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“

— Mike Cavanaugh, Shop Manager

July 2024

MODERN DENTISTRY

Volume 14, No. 7

“I have a fancy that every city has a voice.” www.ohenrymag.com

PUBLISHER

David Woronoff david@thepilot.com

Andie Rose, Creative Director andiesouthernpines@gmail.com

Cassie Bustamante, Editor cassie@ohenrymag.com

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Miranda Glyder, Graphic Designer

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Cynthia Adams, David Claude Bailey, Maria Johnson

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Lynn Donovan, Amy Freeman, John Gessner, Bert VanderVeen, Mark Wagoner CONTRIBUTORS

Harry Blair, Anne Blythe, Susan Campbell, Jasmine Comer, Marianne Gingher, Ross Howell Jr., Billy Ingram, Gerry O’Neill, Liza Roberts, Stephen E. Smith, Zora Stellanova, Ashley Walshe, Amberly Glitz Weber

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In memoriam Frank Daniels Jr.

© Copyright 2024. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. O.Henry Magazine is published by The Pilot LLC

Outfoxed

A tale of rescue

By Cassie Bustama Nte

Before we had kids, I’d stop for any stray dog I saw. Once, with a friend, I rescued a fleacovered female dog who’d clearly had puppies and been left to fend for herself in a field. That dog, Gracie, went on to become my friend’s most loyal pal, seeing her through moves and devastating breakups. The last time I brought home a stray dog, my husband, Chris, looked out the window at the unfamiliar animal, then pointedly at me, my pregnant belly carrying our first child protruding, and said, “You’ve got to stop bringing home strays.”

And while I did, I still do what I can when I see an animal, especially a domestic one that’s possibly someone’s beloved pet, in need.

So one Sunday morning in June, the spring sun already shining through the green grass, turning its blades a glowing shade of chartreuse, I’m out for a leisurely stroll with my two rescue dogs, Catcher and Snowball. The neighborhood is quiet outside, but the smell of bacon wafts through the air. Almost home, where my own breakfast and French press await, I spy something unusual.

In the front yard of a stately brick house in Wedgewood, a neighborhood that runs adjacent to my own, Starmount Forest, an orange fox, shoulders hunched, and a fluffy black cat are having a standoff. The fox bares its teeth and stares, eyes narrowed, at the feline, whose back is arched.

I watch as they continue to hold eye contact. This is someone’s beloved pet, I think. My wild imagination takes off and I picture a family with small children, dressed in their Sunday best on their way to church, opening their front door to find their precious kitty mangled and left for dead.

My thoughts break when suddenly the cat lunges for the fox. For a moment my worries subside. I should’ve known a cat would be able to fend for itself. After all, are they not domesticated relatives of the king of the jungle, the lion?

The fox backs far enough off that the cat turns to walk away victoriously. And that’s when the fox makes his move. But he isn’t the only one to make a move.

“Hey!” I shout from about 40 feet away. “Leave the cat alone!” As if the fox, is going to say, “Oh, sorry! Right, I don’t know what I was thinking. Toodles.” Instead, the fox shifts its head in the direction of me and my entourage of dogs. Uh-oh.

And yes, I should’ve thought, This animal is a rabid beast — just get you and your dogs home safely. But, nope, I couldn’t get the image of a heartbroken family mourning their beloved cat out of my mind.

My dogs, who’ve been by my side, watching all of this unfold, peer up at me with worried eyes as I yank their leashes and hustle-walk toward home, still a quarter of a mile away.

I pick up my pace, the sound of my sneakers slapping the pavement almost matching my racing heart. Glancing over my shoulder, I keep an eye on the fox’s proximity. He seems cocky but intent, skulking behind us in a quick, yet not rushed, trot. All he has to do is sprint and we’ll become his Sunday breakfast.

Just then, a white pickup truck appears around the bend in the road. Oh, thank God! I think. But the truck passes me. However, when I look behind me, I see that the driver has parked between me and the fox, creating a literal roadblock for the wild animal.

This time, I don’t stick around to see what happens next. Catcher, Snowball and I take our chance to hightail it home to safety. To my hero on a white horse — or, rather, in a white armored pickup truck — whoever you are and wherever you are, thank you. Sometimes, as it turns out, the rescuer needs a bit of rescuing, too. OH

Cassie Bustamante is editor of O.Henry magazine.

Celebrating 50 WILD YEARS!

Create cherished memories as the World’s Largest Natural Habitat Zoo celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2024! Engage in family-friendly activities, explore fun challenges, and discover the magic as you journey through time and nature! Don't forget to stop by Watani Grasslands and wish C’sar a happy birthday—he turns 50 this July, too! Your visit to the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro is an adventure that helps save wildlife and wild places.

The Belle of Star City

May her light shine on

colorful character. I call her the

It’s a warm July morning in 1964. We are driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains to Roanoke, where I am to be dropped off at Great Aunt Lily’s apartment for the weekend before my parents take my brother, Dickie, on to church camp, then head to a newspaper convention in Hot

He explains that Lily is my grandfather’s beloved youngest sister, a strong-willed beauty who spurned several suitors in rural Carolina before fleeing to Washington, D.C. There, she worked for years as a stage actress and theatrical seamstress.

“I suppose she was something of the family’s black sheep, but a

Though I fear I’m simply being dumped for the weekend on a boring maiden aunt, my old man turns out to be right.

Lily lives alone in a gloomy Victorian brownstone on Roanoke’s First Street, in an apartment filled with dusty antiques and Civil War memorabilia, including a Confederate cavalry officer’s sword she claims belonged to a Dodson ancestor who fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. There are also exotic paintings of classical nudes and wild beasts adorning her walls, including the stuffed head of an antelope, a gift from her “favorite gentleman friend” who passes through town every winter with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum &

On my first night with her, Lily — a large-boned, blonde woman, endlessly talkative, swimming in White Shoulders perfume — takes me via taxi to a Chinese restaurant in the Market District, where we dine with a snowy-haired “gentleman friend” she says was once mayor. He talks about the recent Kennedy assassination and makes a half-dollar coin appear from my ears, pointing out that Roanoke

The next morning, Lily takes me to breakfast at The Roanoker

Restaurant, a legendary diner where she knows everyone by first name. After that, we are taxied up Mill Mountain to have a close look at the famous Roanoke Star. The cab driver, Ernie, is a Black gentleman with a gold tooth and quick smile. Lily explains that Ernie is a true “Renaissance man,” a parttime preacher, former Navy cook, full-time house painter and her “dearest gentleman friend in the world.” Reverend Ernie is also her “business partner,” who occasionally drives her to estate sales and auctions to buy artwork and antiques, which Ernie sells to collectors, splitting the profits with her. The Confederate cavalry sword is one of their recent “finds,” which she hints might someday pass my way. This thought thrills me.

On the Sunday morning of my visit, we attend a small redbrick church to hear Reverend Ernie preach, followed by lunch at the historic Hotel Roanoke, the planned pick-up spot with my folks. Naturally, Lily knows the waiter, who brings me something called a “Roy Rogers” and her a small crystal glass. After we order our lunch, Lily discreetly removes a silver flask from her purse and pours herself a bit of ruby sherry.

She looks at me and asks if I’d like a taste.

I say yes.

She asks how old I am.

Twelve, I lie, giving myself an extra year.

She slides the glass across the table.

“Just a small sip, dear.”

During the two-hour drive home through the mountains, my folks are eager to hear about my weekend with the Belle of Star City. I tell them about her gentlemen friends and the interesting places she took me, and even mention the Confederate cavalry sword she promises to give me someday.

My dad glances at my mom. “I told you she’s a colorful character,” he says. “Glad you enjoyed her. But here’s the thing . . . ”

He reveals that Great Aunt Lily is about to lose her home and move to Raleigh into a special-care home due to what we now call Alzheimer’s. Lily is scheduled to move around Christmastime.

“In the meantime, sport, she’s coming to stay with us around Thanksgiving.”

My mother chimes in, “And since your bedroom is the bigger bedroom, sweetie, we’re hoping you won’t mind giving it up to Aunt Lily. You can bunk with your brother. It’ll just be temporary.”

Four months later, Lily arrives with a large wooden trunk and her sewing machine in tow. On the plus side, she tells me stories about famous men she’s known — the actor David Niven, golfer Sam Snead, Will Rogers. Even better, she keeps boxes of Lorna Doone cookies hidden under bolts of fancy cloth in her trunk, which she shares with me. One afternoon as we are having our daily cookie conversation, I ask about the sword. Lily gives me a blank look, then waves her cookie dismissively. “Oh, goodness, child! I gave that silly old thing to the church auction ages ago. I think I paid 10 dollars for it at a yard sale up in Fincastle.”

Predictably, as Christmas Eve approaches, my clean-freak mother begins to lose her mind over our private cookie sessions. My father says all Aunt Lily needs is a good hobby. So, he sets up her sewing machine and she goes to work behind closed doors with her machine humming for days.

It turns out to be quilted, floral potholders. Two dozen quilted, floral potholders.

“Lily thinks you can sell them in the neighborhood for Christmas money,” says my dad.

I am mortified. Two pals from my Pet Dairy baseball team live on our block, and so does one Della Jane Hockaday, who I hope to

give a mood ring.

“Look, sport,” my old man reasons, “Aunt Lily is here for only a couple more weeks. Just let her see you go down the block selling them. You’ll make an old lady who has just lost her home very happy. Lily is very fond of you.”

So, I grit my teeth and do it early on a frosty Saturday morning a week before Christmas. To my surprise, I sell a half-dozen five-dollar potholders and make thirty bucks. Years later, my mom lets slip that she’d phoned every woman on the street to grease the skids, including Della’s mom. The next morning before church, my dad and I drive the remaining potholders to the drop-off box of the Salvation Army store.

He gives me an extra 20 for my trouble and insists that I tell Lily, if she asks, that her beautiful potholders sold out in just one morning.

But Lily never asks. Not long after the New Year, my dad drives his aunt and her big wooden trunk and sewing machine to the special-care home.

I get my bedroom back and never see Great Aunt Lily again. She passes away in the springtime two years later.

Every time I drive through Roanoke or eat Lorna Doone cook ies, I think of her with a smile.

Jim Dodson is the founding editor of

SAZERAC

"A spirited forum of Gate City food, drink, history, art, events, rumors and eccentrics worthy of our famous namesake"

What’s Cooking?

It’s been 35 years since entrepreneur Morris Reaves launched his revolutionary drive-through restaurant concept, opening the very first Cook Out on Randleman Road, where the aroma of fresh grilled burgers still bellows from the chimney.

Reaves got his start in the restaurant business as a shortorder cook for Waffle House before becoming the youngest Wendy’s franchisee at the age of 20. In the 1970s, to obtain that franchise, Reaves appealed directly to Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas. Initially hesitant, Thomas remembered that, as a young man two decades earlier, Col. Harland Sanders had taken him under his wing (pun intended), granting him the Kentucky Fried Chicken lease that jumpstarted his career. (Among many other innovations he came up with, it was Thomas who convinced the Colonel to appear in KFC’s commercials.)

While he cooked up that original Cook Out concept in his home state of Florida, Reaves chose our fair city for the rollout in 1989. With expansion into 10 Southern states since then, 117 locations in North Carolina alone, you could cruise up to a different Cook Out menu board every day for a year and still not visit them all.

How does Cook Out compare with another beloved regional chain, the West Coast’s In-N-Out Burger? No contest. Because burgers and hot dogs aren’t the only lure. Cook Out not only has the best barbecue sandwich for my money, it’s also famous for offering N.C.’s own Cheerwine — on tap in states where the beverage isn’t distributed — along with something like 40 flavors of milkshakes including cappuccino, hot fudge, blueberry cheesecake, watermelon (in July and August only) and, had he lived to enjoy

it, a Peanut Butter Banana shake that would surely have enticed Elvis to the nearest location. Morris Reaves and his son Jeremy, who serves as current CEO of Cook Out, are reportedly deeply spiritual Christians, so much so that every beverage cup comes imprinted with a Bible verse.

For such a sprawling enterprise, Cook Out is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to press and publicity. Neither father nor son has ever granted even a cursory interview, nor does the company employ a spokesperson. The marketing department declines to answer the phone or return calls.

What’s next for the restaurant chain? We hope you’re sitting down for this: indoor seating, apparently. There’s already a Cook Out dining room in Kernersville and, rumor has it, the former Mrs. Winner’s on Summit Avenue will be our city’s first sit-down site.

— Billy Ingram

Strike a Paws: Pet Photo Contest

Does your cat’s expression say, “Mr. DeMeow, I’m ready for my claws-up?” Perhaps your Fido is especially photogenic. Or your Beta is fishing for its moment to shine. Whatever feathered, finned, furry — or even hairless — pet you call yours, take your best shot! From now through July 22, you can upload a photo of your beloved critter to our website’s contest page. Voting will open on July 16. But that’s only half the fun. Pet-loving O.Henry readers will be invited to vote on the finest photo, so make sure you beg friends and family to cast their ballots! The winner will fetch a $100 gift card from our contest sponsor, All Pets Considered; plus their photo will appear in our September issue. We’ll be printing several contenders as well, so — who knows? — your pet could be on their way to Sunset Boulevard after all. Visit ohenrymag.com/contests for details and to enter.

Unsolicited Advice

Backyard barbecue season is upon us and Dad’s raring to put some cheeseburgers on that new grill he just got for Father’s Day, along with his “This Guy Lights Our Fire” apron. But your daughter just announced she’s vegan and your son is lactose intolerant, so how about tossin’ some non-carnivorous alternatives to tube steak  and juicy burgers? We’ve got some ideas that are sure to sizzle.

You heard it here in May from our resident Sage Gardener. Cabbage is having a moment. Cut it into slices, brush on EVOO and sprinkle it with seasonings. Might we recommend Montreal Steak Seasoning? It’s like lipstick on a pig, minus the pork. Note: discriminating vegetarians say, “All cabbages are not created equal. The freshest heads feel heavy and are compact for their size.”

Window to the Past

Wheres my TV dinner?

A portobello mushroom cap fits perfectly inside a hamburger bun. Coincidence? We think not. And will it fill your porto-belly? We also think not. Unless that cap is stuffed with, say, plant-based sausage.

Looking for something you can put your satisfying, blackened grill mark on? Tofu. Its rubbery quality will simulate that overcooked steak Dad’s famous for. And the “hot” trend is to freeze it before grilling it? Cool, eh?

Lastly, grill your kids (but not in the way Jonathan Swift recommended). You’ve got questions. They’ve got answers they’re probably not as readily willing to share as they are to pass you that plate of charred cabbage.

PHOTOGRAPHS © CAROL W. MARTIN/GREENSBORO HISTORY MUSEUM COLLECTION

Sage Gardener

Best-selling American novelist Belva Plain once said, “Danger hides in beauty” — as in poinsettias, lenten roses, bleeding heart, larkspur and lantana — all stunningly beautiful and all poison. And whoever said, “If danger comes from anywhere, then your eyes must look everywhere,” surely had a house full of children, pets — and plenty of plants.

C’mon. You’ve heard it before, but here’s a friendly reminder in this, our issue focusing on pets: Even an itty-bitty amount of an ingested lily plant — any part, the stem, flower, leaf — can trash a kitty’s kidney. Your furry friend munching on one or two sago palm seeds can suffer vomiting, seizures and liver failure. Azaleas and rhododendrons, if snacked on, can lead to coma and death from cardiovascular collapse. The ASPCA’s got a top-17 DON’TEVEN-THINK-ABOUT-IT list (www.aspcapro.org/resource/17plants-poisionous-pets). Still, the association’s Animal Control Center ended up assisting more than 400,000 animals in distress in 2022, up from 2021. And it’s not just plants. The top-10 toxins include recreational drugs, OTC meds and, yes, chocolate:

https://www.aspca.org/sites/default/files/top_10_toxins_2022. png (who leaves chocolate lying about?).

And please. Keep your children from eating berries from the holly, yew, jack-in-the-pulpit, juniper and pokeweed plants, as tempting as they may look. And no castor beans. (The horrifying poison ricin is made out of castor beans.)

“Away! Thou’rt poison to my blood,” said Will Shakespeare. So before you go hog-wild with houseplants or that garden extension this summer, remember what happened to Romeo and Juliet. Go wisely.

— David Claude Bailey

CHOOSE YOUR PATH. Discover the breathtaking natural beauty of Alamance County. Tucked between the mountains and the coast, our towns and villages offer small surprises at every turn. Whether by land or water, you’ll find numerous trails winding their way through parks, alongside lakes and over enchanted waterways-such as the Haw River Trail, part of the Mountains to Sea Trail. What you find at the end of the trail may just be yourself.

You’ll find small surprises lead to big memories in Alamance County.

