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Stunning home overlooking Lake Euphemia in Hamilton Lakes-one of a kind property with utmost quality & optimal exposure of light & lake views. Fine finishes include custom molding, perfectly executed doorways, patterned hardwood flooring, open spacious rooms with doors leading to upper deck & gardens. Two island kitchen adjoins octagonal screened porch, Luxurious master suite, upper level bedrooms & baths plus bonus area. Abundant storage & under house additional rooms (not finished). Acre plus property.
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900 Rockford Rd $3,750,000
8121 Riesling Dr $2,995,000
3215 N Rockingham Rd $2,900,000
415 Sunet Dr $1,975,000
807 Sunset Dr $1,499,000
809 Woodland Dr $1,400,000
1804 Worsham Pl $828,000
2100 Berkshire Ln $759,000
7704 Chesterbrooke Dr $749,900
6 Oak Glen Ct $745,000
1 Chesterfield Ct $729,000
3418 Alamance Rd $699,500
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201 N Elm St $592k-267k
701 Blair St $589,000
7732 US Hwy 158 $575,000
1216 Hill St $574,900
3605 Gaston Rd $529,000
5107 Heddon Way $529,000
UC
2900 Saint Regis Rd $434,000
230 Topwater Ln $425,000
1006 Blanton Pl $422,500
5406 Mecklenburg Rd $397,500
3557 Old Onslow Rd $395,000
2300 Princess Ann St $364,900
1722 Sylvan Rd $304,040
3704 Wedgedale Pl $299,000
3415 Dogwood Dr $295,000
1905 N Elm St $292,250
309 Aberdeen Ter $289,900
4809 Edinborough Rd $282,000
UC
1614 Colonial Ave $220,000
1803 Independence Rd $215,000
2612 Beechwood St $209,900
UC
10 Indigo Lake Ter #A $189,000
612 Park Ave $170,000
504 Ashland Dr $159,000
801 McGee ST #2 $114,000
6323 Sweetbay Dr $99,900
156 Flint Ridge Tr $69,900
UC
1700 N Elm St $120k-115k
1728 US Hwy 29 $119,500
1903 Welty Rd $115,000
UC
2800 Lake Forest Dr $1,389,000
201 Kemp Rd East $1,179,000
1400 Briarcliff Rd $999,000
106 Elmwood Dr $929,000
1609 Saint Andrews Rd $899,000
14 Provincetown Ct $890,000
4900-4902 E NC Hwy 150 $695,000
3309-3311 Gaston Rd $649,000
4426 Johnson St $649,000
201 Lake Dr $639,900
512 Woodland Dr $617,000
11 Lands End Dr $595,000
3 Lake Breeze Ct $499,800
2412 North Beech Ln $485,000
708 Dover Rd $475,000
2107 Medford Ln $475,000
303 Topwater Ln $475,000
1900 Tiffany Pl $445,000
1114 Buckingham Rd $319,000
UC
3710 Worthhing Ct $355,000
1307 Sunset Dr $339,000
3404 Round Hill Rd $329,000
6 Anson Cir $325,000
3822 Durness Way $325,000
7708 US Hwy 158 $275,000
4809 Sweetbriar Rd $264,900
1008 Browning Rd $240,000
1706 Walker Ave $229,900
714 Northridge St $221,900
SEE ONE YOU LIKE?
To arrange a showing or get more information on one of these charming
homes, call one of our agents or visit trmhomes.com today.
trmhomes.com / 336.274.1717
Marti Tyler 336.210.7503
Rodney Hazel 336.254.8946
Meredith Parsons 336.202.7070
Katie Redhead 336.430.0219
Wendi Huffman 336.254.4122
Elizabeth Pell 336.447.5516
Alec McAlister 336.707.0463
Kelli Kupiec 336.541.0832
Charlotte Quinn 336.314.4105
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Maggie Marston 336.253.2467
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October 2016 DEPARTMENTS 15 Simple Life By Jim Dodson 18 Short Stories 21 Doodad By Nancy Oakley 23 O.Harry By Harry Blair 25 Life’s Funny By Maria Johnson 27 Omnivorous Reader By Gwenyfar Rohler 31 Scuppernong Bookshelf 33 Papadaddy By Clyde Edgerton 35 True South By Susan Kelly 37 Spirits
By Tony Cross
41 Proper Details By Annie Ferguson
43 On the Street Where You Live By Robin Sutton Anders
51 The O.H. File By Brian Clarey
53 Gate City Journal By Billy Ingram 61 Threads
By Waynette Goodson
65 The Evolving Species By Elizabeth Edmonds
67 Birdwatch
By Susan Campbell
69 Wandering Billy By Billy Eye
73 Botanicus
By Ross Howell Jr.
