuck. There are various tales as to September 2017
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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GREENSBORO HISTORY MUSEUM
how he chose the name, including : (1) he picked it from a society column’s list of attendees at a ball in New Orleans; (2) a friend’s cat named Henry would only respond to “O Henry!”; and (3) the “OH” initials were also the first two letters of Ohio. Biographers can’t agree as to what caused him to select this particular alias. Despite the improvement of prison life, the infrequency of Margaret’s letters cut him to the quick. He worried the young girl was forgetting him, and he beseeched her to reply to his correspondence. In November 1898 he lightly scolded, “I guess you’d rather ride the pony than write about him, wouldn’t you? But you know I’m always so glad to get a letter from you even if it’s only a teentsy weentsy one.” Likewise, in February 1900, he wrote Margaret, now on the brink of becoming a teenager, the following: “I got a letter from you in the last century, and a letter once every hundred years is not very often.” Meanwhile, the Roaches moved to Pittsburgh, where Mr. Roach took up the ownership and management of a second-rate hotel. Granddaughter Margaret came with them. Always trying to draw Margaret out, Porter inquired, “Tell me something about Pittsburgh and what you have seen of it. Have they any nice parks where you can go or is it all made of houses and bricks?” While Porter promised the Roaches he would reimburse them for their expenses in taking care of and schooling Margaret, his propensity for allowing money to slip through his fingers, often giving it away, made it impossible for him to fully catch up even after his later financial success. An exemplary prisoner, Porter’s term was shortened and his release scheduled for July 24, 1901. Excited about the prospect of reuniting with his daughter, he wrote, “We haven’t gone fishing yet. Well there is only one month till July, and then we’ll go, and no mistake.” Starting over as an ex-con in Austin was out of the question, and all of Porter’s relatives in Greensboro were deceased. Of course, he had virtually no money, so once freed, his only real option was to stay with the Roaches and Margaret in Pittsburgh, where he picked up freelance work with the Pittsburgh Dispatch. But not long after arriving, he moved alone to a flat in a rooming house citing the unconventional hours the newspaper required. It must have been hard on Margaret to have her father vacate so soon after his being long apart from her. She would later try to put the best face on the
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stop-start nature of their relationship. “We would just begin to emerge from an ever-increasing reserve that seemed to beset us both,” she wrote, “when time would come to part again.” Porter expressed to Jennings his intense dislike for Pittsburgh, writing that, “Columbus people [presumably the prisoners] are models of chivalry compared with them [Pittsburgh residents].” His antipathy for the city aside, “O.Henry” successfully churned out a number of short stories while in residence, which increasingly began appearing in several New York–based magazines — most notably Ainslee’s, whose editor, Gilman Hall, suggested in 1902 that Porter relocate to New York. After negotiating a $200 advance from the magazine, Porter headed to the city where his dreams of making it big were on the threshold of coming true. Porter’s arrival in New York proved to be perfectly timed. Public demand for good short story writing in the city’s numerous literary magazines had risen to a fever-pitch. Once editors got wind of Porter’s knack for the genre, they knocked down his apartment door in efforts to publish his stories, now all under the pen name of O.Henry. And even though he was prone to missing deadlines, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, McClure’s and Munsey’s magazines — and the New York World newspaper — remained at his beck and call. When absolutely forced to, he could churn out a story with astonishing speed. His tour de force, “The Gift of the Magi,” was conceived and written in longhand in only two hours after Porter discovered he had forgotten an obligation to the Sunday World to produce a Christmas story. He wrote not for fame — that might cause the revelation of his dark secret — but for financial reward. He once explained that, “[w]riting is my business. It is my way of getting money to pay room rent, to buy food and clothes and Pilsener. I write for no other purpose.” But Porter seamlessly mixed his business with pleasure by roaming the “New York Tenderloin” long into the night, observing the escapades of both the high hats and dregs of the city, deriving potential story lines from these varied experiences. An incorrigible ladies’ man, he took particular delight in cajoling young shopgirls into joining him for dinner. For the price of a planked steak, he would urge the women to relate their troubles. Several stories Porter penned during his New York days involve the travails of shopgirls, no doubt gleaned from these dual-purpose encounters. In addition to his New York–based stories, Porter wrote others informed from experiences and people he encountered in Texas, Honduras and in jail. O.Henry never quite managed to turn out a novel as several publishers urged, but collections of his short stories in such volumes as Cabbages and Kings and The Four Million became runaway best sellers. Suddenly he was being compared to the likes of Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Watson’s Magazine’s review of The Four Million summed up what many reviewers were beginning to realize: “In word limit all the stories are shorter than the average magazine story, yet it would be difficult to find as much observation and insight compacted in the short stories of any fictionist today.” But Porter ducked away from all the plaudits. One of his editors, Robert H. Davis, remarked, “Porter fled from publicity like mist before the gale . . . shrank from the extended hands of strangers . . . and avoided conversations about himself.” On holidays from Ward-Belmont School in Nashville, Tennessee, Margaret would occasionally visit her father in New York, but Porter would keep the visits short. While Margaret may still have been in the dark, every editor in New York knew of Porter’s secret by 1907. Nonetheless, Porter kept trying to hide the secret that was no longer much of one — at least to insiders — until the end of his days. Unfortunately for Porter, the end of his days were not far distant. Ill health began to dog him around 1907. Whether from staying out all night drinking copious amounts of whiskey or contracting some unexplained sickness, he found himself in a perpetual state of malaise. His deteriorating health may explain how he came to lean on a woman from his Greensboro youth. As a teen, Porter had been periodically smitten with an Asheville girl who was summering in Greensboro with relatives. Sara Coleman had faded out of Porter’s life once he moved to Texas. Suspecting that Will Porter and The Art & Soul of Greensboro
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GREENSBORO HISTORY MUSEUM
O.Henry were one and the same, she wrote to him in 1905, and a mutual correspondence ensued. The writings became more intimate as time went by, and Sara eventually visited him in New York in September 1907. Before she returned home, Porter had proposed marriage. Before she responded, he haltingly wrote her and revealed his problematic past. She accepted his proposal anyway. They were married in Asheville two months later. Porter had the best of intentions to reform his late night ramblings. “I’ve had all the cheap bohemia that I want,” he told a friend “It’s for the clean, merry life . . .” But the marriage seemed less a romantic union than a dependent one, with Sara filling more of a mothering and nursing role. She convinced her husband to move out to Long Island, where he presumably would not be tempted to partake of the saloon life. Margaret, now an aspiring writer and winding up her education at a girls’ school in New Jersey, would be able to spend her summers with the newlyweds. Inevitably, Porter chafed at the peacefulness of his surroundings, and his wife’s unceasing efforts to get him to mend his ways. Like a moth to the flame, he was ultimately lured back to the bright lights of the city. Bearing little acrimony, the couple separated, with Sara moving back to Asheville. Plunging back into the city’s nightlife doomed any chance of restoring Porter’s health. By midsummer of 1909, he was too sick to work and he reluctantly decamped to Asheville where Sara checked him into a sanitarium. But once feeling better, Porter again could not resist returning to New York. His condition promptly regressed. At the peak of his fame, Porter, 47, found himself alone with no family alongside at the city’s Polyclinic Hospital, where he had been diagnosed with kidney failure, cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes. On Saturday, June 5, 1910, a nurse stopped by Will Porter’s room at midnight to turn off the light. “Turn on the light,” he pleaded. “I’m afraid to go home in the dark.” This served as O.Henry’s personal surprise twist to his own ending. He died later that morning. His long-suffering widow, Sara Coleman Porter, lived until 1959, penning two books herself, and keeping O.Henry’s literary career in the public eye. As for Margaret, she only learned about her father’s criminal past The Art & Soul of Greensboro
several years after his death. She had a short-lived marriage to Oscar Cesare, a Swedish cartoonist and associate of her father’s in New York, and an undistinguished a literary career of her own. Ultimately she succumbed to tuberculosis, like so many members of her family. She died on May 9, 1927 having married her caregiver, Guy Sartin, just three days before. Sartin would then become caretaker of Margaret’s personal effects, including letters from the man once known as Will, “Shirley Worth,” Prisoner No. 30664, the Brownie Aldibirontiphostiphornikophokos, Sydney Porter . . . and to the world, O.Henry. OH Bill Case, a transplanted Ohioan, moved to North Carolina three years ago. Combining his love of history with research skills honed as a litigation attorney, Bill is now a regular writer of historical articles for PineStraw magazine.
O.Henry-bilia
Howard Sartin, Guy’s son, donated his inherited collection of O.Henry letters to the Greensboro History Museum, as did other benefactors including E. M. Oettinger, Carl Prickett Paul Clarkson, and the Porter and Beall families of Greensboro. The GMH, along with the Greensboro Public Library and Greensboro’s News & Record, became faithful repositories of O.Henry — related correspondence, original magazine stories and other materials. Through a joint project of the GHM and the library, spearheaded by Brad Foley (now the librarian for Randolph County in Asheboro), many of these letters and documents became available online in 2005. More recently, GHM and UNCG have teamed up to place these materials onto UNCG’s Digital Collection, where they can be easily enlarged and downloaded at libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/ohenrypapers/. Word searches of transcripts will also be possible, making the O.Henry documents more easily accessible to the public.