Cancer

(June 21 – July 22)

Fancy the tapas sampler? This month kicks off with Saturn ret rograde in Pisces. Rainbows and butterflies, yes. But also, reality checks. (Band-Aids don’t fix everything.) Ready or not, the new moon in Cancer will deliver a much-needed reboot on July 5. And when Venus enters Leo on July 11? Aim those big feelings toward your deepest desires and watch the universe bend over backward to serve them up.

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Leo (July 23 – August 22)

Ditch the predictive text.

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

The proof is in the pie crust.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Knock and the door will open.

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

Be sure to kiss them in the rain.

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Try wiping the lens.

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

Stretch or be stretched.

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

Locate your center of gravity.

Aries (March 21 – April 19)

Just add water.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

Three words: Less is more.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

Plant your tootsies firmly on the Earth. OH

Zora Stellanova has been divining with tea leaves since Game of Thrones’ Starbucks cup mishap of 2019. While she’s not exactly a medium, she’s far from average. She lives in the N.C. foothills with her Sphynx cat, Lyla.

Smoothing out the Ruff Spots

Who's training whom?

By m aria JohNsoN

Witness

this

exchange between two domestic partners:

Partner One really wants something, and pulls hard in that direction.

Partner Two, natch, pulls in the opposite direction.

This ticks off Partner One, who doubles down and lurches the other way.

Which prompts me — I mean Partner Two — to throw her entire weight the other way. And also to call Partner One a pig-headed so-and-so.

Finally, the trigger passes and things calm down, but both parties feel bruised and out of sorts.

This has been happening between me and our dog, Millie, for some time.

She also has been pulling like a sled dog during walks with my husband.

We need help.

We are not alone, as it turns out. Twenty of us gather one Saturday morning at Brad Howell’s downtown Greensboro business, Red Beard Dog Training.

We have two things in common: All of us yearn for more enjoyable walks with our canine companions, and all of us have left our pups at home, per Brad’s instruction.

This is owner training.

First clue.

We are all ears as Brad — yes, he has a red beard — begins a class called Leash Connections.

Assisting him is his human co-worker, Rylee, along with Brad’s pit bull mix, Dexter.

Brad rescued Dexter — a.k.a. Sexy Dexy — from the SPCA 10 years ago to help him with his blossoming dog-training business.

Brad already knew a fair bit about animals. He grew up on a farm outside of Asheville, spending much of his time helping to

raise beef cattle and playing baseball. Still active in adult leagues, he retains a casual athletic bearing.

On the day we go for training, he walks around the room barefoot, dressed in a T-shirt and basketball shorts, as he lays out the cold truth: Your relationship with your dog might never be what you thought it was going to be.

They’re their own creature.

So are you. Each of you comes with your own inclinations and experiences.

“You try to do the best you can for yourself and your dog, for your relationship,” he explains.

That includes what riles them, what soothes them and what they need to be happy. If your pup needs a lot of physical activity, it’s your job to give it to them.

It’s also your responsibility to buffer their stressors. Watch for raised hackles and tucked tails.

“You gotta know the animal you’re with,” Brad urges. “Don’t put your dog in a situation that you can tell, from watching their body language, they wouldn’t make.”

Another key: rewarding the slightest improvement in problem behavior.

“We’re looking for baby steps,” Brad says. “I’m gonna brag on my dog as soon as she gives me a reason to.”

Sexy Dexy demonstrates by walking, on a slack leash, to the left and slightly behind Brad.

“He’s probably looking pretty hard at my treat pouch,” Brad says, smiling.

Indeed, Dexy is staring a hole in the small plastic box belted to Brad’s left hip.

His patience pays off. He snags a nibble of kibble and a hearty “Yes!”

In Brad’s world, positive reinforcement is a valuable tool.

So are negative consequences — and giving dogs enough time and consistency to figure them out.

Brad passes around a slip lead, similar to the looped cords that veterinarians often use as leashes.

He invites us to place the loop over one wrist, pull the cord with the other hand and see how little pressure it takes to feel uncomfortable.

Playing the role of unruly pooch, Rylee offers her wrist for a demo.

If she pulls, she feels the pressure.

If she wants to relieve the pressure, she has to step toward Brad. He doesn’t need to yank the cord. He just needs to stand firm. Rylee is in control of how much pressure she feels.

What if she continues to pull?

Brad’s next move seems counterintuitive. He steps toward Rylee, giving her slack.

If Rylee lurches again, she’ll feel pressure again, proportionate to how hard she pulls.

“I want them to control the level of consequence they get,” he explains. With enough reps, Brad assures us, even the most stubborn pup will understand that she is causing a large part of her own discomfort — and she has the power to relieve it.

The room glows with imaginary light bulbs switching on over human heads.

Later, at home, we try a slip lead with Millie, our wee, atomic-powered hound.

She catches on quickly.

We are the slackers who miss chances to reward her when she does something right. We struggle to stay calm and consistent when she lunges.

It would be so much easier to point the paw at her.

But it’s increasingly clear that Millie will change her behavior if we change, too, by embracing the gospel according to Brad.

Trainer, train thyself. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Civil War: Past and Present

Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest

By Stephen e. Smith

Books about the American Civil War sell themselves. Publishers know there’s a loyal audience eager to buy reasonably well-researched volumes about the most tragic event in American history, and that’s enough to keep the bookstore shelves stuffed with warmed-over and newly discovered material. But how does a Civil War historian appeal to a broader audience? Simple: link the events explicated in his book to the present or, even better, to the future.

Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War purports to do just that. Larson states in his introduction: “I was well into my research on the saga of Fort Sumter and the advent of the American Civil War when the events of January 6, 2021, took place. As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera, I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration . . . I suspect your sense of dread will be all the more pronounced in light of today’s political discord, which, incredibly, has led some benighted Americans to whisper once again of secession and civil war.”

The major news networks have been quick to focus on the book’s possible implications, and Larson has appeared on cable news, NPR, and at bookstores and lecture venues across the country to address the possible parallels between the people, places and events of the spring of 1861 and those of the upcoming presidential election.

Which begs two questions. First, is The Demon of Unrest a wellwritten, thoroughly researched history deserving of the intense scrutiny it is receiving? And second, does the history of the fall of Fort Sumter offer readers insights into the cultural and political divisions in which Americans now find themselves?

The answer to the first question is a resounding yes. Larson is a conscientious researcher, and everything he presents “comes

from some form of historical document; likewise, any reference to a gesture, smile, or other physical action comes from an account by one who made it or witnessed it.” He has analyzed a myriad of primary and secondary sources and produced a narrative that proceeds logically from chapter to chapter, illustrating how a false sense of honor and faulty decision-making on both sides of the conflict facilitated the terrible suffering that would be occasioned by the war.

Larson accomplishes this by drawing on the papers and records of the usual suspects — Mary Chesnut, Maj. Robert Anderson (Fort Sumter’s commander), Lincoln, Edmund Ruffin, Abner Doubleday, James Buchanan, Gideon Welles, William Seward, etc. — but he also delves more deeply than earlier historians into more obscure sources, all of which are noted in his extensive bibliography. Much of what he discloses will be revelatory to readers of popular Civil War histories.

The disreputable activities of South Carolina Gov. James Hammond are a startling example. (Hammond is credited with having uttered the oft-repeated “You dare not make war on cotton — no power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.”) In May 1857, Hammond, an active player in the Fort Sumter narrative, was being considered to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, even though he was a confessed child predator who molested his four nieces. Hammond wrote in his diary: “Here were four lovely creatures, from the tender but precious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19, each contending for my love . . . and permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them and to rest without the slightest shrinking from it.” Hammond not only recorded his misdeeds, he disclosed his indiscretions to friends and suffered no negative political consequences when his pedophilia became public knowledge.

Larson reminds readers that Lincoln’s election also occasioned a demonstration at the Capitol. The crowd might have turned

violent, but Gen. Winfield Scott was prepared: “Soldiers manned the entrances and demanded to see passes before letting anyone in. Scott had positioned caches of arms throughout the building. A regiment of troops in plainclothes circulated among the crowd to stop any trouble before it started.”

In a lengthy narrative aside detailing Lincoln’s trip from Springfield to Washington, Larson reveals that the president-elect had to hold a yard sale to pay for his journey to the inaugural and that despite precautions to ensure his safety, an elaborate subterfuge had to be undertaken to sneak Lincoln into the District of Columbia. He was accompanied on the trip by detective Allan Pinkerton, who was determined to foil a supposed plot to assassinate Lincoln before he could be sworn in.

What readers will find most surprising is the degree to which the 19th-century concept of “honor” held sway over events surrounding the fall of Sumter. As South Carolina authorities constructed gun emplacements in preparation for a bombardment of the fort, mail service continued with messages to and from Washington passing through Confederate hands without being opened and read. While attempting to starve the fort into surrender, the city of Charleston also attempted to accommodate the garrison with deliveries of beef and vegetables, which Maj. Anderson rejected on the grounds that such resupply was dishonorable.

After months of political finagling, the fort endured an intense 34-hour bombardment before being evacuated. Neither side suffered any dead or wounded; thus, the battle that initiated the bloodiest conflict in American history was bloodless.

The second question — Do the events that followed Fort Sumter’s fall suggest that violent consequences will likewise follow the 2024 presidential election? — is easily answered: No. Cliches such as Santayana’s “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it” or Twain’s “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme” short circuit critical thinking. Nothing is preordained.

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who knows something about the Civil War, recently addressed this question in a commencement speech at Brandeis University. The text of Burns’ address is available online, and readers who believe we’re headed into a second civil war should read what Burns has to say.

The obvious message conveyed by The Demon of Unest is clear: Human beings are foolish, arrogant and too often given to emotional irrationality that’s self-destructive. There’s nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes got that right. 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 Jewelweed Experiment

One man’s weed patch can be another’s wild garden

By RoSS howell JR.

Ross Lackey is the first person I ever heard use the word “curating” to describe sustainable agriculture and landscaping. I met him years ago on a tour at Juneberry Ridge, a 750-acre spread just outside Norwood. Lackey thinks of farmers and gardeners as stewards, responsible for the elements that nature provides — earth, stone, water, trees, shrubs, grasses and flowers — protecting them, nourishing them, arranging them so they are presented in the most beautiful, sustainable and balanced way possible.

We gardeners are curating all the time. We thumb through our collection of catalogs, scroll websites and visit nurseries, selecting this or that bulb, flower, shrub or tree for its size, shape and color, and thinking about just where we want to plant it.

But, one day, I wondered, what would I get if I stopped gardening in the traditional way and simply curated nature?

“You’d get weeds,” the gardener in you just blurted.

And you’d be exactly right.

My Blowing Rock garden offered the opportunity for an accelerated and diverse experiment. The land slopes steeply from the crest of a high ridge, where the wind howls like a wolf in winter and eddies in the woods below, just beyond our split-rail fence.

My first spring there, I’d noticed jewelweed — eager, lime-colored, round-leaf sprouts — all along the rail fence. I recognized it from my days on the farm, where it grew by the creek next to our springhouse. Just as I’d been taught as a boy, I dutifully whacked down the sprouts with a string trimmer.

But the first year of my experiment, I let the jewelweed grow and reveled in its waist-high profusion of foliage and orange, redspeckled, pitcher-shaped flowers, where bees and other pollinators droned from morning till dusk. Hummingbirds fed on the

jewelweed, too, one even keeping a perch in a wild cherry tree by the fence.

And once I put down the weed whacker, I found that the howling wind planted other gifts.

It blew seeds from mullein, milkweed, thistles and dandelions. It blew seeds that yielded the pink blossoms of fleabane and the yellow blooms of tickseed. It blew native daisies, clover, sundrops and yarrow.

Wild violets popped up here and there, and I moved them together in small beds, for effect. I discovered Jackin-the-pulpit and Christmas ferns in the shade of a white oak by the fence.

As summer progressed, I found black-eyed Susans volunteering, along with wild asters, Queen Anne’s lace and bushy St. John’s wort. Later, the garden was dazzling with the delicate spikes of low-growing, rough goldenrod, along with the bursts of bloom atop 6-foot-tall spikes of Eastern goldenrod.

As the wild garden created itself, something was blooming somewhere in it throughout the growing season.

These days, with my experiment well into its third year, I’ve become a more active curator.

Thanks to gardening friends in Greensboro and Blowing Rock, I’ve added wild geraniums, mountain mint and wild ginger. I’ve purchased and planted purple coneflowers, Eastern columbine and oakleaf hydrangeas, plus a fire azalea bush and redbud trees.

In the fall, I cover the art in my natural museum with leaves and hardwood bark mulch, leaving the seed stalks for the birds and critters. In spring I administer a modest dose of composted cow manure and more mulch.

I’m happy. My wild garden looks happy.

All because of a conversation with Ross Lackey. OH

Ross Howell Jr. is a contributing writer. Ross Lackey and his wife, Tiffany, a chef, are headquartered at Holly Hill Farm in the community of Whynot, near Seagrove, where Lackey offers land design consulting and services. Tiffany recently opened Seagrove Café, where her cinnamon buns are in high demand. For more information, visit www.hollyhillfarmnc.com.

Jewelweed

By DaviD ClauDe Bailey

In October

Blast from the Past

Or

why chemistry sets are no longer fun

of 1957, my parents and their 11-year-old son — that would be me — walked out into our backyard to watch Sputnik-1 arch across the sky. And so began the Reidsville Rocket Boys Space Race.

Admittedly, years earlier, all my friends and I had acquired chemistry sets manufactured by A.C. Gilbert, the man who invented the Erector Set. That was way before they removed all the fun stuff from the sets — saltpeter, sulfur, sodium ferrocyanide! and, I’m not kidding you, uranium dust. My friend, Jack, and I had been experimenting with gunpowder (a simple mixture of saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal) for months, as in lighting a trail of it to streak across the ground like in Western movies, perfect for scaring cats, dogs and sisters.

That was also back in the good ol’ days when boys could buy almost any chemical from their friendly local apothecary as well as dynamite fuses from the hardware store — not to mention dynamite itself if you were only old enough.

The firecrackers and smoke bombs we made with gunpowder were disappointing, but it did not take long for our inquiring minds to begin designing miniature rockets. We’d take one of those cardboard tubes fused on coat hangers to keep pants from having a crease in them, fill it with gunpowder and close one end. Once fins were added, it soared out of sight.

Half of the fun was thinking we were conducting our

launches in secret, but surely our parents learned of our purchases from the owners of the hardware store and apothecary. I now suspect they thought they might be raising budding space engineers — or even astronauts. After all, on January 31, 1958, America successfully launched into orbit the cylindrical Explorer 1, 80 inches long compared to Russia’s pitiful “beach ball,” only 23 inches in diameter — which prompted more trips into the backyard.

My mom mailed some of the drawings covering my school notebooks to my uncle Bob, who was studying civil engineering at Georgia Tech. He amped them up into what looked like professional, technical blueprints. After I took them to school, I walked around for a few days convinced I was an aerospace genius.

The space race in Reidsville soon mirrored the Cold War. Jack’s cousin, Fred, spied on his older brother and another cousin to provide us with intel regarding their potentially more advanced technology. Erector Sets were cannibalized to build launch gantries; we discovered that match heads glued to flashbulb filaments could ignite a dynamite fuse from a safe distance.

Meanwhile, just as we were foolishly considering trying brass plumbing pipes in place of the clothes hanger tubes (never mind the danger of exploding shrapnel or the elementary physics principle that what goes up comes down), Jack and I connected with some outside support. Across town, Carl, whose parents were at least a generation younger and cooler than ours, had helped him assemble an extensive chemistry lab in the furnace closet of his family’s stylishly modern, flat-roofed house. The shelves were

lined with bottles of chemicals imprinted with scientific-looking typefaces. Beakers, flasks and test tubes covered a counter on which sat an actual Bunsen burner. Carl demonstrated how, when you mixed zinc dust and sulfur, the result was a propellant several times more powerful than gunpowder.

And so, on a Saturday morning, four of us were closeted in his laboratory-furnace room, where he promised to show us his methodology. We started out with a bottle of zinc dust into which we mixed increasing amounts of sulfur. When the mixture was perfect, a sample of it, when introduced to the flame of the Bunsen burner, would burn with an intense and blinding white flash. Some advice: Do NOT use the eraser end of a pencil, which a member of our elite test unit (who will go unnamed) happened to have in his pocket, because erasers are flammable, as was the zinc-dust-and-sulfur. The ensuing explosion blew both double doors of the furnace room wide open and turned the glassware of Carl’s chemistry set into little bits of silica that we combed out of our hair for days afterwards. Why we all were not blinded, I’ll never know.

Somehow our enthusiasm for our rocket projects began to dim after that. Jack, in particular, seemed to lose interest. However, I recently learned that his father had effectively shut down our launch operations by bribing Jack with a used Hamilton “Tank” watch, in the style of the ones worn by WWI tank drivers.