1 16 Arts Calendar 134 GreenScene 143 Accidental Astrologer
FEATURES 51 Recurring Dream Poetry by Sam Barbee
98 Long Live the Kings By Lynn Donovan Gale Byers’ mission to save the monarch butterfly
76 Southern Revival By Cynthia Adams
102 The Nutty Professor
86 The Wright Stuff By Ross Howell Jr.
106 The Queen of Wild Ginger
Cover photograph and
Clinton E. Gravely’s odyssey in Modern architecture
Bert VanderVeen
94 The Garden Guys By Jim Dodson
115 Almanac
By Astrid Stellanova
144 O.Henry Ending By Jeff Paschal
photograh this page by
New life for the oldest house in Irving Park
A few revealing — and hilarious — moments with the South’s most beloved garden designers
6 O.Henry
October 2016
By Maria Johnson Meet the man responsible for saving and spreading chestnut trees By Ross Howell, Jr. The life and times and gardens of Professor Peyton Hudson
By Ash Alder The Feast of Trumpets, marigolds and Stingy Jack The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Art for Eyes | Eye for Arts Fine Eyewear, Artwork and Jewelry 327 South Elm | Greensboro 336.274.1278 | TheViewOnElm.com Becky Causey, Licensed Optician Find us on Facebook
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October 7, 2016
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M A G A Z I N E
Volume 6, No. 10 “I have a fancy that every city has a voice.” 336.617.0090 1848 Banking Street, Greensboro, NC 27408 www.ohenrymag.com Jim Dodson, Editor • jim@thepilot.com Andie Stuart Rose, Art Director • andie@thepilot.com Nancy Oakley, Senior Editor • nancy@ohenrymag.com Lauren Shumaker, Graphic Designer Alyssa Rocherolle, Graphic Designer CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Cynthia Adams, Harry Blair, Maria Johnson CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Lynn Donovan, Amy Freeman, Sam Froelich John Gessner, Tim Sayer, Bert VanderVeen CONTRIBUTORS Ash Alder, Robin Sutton Anders, Jane Borden, Grant Britt, Susan Campbell, Jim Clark, Tony Cross, Clyde Edgerton, Waynette Goodson, Billy Ingram, Annie Ferguson, Ross Howell Jr., Robyn James, Sarah King, Ogi Overman, Gwenyfar Rohler, Stephen Smith, Astrid Stellanova EDITOR AT LARGE David Claude Bailey
O.H
David Woronoff, Publisher ADVERTISING SALES Ginny Trigg, Sales Director 910.691.8293, ginny@thepilot.com
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Hattie Aderholdt, Sales Manager 336.601.1188, hattie@ohenrymag.com Lisa Bobbitt, Sales Assistant 336.617.0090, ohenryadvertising@thepilot.com Brad Beard, Graphic Designer Lisa Allen, 336.210.6921 • lisa@ohenrymag.com Amy Grove, 336.456.0827 • amy@ohenrymag.com CIRCULATION Darlene Stark, Circulation Director 910.693.2488 SUBSCRIPTIONS 336.617.0090 ©Copyright 2016. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. O.Henry Magazine is published by The Pilot LLC
For more information about Dr. Olin and surgery visit www.GreensboroOrthopaedics.com
12 O.Henry
October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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©2016 An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of America, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate, and a franchisee of BHH Affiliates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity.
Tom Chitty & Associates Direct Line: 336-420-2836 Email: tomchitty@tomchitty.com Website: www.tomchitty.com
Simple Life
Dark Clowns By Jim Dodson
I was deep in the country at twilight,
ILLUSTRATION BY ROMEY PETITE
heading home with the radio on when I heard about the dark clowns. The BBC presenter sounded skeptical, even amused by reports out of Greenville, South Carolina, where people dressed as clowns were reportedly trying to lure children into the woods with candy and money.
“So . . . is this just a hoax or something people there are really concerned about?” the host asked a local reporter covering the story, his tongue half in cheek “I can’t say it’s a hoax,” she replied, “because the police are taking this very seriously. They have warned parents and doubled patrols. This really has a lot of people really freaked out.” So-called “after dark clowns” have been spooking America quite a bit lately, it turns out, most recently in Winston-Salem and Green Bay, Wisconsin, where a photograph of a dark clown roaming early morning streets carrying black balloons set the Internet on fire. Two Octobers ago, residents of Bakersfield, California were spooked by photographs of “evil after-dark clowns” roaming their streets after hours, showing up under lampposts and frequenting kiddie rides. Since then, reports of dark clowns have cropped up in a dozen other places around the country. “The police don’t know whether the stories are coming from the imaginations of children or something sinister is afoot, but panicked residents seem to be taking the law into their own hands,” The New York Times noted about this latest outbreak of clowns in South Carolina, adding that shots had been fired into wooded areas where the sightings occurred. Whatever else may be true, clowns occupy a peculiar space in American popular culture, somewhere between what’s perfectly innocent and downright terrifying. My September issue of Smithsonian notes that clowns have been with us since man’s earliest days in the guise of everything from mythologized tricksters to painted medicine men. Pygmy clowns entertained bored Egyptian pharaohs, and Medieval court jesters were entitled to thumb their oversized noses at the king without fear of losing their heads. Ancient Rome had professional clowns whose job it was to pacify unruly crowds at festivals, peacekeepers who kept an eye out for troublemakers. “Well into the 18th and 19th century,” writes Smithsonian’s Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, “the prevailing clown figure of Western Europe and Britain was the pantomime clown, who was sort of a bumbling buffoon.” Once, standing in a crowd of camera-wielding tourists next to my young daughter on the main drag in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, awaiting a parade of local rodeo riders, I spotted a mime working the crowd and approaching us.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
My daughter was delighted. But I wasn’t. Mimes have always made me uncomfortable, a modest phobia I trace to a powerful moment in my early childhood in Mississippi, where my father briefly owned a small newspaper. One evening in the late fall he took my brother and me to a political rally in a cornfield just outside town. A group of strange people showed up wearing white robes and hoods and stood around a bonfire. We didn’t stay long, just long enough for our father to get a quote or two from the mayor and the hooded figures to frighten the bug juice out of his sons. We asked our dad why those men wore hoods. “Because people who wear masks are weak people often up to no good,” he replied. Our mother gave him holy hell when she found out where he’d taken us just to harvest a quote. Forty years later, picking up on my post-Klan jitters, the mime paused right in front of us and attempted to make me smile. He made a huge happy face followed by a tragic sad one, rubbing away imaginary tears when I wouldn’t yield. The crowd ate it up. “Thanks,” I said through gritted teeth. “Feel free to move along now.” Clowns were everywhere in the America where I grew up. Most were fun-loving and perfectly innocent in those faraway days — Clarabell the Clown on “Howdy Doody” and Bozo the Clown with his internationally syndicated show — which according to Smithsonian had a 10-year waiting list for tickets. There was even a clown I liked on my