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The Soul of an
Urban Farmer Innovative Aussie gardner, Stephen Johnson, makes his mark on Greensboro’s Lindley Park neighborhood Next objective: The City at large By Maria Johnson • Photographs by Lynn Donovan
I
f Stephen Johnson’s Australian accent didn’t give away his homeland, his Aussie-made Akubra hat might. It’s a floppy felt lid made from the soft undercoat of rabbit fur. Light and waterproof, the hat keeps Johnson cool in the summer and warm in the winter, which is important when you spend as much time outdoors as he does. He’s a farmer, but not just any old MacDonald. He’s an urban farmer. Unlike hobby growers, he aims to turn a profit with his herbs, greens and vegetables. At least, that’s the idea. “The last two quarters, I broke even,” says Johnson, 52, who started urban farming full-time in 2013. “I’m still experimenting.” As far as Johnson knows, he’s the only farmer inside the Greensboro city limits. His spread? About three-quarters of an acre behind the 1914 bungalow he shares with his wife Marnie Thompson, on South Elam Avenue. The yards in their Lindley Park neighborhood are vast. “I have a land map from 1937 that shows this land was zoned agricultural,” says Johnson. “Most of these houses were here. The guy who developed this neighborhood was a contemporary of Olmsted.” Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture in the United States, is most famous for designing New York City’s Central Park. Lindley Park echoes that pastoral feeling. Johnson recalls a Boy Scout
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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troop trekking through his backyard once. “They said, ‘Wow, we didn’t realize there was a city park back here.’” True to the neighborhood’s agricultural roots, Farmer Johnson can be found on most Saturday mornings at The Corner Farmers Market, an assembly of 20 or so local vendors who pool, year round, in the parking lot of Sticks & Stones, a pizzeria up the street from Johnson’s house. “He’s really a mentor to everybody here,” says market coordinator Kathy Newsom. “If somebody says, ‘Wow, I only sold $10 today,’ he’ll say, ‘Well, let’s go look at your booth.’ He’s able to do it in such a gentle way that it doesn’t feel like he’s telling you what to do. There’s no finger-wagging.” At market, Johnson sets up wherever there’s room, under a canopy with a small sign that says Elam Gardens. He sells fresh seasonal produce — mostly greens and herbs. If he grows too many fruits and vegetables for his personal use, they appear at market, too. This commerce-over-coffee accounts for half of Johnson’s green. The other half comes from selling to restaurants in the same area, the so-called Four Corners at the intersection of Elam and Walker avenues. Sticks & Stones Clay Oven Pizza; Fishbones; Lindley Park Filling Station; Reto’s Kitchen — all of them buy just-picked herbs, salad greens and heirloom tomatoes from Johnson’s plot, the closest they can get to having their own kitchen gardens. Johnson switched to farming after a working for more than 20 years as a psychologist, first in public schools and later for companies that developed assessment and certification tools for various industries. “It was interesting,” he reflects. “But when you retire, and sit down, will it have made sense?” Johnson answered his own question by leaving his job four years ago and doing what made more sense to him: growing produce. “I’ve always grown things, ever since I was 7 years old,” he says. “My first set of plants was a strawberry patch outside the front door.” That was in the city of Perth, on the western edge of Australia. His strawberries bloomed, but Johnson harvested no fruit. “One day, I came home to see a big, blue-tongued skink,” he says, naming the berry-loving lizard. Johnson learned the first lesson of growing: “Plant more than you need, because you’re going to lose some.” Another memory of his youth: going to market. “On the weekends, you went to market to get all sorts of stuff: toys, books, clothes, food,” he says. “It used to be run by mostly immigrants — Chinese or Greek or Italian or Vietnamese.” Johnson carried the experience with him when he became an immigrant. In 1995, he visited Greensboro, half a globe away from his hometown, to follow his Ph.D. adviser to
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UNCG. He found more than scholarly advice. “I came back in late 1996 so that Marnie and I could be on the same continent,” he says. When their neighbor, restaurateur Neil Reitzel — he owns Sticks & Stones and Fishbones — proposed creating The Corner Market in Lindley Park four years ago, Johnson latched on to the idea quickly. “My original plan was I’d build a little market cart and go sell on the weekends,” he says, laughing. His plan mushroomed into a new career. Johnson bought an old diesel tractor and a 50-foot-long hoop house, where he grows his main cash crops: arugula, parsley, basil, peppers, eggplant and tomatoes — which become toe-MAH-toes under the influence of his accent. Outside the hoop house, where it’s cooler, Johnson grows an assortment of lettuces for restaurants, along with vegetables and herbs for personal use. Basil is a staple. “I make a mean cashew pesto,” he says. He experiments with different crops in a back corner of the yard. Last year, he tested carrots, potatoes and oats. This summer, he tinkered with okra, and got better results. Nothing goes to waste, be it produce or experience. If crops succeed, they go straight to table or market. If not, they — and the weeds — go to the chickens that Johnson tends, on his property, with a neighbor. Another neighbor minds the bee boxes along the drainage ditch that bisects the yard. “I get the benefit,” says Johnson, a smile flowering at the center of his salt-and-pepper beard. “I get honey.” For several years, he’s been working to improve the ditch, and the quality of the water that flows through it, by flattening the banks and planting them with willows, blackberries, elderberries, sedges and other grasses. The plants slow down and filter the storm water that passes through his yard. “I’m trying to think not just of my needs but my community’s needs,” he says. To those ends, he and Thompson — she comanages the nonprofit Fund for Democratic Communities — have installed a 10-by-30-foot solar panel in the middle of their backyard. By capturing the sun’s energy, they meet most of their home’s daytime electrical needs. “We’re going through the process of getting a system for solar hot water,” says Johnson. The couple’s appetite for Earth-friendly ways of living extends to the wood stove that heats their home and to the system that catches rain from their home’s metal roof and funnels it to barrels and a 1,500-gallon cistern. They use the water for irrigating plants, including their front-yard fruit trees. Johnson eyes more improvements. Next to the chicken run, he’s building a fish farm/aquaponics operation. He has introduced bluegill, bass and crappie to two plastic vats filled with water and The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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equipped with aerators. The water, fertilized with fish waste, will circulate to zip-grow towers — essentially square vinyl post covers with a slit down one side. In theory, lettuces and other greens will sprout in a soil-free matrix. The idea of growing food in vertical spaces intrigues Johnson. “There are places in the world — like Singapore and Hong Kong — where they are building multistory grow towers on the line of skyscrapers,” he says. Earlier this summer, more vertical experiments dangled nearby. Johnson drilled out fat plastic tubes, plugged them with strawberry plants, and hung them, like living wind chimes, from a wooden frame. He painted the tubes red and green to study the effect of different colored reflected light on the timing and duration of strawberry blossoms. Fellow farmers will recognize his trial-and-error approach to growing. “There’s that old thing that most farmers are country bumpkins — well, no,” says Johnson. “To have a successful growing operation, you can’t be switched off to technology that’s coming down the pike.” Johnson hopes to spark more interest in urban, and suburban, farming. “Greensboro could feed itself — with all of its protein and vegetable and most of its fruit needs — without a doubt in my mind,” he says. “We get as much sunlight as Cyprus; we’re on the same latitude.” His blue eyes flash at the thought that so little of Greensboro’s food is grown locally. The know-how is here, he says. He sings the praises of N.C. A&T State University’s urban horticulture program, which has supplied him with advice and physical assistance for his USDA-registered farm. “There was an intern there that had worked on a strawberry farm,” he says. “We built the strawberry towers together.” John Ivey, an agent in the Guilford County office of the N.C. Cooperative Extension, helped Johnson with crop selection and marketing. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Carolina Farm Stewards Association, based in Pittsboro, schooled Johnson on the best uses of his hoop house. Given the readily available knowledge, Johnson is flabbergasted that Greensboro is so dependent on food grown elsewhere. “We could develop a resilient food system, and put people to work and do it sustainably — financially and environmentally,” he says. “It’s achievable, but it requires a different mindset and support system.” He sees opportunity even in the developed parts of town. “There’s so much empty commercial real estate in this city,” he says. “Why aren’t we rethinking the use of existing commercial properties for hydroponics or food production?” he says. It’s nutty, he says, that an Aussie transplant should be at the fore of urban farming here. “I should be following people in North Carolina,” he says. Newsom, the farmers’ market coordinator, says Johnson doesn’t give himself enough credit. She’s watched him work at the market and at meetings of the Lindley Park Neighborhood Association, which he heads. “He can lead without looking like he’s leading,” she says. OH Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry.
Want to Go?
As a part of Local Foods Week, the N.C. Cooperative Extension will host a tour and talk at Stephen Johnson’s home on Thursday, September 28, starting at 5:30 p.m. Johnson and kitchen managers will discuss the advantages of using locally grown food. The talk and tour will be followed by dinner at a nearby restaurant. The audience will be limited. Register by going to guilford.ces.ncsu. edu and looking for “local foods.” September 2017
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A Walk in the Garden A long and vibrant life, and memories of a beloved white peony By Ross Howell Jr.
A
my Forbis sits in an overstuffed chair by a window that looks out on her backyard garden. The garden is shaded by old pecan and linden trees. Just outside the window is a bird feeder. A cardinal snatches a sunflower seed and flutters away. A smile crosses Amy’s lips as she watches. This year in May Amy celebrated her 91st birthday. Twice she’s been widowed. She’s raised five children — well, seven, if you count her second husband’s two daughters. And once — in 1973 — she was shot in the stomach during an attempted carjacking. “I wasn’t about to give that man my car keys,” Amy states, matter-of-factly, the way she discusses most topics. “It was a brand new Cutlass. And besides, I had a load of groceries in the trunk.” The incident happened right in front of the police station in downtown Greensboro. “So thank goodness, help was right there,” Amy says. “And you just wouldn’t believe all the people who came to the hospital to visit me.” As we chat, Amy admits to feeling a little weak from the open-heart surgery she had a few months ago. “Don’t pay any attention to what they tell you about your golden years,” she says. “It isn’t fun. Anytime I go anywhere now, I have my walker.” The shelves behind her chair are filled with books. There are photographs in frames on the shelves, on the walls, on a table by the back door. Amy first came to this house on Olive Street in 1933 when she was a girl of 8. We’re neighbors, so I’ve visited a few times. Today I’m here because she wants to tell me about a special peony in her garden. But she warms to one of her favorite topics — family. “My father was from Henry County, Virginia, and his family owned property from an original land grant,” Amy says. Though she was born in Greensboro and has lived here nearly all her life, she says because of her father she has a special love for Virginia. “I was a Daddy’s girl, you see,” she says. “But Daddy didn’t want to farm, so he gave up his inheritance to follow a career in business,” she says. “He came to Greensboro and at the time was the youngest auditor in the city’s history. Daddy was working for a bank when the Depression hit, and he lost just about everything, as many people did.” Amy’s father died when she was just 10 years old. It was a difficult time for her family. She married her first husband, Walter Hitchcock, in 1947. He hailed from the borough of Norristown, Pennsylvania, where he had served as mayor. Hitchcock was the father of her children — Walter, Weldon (nicknamed “Sparky”), Sandra Morris (nicknamed “Morrie”), John, and Robert Lee. Hitchcock worked as an engineer with the highway department and helped build many of the main bridges for North Carolina roads. Which brings us to the peony.