Although a history buff, Jack now feels that he sold out cheaply. He remembers that the watch’s style wasn’t 1950s hip. Plus, the dial’s Roman numerals left Jack, neither good at math nor foreign languages, guessing about what time it really was.

So, we did not, in fact, end up becoming astronauts or aerospace engineers, though Carl went on to become a highly popular high school science teacher. Jack, soaring to heights few of us could have imagined, is now one of the nation’s top immigration lawyers. I came closest to going into orbit by becoming an aerospace editor for Cocoa TODAY, covering the Space Shuttle. And although I’d like to say that our friend, the eraser-head igniter, became a Navy Seal demolition expert, in truth he avoided the military altogether and ended up building some of the most innovative houses in Chapel Hill.

Arms races may last forever, but not so for little boys. Secret propellants and proprietary fins “make way for other toys . . . one gray night it happened,” like Puff the Magic Dragon, our launches were no more — replaced by Boy Scouts and basketball. And once we learned what girls were for, our rockets ceased to roar. OH

David Claude Bailey raised daughters and, while he never taught them how to create explosions, did blow their minds with his extensive knowledge of Latin.

Kringle and Milton

Mr. Moon Meets His Match

Just who has nine lives here?

I'm reading peacefully in bed one night when my cat, Mr. Moon, struts into the room, a small, limp mouse dangling from his jaws. Oh dear. Of course, I praise him — after all, it's what cats are supposed to do to earn their keep, right? They've been dispatching vermin from human habitats since before the ancient Egyptians, and the Egyptians deified them for their efforts. My cat drops his little trophy on the rug and preens.

I slide out of bed, fetch tissue to shroud the victim before removing it. Mr. Moon's nudging the poor thing, hoping it will resume their play date. I do feel sorry for the mouse in some tender Snow White way, until suddenly it leaps from the dead and is on the run again. Eeek! I jump back in bed and watch the rodeo of cat-and-mouse for a good 10 minutes before the cat loses it again beneath the bathroom radiator. He's clasped it in his paws several times, tossed it, carried it in his jaws, set it down and waited for it to sprint again and again. Has he talked the mouse into being his pet? The mouse appears to have figured out that pretending to be dead for a few minutes will leave his adversary puzzled and less inclined to play rough.

But this is not Mickey's Playhouse. There's a life-or-death drama going on in my bedroom. Now I hear them scuffling near the bathroom — Rocky Balboa vs. Jiminy Cricket — then all is quiet. I can see the cat sitting on the rug, his tail twitching, waiting for the critter to catch its breath and declare game on! But the mouse has other plans and eventually Mr. Moon abandons his vigil, curling himself at the foot of my bed. Believe it or not, I turn out my light. Everybody's exhausted, and I trust that my cat's got my back should the little pipsqueak revive.

In the morning, Mr. Moon doesn't revisit the crime scene. He believes his mouse toy is broken. I check behind the radiator and see it lying there, lusterless, still as a stone. I follow Mr. Moon to the kitchen, feed him, eat my breakfast, read the news and sip a second cup of coffee before I remember my grave chore. Back in the bathroom, paper towel in hand, I stoop over the radiator. But Houdini the Mouse has vanished!

I'm always cheered by the prospect of tiny besting big: mouse besting cat, David besting Goliath, Ukraine besting Russia, little Greta Thunberg calling out world leaders on laxity regarding climate change. Small is beautiful, some of us folks used to say in the ’70s.

These days of big seeming to gobble up small every place we look, I think rooting for the underdog — or mouse, in this case — is irresistible. Its valor and escape artistry are inspiring, its ferocious will to live. I could write a poem! But wait, I've still got a mouse in my house.

“Oh, Mr. Moon,” I call. “Let's catch that mouse, pal!”

He’s grooming himself in a living room chair, getting ready for his morning nap. “Let’s?" he says. “Did you say ‘Let’s?’ Don't make me laugh.”

Off I go on my lone safari to find that clever mouse and diminish (humanely) its small but potent influence as it wanders at-large through my house. “Courage!” says Mr. Moon, grinning his crescent grin like the Cheshire cat he's not. OH

Marianne Gingher has published seven books, both fiction and nonfiction. She recently retired from teaching creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill for 100 years.

StoRy anD illuStR ation By m aRianne GinGheR

The Dog Who Owned Us

Goodbye to a good girl

Zoe loved to wear a circus-like collar and do tricks Kip was a take-charge (versus a take-commands) dog . . . who wore his authority seriously

By Cynthia a DamS

Agray February fog clung to us as we walked. Our shoulders slumped in the slackened posture of sorrow. Clasping hot cups of coffee couldn’t ease the chill; the worst of the cold was soul deep.

Our eyes flickered towards one another, then slid away to the marsh grasses our two dogs sniffed, then to the sea beyond. Zoe, a gentle-natured mutt, stumbled, stiffly hinged as if her body parts no longer worked together as a coherent whole. Once, she had moved with loose-limbed grace.

Kip, the younger, trailed slowly and I tugged at his leash, wondering. With a canine’s exquisite sixth sense, did he grasp the reason for our sad silence?

Zoe came from humble beginnings as a “pound puppy” 16 years earlier at the Guilford County animal shelter. She was a terrier mix, part Australian shepherd; the greater part was a sweet mystery.

When we had first sought a pet, I produced a picture of a small terrier torn from a magazine long ago. My husband pocketed it, and so began frequent forays to the animal shelter.

“I’ll find our dog,” he assured. “Just be patient. ” On weekly walks through the shelter, the picture in hand, he did.

The story of our charismatic Zoe’s adoption — how my husband got into a lottery with others who also wanted her, then lost out — only underscored the pleasant shock when Zoe was discovered there again, returned. (“She found us. It’s because she was meant to be ours all along,” Don explained.)

Amazingly, Zoe was a look-alike to the dog in the now dogeared picture.

Initially, she was so well behaved she wouldn’t even bark. Don coaxed her with pats, treats and constant assurances that she was “a good — no — a wonderful girl.”

Zoe wanted nothing more than to please and be pleasing.

In her, we discovered a clever dog quickly mastering David Letterman’s stupid pet tricks (she unfailingly chose the larger of two bills when asked!). Zoe also trained us well.

What she loved most was to walk twice daily — even on several-mile-long treks. She also had endless reserves of gratitude, sweetly thanking us for small favors with devotion. Her bright eyes seemingly welled with gratitude. Initially healthy, Zoe battled with nerve sheath tumors in middle age. But inoperable retinal disease left her completely blind. By age 12, cognitive changes began as well, then deafness.

She had found her voice, and used it — now barking at nothing. Still, Zoe demanded twice-daily walks along routes so frequent

they had names, so familiar she needed neither her sight nor hearing to follow them. The “Homer route” looped past the home of a corgi Zoe liked. The “Belle route” passed a sweet yellow lab’s home. The “Weaver” looped past a business park. In Zoe’s older age, a half-mile loop in front of the house could only be managed in a no-hurries gait.

Our slightly younger terrier, Kip, had pancreatitis. Both geriatric dogs’ medical files grew thicker. Both required carrying up and down stairs.

We discovered Zoe was in renal failure while vacationing at the coast. The kindly emergency vet gently advised: “It is time.”

We determined to make those final days Zoe’s best. We took exceedingly slow walks, keeping to our routine. We gave her cheeseburgers. No matter what special wine we uncorked, nor what gorgeous, pink-tinged sunset played out that weekend, we soldiered on, miserable. Kip sniffed Zoe’s frail body knowingly.

The appointed day arrived with impenetrable fog low over the Intracoastal Waterway. As Zoe sniffled and snuffled the marsh grasses, I snapped one last picture with my cell phone. Her eyes showed a ghostly blue-white, otherworldly iris.

Zoe had chosen us 16 years ago; now, it was our final gift to surrender her to the sweet hereafter. The vet stroked her, too, as Zoe’s eyes closed. She left us as she had come to us, in trusting innocence.

A good — no — a wonderful girl. OH

Cynthia Adam is a contributing editor to O.Henry magazine.

Left to Right: Zoe and Kip

A Soaring Kite

The majestic swallow-tailed

By SuSan CampBell

The swallow-tailed

kite is, without a doubt, the most unmistakable of birds in our state — and perhaps anywhere in the world. This large raptor with a long, forked tail is capable of endless, highly acrobatic flight. The size, as well as the long, narrow wings, may cause one to think “osprey” at first, but one glimpse of that unique tail gives its true identity away, even at a great distance. This majestic bird is black on top with a white head and belly, as well as white wing linings. As with all kite species, the bill is stout and heavily curved, but the legs and feet, instead of being yellow, are a grayish hue.

It has only been in the last decade that this magnificent species has become a regular in the summer months in certain locations of southeastern North Carolina. Individuals were observed mixed in with Mississippi kites along the Cape Fear River in the summer of 2003. In 2008 a pair of kites seemed to be defending a territory along the river, but no concrete evidence of breeding could be found. Swallow-tailed kites were finally confirmed as a new breeder here when a nesting pair was located during an aerial survey by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission in May of 2013. Far more likely to be seen in coastal South Carolina and farther south, these birds

have plenty of feeding habitat here, as well as tall trees for nesting. Their numbers are bound to increase in the years ahead.

Swallow-taileds are found in wet coastal habitat where their preferred prey — large flying insects — are abundant. Adults feed entirely on the wing. But, when foraging for young, this bird is so agile that it not only preys on bugs, such as dragonflies and beetles, it readily snatches snakes, lizards and even nestlings of other species from the canopy. Swallow-taileds are not at all choosey. Males forage for a good deal of the food for the growing family. The male will carry food items back to the nest in its talons, transfer to it to his bill and carefully pass it to his mate, who will tear it into pieces and feed it to their young.

This species is a loosely communal breeder like its cousin the Mississippi kite. Swallow-tailed pairs can be seen in adjacent treetops when they find a particularly good piece of habitat. Non-breeding males may also associate with established pairs. These individuals might bring gifts of sticks and even food to breeding females but, interestingly, these offerings usually go ignored.

Swallow-taileds have been found to consume a large number of highly venomous insects. Wasps and hornets are not uncommon food items, as are fire ants. This is possible because they have developed a much fleshier stomach than other birds. An adult kite may bring an entire wasps’ nest to its own nest and, after consuming the larvae, incorporate it into the nest. The motivation for this behavior is unclear.

In late summer, individual swallow-tailed kites can be seen almost anywhere in the state as a result of post-breeding dispersal. They may mix in with feeding or loafing Mississippi kites around agricultural fields or bottomland forest. Last July, I was fortunate enough to spot a soaring individual over Highway 421 adjacent to swampy habitat outside of Siler City in Chatham County. Should you spot one of these magnificent birds, consider yourself very lucky. OH

Susan Campbell would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by email at susan@ncaves.com, or by calling (910) 585-0574.

Elvis Hasn’t Left the Building

No other recording star had a more enduring relationship with our city than Elvis

By Billy i nGR am

“Of all the places we’ve been to, you’re one of the most fantastic audiences we’ve had.” — Elvis Presley to a Greensboro crowd

Afew minutes after midnight on Monday, July 21, 1975, a Lockheed JetStar glided to a halt on a secluded spot at the Greensboro-High Point Airport’s tarmac. A fleet of limousines awaited the colorful parade of passengers as they deplaned, followed by the greatest superstar of the 20th century, Elvis Presley. The King was in town to electrify what would be a record-breaking crowd at the Greensboro Coliseum that night.

Within half an hour of touchdown, Elvis and his enormous entourage pulled up behind the high-rise Hilton Hotel on West Market, located across from Greensboro College, where an advance team had already covered every window on the top two floors with aluminum foil, preventing even a ray of daylight from encroaching. Elvis was escorted to the Wedgewood Suite, encompassing the western end of the 10th floor, familiar to him from two previous stays in 1972 and 1974. Shortly after arrival, the Memphis Mafia called down to the kitchen to order a fruit tray. Normally closed by midnight, the Hilton’s kitchen was fully staffed and prepared to fulfill room service orders not only from the ninth and 10th floors but for the two levels below, where The King’s less crepuscular courtiers were holed up. When the order for that fruit tray came in from Elvis’ suite, a tower of melons, grapes, bananas and cottage cheese was prepared, oddly enough, by Greensboro Daily News reporter Jerry Kenion, who had taken a

Elvis

Presley boarding the Lisa Marie to leave Greensboro, N.C. for Asheville

part-time job in the kitchen in an attempt to score an interview with Presley. The closest she came was catching a glance of the star while wheeling the food cart into the suite’s living room.

Around 3:30 a.m., word went out from Presley’s personal physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos, to Greensboro Coliseum general manager Jim Oshust that Elvis was suffering from a major toothache. Armed with the City Directory, Oshust began ringing up local dentists one by one. Officer Judy Allen, part of a security task force assigned to serve the King, had a better idea. She suggested her longtime practitioner, Dr. J. Baxter Caldwell.

Minutes later at 1100 Sunset Drive, the cacophonous ringing from 1970s-era landlines interrupted the stillness of what was an unusually hot summer night. On the line, the voice of an allnight operator informed Caldwell that the most famous mouth in America was in need of emergency oral surgery. Could he be of assistance?

Caldwell agreed to attend to Presley, dressed hurriedly, and arranged to meet his receptionist, Mrs. Ann Wright, at his practice located just up the street at 1817 Pembroke Road (still a dental office today with the same phone number). Officer Allen drove Presley’s limo to the physician’s back door around 5 a.m. while another stretch transporting two bodyguards and Elvis’ physician, the infamous “Dr. Nick,” followed closely behind.

What the dentist didn’t know was that it had become common for Presley to remove one of his fillings, then arrange to be seen on a rush basis for what would eventually yield him a prescription or two. What Elvis didn’t know was that Dr. Caldwell was especially reticent to prescribe painkillers to his patients. But Presley’s predicament was entirely legit this time. Dr. Caldwell determined there was an abscessed tooth under the bridge in the lower right bicuspid, which he went right to work on. Returning to the Hilton around

The Artof Living

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Working as a 4th generation landscape designer, Steven Dunn was always inspired by nature—which in turn inspires his art. “I paint to record the beauty of the natural world as I experience it,” he says. “Whenever I take a walk, I’m seeing trees and light as a composition.” Today, as part of the Arbor Acres community, Steven teaches painting to other residents in a fully equipped art studio. “I help them express their uniqueness. We’re all one spirit with something personal to say.” For Steven and all of our residents, here is a place that celebrates the joy and mysteries of art—as a vocation, passion, or simply a fuller way of seeing the world.

sunup and before retiring for the day, Elvis finally noshed on that fruit tray he’d ordered earlier.

Around 8 p.m., Elvis, attired in his bedazzled Aztec-inspired outfit, and his posse descended the elevator to encounter about a dozen fans congregating outside the Hilton’s rear exit. Bodyguards had advised the assembled that Presley was suffering from a toothache and wouldn’t be hanging around to talk.

During the previous night’s concert in Norfolk, Elvis began inexplicably pestering his female backup singers, The Sweet Inspirations, with crude insults. Most of his vitriol was reserved for on-again, offagain girlfriend Kathy Westmoreland, who harmonized with the girl singers. All but one of the women walked off stage midperformance. Determined to quit for good, “The Sweets” reconsidered in Greensboro after a preshow heartfelt apology from Elvis. On July 21, all but Westmoreland performed at the coliseum.

To the tune of “CC Rider” at 8:30 sharp, a newly slimmed-down Elvis glided confidently but casually on stage, his mere presence causing 16,300 fans to erupt into screaming and squealing conniption fits. Before he ever sang a note. One local reviewer declared this 1975 appearance “better than ever.”

As the concert progressed, Elvis became increasingly obsessed with a rough spot on his reconstructed tooth that kept rubbing his tongue. Not a small distraction. A midnight call went out to Dr. Caldwell. The entire staff was on hand when Elvis arrived around 1 a.m., including two dental assistants who had been in the audience that night. Receptionist Ann Wright noted that the entertainer didn’t look particularly tired, considering he’d given such a high voltage performance, while Dr. Caldwell told The Greensboro Record, “He was a nice fellow. It was ‘Yes sir this’ and ‘Yes sir that’ with him.”

Upon returning to his 10th-floor Hilton penthouse, Kathy Westmoreland reluctantly met with a morose Elvis as he sat on the bed, clad in karate pajamas. Brandishing a gun in one hand and a gift-wrapped

jewelry box in the other, Elvis offered her a choice: “Which do you want? This or this?” Nervously accepting and opening the gift, a watch, she agreed to remain by his side until the end of the tour.