favorite weeknight TV show, Red Skelton’s eponymous Clem Kadiddlehopper, a bumbling painted-up fool who was only tolerable only because he often broke up halfway through his skits. In my bedroom I even had a harlequin desk lamp. I attended Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus about that time, exactly once, on the other hand, feeling bad for the animals and truly bothered by the clowns. Only the acrobats appealed to me. “So the question is,” Smithsonian’s McRobbie wonders, “when did the clown, supposedly a jolly figure of innocuous, kid-friendly entertainment, become so weighed down by fear and sadness? When did clowns become so dark?” The truest answer is, long ago and far away. Classical operas and Shakespearean dramas, after all, have long used clown figures as sinister messengers of mystery and intrigue. But in the modern American context it may well have been an evil clown named Pogo who established the motif of the dark clown around town. His real name was John Wayne Gacy Jr., a friendly chap who entertained children in the Chicago suburbs for years during the middle 1970s before he was arrested, tried and convicted of killing 33 young men. “You know,” he reportedly told investigators, “a clown can get away with murder.” Before Gacy faced execution in 1994, America’s Crown Prince of Killer Clowns spent his time in his cell painting pictures of clowns and self-portraits of himself as Pogo the clown. After seven years of writing about dark things for my magazine in Atlanta, I officially swore off watching horror films after writing a piece for Boston October 2016
O.Henry 15
Simple Life
blockade-runner.com
NC Holiday Flotilla Nov 24-27, 2016 Photo courtesy of Joshua McClure
Magazine about a reclusive teen in western Massachusetts, whose mother allowed her son to gorge himself on the Friday the 13th films only to have her troubled son don a hockey mask one Halloween night and slash several kids before hanging himself in the woods. The psychologist who’d been treating him for years told me that “his identification with Jason seemed pretty harmless.” A toxic flood of even more ghastly films continues to flow into your local Cineplex, feeding our insatiable desire to terrify ourselves. Heath Ledger’s brilliant if disquieting Joker in the 2008 Batman remake The Dark Knight seemed almost too real and sadly prefigured the gifted actor’s own demons rising to the surface shortly before he died of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose. I sometimes wonder if we aren’t simply hardwired to value a good harmless scare in a world that appears damaged beyond repair and full of very real dangers, providing new purpose to whatever bogeyman has always lurked beneath the bed. In another age, after all, fairy tales and fables of trolls loitering beneath bridges and witches in the woods were meant to instruct children on the dangers of straying too far beyond the light or down a road of ruin, real or imagined. “Always keep a-hold of Nurse,” goes a famous ditty by French writer Hilaire Belloc, “for fear of finding something worse.” Once upon a time, Madge the beautician and Speedy Alka Seltzer were icons of commercial television spots. The pharmaceutical companies peddling expensive drugs for maladies whose side effects may kill you; security firms eager to surveil your home against intruders who are just waiting to ponce; identity theft; Internet and investment firms that torched your 401-K plan a few years back while reminding you that you haven’t put aside nearly enough for a “happy” retirement. Perhaps this explains why Americans can’t seem to get enough of Halloween’s faux gore and fright wigs, projected to shell out a record $7 billion or $75 per ghoul among those celebrating the holiday this year — rivaling Christmas retail. It’s all part of the funhouse ride that thankfully isn’t real. Every town larger than the hips on a snake seems eager to cash in on phenomenon with its own haunted corn maze or woods of terror peopled by chain saw–wielding psychos and evil clowns, bless their dark little hearts. In a broader context, all our lives are challenged by Dark Clowns of one kind or another and things that go bump in the night — a sick child, a worrying diagnosis, a lost job. The worry list is endless. Maybe the way to fight back is to simply make light of such darkness the way John Candy did in the 1989 John Hughes’ classic Uncle Buck. In one of my favorite scenes in a movie, a drunken clown shows up to entertain at a children’s birthday party where Uncle Buck Russell, good-natured loser — played to perfection by the late great Candy — is babysitting his nephew and two nieces. Upon discovering that the clown is drunk from an all-night bachelorette party, Uncle Buck suggests the clown’s behavior is inappropriate for children. Offended, the clown snarls, “In the field of local live home entertainment, I’m a god.” At which Uncle Buck points to the clown’s rodent-eared VW and firmly says, “Get in your mouse and get out of here,” and proceeds to flattens the clown’s big fat rubber nose to drive home the point. According to Smithsonian, only two percent of grown-ups suffer from excessive fear of clowns, technically a phobia called coulrophobia. But don’t try telling that to the anxious parents of Green Bay, Bakersfield and Greenville anytime soon. Truthfully, I’m more worried about some of the dark clowns we’ll have to decide between in the voting booth a few days after Halloween. Bottom line, if a dark clown is foolish enough to show up at my door on Halloween night, don’t be surprised if I give him a shot of John Candy to remember me by. OH Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@ohenrymag.com
16 O.Henry
October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Hong Kong House Memories
Hong Kong House Cookbook is a nostalgic gastronomical journey rooted on Tate street, a how-to manual for re-creating the tastes that sustained scores of students, musicians, hippies and just plain folks for nearly three decades. The menu is the delicious soundtrack of a generation served with great affection by Hong Kong House owners Robert and Amelia Leung. The cookbook was a six-year-odyssey for author Karen McClamrock, longtime Nightshade Cafe door person and rabid HK cuisine fan, who coaxed the recipes from Amelia. Adapting her menu to accommodate regulars like Bobby Kelly, creating a breadless version of her Wok chicken sandwich with rice and cottage cheese called the Brown Bob, and the healthier Green Bob with broccoli substituting for rice, Amelia quite literally nurtured musicians. It’s a feast for the eyes and the stomach, plus tasty time-travel fare for body and soul. — G.B.
Praise for Papadaddy
Let’s hear it for Clyde Edgerton, who, along with crime novelist Margaret Maron and poet Carl Sandburg will join the ranks of O.Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green, Doris Betts, Lee Smith, John Ehle, Fred Chappell and a host of other Tarheel literati as inductees into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame on Thursday, October 16, at the Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities in Southern Pines. The author of ten novels, including the ever-popular Raney, Walking Across Egypt and Killer Diller, Edgerton has been a Guggenheim fellow and is currently a Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCWilmington not to mention being regular contributor to this magazine and its sister publications, PineStraw and Salt. We think a laurel wreath is quite becoming on ol’ Papadaddy — as long as he doesn’t rest on it.