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As much as Amy enjoys gardening, she says it was her husband who was the real green thumb in the family. “Anything Walt touched would turn green,” she says. “He just had that gift.” One spring her husband was helping build a highway through High Point. “He told me the roadway cut right through an apartment building with a big garden,” Amy says. “So he brought a peony home from that garden and planted it in the backyard, by the fence.” She leans toward me in her chair. “You know, that was almost 70 years ago? And every year since, there’s always been at least one white peony blooming on that plant for Mother’s Day,” she says. “I can’t tell you how it makes me feel! It’s very spiritual.” And it wasn’t just plants that Hitchcock brought home. From his highway projects he’d bring orphaned squirrels or baby rabbits from a nest. Amy remembers one Easter when Hitchcock bought up all the baby chicks a vendor had left. “Of course the problem with chicks,” Amy says, “is they become chickens. They were all the time flying over the fence and pecking away at the plants in the garden. Oh, there was never a dull moment with Walt around, I can tell you.” Hitchcock passed away in 1971. He had served as a U.S. Marine in the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Though he had survived three island invasions, the experience had taken a toll. Amy married her second husband in 1977. Charles Forbis was of Scots-Irish descent. His family had been stout Presbyterians in the Carolinas since before the American Revolution. An ancestor, Colonel Arthur Forbis, suffered a leg wound at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. When the leg showed signs of blood poisoning, a physician recommended amputation. “Now the Forbises are stubborn people,” Amy says. “So the Colonel told the doctor if he was going to die, he was going to die in one piece. And that’s what he did, a few days later — gangrene. The local chapter of the North Carolina Society Daughters of the American Revolution is named in his honor.” With Charles Forbis’s two daughters and Amy’s five children, they had quite a full house. Although they bought a home on Cridland Street, which had more space, Amy always held onto the house on Olive Street. She asks if I’d like to tour the garden. Though I caution against the venture, she stands and dismisses my anxiety with the wave of a hand. She shuffles to the back door as I scurry to open it. Her walker is leaning against a wall by the door. She grasps the walker firmly, using it as a cane to lower herself, step-bystep, to the landing. When she’s reached the first stone of the garden walk, I help her unfold the walker, and we begin our tour. We pass through a low arbor. “This always reminds me of a place I used to play when I was a girl,” she says. “O.Henry’s aunt had a school on Market Street near the Masonic Home. There was a little arbor in back, and I loved to go there.” She frets at the weeds and vines infiltrating her beds, whacking at one with the leg of her walker. “We have men who mow the front yard,” she says to me over her shoulder. “And that’s fine. But you just can’t trust them in a garden. I had some men in once, and they pruned a fig bush with the fruit still on the branches! Can you believe such a thing?” The stone path is uneven, yet she moves along confidently. I’m worried about the exertion. And how on earth would I explain myself to her son John, who lives with her and provides her care, should she fall out here on the stone path? She leads on. A few feet ahead, near the center of the garden, is a rectangular pool with concrete walls about two feet tall. The water looks dark in the shade. “I started digging this out when I was pregnant with my daughter Morrie,” Amy says. “I wanted a place where the children could cool off.” She leans on the walker. “Of course, my work wouldn’t do for my husband Walt, the engineer. So he took over, and built everything plumb and square.” Water splatters into the pool from a pipe. “Children from all over the neighborhood would come,” she continues. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
“The pool was about four feet deep. They’d swim and splash for hours, and I’d make them sandwiches at lunchtime and sit here with them and eat. They all called me ‘Mom.’ Some of the mothers in the neighborhood weren’t so happy about that.” Now the pool is home to about 40 plump goldfish and five or six big coy. Amy tells me she feeds them once a day. Chicken wire covers the surface of the water, put there to discourage depredations by neighborhood raccoons and cats. “See that plant there?” Amy asks. “They say it’s ancient. I can’t recall the name.” I do a quick Google search, and find it’s horsetail, Equisetum hyemale, a plant that has changed very little from its ancestors, whose fossils trace back to 350 million years ago. “And day lilies,” she says. “I’ve always loved them. They used to be just thick.” The yellow blossoms nod in the breeze. Ivy has spread through the bed and climbs the limbs of old azaleas. We keep moving along the path. There are Lenten roses, and lush Southern wood ferns. Here and there, a gardenia. Amy raises the walker and turns to me. “You’d never know it now,” she says, “but I used to spend hours working out here. Almost every plant we had was given to us by somebody. And you know gardeners. If I ever had extra plants, I’d pass them along to somebody who wanted them.” In addition to raising her own kids, Amy worked for 19 years at a children’s day care school run by Amelia Hopkins from her home near First Presbyterian Church. Every day Amy would come home to have lunch in her garden. “Walt had built a table right by the pool,” she says. “First we had a sand pile the kids loved to play in. But they were always jumping from the sand pile into the pool, and Walt was worried the sand would ruin the filter and pump.” So he hauled away the sand and built a table and bench. “It was so peaceful,” she says. “Listening to the water. And the birds. I had a lot more blooming plants then. Lots of color. My mother always called them ‘beauty plants.’ I loved them because they attracted butterflies.” Amy turns and leads me to the spot by the fence where her husband planted the peony for her so long ago. Its foliage is deep green, shiny, vigorous. “It bloomed this Mother’s Day,” she says. “Just like always.” The breeze rises, whispering in the leaves of the pecan trees. A towhee calls from the azaleas at the edge of the garden. “See that little lilac there?” Amy asks, pointing just a few feet beyond the peony. “My grandson planted it for my birthday,” she says. “Morrie’s boy.” Her face is beaming. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asks. I nod in agreement. Her breathing sounds labored to me, and now I’m really nervous. “Don’t you think we should go inside?” I ask. “I suppose,” she says. In truth we’re just moments from the back door, but as we make our way back — Amy a bit unsteadily — to me it seems like ages. I help Amy fold her walker and hold the door for her as she climbs the stairs. Her breathing is steady as she eases back in her chair by the window. “I never go into the garden unless someone is with me,” she says. “I don’t want anything to happen. My balance isn’t the best. And I don’t want to put my family through anything more.” I nod, and thank her for showing me around. As I’m taking my leave, the thought strikes me. On our brief walk in the garden, Amy and I had traveled a lifetime. OH Ross Howell Jr. admits failure in his experiment planting Carolina allspice in the heat of July last summer. But a friend gave him new starts this spring, and they’re thriving. “Never thank someone for a plant,” his friend cautioned. “Because it might just die.” September 2017
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A Slice of Heaven Joe and Liz Kelleher keep the home fires burning in their hidden Green Valley ranch By Jim Dodson • Photographs by Amy Freeman
“T
his,” Joe Kelleher says with a wry little grin as he stokes up the flames of his backyard pizza oven, “is the known center of the universe.” In a sense, Joe and his wife, Liz Kelleher, have found the best of both worlds — and certainly the center of their universe — in a typical yet gorgeously renovated Green Valley ranch house tucked into a verdant corner on a high and heavily forested ridge above Greensboro’s seven-acre Cascade Park. As Joe tends to the hardwood coals of his one-of-a-kind wood-fired oven he crafted by hand — more on this engineering feat in a Green Valley moment — hummingbirds flit among the late-summer blossoms of Liz’s lush woodland garden. All at once, you get the fleeting feeling of visiting fortunate former-city friends, urban flatlanders who traded the grind of city life for a retreat in the untrammeled country. In short, the sense of splendid (if suburban) isolation is wildly palpable. “We love this house because it feels like a house in the forest to Joe but is close enough for me to walk to Harris Teeter,” Liz allows with a coy little smile of her own as she shapes out the fresh dough for Joe’s homemade pizzas
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on the work counter of her blissfully uncluttered kitchen. She recalls how even before she set foot in the house in June of 1991, she knew this little abode was perfect for their growing family of five. “I took one look at the backyard,” she adds, “and I knew Joe would love it. And why not? A beautiful forest began at the end of the driveway.” Despite growing up in cities — Liz in Raleigh, Joe on Cornwallis Drive in Greensboro (“Before Cone Boulevard was built!”) — the great outdoors in general, and forests in particular, beckoned the inner nature child of both Joe and Liz. According to script, fate introduced them at N.C. State in the 1970s where both were studying forestry. After marrying and working their first jobs in the forestry business down in Bertie County and Lake Waccamaw, respectively, the couple returned to Greensboro, where Joe went into business with his brother and father, and later opened his own firm specializing in fine hardwoods. “In those days, we had a small house on the north side of town with three little kids,” Liz remembers. “And not a lot of room for a growing family. We moved, basically, for the schools on the west side of town and were fortunate to find the perfect small house with lots of rooms and plenty of doors! For privacy.” “That’s important,” Joe deadpans,” in a small house.” During the summer of 1991, a real estate agent found them the modest 1,800-square-foot ranch perched on the edge of a forested ravine — four bedrooms, two baths, a living room, and cozy den with a fireplace, plus a nice eat-in kitchen. “It fit like a glove,” says Liz. “We found home.” Time and childhood have a way of passing quickly, especially for busy parThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
ents. In 2006, with the young ’uns (two girls and a boy) suddenly grown and flown, Joe added a dramatic screened porch with a cathedral ceiling to the back of the property, which quickly became the couple’s favored morning and evening spot for coffee, talk and reading. Just under a decade later, they embarked on a long-planned renovation using local builder Rob Wilcox of Design/Build Service Remodeling. “I’d been collecting designs I liked and renovation ideas from magazines and the Houzz website for a long time,” says Liz, who nevertheless hired a local designer to consult with her on how to create the ideal “forever” house for a very active couple that was nearing retirement age. “All I knew at the start was that I wanted a house, and especially a kitchen, that was open, bright and sunny — not cluttered and as serene as possible.” To accommodate this vision, the couple blew out an outside utility room to provide for a kitchen expansion that included customized white cabinetry with dramatic black soapstone counters and artful gallery lighting that adds a nice theatrical flair. A removed den wall opened up the space even more, effectively doubling the prime gathering room’s size, while creating an enhanced dining room area that flows seamlessly through the main portion of the house, giving the entire house an airy feel. “Whenever we entertain or the kids come home with friends or family, everyone congregates in the kitchen area anyway, so we decided why not open up the space,” notes Liz. “That has proved to be a very good decision. We’ve had everything from bridal parties and holidays in this room.” A cleverly reworked foyer provided a wider entryway and an expanded home office where Joe — now a forestry consultant who assembles heritage lands September 2017
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for philanthropic clients — works whenever he isn’t scouting the hills for The Conservation Fund out of Chapel Hill or for his clients. Liz, a longtime staffer at Friendly Center’s beloved Extra Ingredient, has her own home organizing area in a corner of her kitchen. Adding to the dominant woodland theme, Liz selected a Benjamin Moore painting scheme called “gray cashmere” that adds both a unifying sense of color and a subtle psychological serenity. “It’s very calming — very spa,” she says with the same coy smile as she finishes up the pizza dough and bowls of meat and veggie fixings for the pizza production about to commence out of doors in the Certified Wildlife Habitat that is their suburban backyard. Not surprisingly, Joe’s version of a home “spa” is out on the patio. Two years ago, while grilling on their frequently used patio chimney, he was inspired to take on an even more ambitious project of constructing his own wood-fired oven. “I really wanted one forever and got it in my head that I wanted to try and build my own outdoor oven for baking bread or making pizza,” he explains. Joe first researched their availability online and found that most were made in New Zealand or Australia and could set you back as much as 10 grand. He enterprisingly found a stove guru living in Asheville who took him in hand and explained how to construct a “serious” working, Old World, wood-fired oven from scratch. The process involved the elaborate layered construction of a solid platform made of wood and structural steel covered by perlite concrete, a fine silicone sand, firebricks and stucco. In a stroke of ingenuity, Joe used a 30-inch rubber exercise ball to mold the oven’s distinctive ceramic-domed ceiling, added boiler insulation, more perlite, stucco and finally a coat of white paint that makes the entire contraption look a little like Chilly Willy’s igloo.