More bewildering, at the airport the next afternoon, Elvis’ retinue discovered that he had flown ahead to their next engagement in Asheville without them. After the jet was piloted back to Greensboro and everyone finally settled in at Asheville’s Rodeway Inn, Elvis demonstrated his remorsefulness by showering his entourage with what the jeweler who traveled with Presley, Lowell Hayes, called “Practically a whole jewelry store!”

That erratic behavior continued. There were multiple accounts that Elvis was angry that his personal physician had confiscated the drugs he’d just scored from another dentist. His temper also flared up when the vertical hold on the TV screen went haywire, a not frequent occurrence. According to those reports, he fired a bullet into the Rodeway Inn television set, which ricocheted into Dr. Nick’s chest but caused no injury.

Frustrated by the lack of standing ovations in the last of his three Asheville dates, Elvis doled out a diamond ring from the stage, worth $6,500 (about $38,000 today), and handed over to a random fan perhaps his most iconic guitar, a Gibson Ebony Dove with a mother-of-pearl “Elvis Presley” inlaid into the black rosewood fret board. Prominently featured in his 1973 Aloha From Hawaii TV special and strummed onstage frequently, that guitar sold at auction in 2016 for $334,000.

Elvis triumphantly returned to the Greensboro Coliseum and the Hilton (now called The District at West Market) in June 1976 and April 1977, the latter being opening night for the last concert tour before The King’s untimely death in August that year. Employees at The District swear to me that Elvis’ spirit hasn’t left the building. I’ll believe that when a late night phone call goes out to Dr. Caldwell’s office. After all, he has the number. OH

Billy Ingram is a hunka hunka burnt-out love.

July 2024

Cicada Rondeau

They don’t so much sing as plead

In their droning sound stampede.

I hope they find the love they need —

Something more than meet-and-breed.

Can that even be with insects —

To have sensations beyond touch?

Do they know joy as well as sex?

They don’t so much.

— Paul Jones

Paul Jones is a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of the collection Something Wonderful.

Out of the Woods

Three Team U.S.A. Olympians redefine themselves in the Gate City

By Cassie Bustamante • PhotograPhs By m ark Wagoner

“Woods are not like other spaces . . . They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs . . . They are a vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.”

— Bill Bryson, from A Walk in the Woods

This month, the City of Light will be aglow with 10,500 athletes from all over the world competing in the 2024 Summer Olympics, plus an estimated 15 million visitors.

To say the world will be watching is an understatement. But who are these athletes — heroes for a glorified moment in time — after the paddles have been stowed, the Nikes unlaced and the skates hung up for the last time? We caught up with three local Team U.S.A. Olympians, including two gold medalists, to answer that question.

Joey Cheek, Gold Medal Olympic Speed Skater

Tamara Cheek, Olympic Canoeist

Sprawled out on his charcoal gray sofa, 2006 gold-medal Olympic speed skater Joey Cheek rests one hand on his chestnut-brown boxer, Cashew, who lets out a contented sigh. Both man and dog are totally at ease in this snapshot of daily life. But, Joey, now 45, admits that was not always the case for him.

“The years after the Olympics are — ,” he begins and then pauses. Tamara Cheek, also 45 and an Olympian herself, jumps in.

“Oh, are we at the walk in the woods?” After checking on Jack, the couple’s 4-year-old son, who’s happily scooting his Paw Patrol vehicles across the floor of the nearby playroom, she explains.

A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s New York Times-bestselling book about his ups and downs — both literately and figuratively — along the Appalachian trail, is a metaphor for how the Cheeks and some of their fellow Olympians describe life after the games. One reviewer called Bryson’s trek “A journey of discovery and renewal.” And that’s certainly been true for both Tamara and Joey.

For Joey, the path to the Olympics began when he was a roller-blading middle-schooler in Greensboro. His parents made sacrifices to support his fledgling athletic career. He recalls a

home with sparse furniture and beat-up cars. “I had everything I needed, which was also all I ever wanted.” At 16, he left home to train in Calgary and made the leap from wheels to blades.

In 2002, 22-year-old Joey made it to the Salt Lake City Olympic Games, where he won the bronze medal in the 1,000-meter speedskating event. Four years later he returned to the Olympic rink, this time in Turin, Italy.

As he headed back, he had an inkling that this would be his last time skating on Olympic ice. Plus, he wondered, “What am I going to get from four more years of this that I haven’t already gotten?” Turns out, that thing was a gold medal — as well as a silver.

Without taking a pause, he hung the skates and hit the ground running, enrolling in Princeton and cofounding Team Darfur to raise awareness about the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Sudan. His humanitarian activism caught the eye of Hollywood star George Clooney, who invited Joey to accompany him to China via private jet to lobby the government there. In 2007, Clooney reached back out to invite him to be in a film he was shooting in South Carolina. “And to give you an idea of the hubris I was feeling at the time,” says Joey, shaking his head, “I said, ‘I’ve got a bunch of big parties I am going to. I can’t make it.’”

He was seemingly skating through life. “Nothing is indicating that this system isn’t flawless,” says Joey, “that you have not cracked it.”

The path was clear: “gold medal, ivy league, billionaire.” Upon graduation, he was off to New York City to launch a sports-streaming start-up.

But, for the first time in his life, “some of the wheels had started falling off,” he says. “And that was crippling for me. Crippling.”

So how did he get out of the woods? “A huge part of it is her,” he says, looking at his wife.

“She had me do this exercise,” he says. Tamara helped him analyze his life up to that point so that he could see the arc of his career — which, he notes, was worse than ever at that moment.

But, soon after, “the arc turned.” He adds, “And it’s only gotten better.”

Did Tamara know from her own experience? Did she have a moment of “who I am without this?” she asks, then answers. “Yeah.”

But, Tamara admits, her moment of truth was not nearly as challenging as Joey’s. Hers came when a a friend who was a philosophy major at the University of California in San Diego (where she enrolled after the Olympics) pointed out to her that when you are young, you look to institutions to assign meaning to yourself. But once you leave academia — or the Olympics — and enter the real world, you’re on your own, and meaning and purpose must be generated internally.

“You might feel a little bit lost,” she admits and, as a mom of a superhero-loving preschooler, likens it to being Bruce Wayne instead of Batman. But, in the end, what was crippling for Joey was liberating for her.

Tamara is a dark-haired beauty who bears resemblance to — and has been mistaken for — supermodel Linda Evangelista. In fact, she opens to a page in her scrapbook, a gift a best friend created for a birthday, to a torn-out page from a 2000 Esquire magazine story, titled “The Girls of Summer.” Among 10 female Summer Olympians headed to Sydney, Australia, there’s an image of then 21-year-old Tamara, strong and tanned, and wearing a white tankini as she stands in a kayak and holds a paddle in her right hand. “I definitely shunned any further movement in that direction,” she says of her short-lived modeling gig.

attended as the kind of place where “no blade of grass should be taller than the next.” But, at the age of 16, Tamara recalls seeing kayakers on a lake in Seattle, where she grew up. Instantly drawn to the beauty of the sport, she quickly discovered she took to it like a fish to water.

Where Joey says that part of the reason you strive for the Olympics is to “chisel your name on a tablet somewhere,” Tamara’s approach as a flat-water canoeist was quite different. “I didn’t really have a gold medal as a goal ever.” She adds, “I just wanted to win races.”

Until she picked up paddles, competition was a foreign concept to Tamara. She describes the progressive Waldorf school she

In another photo album, she opens to an old black-and-white photo of an athletic young woman, her grandmother, who died at the age of 36. She wonders aloud if that’s where her own inherent talent comes from. “I like to think that in some way I was carrying on her spirit when I was in Sydney.”

But, according to Joey, Tamara’s superpower is her ability to pick up anything she sets her mind to and excel. He laughs and adds how it sometimes drives him nuts “because there seems to

be no method and all I am is process.”

While Tamara won the U.S. Olympic trials in the K-2 500-meter sprint as well as the 1999 World Cup silver medal in the K-2 1,000-meter kayak sprint, she did not land on the podium in Sydney and decided to leave her career as a canoeist after just six years. She admits that she was likely only halfway up the arc, but she was ready to move on. “I wanted to go to school and have a life after the Olympics.”

During college, Tamara continued to work closely with Team U.S.A. Canoe/Kayak, which was temporarily without a coach. Testing the waters of her own coaching skills, she filled in, discovering it was not the job for her.

Upon graduation, she was offered a role as a marketing director in Charlotte, working for the National Governing Body for Olympic Canoe/Kayak. While in that position, she also founded her own company — a platform-that connects creative service providers with real estate professionals — directed an award winning documentary and continued to serve the Olympic movement in professional and volunteer capacities. But her favorite career moment? Being on the team that won the rights to bring the 2028 Summer Games back to the states. It was in Charlotte, says Tamara, “where our story begins.”

Her boss, late businessman David Yarborough, who became a mentor to her, asked her to attend a speech that Joey was giving. “For some reason, I didn’t go,” she adds.

But the “subconscious seed,” as Joey calls it, was planted.

Their stars were in orbit, says Tamara.

“Circling and never knowing each other,” adds Joey.

“You can’t fight fate,” he says.

Their stars would finally collide when both were in their upper 30s and involved with the Olympic Alumni Association, now the U.S. Olympians and Paralympians Association.

On January 1, 2019, Tamara, dressed in a white puffy jacket, and Joey, in the matching black, said “I do” atop snowy Lookout Mountain in Colorado, where they lived at the time. A year-and-a-half later, Jack was born amidst a global pandemic. Eventually, in 2021, with Joey working remotely for a venture firm he’d cofounded, the family piled into their Jeep with their dog and most of their belongings and headed for Greensboro, Joey’s hometown. The plan was to stay until they figured out their next move.

But, as he looked around a room full of family, Cashew happily playing with his brother’s dog, he says it dawned on him: “We are not leaving!”

The couple settled into a home where Joey kept an office, but his work was making him miserable and costing precious time with family. “I left with no plan. And I do not do that,” says Joey.

Encouraged by Tamara, Joey headed to a Downtown Greensboro event to learn about upcoming projects.

“You hadn’t been out of your office for three years,” she says to Joey.

While at the event, Joey met Thompson co-founder and president Clifford Thompson, who, Joey says, “is very active in wanting to see a startup community here.” Things began to click into place. In October 2023, he became the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce’s executive vice president for entrepreneurship.

And while the role is still quite fresh, Joey has big dreams for his hometown. “I want to be able to take Jackie downtown and say, ‘Look what we did in this town.’”

As for Tamara, she’s currently doing consulting work with the N.C. Folk Fest and serving on the Miriam Brenner Children’s Museum gala committee. And her community here? “Maybe I like it so much because it feels a little bit like it was training for the Olympics, like everyone is on the same page, “ she says, “that we believe in this place and we mostly want the same things for it.”

Now that these two Olympic speedsters are no longer racing to win, they have time for family, friends, community involvement. A walk in the woods these days? It’s a Sunday family hike along one of Greensboro’s many trails. And while life with a preschooler offers its own set of challenges, Joey says, “I would trade the worst day hanging out with Jack over winning medals.” He pauses and takes it a step further. “I will trade one back if it would give me one more day with him.”

Allen Johnson, Gold Medal Olympic Hurdler

At 53, Allen Johnson doesn’t look much different than he did when he crossed the 100-meter hurdle finish line at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, taking home gold for the United States. His head is clean shaven these days, but his 5’10” frame remains slender and athletic. Sitting behind his desk at N.C. A&T State University’s Truist Stadium, where he has worked as director of the track and field programs since June 2022, Johnson is at ease, comfortable in his navy-blue Nike A&T-branded polo shirt and proverbial coach’s hat.

Is this where he imagined he’d be? No way. As an Olympic athlete training with coaching legend Curtis Frye, Johnson says that was not the life he envisioned for himself. “Being a college coach in track and field was the absolute last thing on Earth I wanted to do. I mean last thing.” Driving it home, he adds, “Last, last, last!”

But when his body could no longer achieve previous heights, Johnson had to take his own walk in the woods. “A part of you dies and you have to mourn it.”

As a young man entering UNC-Chapel Hill in 1989, Johnson, a D.C. native, assumed he’d major in business. “It was the ’80s,” he says with a laugh. “I wanted to get a BMW, big house, have money, live life.” His dream? His own car dealership. “I was always into cars,” says Johnson, who now drives a Tesla.

But his athleticism opened doors for him and he left Chapel Hill during his senior year, not before setting several school records that still stand as well as winning four ACC titles. (He went back to finish his degree, which he earned in sociology, in 2012, when daughter Tristine was an undergrad. He even had a class with her.) Johnson’s pursuit paid off with a full-time track and field career that spanned 17 years, from 1993 until 2010.

During that time, Johnson, participated in three Olympics: 1996 in Atlanta, where he won the gold; 2000 in Sydney, Australia, where he fought a hamstring injury and just missed the podium, placing fourth; and 2004 in Athens, Greece, where he was captain of the U.S.A. Track and Field Team but did not place. For most of that time, he had endorsements from Nike (1994, 1996–2008) and Oakley (1995–2004) to support him. But, he says, “The last two years I was kind of on my own.”

“I was going to run until the wheels fell off, which meant I was

going to stay too long,” he says, confessing he ran two years too long. “In a perfect world, I would just love to get up in the morning every day and go race.” But, he admits, his body could no longer physically handle the work.

In 2008, just two years before his running career crossed its finish line, Johnson recalls seeing Marion Jones on Oprah, discussing her use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Jones likened being an elite athlete to wearing a mask, playing a part. And when those running days are over? “The mask has to come off,” says Johnson.

“You don’t feel invincible, emotionally — or anything — because you become a regular person again.”

But, he adds, “you’re reborn.”

For Johnson, an opportunity to become something new was found in the last, last, last place he ever expected.

It began organically. People came to him, seeking his expertise and offering to pay. He volunteered as assistant under Coach Frye at the University of South Carolina. “I never got paid, but I looked forward to getting up and going out there the next day to work with the people I was working with.”

In the fall of 2011, he was offered a paid position as assistant coach at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. He was nervous. Not only was it something he hadn’t done professionally, but it was far from the Mid-Atlantic states he’d called home for most of his life.

“That was a leap,” he says. But without risk there’s no reward. During his first year there, he led the 4x400-meter relay team to the Mountain West titles. He stayed there for five years before returning to the East Coast as assistant coach for the N.C. State

Wolfpack, where he worked for six years.

While not every athlete makes a great coach, Johnson seems to have cracked the code. “You know the whole cliché, meet them where they are,” he says.

That doesn’t mean just physically. Johnson connects with his athletes on an emotional level, too. He looks for triggers, good and bad, creating strategies to handle those that arise. He helps them stay away from the negative while embracing the positive. Plus, he makes himself available. “I have a policy: If you need to talk to me, call me any time.” With a coy smile, he adds, “But try to keep it between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.”

Now, in his first head coaching position at N.C. A&T, that policy’s expanded to include staff as well. “Be ready for anything” is his daily mantra. Emails and calls come from every which way, sun up to sun down and beyond. “One thing I tell people about being a college track and field coach is the job is never done. You just pick a stopping point each day.” And when he finally makes it

home, he spends time with his wife, Olympic bronze-medal-winning track sprinter Torri Edwards-Johnson, and plays with their 2-and-a-half year old daughter.

While his days can be filled with chaos, he’s got a small network of friends who are also first-time head coaches, similar to having Olympic teammates. “We all have had aspirations of being a head coach and what we thought it was going to be like,” says Johnson. And is this it? No, he says, “You don’t know what it is until you actually do it.”

It’s challenging him in a new way. But he’s got sound advice when it comes to tough times: “It’s what you do on the bad days that is going to define your success.” He adds, “It’s not really that hard on a good day. It’s hard on the bad day when you don’t feel like doing it, but you dig down deep, mentally, physically, and you get it done.”

Are there moments he wishes he could be 25 again and line up with the athletes? Of course. “But I can’t do it anymore.”

Instead, he’s found joy in helping others. As for his student athletes, he wants to make sure their college experience is happy and meaningful, and that he pushes them to move the stopwatch needle.

Plus, Johnson has been working with Olympic hopeful Daniel Roberts, who, like Johnson, is a 110-meter hurdler. Roberts won the bronze medal in the 2023 World Championships and Johnson’s goal this year is to get him the gold at the Paris Olympics later this month. “I wish I could still run — can’t — but getting to coach him, coach Trayvon [Bromell] and the other athletes, I guess for me it’s kind of a natural progression to the next phase.”

Is it the same as competing? No, Johnson admits. “But I have no regrets. I love track and field.” And while it’s the last thing he thought he’d be doing, turns out the next best thing is helping someone else reach their highest potential. OH

*At the time this story was written, Roberts was training with Johnson for the Olympic Trials, which were held June 21–June 30. We will update you on his progress in our biweekly newsletter, found at oheygreensboro.com.