18 O.Henry
October 2016
BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
Whose woods these are? If you’re referring to Woods of Terror (5601 North Church Street) the answer is owner and impresario Eddie McLaurin. Celebrating a quarter-century of scaring the living daylights out thrillseekers, McLaurin offers twentyfive reasons to visit his haunted attraction, including a new Hell-evator, the parade of monsters, tracking your heart rate on your FitBit and perhaps most important, a new escape room. Info: woodsofterror.com.
How Do Our Gardens Grow?
One is never too young to learn the delights of green and growing things. Thanks to Greensboro Parks and Recreation, and Guilford County Cooperative Extension’s 4-H Youth Development Division, garden field trips are available on October 25 and 26, November 1 and 2, to elementary school children. At the Gateway Gardens (2924 East Gate City Boulevard), kindergarteners, first- and second-graders will explore sound, weather and life cycles. Students in third through fifth grades will learn about ecosystems and the connections between plants and animals at Tanger Bicentennial Gardens and Bog Garden (1105 Hobbs Road). Excursions are a mere $5 per student, with a maximum of 60 allowed per trip. Info: greensboro-nc.gov.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
WOODS OF TERROR PHOTO COURTESY PERFECTA VISUALS
Short Stories
THOMAS HART BENTON, PLOUGHING IT UNDER, 1934 REWORKED 1964, OIL ON CANVAS 20 ¼ X 24 ¼ IN. (51.4 X 61.6 CM) CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS. PHOTOGRAPHY BY EDWARD C. ROBISON III. ART © T.H. BENTON AND R.P. BENTON TESTAMENTARY TRUSTS/UMB BANK TRUSTEE/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY
Seasoned
Patting ourselves on the back again, you say? Guilty as charged! If you haven’t picked up a copy of the Fall/Winter issue of our sister publication, O.Henry Seasons Style & Design, please do! In this edition, we continue our fascination with all things related to home and garden in the Triad, go Christmas-shopping in Old Salem, reveal hidden gems . . . and the secrets to making droolworthy pies. You can find Seasons at the usual O.Henry distribution points around town or online at ohenrymag.com.
Green Acres
There was a time when more of the country’s population dwelled in the country on farms than in cities. Exploring the importance of the farm in American culture and history is Grant Wood and the American Farm, which started last month at Reynolda House Museum of American Art (2250 Reynolda Road, Winston-Salem) and continues through the end of the year. Through the paintings of Wood, Childe Hassam, Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Wyeth and others, the exhibition looks at farm life between 1850 and 1950, and offers perspective on current “farm to table” trends of today. Tickets: (888) 663-1149 or reynoldahouse.org.
Greensboro Gothic
A small Southern town, revenge for a crime . . . and its consequences. Such is the stuff of Southern gothic, a genre perfectly suited to the season of chills and thrills, and all the more hair-raising when adapted to film. This month head to Community Theatre of Greensboro (520 South Elm Street) on October 21 at 7 p.m., and check out an alternative to the usual monster flicks with Lake of Fire, produced by Highway 29 Films (owned by Greensboro filmmaker Les Butchart and his family) and starring O.Henry’s own Billy Ingram. In between biting your nails, you’ll get a kick out of identifying familiar shooting locations in Rockingham County, Ramseur and, of course, the Gate City. Tickets: lakeoffire.online.
O.H.-down
Meaning our idea of a “throwdown,” and we’re doing it up right: To celebrate O.Henry’s fifth anniversary and Preservation Greensboro’s 50th, we invite you to don your hippest Rat Pack duds and fly yourself and anyone else to the moon, by way of Blandwood Mansion (447 West Washington Street) on Thursday, October 20th, from 7 to 10 p.m. In addition to the thrill of Chairman sound-alike John Love and the Doug Burns Big Band Orchestra, craft brews, among other libations, abound as do tasty eats (oysters Rockefeller, anyone?). Raise a glass to the magazine that loves Greensboro, while benefiting the organization that helps preserve its history. Tickets: (336) 272-5003 or preservationgreensboro.org. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Ogi Sez Ogi Overman After the scorching, oppressive summer we’ve had, don’t you think we deserve October? Sure, September was tolerable, but now is the time to truly enjoy the seasonal changes. It’s also time to enjoy the plethora of live music choices in our backyard. Some things never change.