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Joe calculates that he spent about $1,200 to build his backyard masterpiece. “But, oooh!” says fire-master Kelleher, “What it does to the taste of food!” The couple inaugurated Joe’s oven for the first time on Independence Day in 2016, delighting their neighbors and friends with fire-cooked pizzas that have quickly become — along with amazing chicken wings seasoned by Roland’s Rub, a seasoning Joe found on one of his forestry sojourns — the Kellehers’ signature backyard fare. Not surprisingly, their al fresco evenings have trebled ever since that day. “It’s taken us even more outdoors,” Liz says. “In fact, regardless of weather, we rarely come inside these days,” jokes Joe — who, indeed, keeps a remarkable little working shed nimbly tucked above the ravine where he makes furniture and fiddles with various projects, including his homemade cooking implements. One half expects to see them soon go on the shelves at the Extra Ingredient. Inside the dome, meanwhile, chunks of oak and hickory raise the cooking temperature upwards of 1,600 degrees, cooking one of Liz’s delectable pizzas in as little as two minutes — three tops if Joe opts to add “leoparding” char by holding the pizza close to the flames with a baker’s tool — one he made by hand, of course. When it comes out, the pizza is bubbling, gorgeous, striped by the flames, better than anything you’d find at a local house of pizza. “How is it?” the hosts asks his guest. “Which do you mean?” replies his guest, tucking into a wedge. “The house or the pizza?” “Whichever you prefer?” “Both are a slice of heaven,” comes the answer. OH
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For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad. — Edwin Way Teale
By Ash Alder
Soft thuds of September apples tap at the windows of ancient memories. This is how it always goes. Long before the leaves turn golden-orange-scarletpurple, we feel the subtle yet sudden arrival of fall. We can smell it in the air. Even our skin has memorized this electric instant. We open the kitchen window. Inside, chrysanthemums in mason jars and herbs in tidy bundles, hung to dry. Outside, a murmuration of swallows flashes across the whispy-clouded horizon, confirming what we already know: Autumn is here. This moment of recognition is embedded in our bones. Among the harvest — winter squash and lettuce greens — Rome Beauties call for homemade pie. Brilliant red spirals of skin fall away with each smooth crank of the apple peeler, spelling out a sacred message on the countertop. We flash back to grade school, remember twisting the stems of our lunchtime apple to see whom we might marry. Soon, the trees will be naked as the apples on the cutting block. We cut them into perfect slices, toss them in brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. Autumn’s first breeze filters through the open window — a dear, bright-eyed friend returning home with stories and souvenirs.
Harvest Season
September apples call to mind Pomona, Roman goddess and virgin wood nymph depicted as keeper of the orchards and fruit trees. The harvest she effortlessly carries in her arms reminds us of the sweet abundance of this most prolific season. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, one of the best days for harvesting this month is with the new moon on Sept. 1. The full moon
The milkweed pods are breaking, And the bits of silken down Float off upon the autumn breeze Across the meadows brown.
rises on Saturday, Sept. 16, which also happens to be International “Eat an Apple Day.” Lakota tribes associated this moon as the time when the “plums are scarlet.” For the Omaha, it rose “when the deer paw the Earth.” On Friday, Sept. 22, the sun enters Libra (the Scales) on the autumnal equinox. We look to nature and our gardens to remind us of our own need for balance and harmony. Day and night will exist for approximately the same length of time. Literally and figuratively, now is time to reap what we have sown. The Feast of the Archangels is a minor Christian festival observed on Friday, Sept. 29. Also called Michaelmas, this celebration honors the angelic warrior who protects against darkness. As autumn days grow shorter, we acknowledge the dance between lightness and dark.
Crock-Pot Apple Butter Ingredients
6 pounds apples (variety) 1 1/2 cups sugar 2 teaspoons cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
Preparation
1. Peel, core and slice apples. 2. Combine apples, sugar and spices in a Crock-Pot; cover and cook on high for one hour. 3. Remove lid, and cook on low, stirring occasionally, until apple butter reaches a spreadable consistency and is dark brown in color. Cook time will vary, depending on the types of apples you use. 4. Transfer apple butter to hot, sterilized jars. OH
— Cecil Cavendish, The Milkweed The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Marco Antio Solis 9/
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September 1 LET’S GROOVE TONIGHT! 10 p.m. Throw down to some tunes spun by DJ Jessica Mashburn at PopUp Dance Party. Print Works Bistro, 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-0699 or printworksbistro.com.
September 1–October 6
National Folk Festival 9/
8-10
Hannah’s Haven Teen Challenge Golf Tournament. Registration starts at 11 a.m. followed by a clinic with PGA TOUR veterans Fred Funk, Bob Gilder, Mike Goodes and Gene Sauers. Then at 12:30, a shotgun start with prizes and trophies to follow after the match. Greensboro Country Club, Farm Course, 5121 Hedrick Drive, Greensboro. To register: (336) 61302646 or mgoodes7@ icloud.com. Info: hannahshaven.net.
AFFAIR OF STATE (CAPITOL). Use this time wisely to buy tickets to The State Capitol Foundation’s Oyster Roast, (October 6 at 7 p.m.), featuring oysters, crab, shrimp, a silent auction and music by the Embers — and for a good cause: the preservation of the old capitol building. State Capitol grounds, 1 East Edenton St., Raleigh. Tickets and Info: (919) 733-4994 or ncstatecapitol.org.
September 1–October 15
September 1–October 9
September 1–November 5
RESERVE NOW! Though it doesn’t take place until October 9, you might want to reserve a space for the 2017
TWO IN ONE. Double your pleasure with Two Artists One Space: Renzo Ortega and Antoine Williams, who ex-
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SHINY AND NEW. See the latest and greatest pieces of art at Red-Hot and Newly Acquired: Recent Additions to the Collection. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 3345770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
Peter Fletcher Classic Guitar 9/
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plore the black identity and the immigrant experience. The exhibit kicks off on First Friday (9/1) with live music by Julia Price at 6 p.m. ArtQuest invites visitors to create their own boxes ($6 per person), similar to the painted collaged containers in Ortega’s works. GreenHill, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info (336) 333-7460 or greenhillnc.org.
September 1–February 11 NOTHIN’ BUT TIME. Or maybe not! Check out For All Time: Interpretations of the Fourth Dimension from the Collection. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 3345770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
September 2 HOME(GROWN) STRETCH. 9 a.m. Get fit at Pilates in the Garden, thanks to Mindful Bodi Movement. Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 S. Main St., Kernersville. Info: (336) 996-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Arts Calendar
Some Enchanted Evening 9/
17- 8 10/
TRANE SPOTTING. 11 a.m. Catch a screening of Chasing Trane, the first authorized documentary about jazz great with N.C. ties. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
September 2, 9 & 30 IN FOR A POUND. 10 a.m. He’s still smokin’ hot! The Blacksmith returns. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
September 2–3 LOVE TRANE. 3 p.m. Gerald Albright and Jonathan Butler, Spyro Gyra, Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo, the Gate City Divas . . . and that’s just a sampling of the talent taking the stage at the seventh John Coltrane International Jazz and Blues Festival. Oak Hollow Festival Park, 1841 Eastchester Drive, High Point. Tickets: (336) 819-5299 or coltranejazzfest.com. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Blow-Down Latin Brass 9/
22&23
All The World's A Stage 9/
28-30
September 2–December 15
September 6 & 11
THOSE WHO CAN, DO. And teach, as it happens. Catch the exhibition of recent works by the faculty of UNCG’s School of Art at 2017 UNCG Faculty Biennial. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
K-9 SQUAD. 7:30 p.m. & 6:30 p.m. While the Hoppers are away, the Sheepdogs will play! The Greensboro Police Department’s softball team, the Sheepdogs, will play its final two games of the season. Field No. 3 (on 9/6) and Field No. 4 (on 9/11), Carolyn S. Allen Softball Complex, 3610 Drawbridge Parkway, Greensboro. Info: www.facebook. com/GreensboroPolice/posts/1405673159481756
September 3 SOLIS SOLO. 7:30 p.m. Mexican singer Marco Antonio Solis croons for the crowds. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro.Info: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
September 4 WETLANDS. Noon. Catch a lunch-and-learn, “Quick Steps to a Backyard Rain Garden,” led by Wendi Hartup, stormwater manager for the town of Kernersville. Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 S. Main St., Kernersville. Info: (336) 966-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.
September 7–10 BOOKISH. Steve Cushman, John Feinstein, Alan Gurganus, Margaret Maron and Jill McCorkle are just a handful of writers who will grace the BookMarks Festival of Books and Authors. Downtown Winston-Salem. Info: bookmarksnc.org.