Johnson works with N.C. A&T student Shadajah Ballard

Johnson chats with Olympic hopeful Daniel Roberts

ON THE GREENWAYS

Casual conversations with local canines

Photographs by Becky VanderVeen

Spontaneously and at great expense,  O.Henry magazine dispatched a dogged team of professional pooch whisperers and dubiously accredited pet psychics, positioning themselves along and around Greensboro’s

The Dynamic Duo is on the scene . . . in a leisurely search for Catwoman!

Or any cat, really. A squirrel will do. We’re just here for the chase.

greenways — both downtown and at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park — in an attempt to uncover just what poochie profundity might possibly be barking inside the furry little heads of our cherished canine companions.

I have the attention span of a goldfish.

Oh, look, a dandelion!

CHESTNUT

CLAUS

PETEY

I am the Duchess, all bow before me!

Bow wows don’t count!

Normally I’m a couch potato, today I’m a baked potato!

Bacon bits, please.

I’m a Diamond Dog fo sho.

Can’t wait to get home and run zoomies around the pool.

Sprints are greater than strolls any day!

DUCHESS

SUKI

CHILI

BOWIE

Wanna know why there are no squirrels along this route? You’re looking at ‘er.

See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!

CHICKEN NUGGET

Am I going to lead this guy to Arrowhead Coffee today or Westerwood Tavern?

Let me off this leash and I’ll be to the top of Everest by sunup.

I’m as Southern as pecan pie!

I have paw-litical aspirations Either way, I’ll reward my good boy with a little treat.

YETI

Lola

LolLY

BELLA

PEARL

Endowed by the goddess Isis with the powers of the antelope and the elements, I will soar as the falcon soars, run with the speed of gazelles, and command the elements of the sky and earth . . .

Soy el cachorro más bonito de la Vía Verdeindiscutido!*

*I am the prettiest dog on the greenway - indisputable!

Fifteen minutes after my haircut and a modeling gig already?

Give ‘em with that far-away, supermodel stare.

Shazam!

ISIS

JIMMY

BOLT

TEDDY

I thought we were going out for bacon.

Make way for the biiiiiiig daaaaaawgs!!!

Wait, what? I didn’t make the cover?!?

I’m training to be the dock-diving champion of the state! I’m leaping past you, Sapper!

What a bonehead!

ASPEN

MACEY

PHOEBE

Hopper

Coco

I’m Jimmy Cagney trapped in a canine body. Yeah, see?

Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.

If you knew what I was really thinking about they’d never print it!

In another six months, I’ll be picking this kid up!

And Lola wants it all!

Make way for Hank the Tank!

My goal this afternoon is to meet an interesting individual I can engage in an intelligent conversation with.

Peanut butter! Case in point.

RUDY

LOLA

HANK

PEPpER

LUA

FREDDY

This dog-eared doggerel was penned by Billy (Barking Mad) Ingram.

Dog Is Love

Sedgefield Presbyterian Church laps up its new congregational canine

By m aria Johnson

PhotograPhs By m ark Wagoner

It’s been several weeks since 79-year-old Sue Lucado could make it to church.

She had a cold.

She had guests.

She had COVID.

It’s been one thing after another, but she’s here, at Greensboro’s Sedgefield Presbyterian Church, this Sunday morning. She steps into the vestibule and receives an unusually robust welcome.

She is sniffed

She is licked.

Her shoelaces are tasted.

In an instant, Lucado’s expression changes from somber to smiling.

She leans over and sticks a hand into the mass of apricot curls dancing around her feet.

Two gleaming brown eyes look up.

Two floppy ears emerge.

A finger-length tail covered with wispy tendrils thumps the carpet.

The furry swirl slows enough to reveal Chloe Grace, the church’s 3-month-old, 8-pounds-and-gaining, congregational dog.

Genetically speaking, Chloe Grace is a cavapoo, meaning she’s part poodle, part King Charles Cavalier spaniel.

Spiritually speaking, she’s heaven-sent.

“She’s the most beautiful thing,” Lucado gushes. “Bless her heart!”

The good news about Chloe Grace reached Lucado a couple of weeks ago, when she cut the pup’s picture out of a church newsletter, stuck the picture on her refrigerator, and made an announcement to her own beloved dog, Katie, a Yorkshire terrier.

“I said, ‘Katie, we have a little friend at church,’” she says.

Now that Lucado has met Chloe Grace, she is smitten.

She takes a program from human greeter Paul Durant, who owns the dog with his wife, the church’s pastor, Rev. Kim Priddy.

“You know me and dogs,” Lucado tells him. “I like them better than people.”“Don’t tell anyone, but me, too,” Durant confides playfully.

Lucado nods, still smiling, and finds a pew.

•

Priddy, the shepherd of this flock, swiped the idea of a pastoral pup from a friend, Rev. Michelle Funk in Pennsylvania.

Funk, who got a church dog last year, had toyed with the idea of a congregational canine for years. Using a therapy dog for church work

made sense to her, but when she pastored a church in Burlington, N.C., a few years ago, she had two beagles.

“Neither of them was church therapy dog material,” Funk says in a phone interview.

“You know beagles. They follow their noses. They’re very loving, but they have a mind of their own.”

Then, in 2022, she was called to her current church, Heidelberg Union Church in Slatington, Pa.

The time and place seemed right.

One member trained seeing-eye dogs and often brought the trainees to church. A past member had attended with his personal service dog, who sometimes sat in on messages for the children.

“Dogs in church was not a new concept in this congregation,” Funk says.

She resurrected her hunt for a four-legged staffer. Her research turned up a handful of pastoral pooches nationwide. The cavapoo breed, known for being warm, intelligent and hypoallergenic, was a popular choice.

Funk visited a reputable cavapoo breeder and brought home a 4-month-old pup that her family — fans of the Harry Potter franchise — named Muggles.

At a pastoral retreat last year, Funk told Priddy about taking Muggles, in his first week on the job, to see a church member who was living at home under hospice care.

Funk placed Muggles in the woman’s lap. As the woman stroked Muggles’ soft coat, she opened her heart. Words poured out.

Muggles knew what to do. He relaxed, stayed put and let the woman talk.

She was scared of dying, she said. She had things she wanted to do in life. As faithful as she was, she wondered if God would be present at her passing.

Funk reminded her of Jesus’ words on the cross: “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

She reassured her that fear and doubt were normal.

She prayed with the woman.

It was clear to Funk that Muggles had helped the woman tap a vein of emotion that she, the pastor, might not have been able to reach alone.

The story lit a fire in Priddy, who’d grown up with dogs and owned dogs when her three children were young.

“I knew that dogs made people happy, but when Michelle talked about her visit, I realized the potential of reaching church members in a new way,” she says.

She ran the idea past her husband, Durant.

“I said, “As long as it’s for a purpose . . . ’” he recalls.

Historically a “big dog person,” he agreed to getting a smaller, more portable cavapoo — with a mature weight of 15 to 20 pounds — for the church gig.

Priddy pitched the plan to her session, the congregation’s ruling body. She told the story of Muggles.

If she got a similar dog, she said, she would bring the dog to work, take it to visit sick and homebound members, and have it certified as a therapy dog as soon as possible.

The idea was consistent with other forward-leaning projects that Priddy has backed to improve the church’s outreach, relevance and

membership — an Earth-care committee; a yoga class that meets during the Sunday school hour; guest speakers on the war in Gaza.

Like many mainline churches, the Sedgefield congregation has shrunk over the last several decades. Today, riding an uptick following the doldrums of COVID, there are about 85 active members. About half are seniors. Many live alone.

A dog, Priddy hoped, would comfort those who missed touching and holding another living being.

She also aimed to delight children in the church’s preschool program and signal to potential members that the congregation was open to new ideas.

The session agreed unanimously.

On a Friday in March, Priddy and her husband brought their 8-week-old bundle of joy home from a breeder in Charlotte.

That Sunday, they toted the puppy to church.

Priddy invited church members to vote on a name for the dog by dropping dollars into red Solo cups bearing the names suggested by children of the church.

After the service, $125 in votes were tallied. The top two votegetters were Chloe and Grace.

“Helllllllo, Miss Helen,” Priddy singsongs as she steps through the door of an apartment at the River Landing retirement community in Colfax. “I’ve brought all kinds of guests today.”

Across the room, church member Helen Boyer, 98, sits in a recliner with her feet up, watching daytime television.

“Where’s Amazing Grace?” She calls out in a bright voice. “I call her Amazing Grace. Amazing Grace is better for a church dog.”

Priddy leads the pup into the studio, detaches a leash and lifts the dog into the chair with Boyer, a stalwart church member who attended services regularly until she gave up driving about seven years ago. These days, she watches on YouTube or, if her daughter is with her, on Facebook Live.

“Get up here, Amazing,” says Boyer, whose manicured fingers slide into the pastoral pup’s curly coat and begin massaging. “How are you, missy? It’s been a while.”

Soon, Boyer is talking about how she misses the dogs she used to own — what good company they were and how they kept her on her toes. One dog, Suzy, a Doberman, lived with her when she moved to a cottage in the retirement community 20 years ago.

Suzy died about 10 years ago, but Boyer still feels close to her. Literally.

“She’s over there, in that drawer,” Boyer says, pointing to a bureau that holds her beloved dog’s ashes. “She’s going to be inurned with me.”

Chloe Grace is not impressed. She nibbles Boyer’s unguarded toes.

“No biting!” Priddy says, removing her charge.

Priddy pulls out a bag of treats and hands some to Boyer. For a tasty price, they finish their visit peacefully.

In closing, Priddy scoots closer to the recliner and offers Boyer a hand in prayer. She thanks the Lord for this time together, for Boyer’s devotion to the church and for the opportunity to talk about their dogs.

her usher-dad, Durant, and her clerk-of-session-pet-sitter Johnson.

Does Chloe Grace help take up the offering?

Ask almost any question about Chloe Grace, and the answer is probably “yes.”

Has Chloe Grace had any accidents at church?

Yes, but none in the sanctuary. As of this writing.

Did Chloe Grace participate in this year’s Easter egg hunt?

Yes. She quickly found a candy-filled egg, at which point Priddy and Durant pulled her from the hunt.

Has Chloe Grace been invited to children’s birthday parties?

Several. One girl requested the gift of being chased around her party by the puppy.

Do adults drop by the church just to see Chloe Grace?

Yes. The clerk of session, Karen Johnson, who is retired and lives near the church, sometimes texts Priddy to see if she has brought the pup to work. If the answer is yes, Johnson heads to the church.

Are people sometimes disappointed if Priddy shows up to a church meeting alone?

Yes. “I thought Chloe Grace would be here,” they say sadly.

Does Durant tease his wife that more people come to church to see Chloe Grace than to see her?

Yes. Priddy’s reply: “I don’t care, as long as they come.”

Does Chloe Grace attend Sunday services?

Yes. Usually, she hangs out in the back of the sanctuary with

Yes. She has a flair for opening hearts and wallets. Someone suggested training her to stare at people until they drop money in the offering plate — and to bark if they don’t give enough.

Does Chloe Grace occasionally run under the pews, causing a visible ripple of heads turning to catch the flash of fur under their feet?

Yes. Sometimes, they step on Chloe Grace accidentally. She seems to forgive those who trespass against, and on, her.

Does Chloe Grace have a time-out spot for when she is too excited?

Yes. See the playpen in the church library.

Does Chloe Grace have an Instagram account?

Yes, @chloe_the_spc_pup. Follow her colleague, Muggles in Pennsylvania, @pupminhuc.

Are there members of the church who aren’t crazy about dogs in general, or Chloe Grace in particular?

Yes, probably. But they haven’t whined to the leadership. Do people seem to be smiling more around Sedgefield Presbyterian these days?

Definitely. Johnson credits Chloe Grace with lifting spirits.

“She’s a ray of sunshine for people. When she greets you, how can you not have a better day?” she muses. “She doesn’t care if you’re walking with a cane or if you’re in a wheelchair, if you’re 2 feet tall or 5 feet tall, if you’re Black or white, gay or lesbian. She doesn’t care. She’s there to give you love, like God is.” OH

Memento Mori

The affirming life of Leslie Deaton

By Cynthia a dams • PhotograPhs By a my Freeman

“The ache for home lives in all of us,” wrote poet Maya Angelou. “The safe place where we can go as we are . . .”

For Leslie Deaton, sanctuary is a Dutch Colonial in the historic Fisher Park district. “My story is one of breath-stealing tragedy, but also love in its wildest form, of soul-crushing pain and new mercies every morning,” she says. On leave as a Northern Guilford High School counselor, she’s fighting cancer while drawing comfort from her beautifully realized retreat.

The home, a slate-gray charmer, tells a visual version of Deaton’s story. This is a place of meaning, its well-appointed rooms say. Of warmth. Of joy.

As she found it only a few years ago, it was move-in ready, which was a particular boon, after a sensitive and full restoration by Dunleath residents Camilla Cornelius and Stephen Ruzicka.

“The house was built in 1922; it looked great,” she praises. Cornelius, who formerly housed a counseling practice there, presented Deaton with four pages of itemized renovations, including specialty faucets.

It was a turnkey home with curb appeal, given the on-trend gray exterior with crisp white trim. “So perfect for me,” Deaton adds, having bought the property in August 2020, “in the heart of COVID.”

She made the move well before she became ill, and a year before she lost her only child, William Walton Finch, at age 23.

“Losing my son . . . ” she falters, explaining. “He took a Xanax that was pressed with Fentanyl on July 28, 2021. I believe that is why I have cancer. I just could not endure it.” She pauses. “The love of my life. My only child.”

Her son graduated a semester early from N.C. State University with magna cum laude honors, she adds. Nothing fit.

She sighs raggedly. Tears fall.

Deaton understands those tears are therapeutic and necessary. Ironically, she has seldom been able to enjoy much leisure time at home prior to her illness, given a busy professional life.

Fueled by her longtime work with young adults, she has continued to speak to students and anyone who will listen about the lethal threat street drugs pose to young people, even after a shocking diagnosis last year.

She believes “the trauma of losing Will opened me up to invasion. Losing a child is a different type of loss.” Losing an older child is no less challenging, she says. “It’s different.” Two people in her life who lost children subsequently “ended up with breast cancer.”

In February 2023, she chose to share her son’s story with 700 students, parents and educators at Northern Guilford. She was joined that night by Amy Neville, a California parent who lost a 14-year-old son.

“Tragedy would hurl me without warning into a spotlight I never in a million years asked for but felt required to assume in order to tell the most soul-crushing story of my lifetime.”

Publicly, she drew back the curtain on pain following the loss “of my sun, my moon and all my stars — my beautiful son and my only child.”

The title of her presentation? One Pill Can Kill.

In a televised interview with WFMY-TV, Deaton shared the nature of her personal trauma. “I got the absolute worst phone call of the human experience. I was informed that I lost my child to a horrific poison, Fentanyl,” she explained

She met Jane Gibson at Authoracare while grieving.

“I was touched by the love and the pride she shared with me about her son,” says Gibson, a recently-retired staff member. “And despite her great sorrow, she was not crawling away into a hole.” Even though it was a busy time in the academic year for her and her students, it was clear to her that “she would find healing by providing counseling support for these teens. What an amazing, loving woman!”

As long ago as 2022, Deaton began experiencing persistent stomach pain. Late that year, nagging back pain worsened.

“I was trying so hard to resist painkillers,” she recalls. “To honor what I’d been so vocal about.” Instead, she bought a new mattress to help her back, still suspecting she also had a stomach ulcer.

“Then we got new office chairs. Each member of our counseling department had back complaints . . . But guess what? I still had agonizing pain.”

She turned to Ibuprofen, Tums and a heating pad in order to make it through the work day. “One morning in May [2023], our well-intentioned counseling secretary stood at my desk and said, ‘I’m not going to move until you call the doctor.’”

Deaton eventually capitulated, seeking help. When a

radiology interventionist proposed a nerve block to alleviate back pain, she tried it.

It helped briefly. Then her pain roared back.

During follow-up, her blood work was normal. But an endoscopy and a CT scan detected a large mass in her pancreas.

Deaton was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer on May 31, 2023. “I was told to get my affairs in order while I still had cognition.” When she learned her diagnosis, she was at

home alone. It was a phone call “that cruelly propelled me off my axis once more.”

“Yes, I know I have a terminal diagnosis, but I don’t know what that means,” she says calmly, gazing out a kitchen window. “I could be in a car wreck today,” she says unemotionally. Outside, colorful plants await planting in a garden she plans to call “Will’s Garden.”

She makes plans and continues home projects.

“I’ve not asked my life expectancy from my doctors, and

the reason I haven’t is, I feel it’s a guess, at best. I’m focused on today. Today is a gift,” she muses. Shortly after her diagnosis when she realized she wouldn’t be going back to work in the fall, she recalls deliberating over “this silly little rug from Ballard Design. And my friend, Jane Harrill, was here. And she said, ‘You’re going to be here a lot. If that rug gives you happiness, get it.’”