• October 15, Carolina Theatre:
When I heard that Jimbo Mathus had put the Squirrel Nut Zippers back together, I literally jumped out of my chair. There are few bands that I’ve loved more in my life than the Zips. And if you need proof, I’ll show you the gold record their label sent me for giving them so much press back in the day. • October 15, Greensboro Coliseum: Greensboro has become a regular stop on every tour that Jason Isbell goes on. There’s good reason for that — he packs the Coliseum to the rafters every time he shows up. • October 20, Blandwood Mansion: I’m not kidding; this is a once-in-alifetime show. It is a song-by-song recreation of the Vegas show that Frank Sinatra performed at The Sands in 1966. John Love is Frank and the Doug Burns Big Band Orchestra is the Count Basie Orchestra. For real. • October 22, O.Henry Hotel: The bar seems to be continually being raised for the burgeoning local jazz scene. And one of the prime bar-raisers is monster jazz trumpeter Benjamin Matlack and his quartet. I swear, the kid channels Miles Davis. • October 30, Huggins Performance Center: Last year two Greensboro College profs, Dave Fox and Ted Efremoff, put together the Healing Blues CD, featuring all the stop-shelf talent in town, to benefit the Interactive Resource Center. So well received was it, that Dr. Drave (Fox) decided to do another, and is launching Vol. 2 with a live concert on the GC campus. October 2016
O.Henry 19
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For cyclist/bassoonist Mark Hekman, life is a wild ride
A
mong the good-natured barbs that Julliard professor and violist Toby Appel once delivered in his comical “Irreverent Guide to the Orchestra” on NPR was the following: “Bassoon players like to give the impression that theirs is a very hard instrument to play, but the truth is that the bassoon only plays one or two notes per piece and is therefore only heard for a minute in any given evening.” The ribbing elicits a hearty laugh from Mark Hekman, second bassoonist for the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, which continues its inaugural Masterworks concert on the first of this month with “War and Peace Reimagined.” Hekman’s instrument, a double-reed woodwind is, to be sure, difficult to play, and he actually appreciates that it’s not one of the flashier instruments. “I enjoy being part of a group,” Hekman says. “I’m there to add a layer of color.” It’s a modest statement, considering that five years ago, the musician was honing his competitive chops as a professional cyclist. After completing his Master’s in music at Ohio State in 2004, Hekman chose to defer one dream for another: racing. “I didn’t touch my instrument for five years,” he says. Lured by the mild North Carolina winters, which lend themselves to year-round training, the Michigan native landed in Winston-Salem with a housesitting gig and soon discovered the tight-knit community of cycling enthusiasts. Before long he was competing on eight-man teams in criterium races across the United States. He placed third in the United States National Criterium Championship, the highest level of pro racing, in 2008, and went on to win the USA Crits series in 2009. Hekman has pedaled his way through Mexico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, but his fondest memories are of the nighttime laps through big North American Cities in Crit races, “with people coming out of bars” cheering him and his teammates on — much like the festive scene in Twin Cities’ Arts District during the Winston-Salem Classic each spring. These days, the applause is coming from appreciative audiences at the performances of the GSO Symphony, which Hekman joined for its 2012–13 season. And the transition from cyclist to bassoonist isn’t as big a leap as one might think: “A lot of musicians are into cycling,” he observes. Both pursuits require self-discipline, and, Hekman adds, “Exercising is like practicing: There’s a good sensation afterward.” Practicing since the fifth grade, when he chose the bassoon “because it looked funny and sounded great,” Hekman is also working on his doctoral degree at UNCG and teaches at HPU in between concerts. “Performing with the Greensboro Symphony has been a lot of fun,” he says, citing the thrill of working with Dmitry Sitkovetsky, “one of the all-time great violinists.” And, he adds, “the programming has been superb since I joined.” In addition to October’s program of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, he’ll be “adding layers of color” to the likes of Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven and Mendolssohn later in the season. “It’s crazy how much great music is out there,” he marvels. As for the cycling? “I get out when I can,” he says, adding that it’s harder to find the time for sport while raising a family. But Hekman isn’t one to complain, noting, “ I’m really blessed with the way life has gone.” OH — Nancy Oakley The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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O.Henry 21
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O.Henry 23
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Life’s Funny
Mazed and Confused Corny but true
By Maria Johnson
There’s something about this time
of year — maybe it’s the golden light of evening, or the first kiss of frost — that makes me want to wander around in a corn maze for a couple of hours until the sweat trickles down my dusty, bug-plastered face and I start to cry.
OK, I’m exaggerating. I didn’t cry. But I did go through the Maize Adventure at Kersey Valley in Archdale, thanks to owner Tony Wohlgemuth, who allowed me to bring a friend and try out his 10-acre corn maze before this year’s official opening. My meandering companion was someone who, as it turned out, has a sense of direction that rivals my own: my friend and colleague Cindy Adams. Perhaps we should have taken the clue when we got lost while driving to the maze. “Wherever we are, it’s pretty,” said Cindy as we toured southeastern Guilford County. We pressed on. Finally, we arrived at Kersey Valley, an adventure park that Tony has built on the 60-acre farm where he and his parents, immigrants from Switzerland, landed in 1979. Tony was 9 years old. He planted the seeds of his business at age 15, when he and some buddies made a haunted house out of a former caretaker’s quarters. Today, Kersey Valley has grown to include year-round attractions including nature education for school kids; a ropes course; a zip line; a laser tag venue; and escape rooms (locked rooms that challenge groups to find the clues to escape). Spooky Woods — including the original haunted house — runs full steam this time of year. So do the low-scare attractions: a pumpkin patch; giant inflated jumping pillows; and trampolines with bungee harnesses. Then there’s the corn maze, which Tony added 16 years ago. In case you’ve been living inside a crop circle and don’t know, corn mazes are labyrinths carved into cornfields by tractors using computer programs linked to satellites. The mazes can be intricate and artistic. From the air, Kersey Valley’s design this year looks like butterflies and flowers. From the ground, it looks like . . . corn. Tony briefed us at the maze entrance. The challenge, he said, was to win a game inside the maze. He handed each of us a scratch-off card. When we found six checkpoints inside the maze, we were to insert the cards into a template and scratch off to reveal points. The person who finishes with the most points wins. Tony showed us a map of the maze and encouraged us to memorize the 3.4 miles of trails. Cindy and I stared at the whorls. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Cindy whipped out her phone to take a picture of the map. “That’s kind of cheating,” Tony said. “No,” Cindy corrected him. “It IS cheating.” Tony told us other ways that scofflaws have tried to beat maze — by taking shortcuts through the inner walls and by breaching the outer walls. Cindy and I nodded gravely. Cheating bad. Tony pointed out two bridgelike observation decks high inside the maze. If we needed to get oriented, we could climb up on the bridges and look around. How long would it take us to get through the maze? “If you’re fast, maybe an hour,” Tony said. “But we’ve had people in there as long as three hours. We really don’t know this year. You’re the first ones to go through.” As the sun dropped toward the tree line, Tony recounted how they used to open the maze at night, but they stopped having evening hours for the general public because it would be time for the employees to go home, and there would still be customers’ cars in the parking lot. “Well,” said Tony. “Have fun. Watch out for snakes.” “What kind of snakes?” I asked. “Corn snakes and green snakes, usually,” he said. “Usually?” I asked. “Call me when you get out!” he said. I want you to know that Cindy and I tried to do the maze honestly. We really did. We trudged around full of virtue for, oh, two or three minutes. Then we began parting stalks and taking short cuts. We used the map on Cindy’s phone. We used the compasses on both our phones. We climbed the bridges to reckon where the checkpoints were relative to the bridges. After an hour-and-a-half, we stopped. It was getting dark, and Cindy had told enough snake stories to scare the bejesus out of both of us. We’d found five of the six checkpoints, and I’d amassed 870 points. We don’t know how many points Cindy collected. She “lost” her card before we got back to the car. This much we do know: She kept scratching off negative points, denoted by a boot symbol. “Shucks!” Cindy said every time she got the boot. She didn’t really say that. But the word she used was similar. In the end, we agreed that going through a corn maze was a little like shopping with a friend: You walk down lots of aisles. Some are fruitful, some are not. The point is to go with someone you enjoy, and get the hell out before the place closes. Back home, we told our astonished husbands that we’d set the record for best time and most points scored at the maze so far this year. A kernel of truth goes a long way. OH Maria Johnson is the corniest contributing editor O.Henry has ever had. Find out more about Tony Wohlgemuth’s adventure empire at kerseyvalley.com October 2016
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The Omnivorous Reader
On the Lookout A fascinating first novel, a talk of ecological disaster
By Gwenyfar Rohler
Upstairs in the UNC Wilming-
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN GESSNER
ton Creative Writing Department is the publishing laboratory, where the Literary magazine Ecotone matured, a small press, Lookout Books, refines their books into existence like a oyster begeting a pearl. Until recently, Lookout’s carefully curated and award-winning catalog included two collections of short fiction, a memoir and even a book of poetry, but no novel. But now, Lookout and writer Matthew Neill Null have both dipped their proverbial toes in the water of novel-writing by debuting their first novel, Honey From The Lion, last year.