September 8 AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Mylène Dressler at the launch of her novel, The Last to See Me. Scuppernong September 2017
O.Henry 93
Arts Calendar September 8–10 FOLK FAREWELL. The 77th National Folk Festival winds up its last year in the Gate City. So come out for music, dancing, live performances, demonstrations, arts, crafts, food and drink — and a whole lotta fun. Downtown Greensboro. Info: nationalfolkfestival.com.
September 8–17 FAIR PLAY. Rides, sinful carnival fare, music, games . . . no wonder the Central Carolina Fair has been going strong for 119 years. Greensboro Coliseum Complex, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Tickets: ticketmaster.com.
September 9 LATINO LOVERS. 1:30 p.m. Join photographer Jose Galvez for a discussion of his photographs in the exhibit Al Norte al Norte: Latino Life in North Carolina (until 11/4), on loan from the N.C. Museum of History. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org. TIME AND AGAIN. 7p.m. As in, Morris Day and the Time, headliners for WQMG’s “Summer of ’17 Throwback Party,” with special guest Doug E. Fresh.
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F U N .
F U N K Y .
White Oak Amphitheatre, Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
September 10 LILLY-PUT. 2 p.m. Learn all about daylilies from David Dekort, hybridizer responsible for the cultivar, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” Triad Daylily Fans Garden Club, 4301 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro. Info: (336) 456-4509 or thegreensborocouncilofgardenclubs.com. FIRST-HAND HISTORY. 3 p.m. Hear eyewitness accounts of historical events at “Double V to the March on Washington: the Civil Rights Movement from the 40s to the 60s.” Benjamin Branch, Greensboro Public Library, 1530 Benjamin Parkway, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-7540. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 3 p.m. Meet novelist Heather Bell Adams, author of Maranatha Road. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
September 12 STRUM-DINGER. 6:30 p.m. Classical guitarist Peter Fletcher brings Bach, Satie and more to the strings. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
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September 14 THY QUILL BE DONE. 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Learn the Renaissance art of quilling (roping looping, cuiling and twisting strips of paper into decorative designs). Admission is $35. GreenHill, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. To reserve: (336) 333-7460 or greenhillnc.org.
September 16 HISTORY TREK. 8 a.m. Let Glenn Davis be your guide on a walking tour of the historic Washington Street district. Changing Tides Cultural Center, 613 Washington St., High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org. SECRETS OF THE DEAD. 11 a.m. Historian Phyllis Bridges resurrects stories of early African-American settlers on a guided tour. Oakwood Municipal Cemetary, 512 Steele St., High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 3 p.m. Meet Phil Cohen, author of The Jackson Project: War in the American Workplace.
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AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Emily Herring Wilson, author of The Three Graces of ValKill: Eleanor Roosevelt, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook in the Place They Made Their Own. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Arts Calendar with your
September 16 & 17 PUPPETHEADS. 7 p.m. and 3 p.m., respectively. Paperhand Puppets dramatizes the human (and animal) struggle in Wings and Feet. Carolina Theatre, 210 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
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CRIME TIME. 2 p.m. Celebrate the 30th anniversary of Sisters in Crime with cake (baked without a file inside), lemonade and access to crime, writing and publishing professionals. High Point Library 901 N. Main St., High Point. Info: murderwewrite.org. FINE AND BAND-Y. 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. Piedmont Triad Jazz Orchestra presents “100 Years of Big Bands.” Huzzuh! Carolina Theatre, 210 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
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SOME ENCHANTED EVENING. Triad Stage aims high — or rather H’ai — with Rodgers & Hammerstein’s beloved World War II–era musical, S. Pacific, in which a Midwestern nurse finds love and learns tolerance. Performance times vary. Pyrle Theater, 232 S. Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.
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HOT NUMBERS. 10 a.m. Greensboro History Museum Guild hosts “Her Steps Were Ordered,” a talk by Katherine Moore, youngest daughter of Katherine Johnson, NASA’s math genius portrayed in the book and film Hidden Figures. Greensboro History Museum, 130 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-3043 or greensborohistory.org.
September 19
Steve Lucey, M.D.
AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Nancy Haines, author of We Answered with Love: Pacifist Service in World War I. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
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THE “M” WORD. Might as well make light of “the change” that occurs in women at midlife. Menopause the Musical comes to the stage. Performance times vary. Odeon Theatre, Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
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September 21–24 STYLIN’ AND PROFILIN’. Greensboro’s own fashion scene walks the red carpet at Greensboro Fashion Week. Elm Street Center, 203 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info and Tickets: greensborofashionweek.com.
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O.Henry 95
Arts Calendar September 21
September 23
September 27
OMMM-BUDS-MEN 9 a.m. And women, too, of course. Limb-er up at Yoga in the Garden, courtesy of Mindful Bodi Movement. Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 S. Main St., Kernersville. Info: (336) 9967888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.
AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 3 p.m. Meet Sidra Owens, author of A Haven Amidst Perdition, with songs by Logie Meachum. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet author Maura Way at the launch of Another Bungalow. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
DOUGH RE MI. 6:30 p.m. Spend a little to support Greensboro’s production of The Barber of Seville next January at its fundraising gala, Go Barber! The evening includes Italian fare and libations from B. Christopher’s, a barbershop quartet, live auction, Kevin Dollar and the Minor Swing Band and headliner David Pershall, the Met baritone who will play the opera’s title character, Figaro. Center Pointe Ballroom, 201 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Tickets: greensboroopera.org.
RANGE ROVERS. 6 p.m. Gentlemen, start your ovens! More than 50 fellas turn up the sizzle for Men Can Cook, a fundraiser benefiting the Women’s Resource Center. Special Events Center, Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 275-6090 or womenscentergso.org.
September 22 BLUE-GRASS MUSIC. 6:30 p.m. Literally! This Concert on the Lawn will have you tappin’ your toes to the bluegrass tunes of Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys. Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 S. Main St., Kernersville. Tickets: (336) 996-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org. TEMPTED. 8 p.m. We heard it through the grapevine that the Temptations Revue, featuring Bo Henderson is taking the spotlight. Carolina Theatre, 210 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
September 22 & 23
September 23 & 30 A TOUCH OF CLASS(ICAL). 8 p.m. Or maybe not. Greensboro Symphony opens its season with a Tanger Outlets Masterworks concert billed as a hybrid performance of orchestral music, consisting Haydn and Mozart, among others — and film by filmmaker David Donnelly. Carolina Theatre, 210 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
September 23 & 30; October 7 A LOOK AT LATINOS. 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Watch the comprehensive documentary, Latino Americans, (two episodes over three consecutive Saturdays), tracing the 500year history of the largest minority group in the United States. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
GORE GALORE. 6 p.m. Fans of Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Chucky and Norman Bates will appreciate the Wreak Havoc Horror Festival, consisting of shorts and feature-length horror flicks. Carolina Theatre, 210 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
September 25
BLOW-DOWN. 7:30 p.m. Latin brass music is the theme for North Carolina Brass Band’s performances. Dana Auditorium, 5800 W. Friendly Ave., Greensboro (9/22) and Brendle Recital Hall, Wake Forest University, 1834 Wake Forest Road, Winston-Salem (9/23). Tickets: (336) 340-6764 or ncbb@ncbrassband.org.
September 26
AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Bryant Simon, author of The Hamlet Fire. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. WHAT’S UP, DOC? 6:30 p.m. Dr. Will Ferrell discusses his historical novel, Secrets of Sterling Shearin: The Noblest Cause, about lesser-known Founding Fathers. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
September 28 PINKEDIN. 10:30 a.m. Help raise awareness of breast cancer and honor or remember those afflicted with disease with a contribution to the ribbon wall at Pink in the Park, presented by Greensboro Imaging. LeBauer Park, 208 North Davie St., Greensboro. Info: pinkinthepark.org. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, part of the One City, One Book Project. Dana Auditorium, 4800 W. Friendly Ave., Greensboro. Info: beth.sheffiled@greensboro-nc.gov.
September 28–30 ARDOR IN ARDEN. Meaning, the Forest of Arden, the refuge for young Rosalind, who, disguised as a boy, falls in love with Orlando in William Shakespeare’s comedy, As You Like It, performed by UNCG Theatre. Performance times vary. Taylor Theatre, 406 Tate St., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 272-0160 or vpa.uncg.edu.
September 30 STARMAN. 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Author and astronomer Richard Bartlett discusses the stars and planets using a smartphone viewing app. Glenwood Library (10 a.m.), 1901 W. Florida Street and Glenn McNairy Library (3 p.m.), 4860 Lake Jeanette Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 297-5000. HEALING WORDS. 2 p.m. Hear readings from the collection of poems, Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women, part of the 100 Thousand Poets for Change Day. Central Branch, Greensboro Public Library, 219 N. Church St., Greensboro. Info: beth.sheffield@greensboro-nc.gov. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Bill Morris, former News & Record reporter and author of American
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96 O.Henry
September 2017
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O.Henry 97
Arts Calendar
Berserk: A Cub Reporter, a Small-Town Daily, the Schizo ’70s and listen to music by The Difficulties. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. KEN FOLK. 8 p.m. Singer/songwriter Michael Ken performs original tunes, plus covers of hits by The Eagles, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Johnny Cash and more at the Crown. Carolina Theatre, 210 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
WEEKLY HAPPENINGS Mondays BUZZING. 10 a.m. Your busy little bees engage in a Busy Bees preschool program focusing on music, movement, garden exploration and fun in the kitchen, at the Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 N. Church St., Greensboro. Preregistration: (336) 574-2898 or gcmuseum.com. CHAT-EAU. Noon. French leave? Au contraire! Join French Table, a conversation group. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
Tuesdays
St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7460 greenhillnc.org.
READ ALL ABOUT IT. Treat your little ones to story times: BookWorms (ages 12–24 months) meets at 10 a.m.; Time for Twos meets at 11 a.m. Storyroom; Family Storytime for all ages meets at 6:30 p.m. High Point Public Library, 901 N. Main St., High Point. Info: (336) 883-3666 or highpointpubliclibrary.com.
MUSSELS, WINE & MUSIC 7 until 10 p.m. Mussels with house-cut fries for $15, wines from $10–15 a bottle and live music by AM rOdeO — at Print Works Bistro, 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-0699 or printworksbistro.com/live_music.htm.