Harrill is Will’s former kindergarten teacher, explains Deaton, as well as an artist. She helps Deaton following treatments.

Deaton’s close, longtime friend, Todd Nabors, who met her at First Presbyterian church, agrees with Harrill.

“We’re the same age,” he says. “We’ve been friends forever.” They see each other nearly every Sunday. Deaton admires his aesthetic and relied upon his point of view when it came to her home.

Nabors, who works for furniture company Thayer Coggin and also consults on design, offered similar advice. “Beauty matters,” he told her.

And so, Deaton ordered the sisal rug.

Deaton has always found “feathering her nest” therapeutic. Years ago, she frequented Summer House, a home decor shop. There she met Kaylee Phillips.

Phillips, who now works in antiques and collectibles at Carriage House, says, “She collects beautiful things. And along the way, she collects beautiful friendships.”

“Beauty does matter to me. And surrounding myself with joy and cheer is a medicine of sorts. It’s a therapy. It’s treatment,” says Deaton. There’s sorrow here, too, of course: the elephant in the room, as the expression goes. Yet there’s an aura of peace, too, and light. It streams through the house’s many windows.

At home, the gentle colors of a spa surround her.

Along those lines, she has selected a fabric with which she wants to reupholster an upstairs den chair. The room is softly feminine, accented with the pastel art she collects. Inside sit her desk, a vintage French chair found at Carriage House, along with a television, chaise lounge and cushy seating. After treatments — a more aggressive regimen of chemo and radiation began in April — she often rests here.

She cocoons here in the beautiful room, sometimes tossing a toy to her dog, Charley, whom she shares with her dad, and Virginia, her cat.

She resists staying in bed when under the weather, and refuses to recover in pajamas but prefers regular clothes. To be as normal as possible. “When I go to treatment, they say, ‘We love seeing what you come in wearing.’” Deaton takes pride in this, saying it is a form of self-care.

Even while wearing yoga pants, she stacks delicate beaded bracelets along her arm — many are gifts from devoted friends.

She refuses to give in or stop making an effort.

This applies equally to her personal environment.

She has just chosen a new fabric by Elliston House for a favorite bedroom chair. “The company is owned by [Greensboro residents] Morgan Hood and Ally Holderness. And I just admire them for taking that leap of faith,” she says of their venture into business.

“At times I’m tethered to that chair.”

She chose Elliston House for Roman shade fabrics in the same space and the company’s wallpaper to line a breakfront she uses for storage. She’s deliberating another Elliston House fabric for an often-recovered armchair.

She, perhaps, values art and personal mementos above all else. Art is present in every room, as are personal touches. Many of the works she’s acquired have been created by local and regional artists.

Winston-Salem artist Carolyn Blaylock is a favorite. She collects North Carolina artists Bee Sieburg, Libby Smart, Sharon Schwenk,

Sue Scoggins, Helen Farson, Amy Heywood, Yvonne Kimbrough, Crystal Eadie Miller and Murray Parker. She describes their styles as “warm and inviting.” She treasures pieces by artist (and fellow educator) friend Harrill.

Virginia artist Martha Dick and Georgia artist Lisa Moore are also part of her collection.

Favorite places and influences?

Deaton admires the Carolina Inn, in the “most classic of ways.” (She’s a UNC-Chapel Hill grad.) She loves “going room to room and seeing the differences.”

Home magazines are a constant source of inspiration. She again mentions former home decor shop Summer House. “It had a great influence. I loved it.” She uses painted pieces acquired there, including chests and breakfronts.

Once, a man delivered something to her prior home and exclaimed, “You’ve shopped at Summer House!”

“Everybody who’s ever encountered her loves her,” says Phillips, musing about the friendship that originated in that store. “We’ve all become friends with her. It was deepened due to the connection with our children,” she adds.

Often, too, Deaton finds Randy McManus’ floral shop “very therapeutic for me.”

She picks up a small plate displayed in her den, found in a Pawley’s Island shop in 2019.

“It simply says, ‘Tell stories.’ It’s funny because I didn’t buy it initially, but it popped into my mind several times before our departure, so I scooped it up on

our way out of town, never dreaming of its significance, completely oblivious that it would ultimately become my life’s theme song.”

Deaton still considers her home a creative outlet and she now has time to contemplate every detail. She considers a colorful pink Elliston House lampshade. (Pink is a favorite color. There is even a pink Keurig coffeemaker on the kitchen counter and a pink leopard print sisal on the kitchen floor).

She just replaced the upstairs bath’s colorful mirror with a high gloss white-framed one. Satisfied, she says it calms the effect of a lively wallpaper.

This is part of “living my life,” she explains. Design, color and beauty bring her great joy.

When Deaton walks into her son’s former bedroom, her voice is softer.

“His special, special things,” she says quietly. “I just had to totally redo it . . . ”

She pauses, as if she is seeing the room as it was before it became a guest room, adding a white Matelassé coverlet, crisp linens and French blue accents. One wall displays diplomas, pictures and mementos from her son.

Everything in here is something about Will, she says.

After his dad left when he was young, Will and his mom had years together. “We had such a unique and special relationship. I weep. And I will never stop weeping. I tell people, I do not cry over my cancer, but I cry over Will.”

She reads aloud framed stickies he wrote to her, struggling with her emotions.

“I have beautiful portraits of him,” she says of her son. “I am so thankful.”

Friends who know of Deaton’s loss and health issues have donated wallpaper, fabrics, bedding, a specially monogrammed neckroll with Will’s initials from Matouk bedding — even a special commission by Triad artist Amy Heywood.

“She gave that [painting] to me. Came into the home, looked at all my art. And that’s what she created.” Fresh flowers appear at her doorstep. Letters with donations arrive from strangers.

“Never did I dream when I redid this room that so many dif-

ferent people would be using it to stay with me,” she continues, lingering in Will’s former room. She is pleased when they tell her they find peace here.

If memories of Will are the dominant focus of her home, the underlying theme is serenity.

The lighting fixture in her room was a gift from a friend. “It’s a very visual comfort,” she says. “It’s so beautiful at night.” This is a real place of sanctuary, she repeats.

She picks up and cuddles Virginia, the blue-eyed rescue cat. “She has a little dot on her nose,” Deaton says delightedly. She imagined her “walking up Virginia Street. to find me.”

Deaton rehabilitated her. She is epileptic, Deaton says, and takes phenobarbital; once, a well-meaning friend almost gave her Virginia’s medicine. She winces, but smiles, quipping, “Wonder what that would have been like?”

The downstairs rooms are tasteful yet casual with cream-colored walls, accented with French finds, collections and artwork. The eating nook off the kitchen had original benches and table, which she decided to keep but stash in storage. It was original, and Deaton says she didn’t want “to be disloyal to the Ruzicka’s renovation.” While she would “never get rid of it,” she stored it in

the basement so she could add a table that better worked for her 6’3”-tall son when he lived with her.

Each room in her home sparks a return to the subject of her son.

Will chose to enter treatment at Fellowship Hall, she says quietly, standing in the breakfast nook where they ate together when he was staying here.

He had completed treatment for addiction. Will had just qualified for Navy Seal training, “when this all happened.” Deaton would never know if it was his first relapse either. At the time, her son was living in Charlotte and doing incredibly well, according to his roommate. He had, for months, endured miles of running and swimming. “He doesn’t fit the mold,” she stresses.

Nonetheless, Deaton extols the virtue of a recovery program. “But when you are 22, and everything about socializing is a drinking event . . .”

Alcohol, she explains, lowers our inhibitions. “And opioids are the worst. Instantly addictive. I’m not minimizing alcohol,” she stresses, “but it’s a different beast.”

“It’s a tragic, tragic story,” she says. “An incredible, stinging hurt and [emotional] pain followed him,” she says. “But Will was definitely trying to find a way to deal with that pain. And he went

at it the wrong way.”

“But he was always outstanding, and he will always be my greatest accomplishment,” she says.

Coping with extreme pain, Deaton has had to learn how to handle her own fears regarding painkillers. She credits the Palliative Care Program at Cone for guidance.

“Dr. Beth Golding took me under her wing and has gotten control of my pain,” says Deaton. Controlling pain enables her to walk again, go to the grocery store, to do chores. “Transformative,” she adds.

She recalls Dr. Golding saying “we don’t see thriving in pancreatic patients. But you are doing life.”

With Deaton’s pain lessened, she occasionally found diversion working a few hours at Watkins Sydnor, a home store. Earlier last year, she even managed 5-mile walks from Fisher Park to Irving Park, feeling completely energized.

“For me, time with my friends is what matters. It’s not about stuff. Funny, because this article is about stuff, in a way. But what this disease has taught me is that time together is all that matters.” OH

ALMANAC

July

By a shley Walshe

July is the scratch of wild bramble, a rogue rumble of thunder, the snap, crackle, pop of grasshoppers on the wing.

The soundtrack of summer is alive and swelling. As the temperature rises, the cicadas turn the dial from lusty to deafening. Gentle crescendos are for the birds.

Catbird sings of blueberries. Mockingbird, too. Red-bellied woodpecker gorges on fruit.

Among ditch daisies and dancing grasses, meadow-beauty and blooming Joe Pye, the crickets declare their sole intention. It’s time now, they announce. Let’s do this! We came here on a mission!

Life wants to live. All beings know some version of this tune. The dream of every cricket is next sum mer’s mating song.

In the garden, mantis munches on June beetles. Honeybees serenade blackeyed Susans. A watermelon whispers that it’s time, now.

One look and you know it’s true. Still, you give the rind a solid thwack.

Yep. Music.

As you gently twist the whopper from the stem, the cicadas scream with primal knowing. This is when you choose to slow down. Feel the weight of swollen fruit as you hold it close. Give thanks for the soundscape, the sweetness, the sweat on your brow.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.

— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Despite these endless summer days, the transience of this season is palpable.

Let’s do this, the crickets trill. It’s time now. Life as we know it depends on us.

All That Glitters

Grab the binoculars. A Mars-Uranus conjunction will grace the Eastern sky an hour before sunrise on Monday, July 15. Look to Taurus (the white bull) for this rare glimpse of two planets, seemingly close enough to kiss.

On the subject of shining moments, jewelweed is having one this month, too. In other words: It’s blooming.

With its small-but-showy orange flowers (they do look like tiny charms dangling from slender stalks), you’re likely to spot this native medicinal along forest edges — especially near poison ivy. As Nature has arranged it, the sap from jewelweed leaves and stems can be applied topically to help soothe itchy rashes. Simply brilliant.

En Plein Air

Did you know that National Play Outside Day is celebrated on the first Saturday of every month? This Fourth of July weekend, turn off the screens. It’s time for some old-fashioned yard fun. Hopscotch. Double Dutch. Corn-shucking on the porch.

Bust out the freeze pops. The hammock. The threadbare picnic blanket. Is your kid the next eggand-spoon race champion? Watermelon seed-spitting extraordinaire? Double-dog dare you to find out. OH

DESIGNER FABRICS

Real House Pets

Please verify times, costs, status and location before attending an event. Although conscientious efforts are made to provide accurate and up-to-date information, the world is subject to change and errors can occur!

To submit an event for consideration, email us at ohenrymagcalendar@gmail.com by 5 p.m. the first of the month one month prior to the event.

Weekly Events

SUNDAYS

BARRE CLASS. 10 a.m. Strengthen, tone and stretch your way into the week. Tickets: $10. Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.

SIT, SPEAK. 4:30–5:15 p.m. Megan Blake, The Pet Lifestyle Coach, provides free group training and real time practice as you learn to connect more deeply with your four-legged, best friend. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

KARAOKE & LINE DANCING. 4–7 p.m. Two of your fav activities merge for one evening of fun with DJ Energizer. Free. Center City Park, 200 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

TUESDAYS

YOGA IN THE PARK. Noon–12:45. Take your lunch break with a power flow led by Greensboro Power Yoga. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

TRAILHEAD SWEAT SESH. 6–7 p.m. Throughout the month, sweat and flow to a variety of YMCA-led fitness classes, spaced out along various spots of the Downtown Greenway. Free. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.

WEDNESDAYS

LIVE MUSIC. 6–9 p.m. Evan Olson and Jessica Mashburn of AM rOdeO play covers and original music. Free. Print Works Bistro. 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: printworksbistro.com/gallery/music.

ZUMBA. 5:30–6:15 p.m. Shake off the day with a spicy dance-inspired workout led by Velmy Liz Trinidad. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/ calendar.

FAMILY NIGHT. 5–7 p.m. Enjoy an art-driven evening with family and friends in the studios. Free. Art Quest at GreenHill Center for NC Art, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greenhillnc.org/events.

MUSIC IN THE PARK. 6–8 p.m. Sip and snack at LeBauer Park while grooving to local and regional artists. Free. Lawn Service, 208 N. Davie St, Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/ calendar.

July 2024

THURSDAYS

(With exception to July 4)

JAZZ AT THE O.HENRY. 6–9 p.m. Sip vintage craft cocktails and snack on tapas while the O.Henry Trio performs with a different jazz vocalist each week. Free. O.Henry Hotel Social Lobby, 624 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: ohenryhotel.com/o-henry-jazz.

WALK THIS WAY. 6 p.m. Put on your sneakers for a 2–4 mile social stroll or jog with the Downtown Greenway Run & Walk Club, which is open to all ages and abilities. Free. LoFi Park, 500 N. Eugene St., Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.

EASY RIDERS. 6–8:30 p.m. All levels of cyclists are welcome to ride along on a guided 4-mile cruise around downtown. Free. Lawn Service, 208 N. Davie St, Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

YOGA IN THE PARK. 6–7 p.m. Unwind your mind and body with a flow led by Embodhi Yoga. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

KIDS’ KLUB STORYTIME. 10:30–11 a.m. The Greensboro Public Library librarians entertain little ones with stories and singalongs. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St, Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

THURSDAYS & SATURDAYS

KARAOKE & COCKTAILS. 8 p.m. until midnight, Thursdays; 9 p.m. until midnight, Saturdays. Courtney Chandler hosts a night of sipping and singing. Free. 19 & Timber Bar at Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.

FRIDAYS & SATURDAYS

LIVE MUSIC. 7–10 p.m. Enjoy drinks in the 1808 Lobby Bar while soaking up live music provided by local artists. Free. Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.

SATURDAYS

YOGA. 9:30 a.m. Don’t stay in bed when you could namaste in the spa studio. Tickets: $10. Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.

WATER AEROBICS. 10:30 a.m. Make a splash while getting a heart-pumping workout at an indoor pool. Tickets: $10. Grandover Resort & Spa, 1000 Club Road, Greensboro. Info: grandoverresort.com.

BLACKSMITH DEMONSTRATION. 10 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Watch a costumed blacksmith in action as he crafts various iron pieces. Free. Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.

July Events

July 01–31

ARTISTS AT EDGEWOOD. 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Meet the 30 artists-in-residence at Elliott Daingerfield’s restored historic cottage in Blowing Rock. Featured artists change weekly. Free. Edgewood Cottage, Main Street and Ginny Stevens Lane, Blowing Rock. Info: artistsatedgewood.org.

HITTING THE HIGH NOTES. Check out High Notes: Echoes of High Point’s Musical Talent, an exhibit highlighting local renowned musicians throughout the decade — developed by Dr. Shannon Lalor’s Public History course students at High Point University. Free. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpoint museum.org.

July 01–27

EASTERN MUSIC FESTIVAL. Times vary. Enjoy daily free and paid programming by EMF’s world-renowned faculty artists, young artists, and featured soloists performing locally, with exception to one special performance in Boone. Dana Auditorium, 710 Levi Coffin Drive, Greensboro. Info: easternmusicfestival.org/festival.

July 01–26

WATERCOLOR EXHIBIT. Face to Face, A Look at the World features the work of local artist Alexis Lavine; meet the artist at a festive reception from 5–7 p.m., July 12. The Artery Gallery, 1711 Spring Garden St., Greensboro. Info: alexislavineartist. com/exhibitions-and-events.html.

July 03

READING THE WORLD. 7–8 p.m. Discover contemporary authors’ works in translation, such as this month’s selection, The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé Free. Online. Info: scuppernongbooks.com/event.

July 04

FUN FOURTH. Downtown Greensboro hosts an array of events to celebrate America’s birthday, including a 5K to Freedom Fest and pop-up nuptials. Downtown Greensboro. Info: downtowngreensboro.org/fun-fourth-festival.

UNCLE SAM JAM. 4:30–10 p.m. Enjoy an evening of family-friendly activities in the park. $10 parking, $20 Family Fun Zone. Oak Hollow Festival Park, 1841 Eastchester Drive, High Point. Info: highpointnc.gov/calendar.