In the book, set in and around a logging camp in West Virginia at the turn of the 20th century, Null brings us characters that many people would cross the street to avoid. He slowly pulls back the curtains and, with a flickering gaslight, breathes life into these unwashed, violent and desperate people who then become the source of great empathy. Honey From The Lion is not a hymn to strong men who control other people’s destinies, though the first chapter and the title (an allusion to Sampson from the Bible) might hint at that. For Null, the real story is the struggle of the hundreds of working men to realize their own destinies within their private lives and a system with the singular purpose of exploitation of resources — natural and human. He takes a microscope to look as closely as possible at individuals who, in most circumstances, would never be anything more than The Art & Soul of Greensboro
statistics: ledger columns, payroll, accident reports. These moments, teasing out the backstories of each character, no matter how minor, are reminiscent of David Foster Wallace. Echoes of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove reverberate as well. The introduction and development of the uber macho world are built around a strict code and the appearance of outsiders unprepared to understand the code. But where McMurtry’s men have developed their own code and live outside the dictates of a world they reject, Null’s are trapped inside the code as the least powerful players in their ecosystem. The care and adoration lavished on a Lookout book is obvious. The physical product is a beauty to behold in an age where book design and production are sidelined for bargain prices and expedient content delivery. Not at Lookout. French flaps, beautiful graphic design and tailored page layouts are the hallmarks of a book that someone cares about. (On the rare occasions that you see a book this carefully created from a big publisher, you know it was the pet project of someone in the office who went the extra mile.) At Lookout, each book radiates that level of care. Perhaps that is the best argument for smaller presses: Because each book takes so much time and effort, they put out few in a year (Lookout produces only one or two annually), and each book is almost a sacred experience. Any author would swoon to have his or her work treated with such reverence, especially for one’s debut novel. Curious about the selection process for Lookout’s first novel, I reached out to Emily Smith, publisher and co-founder of Lookout. Smith writes, “Null evokes the virgin forest as a fully realized character we grieve deeply by the end of the novel. He implores us to care about the ecological tragedy in West Virginia through story . . . it presented a rare opportunity for our publishing entities to better align our missions and to showcase a book in which place and the natural world feature prominently.” Ecotone, the sister imprint, place-centric magazine, published Null’s story “The Island in the Gorge of the Great River” in the spring 2014 issue. Null, October 2016
O.Henry 27
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the then-emerging writer, had not published a book, which appealed to Lookout, whose mission states “seeks out emerging and historically underrepresented voices, as well as overlooked gems by established writers.” In manuscript form, Smith was attracted to this novel’s “nuanced and lyrical descriptions of the natural world, its expansive and cinematic pace.” Lookout has enjoyed success with previous publications, like their first one, Edith Pearlman’s
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story collection Binocular Vision, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2011. The following year, Lookout published Steve Almond’s story collection God Bless America: Stories, which won the Paterson Fiction Prize. They know how to pick a winner and how to present one. I can only imagine the stunned grin that must have spread across Null’s face the moment he received his first novel in Lookout-form. But, from reading Honey From The Lion, I am certain he would recreate the moment in stunning, captivating, undulating prose, drawing the experience out for paragraphs if not pages, intensifying the moment to something epic in contrast to the momentary sensation of pages in hands. A part of the Creative Writing program at UNC Wilmington, Lookout ensures that the art of bookmaking continues to live hand-in-hand with the art of writing. It may be one of the most valuable lessons to impart on to the next generation of writers. Because, as in Lookout’s new novel, each page holds moments experienced in-depth that draw and enlighten the darkened corners of each character’s soul. Value the written word (and the well-designed book) as something sacred, for it will out live all of us. OH Gwenyfar Rohler spends her days managing her family’s bookstore on Front Street. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Scuppernong Bookshelf
A Vote for Books October surprises with election-themed books
Don’t despair, voters. Interesting
times are fodder for interesting books, and throughout history both elections and political movements have led to some of the world’s greatest reads. Some candidates are voracious readers, others, barely literate; neither has stopped anyone from writing books about them. We can’t wait for the exposés of the 2016 campaign; for now we’ll look back at some historical perspectives on the political process.