PINT-SIZED GARDENERS. 3:30 p.m. Instill a love of gardening and growing edible things in your kiddies at Little Sprouts (ages 3 to 5 years). Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 N. Church St., Greensboro. To register: (336) 574-2898 or gcmuseum.com. PICKIN’ AND GRINNIN’ 6 until 9 p.m. Y’all come for Songs from a Southern Kitchen, featuring Lacy Green & Friends (9/5); Graymatter (9/12); South Carolina Broadcasters (9/19); Kristy Jackson & Vicki Genfan (9/26). 1421 Westover Terrace, Greensboro. Info: (336) 370-0707 or lucky32.com/greensboro_music.htm.
Wednesdays TO MARKET, TO MARKET. 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. The produce will be fresh and the cut fleurs belles at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2402 or gsofarmersmarket.org. CREATIVE KIN. 5 to 7 p.m. Moms, dads, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins: Enjoy a free evening of artistic expression at ArtQuest. GreenHill, 200 North Davie
ONCE UPON A TIME. 2 p.m. Afterschool Storytime convenes for children of all ages. Storyroom, High Point Public Library, 901 N. Main St., High Point. Info: (336) 883-3666 or highpointpubliclibrary.com.
Thursdays TWICE UPON A TIME. 11 a.m. Preschool Storytime convenes for children ages 3–5. Storyroom, High Point Public Library, 901 N. Main St., High Point. Info: (336) 883-3666 or highpointpubliclibrary.com. ALL THAT JAZZ. 5:30 until 8 p.m. Hear live, local jazz featuring Dave Fox, Neill Clegg and Matt Kendrick and special guests: Holly Hopkins (9/7); Stephen Henson (9/14); Karon Click (9/21); Dr. John Henry (9/28). All performances are at the O.Henry Hotel Social Lobby Bar. No cover. 624 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 854-2000 or www.ohenryhotel.com/jazz.htm. JAZZ NIGHT. 7 p.m. Fresh-ground, fresh-brewed coffee is served with a side of jazz at Tate Street Coffee House, 334 Tate St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 275-2754 or www. tatestreetcoffeehouse.com.
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Please join us for fine art, wine and hors d’oeuvres while raising funds for local breast cancer patients THURSDAY | OCTOBER 5, 2017 5:30 TO 8:30 IN THE EVENING TYLER WHITE O’BRIEN GALLERY | 307 STATE STREET
Visit us online at AlightFoundation.org or call 336.832.0027 for more information.
We believe that all breast cancer patients should have the support and resources to face the challenges of their treatment journey with dignity and grace. Note: Individual event tickets also sold at the door.
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September 2017
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September 2017
O.Henry 99
Arts Calendar
the finest
Mexican food fish dishes
OPEN MIC COMEDY. 8–9:35 p.m. Local pros and amateurs take the mic at the Idiot Box, 2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro. Info: (336) 274-2699 or idiotboxers.com.
and most delicious
Fridays THE HALF OF IT. 5 p.m. Enjoy the hands-on exhibits and activities for half the cost of admission at $5 Fun Fridays ($2 on First Fridays). Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 N. Church St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 5742898 or gcmuseum.com.
in the triad
Food & Dining
Daily Specials Available
Fridays & Saturdays NIGHTMARES ON ELM STREET. 8 p.m. A 90-minute, historical, candlelit ghost walking tour of Downtown Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 905-4060 or carolinahistoryandhaunts.com/information.
Saturdays TO MARKET, TO MARKET. 7 a.m. until noon. The produce is fresh and the cut fleurs belles, and Market Music Makers series bring plenty of humming and strumming. Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville St., Greensboro. Info: gsofarmersmarket.org. THRICE UPON A TIME. 11 a.m. Hear a good yarn at Children’s Storytime. Scuppernong Books, 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
2 5 0 5 B attlegrou nd Ave G r eensb o r o N C • (336) 617-4155
JAZZ ENCORE. 6:30 p.m. Hear contemporary jazz cats, Angela Bingham (9/2); Lydia Salett Dudley (9/9); Joe Gore (9/16); and Anne-Claire Niver (9/23) and enjoy seasonal tapas at O.Henry Jazz series for Select Saturdays. O.Henry Hotel, 624 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 854-2000 or ohenryhotel.com.
Monday: 16” cheese pizza $ 8.99
Tuesday: 14” 2 topping pizza $ 10.99
IMPROV COMEDY. 10 p.m. on Saturday, plus an 8 p.m. show appropriate for the whole family. The Idiot Boxers create scenes on the spot and build upon the ideas of others, creating shows that are one-of-a-kind — at the Idiot Box, 2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro. Info: (336) 2742699 or idiotboxers.com.
Sundays HALF FOR HALF-PINTS. 1 p.m. And grown-ups, too. A $5 admission, as opposed to the usual $10, will allow you entry to exhibits and more. Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 N. Church St., Greensboro. Info: (336) 5742898 or gcmuseum.com.
Wednesday: all Draft pints $ 2.99
Thursday: 1/2 price Bottles of Wines
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September 2017
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iTalia n rea der’s CHoIC e
MISSING YOUR GRANDMA? 3 p.m. Until it’s gone, tuck into Chef Felicia’s skillet-fried chicken, and mop that cornbread in, your choice, giblet gravy or potlikker. Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen, 1421 Westover Terrace, Greensboro. Info: (336) 370-0707 or lucky32.com/fried_chicken.htm.
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Subscribe today and have this beautiful magazine delivered to your home winter, spring, summer, and fall! In State: $25 (4 issues per year) Out of State: $30 (4 issues per year) Call 336.617.0090 or email darlenecirculation@gmail.com Seasons • P.O. Box 58, Southern Pines, NC 28388 September 2017
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Practicing Commercial Real Estate by the Golden Rule Bill Strickland, CCIM Commercial Real Estate Broker/REALTOR
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We stock over 500 pair of pants
custom engraving corporate recognition giFts • tropHies • pLAQues AnD mucH more! We have a variety of special gifts and can engrave most any personal item. Stop by and see us!
2172 Lawndale Drive Lawndale Shopping Center - Rear Level
Bill’s KhaKi Ballin TROUsERs JaCK ViCTOR haRT sChaffnER MaRx BERlE MfG.
2921-D Battleground Ave. • Greensboro 1.866.482.5836 | TheHubLtd.com
102 O.Henry
September 2017
336-285-9075 mail@allaboutawards.biz
ASHMORE RARE COinS & MEtAlS Since 1987
• 30 years as a major dealer of Gold, Silver, and Coins • Most respected local dealer for appraising and buying Coin Collections, Gold, Silver, Diamond Jewelry and Sterling Flatware • Investment Gold, Silver, & Platinum Bullion
Visit us: www.ashmore.com or call 336-617-7537 5725 W. Friendly Ave. Ste 112 • Greensboro, NC 27410 Across the street from the entrance to Guilford College
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
s o U r c e
aftermarket
UPGr DeS
sUnrooFs Blind spot monitoring leather interiors BacK Up camera
We Service What We Sell & Offer Personal Attention 336-854-9222 • www.HartApplianceCenter.com
2201 Patterson Street, Greensboro, NC (2 Blocks from the Coliseum) Mon. - Fri.: 9:30am - 5:30 pm Sat. 10 am - 2 pm • Closed Sunday
F o r
heated seats BlUetooth convertiBle tops moBile video sYstems
WHERE QUALITY AND SERVICE COUNTS SINCE 1977
Business & Services
Shop LocaL for Best Prices
Y o U r
Kernersville • raleigh • asheville
8 8 8 . 2 2 0 . 8 6 7 7 | w w w.t o p s a n d t r e n d s . c o m
certified
personal property appraisals antiques, estates, insurance, property division, silver, furniture
gary d. brame c.a.g.a. 336-451-0461 gary@personalpropertyappraising.com
it’s about Communities, Families and Homes. John Joshua Wood, MA M. Gaines LeGare
NMLS# 198806 • Area Manager 5 A OAk BrAnch Drive, GreensBOrO, nc 27407
Office:336.663.0778 cell:336.213.3186 www.GatewayLoan.com/gaines-legare
Gateway Mortgage Group is a registered service mark of Gateway Mortgage Group, llc nMls 7233. Greensboro Branch: 5 A Oak Branch Drive, Greensboro, nc 27407
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Private Tutor SAT and ACT Test Preparaton; Math and English, Grades 2-12; Study Skills, ESL Instruction References available upon request
336.509.8096 johnjoshua001@yahoo.com
September 2017
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shops • service • food • farms
support locally owned businesses
This year, as part of our annual Community Table Fundraiser, Triad Local First is selling tickets for the
“Ultimate Localist Gift Basket Raffle.” ~ TheRe wILL onLy Be 200 TICkeTs soLd ~
Items in the raffle basket have a total value of over $4000 (and growing!) which include hotel stays, jewelry, gift certificates, brewery tours, distillery tastings and more!
Purchase your ticket by visiting www.triadlocalfirst.com/communitytable2017
Bringing you the latest in fashion trends for all facets of your life, whether it’s work, play, formal, casual or just plain stylin’!
Simply Meg’s Savvy Style. Purely PerSonal.
104 O.Henry
September 2017
the shops at friendly center 3334-123 w. friendly ave. greensboro, nc 27410 p: 336.272.2555 www.simplymegs.com
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Join the effort. Visit www.triadlocalfirst.com.
shops • service • food • farms
support locally owned businesses
A Life well lived. Summerfield Farms is a working farm and events venue with a focus on memorable celebrations, 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef, certified organic produce and whole-body wellness. Visit our store, The Market, 7 days a week or shop online at SummerfieldFarms.com (use code OHENRY for 10% off your first online order or mention ‘O.HENRY’ when you visit The Market and get a 10% discount!).
Furnishing stylish homes in the Triad FURNITURE, ACCESSORIES AND GIFTS. Tuesday- Saturday 10-5pm 3500 Old Battleground Rd. Suite A (336) 617-4275 • www.aubreyhomedesign.com
100% GRASS-FED BEEF
CERTIFIED ORGANIC PRODUCE
WEDDINGS & EVENTS
LUXURY LODGING
Just 20 minutes from downtown Greensboro 3203 PLEASANT RIDGE RD • SUMMERFIELD, NC • 336.792.5712 • SUMMERFIELDFARMS.COM
M A R K E T H O U R S : M O N D AY– S AT U R D AY: 9 A M –7 P M , S U N D AY: 1 – 5 P M
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
Join the effort. Visit www.triadlocalfirst.com.