July 05

FIRST FRIDAY. 6–9 p.m. Head downtown for a night of live music and happenings stretching all the way from LeBauer Park and the Greensboro Cultural Center to the South End. Free. Downtown Greensboro. Info: downtowngreensboro.org/first-friday.

STORY TIME. 10–11 a.m. A member of the youth librarians team from the Greensboro Public Library engages young children through playful storytelling. Free. Woven Works Park, East

Lindsay Street and North Murrow Boulevard, Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.

July 06

FLASHBACK TO THE FORTIES. 11 a.m.–4 p.m. Explore life in 1940s Greensboro with WWII re-enactors, vintage vehicles, a Ration Book bake-off, Victory Garden planning, scrap collection crafts compliments of Reconsidered Goods, films, flash talks and food trucks. Free. Greensboro History Museum, 130 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: greensborohistory.org/events.

SWING WORKSHOP. 4–5:30 p.m. Prepare for the Greensboro History Museum’s evening event by learning how to swing dance and do the Lindy Hop. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborohistory.org/events.

SWING TIME. 5:30–8:30 p.m. Step into the vibe from the service clubs of Greensboro’s World War II Overseas Replacement Depot with food, drinks and dance, plus a fashion show with Vintage to Vogue, costume contest and party games. Greensboro History Museum, 130 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: greensborohistory.org/events.

. . . OF SINKING SHIPS. 8:30 p.m. The band rocks out with guests KillerAntz and Dai Cheri. Tickets: $10+. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.

QUILL SKILL. 11 a.m.–4 p.m. All ages are welcome to drop in and learn the art of writing with a quill, just as the Declaration of Independence was crafted. Free. Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.

July 06–28

SUMMERS IN SEAGROVE. During Stepping into the Craft, Seagrove potteries host kiln openings, special events, demonstrations and handson experiences. Free. Seagrove. Info: discoverseagrove.com/events-all.

July 07 & 21

BLUEGRASS & BRUNCH. 11 a.m.–1 p.m. Enjoy live bluegrass and folk music while munching tasty treats from vendors. Free. LeBauer Park, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

July 7, 10, 17, 24

CAROLINA KIDS CLUB. 9 a.m. Keep your kiddos cool while watching family-friendly films and noshing on complimentary kids’ snack packs. Tickets: $5+, Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: carolinatheatre.com/events.

July 08–31

SUMMER FILM FEST. 7 p.m. Munch on movie theater popcorn while catching the season’s popular classics. Tickets: $8+, Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: carolinatheatre.com/events.

July 09

BEATLES TRIBUTE. 7:30 p.m. “Come Together” to celebrate the beloved music of the fab four as performed by RAIN. Tickets:

$29+. Steven Tanger Center, 300 N. Elm St., Greensboro. Info: tangercenter.com/events.

July 11

TRASH BASH. 6–8:30 p.m. Reconsidered Goods and the Office of Sustainability and Resilience invite teams of three-to-five teens to create “found objects” art in a live competition. Free, registration required to compete. Grove Creative Coworking Space at Revolution Mill, 1200 Textile Drive. Info: greensboro-nc.gov/ government/city-news/city-calendar.

HUSTLE SOULS. 8:30 p.m. Enjoy a night of nostalgic soul plus modern sensibilities with this Ashevillebased band. Tickets: $10+. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.

July 12 & 19

ARTS SPLASH CONCERTS. 6–8 p.m. The High Point Arts Council presents a summer concert series featuring an array of local musical talent — on July 12, catch the pop-rock tunes of Fifth Floor, at Mendenhall Transportation Terminal in High Point; and on July 19, Spindle 45 performs Top 40 plus R&B at Creekside Park in Archdale. Free Info: highpointarts.org/arts.

July 12

BEN JONES. 8 p.m. He’s been a featured performer at the North Carolina Comedy Festival and now he’s gracing the Idiot Box stage for a night of laughs. Tickets: $15+. The Idiot Box, 503 N. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: idiotboxers.com.

SPEED FRIENDING. 5–8 p.m. Looking to make new friends and spark great conversation? Register for your age group’s time slot and come away with new buds. Free. LoFi Park, 500 N. Eugene St., Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.

A GOOFY MOVIE . 8:30 p.m. Bring your chairs, blankets and picnic food to watch a familyfriendly movie under the stars. Free, water and popcorn provided. Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.

July 13–31

SCULPTED GLASS. Delve into a thought-provoking exploration of American history, politics and contemporary culture through an exhibit of glass artist John Moran’s work, titled American Idols. Opening reception from 4–6 p.m., July 13. Free. Starworks Exhibition Gallery, 100 Russell Drive, Star. Info: starworksnc.org/starworks-events.

July 13 & 27

POLLINATOR FAVOR. 8–10 a.m. Buzz on over to the bird, bee and pollinator garden on the Greenway to get your hands dirty while keeping the Earth clean. Free; registration required. Woven Works Park, East Lindsay Street and North Murrow Boulevard, Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.

July 13

ROLLER DERBY. 2:30 p.m. Greensboro Roller Derby members battle it out on wheels during their Summer Slam. Tickets: $44.99+. Greensboro

Coliseum, 1921 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Info: greensborocoliseum.com/events.

SOUTHERN ROCK. 7:30 p.m. Atlanta Rhythm Section has been rocking the stage for nearly 50 years and you can catch them at a live charity show benefiting the Britt Balser Foundation for TTP. Tickets: $30+. Castle Boo, 20 Fisher Ferry St., Thomasville. Info: castleboo.com/music-and-eats.

JARED STERN. 8 p.m. You’ll see why he’s kept the laughs rolling for over 20 years. Tickets: $15+. The Idiot Box, 503 N. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: idiotboxers.com.

BEDROOM DIVISION. 8 p.m. Bask in the mellow, woozy and romantic indie-pop of a hometown band. Tickets: $10+. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.

GUIDED GREENWAY TOUR. 9 a.m.–noon. Step into Greensboro’s history, take in public art installations and learn about environmental stewardship and economic impact during a walking tour of the 4-mile Downtown Greenway. Free; registration required. LoFi Park, 500 N. Eugene St., Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.

CHILDREN’S CONCERT. 10–10:45 a.m. Travel “Up, Up and Away” to new places, such as Japan, France and Argentina, and explore all the different kinds of music you’d find there. Free. The Music Academy of North Carolina, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: musicacademync.org.

JAZZ WORKSHOP. 3–4:30 p.m. Bring your own instrument or vocal chops for an interactive learning experience focused on techniques, improvisation, styling and sounds. Free. The Music Academy of North Carolina, 1327 Beaman Place, Greensboro. Info: musicacademync.org.

July 14

MUSEP. 6–8 p.m. Enjoy an evening of folk music with Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs and Folkknot during MUSEP, aka Music for a Sunday Evening in the Park. Savor concessions from Kibi’s Crazy Casserole and StayFresh Italian Ice, or BYO Snacks. Free, donations accepted. Shelter 4, Country Park, 3905 Nathanael Greene Drive, Greensboro. Info: creativegreenboro.com.

SYNTH SPOT. 5–7 p.m. Grab a blanket, bring a friend and immerse yourself in a sonic experience by Modular on the Spot Greensboro, featuring synthesizer music. Free. LeBauer Park, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

July 18

ALEX KRUG COMBO. 8 p.m. This crew delivers a night of unique queer psychedelic tunes that speak to being an outsider in this world. Tickets: $10. Flat Iron, 221 Summit Ave., Greensboro. Info: flatirongso.com/events.

July 19–21

DISNEY’S LION KING KIDS. Times vary. Children ages 6–12 will star in this show that takes audiences on a fur-raising adventure through the African savanna. Tickets: $12+. Centennial Station Arts Center, 121 S. Centennial St., High Point. Info: highpointtheatre.com/events.

July 19

NIK MACIK. 8 p.m. Think your dating life is like a bad comedy sketch? Macik turns his — and more of his everyday life — into dark and charming hilarity. Tickets: $15. The Idiot Box, 503 N. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: idiotboxers.com.

SKATE PARK. 5:30–7 p.m. BYO skates for a special evening where the park becomes an outdoor roller rink. Free, but please sign a waiver upon arrival. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

July 20

CLARK SISTERS TRIBUTE. 7 p.m. Blessed & Highly Favored performs the gospel tunes of the Grammy-winning group. Tickets: $19+. Carolina Theatre, 310 S. Greene St., Greensboro. Info: carolinatheatre.com/events.

ROAD TO EQUALITY. 6–8 p.m. The International Civil Rights Center & Museum honors six notable contributors to the movement at its annual gala, The Road to Equality. Tickets: $150; Virtual only, $50. Koury Convention

August 10 • 10am - 5pm

Blue Hen, Dean & Martin, Eck McCanless, From the Ground Up, Red Hare and Thomas pottery shops. Enjoy samples from Carriage House Tea, The Table and Seagrove Cafe.

Center, 3121 W Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Info: sitinmovement.org/events.

KIDS’ KLUB DANCE. 11 a.m.–noon. Kids ages 3–8 are welcome to move and grove in a fun, explorative way with members of the Greensboro Ballet. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greensborodowntownparks.org/calendar.

GSO TO HP RUN. 7 a.m. Run solo or as part of a two- or four-member relay team in “The Pickle,” a 16.1 mile race starting at Fleet Feet in Greensboro and ending at its High Point location. Registration: $35. Fleet Feet, 3731 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro. Info: runsignup.com/Race/ NC/Greensboro/TheFleetFeetPickle

NATIONAL ICE CREAM DAY. Noon–2 p.m. Ages 12 and under are encouraged to celebrate the day by learning how to make ice cream in a bag. Free. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.

STORYTIME. Noon–2 p.m. Author Dr. Sadie Leder Elder and illustrator Kathryn Cushwa Gerac read and share a craft inspired by their book, Boopers the Bad Cat. Free. Little Red Schoolhouse at High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington Ave., High Point. Info: highpointmuseum.org.

July 21

CANDLE MAKING. 4–6 p.m. Embark on a sensory journey while learning through handson experience how to make your own candles.

Free, registration required. Vigilance at the corner of Market Street and Murrow Boulevard, Greensboro. Info: downtowngreenway.org/events.

July 25–31

THE ART OF INCLUSION. Indelible presents four artists whose artwork reflects the role of inherited cultural practices in imagining stories that reflect individual investigations of identity. Free. GreenHill Center for NC Art, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: greenhillnc.org/events.

July 27

BOYS LIKE GIRLS. 8 p.m. The American rock band that hails from Andover, Mass., performs a night of hits. Tickets: $22.50+. Piedmont Hall, 2409 W. Gate City Blvd., Greensboro. Info: greensborocoliseum.com/events.

STREET NIGHT MARKET. 5–9 p.m. Buy local, buy used and support Black-owned businesses at the new Gate City Street Night Market on the last Saturday of each month. Along the Downtown Greenway at Elm Street and Bragg Street, Greensboro. Info: greensboro-nc.gov/ government/city-news/city-calendar.

THE TREE. 4 p.m. Arts Angelica presents an original ballet and score that take you on a life-changing journey, displaying the hope we have in every season of life because of the finished work of the Cross. Tickets: $15. High Point Theatre, 220 E. Commerce

The Ar ts

Ave., High Point. Info: highpointtheatre.com/events. BAD PENNY. 7–9 p.m. Enjoy a night of live tunes from an eclectic group of musicians who play everything from Americana to blues. Free. Starworks Cafe & Taproom,100 Russell Drive, Star. Info: starworksnc.org/starworks-events.

July 28

MUSEP. 6–8 p.m. Put on your dancing shoes and salsa the evening away with Orquesta Internacional la Clave. Savor concessions from Taqueria El Azteca and The Tiki Dessert Bar by Knightly Rose, or BYO Snacks. Free, donations accepted. Lindley Park, 3300 Starmount Drive, Greensboro. Info: creativegreenboro.com.

July 30

JAMEY JOHNSON. 7 p.m. Featuring awardwinning tunes you know and new songs you’ll love, the country singer-songwriter performs with special guest Southall. Tickets: $42+. White Oak Amphitheatre, 1403 Berwick St., Greensboro. Info: greensborocoliseum.com/events.

July 31

ARTIST HAPPY HOUR. 5–7 p.m. The Arts Council of Greater Greensboro welcomes all artists, arts businesses and administrators, local college students studying art, and discipline groups to mix and mingle. Free. LeBauer Park, 208 N. Davie St., Greensboro. Info: theacgg.org/grants/ artist-happy-hour. OH

BEACH BLAST BLOCK PARTY

Saturday, July 6 — 4:00 pm

Celebrate our Nation’s birth with an old fashioned backyard BBQ. Family fun with waterslide and other games. DJ King Curtiss of Star 102.5 spinning the oldies.

PEACH GRASS FESTIVAL

Saturday, July 27 — 6:00 pm

Bring your blanket or chairs and settle in on the lawn for a good old fashioned hootenanny with three groups with local connections. Headlined by the Low Tide String Band.

DRIVE-IN MOVIE ON THE GROUNDS

Saturday, August 24

Bring your chairs and blankets for a classic drive-in on the lawn. Experience Spielberg’s BFG on the big screen with popcorn, cold beverages, and candy.

Also! Register now for our Explorer of the World Camps. August 5-9 and 12-16. For rising 4th - 8th graders.

For more details and to check out our other events, scan the QR code!

555 East Connecticut Avenue, Southern Pines, NC

LeadingWomen

Successful Women Shaping Our Local Business Landscape

Boxwood Antique Market | Restoration Place Counseling

Kim Kesterson Trone | Revolution Mill | Home Instead Senior Care

Association of Bridal Consultants | Antique & Design Center of High Point

Well-Spring | Wake Forest Outpatient Imaging Affiliates, LLC AssuredPartners | Kim Wilson Homes

SPONSORED SECTION | JULY 2024

Photographs by Bert VanderVeen & Betsy Blake

Kim Wilson

Kim Wilson Homes

Adopting a client-centered approach, Kim Wilson leads a collaborative team of eight, servicing all areas of residential real estate, from first-time home buyers to luxury real estate purchases. With an emphasis on connections and professionalism and a dedication to excellence, her goal is to provide the highest level of service to clients.

• Mission: Providing extraordinary experiences to make great neighbors.

• What Sets Us Apart: Client-centered approach; handson support; Client-for-Life program, keeping agents and clients connected.

• Awards: Recipient of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Yost & Little’s honored Legend Award for consistency in the top 2% of agents worldwide. Most recently, named first in NC for the highest closed residential units for a medium sized team for Q1 2024.

• Proudest Career Accomplishment: Creating a team of highly skilled, collaborative agents who simultaneously build one another up and make each day fun; achieving a good balance between time spent with family and friends.

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Believe in your capabilities and embrace opportunities with confidence; surround yourself with people who both inspire and support you; don’t be afraid to take risks and learn from failures, as these experiences are invaluable for growth; staying true to your values will guide you toward success and fulfillment.

• Biggest Lesson Learned: “Success in real estate hinges on trust and rapport with clients, colleagues and the community. Strong relationships foster repeat business, referrals, a positive reputation and lifelong friendships. By prioritizing relationships, I can better understand the unique needs and motivations of each client, help tailor services and provide exceptional value.”

• For Fun: Spending time with her daughters — both attend UNC — go Heels! — and husband of 22 years, Scott; watching F1 racing; traveling.

1007 Battleground Ave., Suite 101, Greensboro 336-662-7805 | KimWilsonHomes.BHHSCarolinas.com

Cindy Mondello LCMHC | Restoration

Place Counseling

Cindy Mondello founded Restoration Place Counseling in 2005, providing affordable and professional Christian counseling to girls and women aged 12 and older. With a team consisting of nine therapists and three administratives, Cindy manages, leads and supports her staff in addition to event planning and fundraising. Her belief? God first.

• Mission: To journey with clients through a process of healing and restoration, allowing them to fully accept and experience God’s unconditional love and to find freedom from life-crippling issues that inhibit clients from reaching their full potential.

• What Sets Us Apart: Significantly-discounted counseling fees (as low as $12.50 per session) for clients with the greatest financial need.

• Qualifications: State-licensed, master-level clinicians trained in a variety of modalities and therapeutic interventions

• On the Horizon: The March 2025 return of a long-running fashion-show fundraiser focusing on the true beauty of everyday women.

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “It’s not all about you. Let go of control. Always be open to the ideas of others and trust God. He always provides.”

• Biggest Lesson Learned: Putting the person before the task at hand is crucial for success.

• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: The relationships that have been formed with supporters. “A nonprofit does not survive without the support of its community, and our community has shown up big for us. I am so grateful for every single person who has ever invested time, talent or treasure into this ministry.”

• For Fun: Active in church, hiking in mountains, running, country dancing, watching the New Orleans Saints play football and, as a kidney transplant recipient, supporting kidney donors.