Think the upcoming election is tumultuous? How about taking a look back to the founding of our country? What a wild ride! The 2016 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, Hamilton, is a great place to start. Hamilton: The Revolution (Grand Central Publishing, $45) includes the full libretto for the show annotated by creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, and reflections on the production process and cultural magnitude by both Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, former New York magazine and News week cultural critic. The show follows the life, love and political climb of the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, and his untimely demise at the hands of his former colleague, Aaron Burr. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons provides unerring proof that not much has changed during the last 150 years in the way politics and political movements function — and the crazed motives they inflame. Set in a provincial town in Russia around 1871, Demons mercilessly dissects not only the straitlaced politicians of the time and the devious radicals, but also the machinations of the levels of society supporting each political movement. Yes, it’s long, and yes, it’s Russian, but it’s brilliant, complex, funny and heartbreaking. Think of it as a new Netflix series. Twentieth-century books on the American process include a couple of classics on the 1972 presidential campaign. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (Simon & Schuster, $17) includes a new introduction by Thompson’s successor at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi, and while it begins to expose the limits of the Thompson style, it also contains enough no-holds-barred truth-telling to sustain interest. The better book on Nixon’s eventual landslide — and on journalism as it’s practiced even today — is Timothy Crouses’s The Boys on the Bus (Random House. $15.95). The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Of course, fear and loathing pretty much sum up the 1968 election. Who better than Norman Mailer to chronicle both party conventions that saw the anointing of Richard Nixon among Republicans and a deeply divided Democratic party haunted by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy? In Miami and the Siege of Chicago (Random House Trade Paperbacks $18), deemed “terrifying” by The New York Times, Mailer is both eyewitness and participant to America’s political future on the brink. No doubt Mailer would have had a field day with the “fraud of the century,” the 19th century. Michael F. Holt’s By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (University Press of Kansas, $22.50) examines the contest between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden, which saw the largest voter turnout ever (82 percent) and Hayes’ razor-edge victory — of a single electoral vote. The wackiness and inspiration of the 2008 race seems like only yesterday. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (Harper, $16.99) goes beyond sound bytes and teleprompters to reveal the sordid details about the candidates and their campaigns: the screaming, the cussing, the infidelities (and not just among the Clintons, but the Edwardses, McCains and Giulianis, too); how woefully unprepared vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin was — and in the minds of some, then-Sen. Barack Obama. But is anybody ever qualified for the job as Leader of the Free World? Try not to think about it as you cast your vote. New Releases for October October 4: My Own Words, by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Simon & Shuster, $30). The notorious RBG lays down some tracks. October 11: The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press, $35). A much-needed critical biography of the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve who oversaw the economic collapse. October 18: The Secret History of Twin Peaks, by Mark Frost (Flatiron Books, $30). A well-earned break from the madness of politics and a good preparation for the upcoming new Twin Peaks series. October 25: A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life, by Pat Conroy (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22). This new nonfiction collection comes on the heels of this much-loved writer’s death in March. OH Scuppernong Bookshelf was written by Martha Adams-Cooper, Shannon Jones, Steve Mitchell and Brian Lampkin. October 2016
O.Henry 31
Party Line
Papadaddy
Telephones have come a long way — even if our politics and sense of civility haven’t
By Clyde Edgerton
A red rotary phone
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY BLAIR
recently ended up in our house. It had been used in an elementary school talent show. Some of you remember the pre-push button, dial telephone once in many homes. The phone itself, about the size of a brick, but a little taller, usually sat on a table or shelf and was plugged into the wall via a cord. My 13-year-old son wondered if people used to walk around holding them when they talked — receiver in one hand, phone in the other. I said that early on the cord wasn’t long enough and then later very long cords became fashionable and people could walk around with them if they liked. A phone was about the weight of a laptop, but with significantly fewer functions.
For younger folks: On the front of the phone is a round disc — about the size of a CD (remember those?) with 10 holes in a circle — counting counter-clockwise. Inside each hole is a number, 1 – 9, and then the final number, 0. A phone number is dialed, one number at a time, by sticking your finger into the correct hole on the dial and pulling around one number at a time until it reaches a little metal stop. The 1 is nearest the stop. Our number in Durham County, North Carolina, when I was a child, was 6-4558. As I write, I realize that perhaps the 0 should have preceded the 1 rather than follow the 9. That’s off-topic, though. But to continue off-topic: Back then when you called the operator to say the number of — and ask her to place — a long distance call, you had to dial 0 to get the operator — meaning the dial had to be cranked from the 0 spot all the way around to the stop and then released. The 0 took longer to finish dialing than any other number. An enormous amount of time was wasted over several decades while people waited for the 0 to finish dialing. Sorry, I just did the math: Every billion long distance calls collectively wasted about 30 years. The phone had a receiver which rested atop the phone. The receiver, about the size of a banana (actually a sender/receiver because you talked into one end and listened from the other), while resting on the phone, pressed down two The Art & Soul of Greensboro
buttons which did not work independently. When you pressed one button, they both went down. When you lifted the receiver from its cradle, the buttons came up together and the line was open for you to make a call. There was a dial tone that I’m sure I can’t describe to one who’s not heard it. To one who has: You are probably hearing it in your head now. While explaining things to my son, I remembered this: In the early 1950s, our phone was on a party line, shared with seven or eight households, not a private line; and there was a skillful way to secretly listen in on neighbors’ phone conversations. I probably learned the technique from watching my mother, though I can’t be sure. Usually, if you were talking along and somebody on your party line lifted their receiver off their phone, you would hear a click and then you could hear breathing or whatever was going on in their house, and then they’d hang up since the line was in use. If they continued listening, you could say, “Sorry, I’m using the line.” But if you wanted to listen in on another conversation, you lifted only one end of the receiver and pressed the exposed button (so that both buttons stayed down), and then kept holding them down as you lifted the receiver to your ear. Next, you slowly lifted the button that was depressed, stopping just before the click. Then you heard the talkers, but they couldn’t tell you were listening in. If you lifted that button too high, a click would sound and your presence would be known. Of course, you couldn’t do something like this in our day and age as you might get banned from the county park system or the courthouse or county school grounds by vigilant officials. Thinking back on all this led me to what may be a naive realization: Let’s assume we are in the 1950s and that today’s political climate exists: many people despising fellow citizens because of “political beliefs.” Let’s assume further that because of your new neighbor’s bumper sticker, you’ve never spoken to her/him. But, you happen to overhear a phone conversation that neighbor is having with a friend on a neighborhood party line. You hear no political talk, but you learn that your neighbor likes dark roast coffee like you do. I mean, really likes it. His mother has dementia, like your mother. He likes Dr. John’s music, like you do. When you next see that neighbor in person, the chance for friendship is greater than before. The possibility of being civil, of seeing beyond the spirit of bumper-sticker-like cable news, of showing some Southern hospitality — is not so far-flung. OH Clyde Edgerton is the author of 10 novels, a memoir and a new work, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW. October 2016
O.Henry 33
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True South
The Great Divide What stays? What goes? Only Heaven knows
By Susan Kelly
William Faulkner freaks
ILLUSTRATION BY MERIDITH MARTENS
will tell you that a seminal scene in The Sound and the Fury is the basis for all that follows in his famous novel. A little girl named Caddy falls into a puddle. When she climbs a tree, her brothers see her muddy drawers and predict their mother’s fury that Caddy has gotten dirty.