O.Henry 105
shops • service • food • farms
support locally owned businesses
HanD cRaftED, cuStOm WOOD itEmS
RED DOG WOODWORKS - Bill HiER
Summerfield, N.C. 27358 | 267-566-4574 www.reddogwoodwork.com | reddogwoodwork@gmail.com etsy.com/shop/reddogwoodwork | pinterest.com/reddogwoodwork facebook.com/reddogwoodwork | instagram.com/reddogwoodwork
o ur c u Sto m e r S a r e yo u n G a n d t he yo u n G at h ea r t. t h e y a r e t he c laSS i c a mer i c a n b e au t y o r th o S e lo o k i n G fo r th re a dS t hat a r e un i q u e ly o n t r e n d.
Sometimes it’s smarter to lease than to sell your home. Call us when you think you’re there! Michelle will be pleased to discuss how Burkely Rental Homes can help you. -Sterling Kelly, CEO Burkely Communities
boutique boutique 809 G reen Va lley road Sui te 101
106 O.Henry
| 336-944-5335
T u es- F r i • 1 0 - 6 | saT • 1 0 -3
September 2017
Join the effort. Visit www.triadlocalfirst.com.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
shops • service • food • farms
support locally owned businesses
Thank You for Voting us BesT PharmacY Winner in the Battle for Guilford’s Best
8 0 3 - C F r i e n d ly C e n t e r r d . G r e e n s b o r o , n C
336.292.6888 • gatecitypharmacy.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
Join the effort. Visit www.triadlocalfirst.com.
O.Henry 107
Arts & Culture
Art
in the
ARBORETUM Juried Art & Fine Craft
SU NDAY, OCTOBER 1 st 12-5 PM GREENSBORO ARBORETUM
401 ASHLAND DRIVE . GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA
50 Artists 3 Stages 2 Food Courts Art Bark Butterfly Exhibit Garden Center Exhibits Beekeeping Exhibit Garden Quest Garden Popup Free Admission
GreensboroBeautiful.org
GREENSBORO
336.373.2199
This event is made possible by Greensboro Beautiful with support from the City of Greensboro, 88.5 WFDD, and private donations from the community.
Triad Stage invites you to be part of its most ambitious production to date.
SEPT. 17 - OCT. 15, 2017 Triad Stage, in partnership with UNC Greensboro, brings to life one of Broadway’s most iconic musicals. The world is at war, and on an island in the South Pacific the U.S. has created a military stopover for young men on their way to the front lines of battle. But love is also in the air. Emotions run high as a Midwestern nurse and a young lieutenant each navigate the treacherous waters of unfamiliar cultures and new romances. Winner of the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific will sweep you away with the delightful cast of characters and unforgettable songs like “Bali Ha’i,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” and “Younger Than Springtime.”
presented by
in partnership with
BUY TICKETS TODAY! 232 SOUTH ELM STREET | GREENSBORO | 336.272.0160 | TRIADSTAGE.ORG
Triad Stage - SP- OHenry.indd 1
108 O.Henry
September 2017
8/14/2017 9:24:37 AM
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
BOOK premiere
FRIDAY SeptembeR 8 5:30-8:30 pm
Original illustrations and pottery by Leanne Pizio will be on display and for sale. A reading will be given by Katy Torney at 7:00 PM.
THE 18 & 20 2017 SON SEA
Summer Brooke & The Mountain Faith Band with Emi Sunshine
Sunday, September 24, 2017 - 7:00 PM
The best in old-school Appalachian, Americana-Root, Bluegrass & Country music.
Classic R&R, Latin, Southern Hip Hop and Muscle Shoals Era “Gulf Coast Soul” soundings.
Friday, September 22, 2017 - 8:00 PM
Saturday, November 4, 2017 - 8:00 PM
SAtURDAY, SeptembeR 9
Join Inca the llama herself at the first reading held at 11:30 AM. A second reading will be held at 12:30 PM. All ages are welcome.
IrvIng Park art & Frame
2105-A West Cornwallis Drive • Greensboro, NC | 336.274.6717
Masters of the Mind
featuring Guy Bavli & Friends Saturday, November 11, 2017 - 8:00 PM
A gleeful gumbo of “red hot mojo music” reflecting Louisiana CajunCreole traditions. Telekinesis, predictions and mind-reading injected with elements of humor and intrigue.
Arts & Culture
Mojo and The Bayou Gypsies
book signing
The Suffers
For Tickets, call 336-887-3001 or visit HighPointTheatre.com Acts and dates subject to change. For the latest news, go to HighPointTheatre.com
SArAH’S
Long run By DaviD BuRl MoRRis
The story of the longest solo run in history according to Guinness Book of World Records. High Point resident, Sarah Fulcher’s Inspiring story is available on Amazon and at:
Scuppernong Books BOOKS • WINE • COMMUNIT Y 304 S. Elm St. • Greensboro, NC • 27401 scuppernongbooks.com | 336.763.1919
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
O.Henry 109
Arts & Culture 110 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Arts & Culture
C.P. LOGAN
Classes, Commissions, Party Classes French Flower Market • 24”x30” • original oil • connie P. logan
online Classes
www. CPLogan.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
O.Henry 111
Irving Park
4 reAsons to shop At Clothing, Accessories
Gifts & More!
1804 Pembroke Rd. • Greensboro, NC 27408 (Behind Irving Park Plaza) • 336.763.7908 Tues. - Fri. 11-6pm & Sat. 11-4pm www.facebook.com/Serendipity by Celeste
blooms + bows
ALL YEAR
www.polliwogs.com 336.275.1555 1724 Battleground Ave. Suite 104 Greensboro, NC 27408
112 O.Henry
September 2017
lAdIeS ClothING, GIftS, BABy, jewelry, GIftS for the home, tABlewAre, delICIouS food
1738 Battleground Ave • Irving Park Plaza Shopping Center • Greensboro, NC • (336) 273-3566
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
GreenScene
Beth Mannella, Grace Winberry
Anita Graham, Ashley Walker
Opportunity Greensboro Fellows Program Welcome Reception Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Photographs by Lynn Donovan Andy Lamb, Marin Burton, Monique Steele, Meliza Abdallah
Ashlyn Markosky, Arielle Watkins
Peter Pappas, Julia Brown Chris Wilson, Terrence Johnson
Jada Cooper, Donna Newton, Pat Soenksen, Jana Barrett, Ashley Walker Nicholas Dasnoit, Chad Watson, Maria Perdomo, Alyx Bean, Ian Pomeroy
Zack Matheny, Daniela Hernandez, Jim Melvin Caryn Atwater, Jada Cooper, Spencer Lindsay, Pamela Basheer
Todd Gaines, John Brandberg
Neisha Washington, Nicole Galante, Tom Brinkley
Xxxxxxxx
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
O.Henry 113
GreenScene
Luca Call, Ashley McKovich
UNCG presents Spartan Cinema LeBauer Park Beauty and the Beast Friday, July 21, 2017
Photographs by Lynn Donovan
Katheryn Henry, Kristina Ibaira Erin Morrison, Mike Mayfield
Matthew, Vincent, Katherine & Tania Cerna
Devin & Heather McKinney Gianella Solis, George Cabrera, Angela Gueriero, Samantha Alonso
Amy Crawford, Jade Lewis, Tyra Lewis, Stephanie Macfoy
Rick Hannon, Kate McKenzie Dean & Angela Hawks
Sergio, Jessica & Humberto Trevino
Charles Green, Taylor Duff
Victoria, Kelly, Kelsey & Victory Littlejohn
114 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
GreenScene
Clare O’Connor, Hunter Bledsoe
Kate Frid, Isabella McNeil
Shakespeare in the Park — The Tempest
Guilford County Schools/The Drama Center Friday, July 28, 2017 Photographs by Lynn Donovan
Glenn Weyler Erin Wolf-Goldstein & Joel Goldstein
Karin Powell, Bill Pirkey, Alyssa Pirkey Savannah Ettinger, Raven Thompson
Abby Wilson, Olivann Shropshire
Miranda Shropshire-Smith, Eleanor & Nathan Smith
Libby Frid, Sarah Martinez, Sakia Lindsay, Drew McGinniss
Jacob, Traci, Grace & Noah McGinniss
Jemma Swain, Jennifer Williamson, Jason Swain
Juhee Park, Lia Man
Jenni Pirkey, Rosina Whitfield
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2017
O.Henry 115
Miracle Mountcastle, Kristyan Boston, Madison Mountcastle
GreenScene
Kristi Wilson, Margaret Benjamin
LeBauer Park One Year Birthday Bash LeBauer Park, Greensboro, NC Tuesday, August 8, 2017 Photographs by Lynn Donovan
Arthur Kinney, T.J. Johnson
Nasiyah Wallace, Nancy Tabron, Jaheim Morgan
Clara & Clark Outling
David, Virginia, Anna & Teresa Crowe
Annalee & Lily Sorsenginh, Michelle Bustos, Alejandra Maquez
Nancy Hoffmann, Nancy Vaughan, Marikay Abuzuaiter
Denise & Mark Schrauben
Walker Sanders, Justin Outling
Will, Matthew & Leah Dolen
116 O.Henry
September 2017
Kendrick Gilbert, Jackie Austin
Justin Washington, Ashley Wigglesworth
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
1007 Bl anton Pl ace
6 o a k G l e n c t.
One of the best! Cul-de-sac location. Terrific floor plan. Stainless steel appliances, vaulted ceiling, beautiful moldings & details. Master Bedroom on main level plus 3 Bedrooms & Bonus Room. 2-car garage. Recently painted & looks terrific!
Stunning 2-story Transitional home with 5 BR, 5.5 BA. Master BR on main level with bath updated in 2013. 2-story Great Room with skylights. Gorgeous back yard with stream, pond & gardens. 3-car garage. Lots of storage. Priced to sell.
Chesnutt - Tisdale Team Xan Tisdale 336-601-2337
2700 lake Forest Dr.
3 e l m r i D G e c t.
Classic brick Georgian home located on Buffalo Lake. Custom built in custom details throughout. 5 Bedrooms (one on main level,three on 2nd level and one on lower level). In-law suite on lower level. Lots of closets and storage areas. Large, lake view lot.