1301 Carolina St., Suite 114, Greensboro 336-542-2060 | rpcounseling.org

Kelly Cronin, MD

Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Outpatient Imaging-Friendly Center

As section head of the Breast Care Center at Atrium Wake Forest Baptist Health, Kelly Cronin, MD, is part of a 110-person team dedicated to diagnostic imaging services such as MRIs, CTs, mammograms, ultrasounds, bone density and X-rays. Founded in 2008 with the opening of the Winston-Salem center, a Kernersville office opened in 2019 and new location is slated to open at Friendly Center this month.

• Mission: Offering quality imaging services in a convenient location and at outpatient pricing.

• What Sets Us Apart: Outpatient pricing, access to appointment times, convenient locations and subspecialty radiologists.

• Qualifications: Radiology residency at Wake Forest Baptist Health, fellowship in breast imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University, board certification from the American Board of Radiology-Diagnostic Radiology, special competence in nuclear radiology.

• On the Horizon: Newly-constructed outpatient imaging center in Greensboro providing breast imaging, MRIs, CTs, ultrasounds, bone density and X-rays.

• Proudest Career Accomplishment: “The high quality and compassionate care that our team provides on a daily basis. We truly have a culture here of putting the patients first.”

• At Home: Anesthesiologist husband, McNeil, three children, two dogs and a cat.

• For Fun: Cooking, gardening and attempting to improve at golf.

3120 Northline Ave., Suite 101, Greensboro 336-765-5722 | wakehealth.edu/imaging

Karen Little & Maggie Cummings

Revolution Mill

As property managers of Revolution Mill, Karen Little and Maggie Cummings manage space at the mixed-use property with residential, commercial, retail and restaurants offering residents, tenants and locals a variety of services.

• Services: Commercial space, meeting and conference facilities, 183 loft apartments, outdoor performance spaces, public art galleries, restaurants, retail, event space rentals, greenway trails and more.

• What Sets Us Apart: Drive for success, good character practice, excellent customer service, the ‘Golden Rule’ mentality, strong relationships, fast response times and confident decisions; plus our team of people possessing strong character values and the desire to deliver excellence.

• Qualifications: Member of Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and Guilford Merchants Association, accredited residential manager, accredited commercial manager, Notary Public.

• On the Horizon: Continued campus growth and expansion, including a new building on the Revolution Mill campus that

includes 33 apartments and more than 60,000 square feet of commercial space.

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Learn every aspect of how your company works and what you can contribute to make it work better. Make connections and foster them, and always be kind.

• Biggest Lesson Learned: Without a healthy work-life balance, you will never achieve your full potential. Do something that you love, and it won’t feel like work.

• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: “Being able to build long-lasting relationships that will surpass the workplace. Get to know people in your community and help as much as you can.”

Karen S. Luisana & Amanda Lane Kinney

Antique & Design Center of High Point, LLC

Founded in 2010, Antique & Design Center of High Point is owned by Karen S. Luisana and Amanda Lane Kinney. These longtime friends share a love of antiques, design and producing something unique, making it a natural fit for them to go into business together.

• Services: An antiques show presenting 75+ of the country’s preeminent antiques dealers during High Point Market each April and October. Located in Historic Market Square, the showroom is also open by appointment year-round to the design trade and anyone who loves antiques.

• Mission: To create a place of collaboration where interior designers, architects and shop owners can connect with the best dealers of antique and modern home furnishings, original art, vintage jewelry, and artisan made, one-of-a-kind pieces

• What Sets Us Apart: The passion and expertise of the 75+ vetted exhibitors; as well as presentations, book signings, panel discussions and social events throughout the week of each Market.

• Proudest Career Accomplishment: Rekindling the demand for

antiques and interior design in 2009, when studios and storefronts were closing nationwide, by opening a new High Point venue and collaborating with talented dealers and designers.

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Work hard, follow your passions and listen to your instincts. They will serve you well. Learn from those that you admire and share what you’ve learned with others. Pass it on and never stop growing.”

• Biggest Lessons Learned: Don’t take no for an answer. Treat others as you would like to be treated.

• Best Thing About Being Leading Women: “Surrounding ourselves with like-minded women has made all the difference in the world to us and our success. Passion and respect for shared goals rule. When women support and lift each other up, we all rise.”

316 West Commerce Ave. High Point 336-908-2735 | www.hpadc.com

Erin Pearce

AssuredPartners

Founded in 2011, AssuredPartners has 30 employees in its Greensboro office, which began as Craft Insurance in 1934. Although not restricted to any particular territory, it has hundreds of clients based in Greensboro and across N.C. Internationally, AssuredPartners has over 10,000 employees serving clients.

• Mission: “Power Through Partnership.” Risk management and resolution of client issues; dedication to the delivery of innovative insurance solutions that protect individuals, families and business of all types and sizes.

• What Sets Us Apart: A client-centered approach combined with team collaboration.

• Specialties: Business insurance, risk management, employee benefits and personal insurance in such industries as aerospace, agribusiness, captives, construction and surety, education, energy, government contractors, manufacturing, mergers and acquisitions/private equity, real estate and senior living

• Licenses/Awards: Graduate of 2023 Greensboro Chamber of Commerce Leadership Program; identified by Triad Business Journal as a 2024 “Best Place to Work in the Triad;” licensed in all 50 states for life, health, property and casualty insurance.

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Growth and comfort never coexist. Taking no risks will be the biggest risk to your career. Making the difference means being the change. Make certain your team is. better with you on it.”

• Biggest Lesson Learned: “No one will advocate for you like YOU. Be assertive, become active in a professional organization and find the people who will advocate for you when you’re not in the room.”

• Best Thing About Being a Woman in Business: The ability to connect and network with other leaders who have the same enthusiasm and passion for our community.

• For Fun: Volunteer work as leadership development co-chair with the Junior League of Greensboro and co-chair of the Women’s Coalition, part of AssuredPartners’ Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) council.

1007 Battleground Ave., Suite 103, Greensboro 336-375-0600 | www.assuredpartners.com

Kim Kesterson Trone

GalleryKTO

Kim Kesterson Trone enjoys playing with the juxtaposition of realism and abstract in her paintings. This professional artist has more than 50 years experience and her work combines German expressionism with a beautiful, vibrant color palette

• Mission: “Whether I’m painting the figure or the landscape, my work falls into its own gestural abstracted beauty. The beauty is seeing the object and thus having your own personal vision captured for a moment in time.”

• Services: Fine art and commission painting, consulting and curation.

• Qualifications: Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees from UNC-Greensboro; sponsorship of National Geographic Spencer Love Scholarship for four consecutive years.

• On the Horizon: 50 Years of Art, a retrospective exhibit October – December 2024 at Revolution Mill’s Central Gallery.

• Biggest Career Accomplishment: Achieving a unique painting style, “a balanced and harmonious play on color and light.”

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Work every day — even if you don’t feel like it, can’t hear the muse, the weather’s bad or life gets in the way. . Do the work. Success doesn’t just happen. It’s the byproduct of very hard work, focus and talent.”

• Biggest Lesson Learned: “Appreciate and never take for granted great opportunities and hard-won rewards.”

• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: A great circle of friends within the artistic community and the Women’s Professional Forum in Greensboro.

• For Fun: Serious about yoga and currently mastering crow pose.

kimberlyt0011@gmail.com | gallerykto.com

Veronica M. Foster Master Wedding Planner

Association of Bridal Consultants

For Veronica Foster, wedding planning is not a hobby — it’s a business. This Master Wedding Planner and longtime member of the Association of Bridal Consultants made the leap to Association owner and President on January 1, 2024. She is proud to have a leadership team that consists of seven wonderful and smart women.

• Services: Providing education, networking and income stream opportunities.

• Mission: To continue a long history of delivering quality education and training to wedding and event industry professionals, providing revenue-generating opportunities to members; to recognize those who complete advanced accreditation programs; and to facilitate networking events that treat all colleagues, suppliers and clients with fairness, respect and honesty.

• What Sets Us Apart: A free training program that helps members create additional streams of income.

• Qualifications: One of 60 Master Wedding Planners in the world and has run her own wedding planning business, Behind The Scenes, since 2002.

• Proudest Career Accomplishment: “I’ve been a member of the Association since 2003 and now I own it. It’s the first time ever that this Association is owned and managed by its own industry professionals.”

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Careers: “Follow your heart and never quit; it will come. All of the hard work and tough lessons that you’ll learn along the way are just preparing you for greatness. Struggle though, never bend your standards and just keep moving forward.”

• Biggest Lesson Learned: “To slow down and think before I jump.”

• At Home: Husband, cheerleader and biggest supporter, David; four daughters and four grandchildren.

• For Fun: Travel and reading mystery novels.

abcweddingplanners.com

Misti L. Ridenour

Well•Spring, A Life Plan Community

As Well-Spring’s first female executive director, Misti Ridenour believes it’s both her responsibility and obligation to give to others from the blessings she’s received. Originally hired as a part-time social worker before the senior living community opened, Misti also served as the director of health services for 14 years.

• Mission: To provide aging-adult services that create an experience exceeding the needs of an evolving and diverse population of older adults.

• What Sets Us Apart: Superior experience for residents who want an engaged, active, robust and fulfilling lifestyle balanced with compassionate care, safety and peace of mind; favorable work environment with promising career opportunities for team members.

• Qualifications: Licensed nursing home administrator in both North Carolina and the United States; certified preceptor for North Carolina State Board of Examiners for nursing home administrators; training of eight former nursing home administrator students; intern advisor for health care management and gerontology students from various N.C. colleges; recipient of LeadingAge North Carolina’s Resident Service Award; served on Guilford County Adult Care Home Community Advisory Committee for 15 years.

• On the Horizon: Merger with Brightspire to form Kintura, becoming North Carolina’s largest not-for-profit senior living organization and part of the US’s top 40 senior living communities designed to serve older adults across the state through five continuing care retirement communities, memory support programs, PACE organizations, senior housing, home care, management and development services.

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Take all of the opportunities you have to learn from those around you. Keep learning and growing.”

4100 Well-Spring Drive, Greensboro

336-545-5400 | well-spring.org

Patty Aiken Home Instead

A native of Greensboro, Patty Aiken worked in corporate management for years before assuming ownership of Home Instead, an in-home senior care service, in 2008. Patty and her team of 130 care professionals and 10 administrative team members strive to meet the needs and make a difference in the lives of those they serve.

• Services: Non-medical, personal care for older adults in their private home or senior living community.

• Mission: To consistently and professionally demonstrate our commitment to provide extraordinary service that shows respect, compassion, dignity, responsiveness and a passion for care.

• Licensing: Licensed by the state of North Carolina to provide home care.

• What Sets Us Apart: Transparency and receptiveness to potential and current clients as well as staff needs; highly trained support staff who are always available; employee training programs.

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: “Listen a lot! Mentors can be highly valuable and willing to help young women navigate the work world. Nurture those relationships, keep them close and be sure to reciprocate. Also remember, you’re in control of your attitude.”

• Biggest Lesson Learned: “Everyone makes mistakes along the way. Forgiving others and how you respond to them and your mistakes are extremely important. Being honest and treating others respectfully go a long way.”

• Best Thing About Being a Leading Woman: Support through networking, plus service and industry groups.

• For Fun: Spending time at the coast; Clemson football; cooking and spending time with husband of 22 years, Lee; family, friends and golden retriever, Cody.

4615 Dundas Dr., Suite 101, Greensboro 336-294-0081 | homeinstead.com/311

Jana Vaughan Boxwood Antique Market

Jana Vaughan and business partner Joey Marlowe opened Boxwood Antique Market in July 2021. Her 30 years of experience in the antiques industry, combined with her love of people, have prepared her for driving Boxwood to be the best antique market in the area

• Services: Antiques, home decor, gift market, vintage, reclaimed goods and collectibles.

• Mission: To provide superior service to customers and designers; to be an antique market like no other, providing a treasure trove of antiques, decor and gifts in the Triad.

• What Sets Us Apart: Exemplary displays, outstanding products and a knowledgeable and friendly staff who go above and beyond to help customers.

• On the Horizon: “We are constantly changing and upgrading, always looking at new products to add, and new vendors and consignors to add to Boxwood. We’d like to expand and create more Boxwood Antique Markets here in North Carolina.”

• Proudest Career Accomplishment: “Boxwood is my biggest venture so far, and the growth and success we’ve experienced in such a short time brings me a great sense of pride.”

• Advice for Young Women Starting Their Career: Practice respect, integrity and character. Be proactive, not reactive.

• Best Thing About Being a Woman in Business: “I moved to the Triad five years ago, knowing exactly one person. Now, five years later I have an entire village of friends and fellow businessmen, women and customers who make me feel so much more at home in N.C.”

• At Home: Two daughters, two grandchildren and a “righthand” dog, Gracie.

• For Fun: Hunting for antiques, of course!

520 North Hamilton, High Point 336-781-3111 | boxwoodantiquemarket.com

Living Information For Today (L.I.F.T.)

L.I.F.T. is a social support program that helps surviving spouses adjust to the loss of their partner. It gives participants the opportunity to socialize with others who share similar feelings and experiences. This program is both entertaining and educational, with speakers on a wide variety of topics. For more information on the L.I.F.T. program, please contact Hanes Lineberry Funeral Services at 336-272-5150.

GreenScene

Red Dog Farm’s Dogs on the Catwalk Tanger Center

Thursday, April 11, 2024

Photographs by Wilder by Lyns

Leslie Marus & Fermo

Ollie Trick & Barnaby

Winkler Family & Koda

Herman Jane & Mike Glynn & Biggs

Shelley Ryals

Ayden Trick & Ratatouille Annie

Animal Hospital Team

Laura Cheek, Valerie Gibson, Alison Schwartz

Kristin & John McLaughlin

Sophie Shipman & Spark

Betsy Crone

Arlo

GreenScene

2005 Revolution Mill Opening + Ribbon Cutting Celebration

Revolution Mill

Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Photographs by Joey Seawell

Nick Piornack

Karen Little, Leslie Thomas

Tammi Thurm, Chris Wilson, Dr. Goldie F. Wells

Brittany Bowen, Neil Marion

Kandi Mussallem, Edward Gronet, Lisa Allen, Kathy Cates

Karen Little, Eddie Belk, Dr. Goldie Wells, Mayor Nancy Vaughn, Chris Wilson, Emma Haney, Lee Mortensen, Tucker Bartlett, Nick Piornack, Tracy Myers, Caroline Mundy

Will McIver, Blake Cummings, Karen Little, Caroline Mundy, Lee Mortensen, Nick Piornack, Maggie Cummings, Don Elliot, Jonathan Gay, David Parrish

Jeff Case, Amy Pagano, Rusty Collins

J. Isley, C. Snow , J.P. Cory, Nathan Cory, Skip Matheny

Greg Rockett, Lee Mortensen, Nick Piornack, Melissa Alford, Brooklin Yards, Debra Eidso , Tucker Bartlett, Emma Haney, Paul Brown, Dave Shumannfang, Dan Levine

Brooklin Yards, Raven Williams Lee Mortensen, Dan Levine

Maggie Cummings, Jonathan Gay

Angel Johnson, Tyra Briles, Melissa Jones, Dianne Griffin

GreenScene

Greenhill Center for NC Art: 50th Anniversary Gala

Thursday, May 9, 2024

Photographs by Lynn Donovan

Kathy & Jim Gallucci

Jim Brady, Colleen & David Ball, Dabney Sanders, Louise Brady, Marygrace Llewellyn

Dean Norman, Chip Hagan, Laura Norman, Annabel Norman, Swati Argade

Nancy Hoffmann, Reid Phillips, Marsha Kelly

Noni Penland, John Poss, Mina Penland Fuller, Laura Poss

Rodney & Christy Speight, Kisha & Bret Kelley

Gustav & Mary Magrinat, Kelli Coley, Susan McDonald

Kara Cox, Martha Thompson

Ande & Dr. John Hewitt, Tom Townes, Marianne Bennett, Sharon Thompson, Cynthia Townes

Susan & Mackey McDonald Leonard & LeKecia Glover

LeKecia Glover, Charles Dabney

Alejandra Thompson, Soumya Iyer

Goldie Wells, Nancy Hoffmann, Yvonne Johnson, Tammi Thurm, Marykay Abuzuaiter

Pin-up Pups

Harry Blair’s plan to sketch and fetch for a cause

What started as a fun creative undertaking inspired by his own Henderson Road neighborhood dogs turned into a furry fury of ink across illustrator extraordinaire Harry Blair's desk. He certainly gave these pups pawsonality plus! Coming soon to a Greensboro near you, Blair plans to draw precious pooches for their humans at a small charge, half of which will go to local rescue operations. De-tails to come. OH

Buster

BY HARRY BLAIR

Bo

Millie

Arnie

Abby Gale

Gracie

SCULPTED CABLE COLLECTION