This wonderful Country French style home is alive with contrasts. Formal, yet comfortable and refined. The art of living well is evident in this enchanting spot with cul-de-sac location and secluded gardens and pond. Master on main level.
MeRiditH MaRtens state of the ART • north carolina
Kay Chesnutt 336-202-9687
Xan.Tisdale@bhhsyostandlittle.com Kay.Chesnutt@bhhsyostandlittle.com ©2017 BHH Affiliates, LLC. An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of America, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.
Happy
& HEaLTHy IS OUR BUSINESS
Reproductions from Original Oil Paintings High Quality Paper or Metal Plates Sizes range 16x20 up to 40x60 • Prices start at $270
www.meridithmartens.com MeridithMartens.Artist • 910.692.9448
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
1052 Grecade St. • GreenSboro, nc 27408 Conveniently located in Midtown
dr. Janine oliver dr. Katelyn cobb
336.897.1505
www.BAHpetcare.com
September 2017
O.Henry 117
501 State Street Greensboro, NC 27205 336.274.4533 YamamoriLtd.com
10:00-5:30 Monday-Friday Saturday 10:00 - 3:00 and by Appointment
Unique Shoes! Beautiful Clothes!! Artisan Jewelry!!! Shoes Sizes 6 - 11 • Clothes Sizes S - XXL
Bedstu Gretchen Scott Lior Paris Latico Leather Jolibel Think! & More
507 State Street, Greensboro NC 27405 336-275-7645 • Mon - Sat 11am - 6pm www.LilloBella.com
118 O.Henry
September 2017
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Accidental Astrologer
Sweet September Friends in need are friends indeed
By Astrid Stellanova
Virgo, close your eyes and think of Mars! You’re not a Martian, but
this is where your energy lies. Known as good communicators, you are attracted to professions that demand a stage. Fellow Virgos include Kobe Bryant, Charlie Sheen, Mother Teresa, Sean Connery, Richard Gere, Pippa Middleton, and Lance Armstrong. Shew-we, Baby Doll, you know how to make entrances and exits, and sure look just as good going as coming! — Ad Astra, Astrid
Virgo (August 23–September 22) Thoughtful and sincere you are, and that is your calling card, Sugar. You care about your fellow man and we know it. Friendships are golden, and this year makes that clear to all closest to you. You and your inner circle are about as tight as bark on a tree or a tick on a hound dog. This makes your life a whole lot sweeter, and the world an itty bit better knowing you are in it. Now, be alert to a communication. It will need your attention and will pay off to boot. Libra (September 23–October 22) What happened wasn’t fair, and you knew it, but life has offered some very sweet compensations for your troubles. The stars look a whole lot better this month, and an even better opportunity pops up on the horizon. That person that causes you grief? About the only thing you share is you both breathe air, Baby. Scorpio (October 23–November 21) Aw, c’mon. You didn’t orchestrate world peace, but then, you didn’t fire a missile at North Korea. Here’s what you can do in your own little corner of the world. Turn off the telly and take a walk. Leave the office. Bay at the moon if you wanna. But don’t treat the checkout line at Harris Teeter like it’s the suicide prevention line. Sagittarius (November 22–December 21) You’ve been looking like you lost your platoon, but Sugar, you might need to know this little tidbit: You at least have a clue where you are going. Those around you don’t. Stop following the lost and take back control; you have some valuable intel and plenty of people who would give you a helping hand. Capricorn (December 22–January 19) Your give-a-damn meter is broken, Darling. Everybody is cracking up, watching you square your shoulders and standing up for yourself. About time, they are saying to themselves. Before you tangle with the boss/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/manager of 7-Eleven step back and get a grip. You’ve made your point. Aquarius (January 20–February 18) As things are slowly being revealed, you keep your peace and watch it play out. You think you are completely subtle, but Sugar Pie, you’ve been giving them catfish eyes and everybody noticed. Until the game is over, wear shades. Meantime, an investment in something you know a good bit about is worth a closer look.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Pisces (February 19–March 20) A bestie has risen up in life, and they act like they think they’re the manager at Jo-Ann Fabrics. Indulge them a little. They need your kind words because what you say and think matters more to them than anything. Meanwhile, be mindful of your health and check your craving for Blue Bell ice cream. Aries (March 21–April 19) Summer has taken the air out of your sail, and you’re feeling it. By the time you settle yourself down in a chair and take a rare break and a deep breath, it’s a lot like Zeus sucking the oxygen out of the room. Honey, you have no clue that your idle is a lot of folks’s high gear. Read a book; take a nap. Give us a break, why dontcha? Taurus (April 20–May 20) You’ve ignored mending fences because you just cannot admit to your stubborn self that you had a role in the breakdown. Now you gotta choose: Would you rather be happy, or would you rather be right? This ain’t Dr. Phil talking; we all know you don’t need this person like they need you. So go for the high road. Gemini (May 21–June 20) Just when you thought your achy breaky heart was done for, good fortune smiled. It’s like that for you; you take to your bed, moping and moaning, and then the sun shines again. Honey, you are going to like the astral forecast because you get lucky on so many levels it ain’t even real. The odds break in your favor. Cancer (June 21–July 22) You’ve got a concealed weapon that has a whole lot of power: your never-fail charm. It’s often concealed because you know that you could rely upon it too much and be less authentic, but you are better than that. There’s a sneaking suspicion building up that you are more intuitive than you knew. Leo (July 23–August 22) Here’s a snapshot: you get up from a nap, roar a little, then fall back onto the sofa. Snap outta this cycle, you lazy feline. Time to move out and do your own hunting. The object of your considerable desire is prone to change, so focus, Sugar, focus. By feeding time, you will have the meal you deserve. OH
For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path. September 2017
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O.Henry Ending
Friday Night Lights
By Lynne Brandon
My first memory of my father was
walking alongside him on a sidewalk, my toddler-sized hand hidden in the clutch of his man-sized grip. Grey Boyles, aka “The Coach,” was a towering (6-foot-4), big-boned man with long sideburns and close-shaved hair. He liked good cigars, outlaw country music (Willie Nelson/Waylon Jennings), family and sports. But, not in that order.
A tender-hearted soul, Dad had returned from the Korean War bearing invisible but lifelong scars (a dislike for flying and Asian food were the only outward indications of them). He met my mother in the little town of Mount Airy, N.C., and it was love at first sight. They married at the tender ages of 19 and 21. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, Dad earned a B.S. in history from Appalachian State Teachers College and, soon after, began his life’s work teaching World History to high school students and coaching sports, namely, football. In 1965, Dad’s career took us from Sparta, N.C., where he and Mom had settled, to Florida. It was a bold move, uprooting the family, but Dad was prime for adventure. And in his new surroundings, he got it. The late ’60s were a time of racial flare-ups and knives flashing in the air at Seminole High School, but Dad would step in with a few calm words and a steady, cool presence to diffuse any conflict. He loved young people and they loved him back. He never saw color, race or shaggy hair. (He let male athletes play with long hair when other coaches would not.) He only saw the person and asked for one thing — that athletes give their best. Winning was great but he cared more about the effort, and as long as the person tried, he was OK with the result. Dad coached every sport imaginable, including swimming and golf, but his consuming passion was football. He mentored football players who went on to play in college championships. He is featured in the book about Bear Bryant as the charismatic coach from Sparta who had a kid he wanted Bryant to see. In a move that didn’t make sense to the Alabama coaching staff, Bryant signed on the unknown athlete (without meeting him) who went on to help the team win several championships—all because of my father’s persistence and belief in Jerry Duncan. As for his own children? My sisters and I had an idyllic childhood. We would spend weekends at New Smyrna Beach, stopping at Frozen Gold Ice Cream Shoppe on the way home. Dad would swim in the ocean and drive us home in the family Buick while eating his strawberry cone. He also passed
120 O.Henry
September 2017
on a lifelong love of books and reading. My sister and I would eagerly await Saturdays when he took us to the library and we all piled up books to bring home. On Sundays, he took us to church where he taught Sunday School. Pretty conventional stuff for a rebel of sorts. Living up to his mantra, “Be your own person,” Dad bucked his Southern Baptist, Republican upbringing to become a card-carrying Democrat and Presbyterian. Men liked his funloving and irreverent personality, much like Burt Reynolds’s character from Smokey and the Bandit. Women openly flirted with him. But what he loved was climbing onto his red 1959 Ford tractor, wearing his overalls and smoking a cigar, as he plowed rows for the family garden. Or frequenting the golf courses with his coaching buddies. (On one occasion that involved moonshine and golf carts, he had to call on Mom to bring him home). Dad loved his dogs, his favorite being a Great Pyrenees-black Lab mix named Brutus, who’d seen my father through a minor stroke and was once stolen off the back of Dad’s truck. All it took was for Dad to walk through the woods with a shotgun to retrieve his beloved hound. By then we had moved back to N.C. to Pilot Mountain, because Dad’s parents were ailing. He turned down an offer to coach at Clemson University — a job he really wanted — to teach at his alma mater, East Surry High School. During football season, Friday nights were spent at home dissecting the game with my mother until “The Coach” got home. I remember once when his team was penalized for rushing onto the field; he didn’t like the official’s call. Dad was ultracompetitive and dedicated to the game. Decades after he retired, the Mount Airy newspaper called him the “Godfather of football.” His big heart weakened as he aged. Getting a pacemaker was a production with Dad. He asked the doctors to play the soundtrack from O Brother, Where Art Thou? during surgery, and they happily complied. We took walks, as long as he could, down country roads, and talked about life and hard times when I went through a divorce. We talked of many things on those paved and graveled roads. Over time Dad’s words have faded, but the memory of his presence has not. My father was a king until the end, when his heart got tired of working at the age of 82. Nurses fell in love with his gentle spirit and larger-than-life personality even as he grew quieter. “The Coach” spent his last month at home, where he was surrounded by the woman he’d loved for 57 years and three daughters who adored him. At his funeral, former students and athletes cried as they spoke about his influence on their lives. Fiddle players played his favorite “Orange Blossom Trail.” He was a father for all seasons and the first man I ever loved. He will never be replaced. OH Lynne Brandon is a freelance journalist with a bent for all things Southern. She writes about culture, the food and beverage scene and travel for national and international publications from her base in Greensboro. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY BLAIR
Traveling the road of life with “The Coach”
THE UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA
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