What, you might fairly ask, has this English-majorish observation to do with downsizing? Downsizing necessitates decisions, divesting and division, tasks that are, by turn, hilarious, tedious and heartbreaking. Never mind the big stuff; this weekend, we — myself and my two sisters — were merely dealing with the contents of our mother’s chests and closets and shelves. And so we find ourselves faced with What Goes, What Stays, What We Want, and What We Can’t Bear to Think About piles. “Sentiment,” I quote from a past writing teacher who was quoting someone else, “is giving something more tenderness than God intended it to have.” We’re staring sentimentally at three pyramids of toys that defined each of us, certainly then, and kind of now. My Steiff stuffed animals — brought from NYC by my father in the “rag trade” — and with which I made up endless stories. The writer. Save. Her Barbies (and Kens and Midges) as well as their clothes, exquisitely made, with labels sewn in the collars, and tiny buttons and buttonholes, and real zippers. The clotheshorse extrovert. Save. Her Tonka trucks. A big, shin-high pickup truck, a horse trailer, a hookand-ladder, an earthmover. The tomboy. Suppressed sob … Sell. Because not a daughter or daughter-in-law alive would ever permit the no-doubt lethally leaded paint and sharp, semi-rusted corners of the metal vehicles in the sanitized, onlyeats-non-GMO-avocados fingers of their helicopter-parented offspring. Tears blinked back. We let the Barnabas Network guy have the Schlitz beer can lamp (he had a collection of beer can lamps, I kid you not.) We kept our Stokes County grandfather’s lapboard with the inlaid checkerboard where, if I could get a single king, I won. (I never did.) I sat on the radiator cover and watched him eat a hundred pieces of watermelon — cut not in wedges but in rounds, like a doughnut — on that lapboard as we watched “Jeopardy!” together. At one point, after we’d unhesitatingly pitched the homemade afghan we remembered being sick — red measles to the vomits — beneath on the den sofa, The Art & Soul of Greensboro
the three of us laid flat on our backs on the floor to rest. “Get up and look at me,” I told the youngest. “This is what I’d look like with a face-lift.” At another point, my mother said, “I want to watch this part,” as we prepared to divide up table linens, from Italian damask to exquisite lace hems to monogrammed satin-hemmed napkins the size of small tablecloths to, well, tablecloths. We were made to understand that each set had its story: wedding present, purchased in France, etc. We counted, chose, caressed, chose, hovered, chose, thought silently and disloyally about drawer space and lifestyle. “This is boring,” my mother announced, and left. But about those underpants. “Where’s my Joy of Cooking?” she asks. Exchange of panicked glances. Her Joy of Cooking was no longer a book. It was a chunk composed of a single frayed, faded, fabric-covered cardboard whose visible spine was stitched with what looked like kitchen twine holding clumps and singles of thin yellow pages with 6-point-font printing. And no pictures. “It’s falling apart,” we object. “Do you think you’re going to be cooking recipes from The Joy of Cooking?” we ask. “We’ll get you a new one,” we offer. “The new one doesn’t have the same recipes,” she says. Like what? I think. Chilled beef consomme? No loss. “I want it,” she says. This, from the same woman who threw out decades of travel pictures, even her wedding album, without a twinge. “It’s in the car,” I say, cool as Melanie Wilkes lying to the Yankees. “I’ll get it.” My mother’s Joy of Cooking was not in the car. It was buried somewhere in a black plastic bag in the Dumpster squatting in the asphalt parking lot of an elementary school. Which is how I came to find myself folded at the hips like a hinge over the sharp, rusty, Tonka truck-like Dumpster edge, fishing, digging, clawing, groping and tearing at bags of cafeteria refuse, supply room cast-offs and restroom detritus (Is that a book spine I feel or a box of rotting fish sticks?) in 100-degree heat while my sister stands behind me saying unhelpful things like, “I hope they don’t have closed circuit cameras to catch people illegally throwing stuff away.” If so, kindergarten show and tell can be the film of my drawers and backside as I’m trying not to fall into the dark, stinking, super-heated, steel-walled abyss of a Dumpster interior. Although at the very least you should be in high school to really appreciate The Sound and the Fury. And you need to be 86 to really appreciate your original Joy of Cooking. Because I recovered it. My sister recovered, too. The Tonka trucks sold instantly on consignment, for a lot of money. Plus, no one came down with lockjaw. OH In a former life, Susan Kelly published five novels, won some awards, did some teaching, and made a lot of speeches. These days, she’s freelancing and making up for all that time she spent indoors writing those five novels. October 2016
O.Henry 35
“The best thing about Friends Homes West is my neighbor!”
Everyone is Invited! Fried Apple Pies •
Open House
Friday, October 14 • 2:00 to 4:00
Mingle with our residents, enjoy fried apple pies and tour the apartments at Friends Homes West! Also joining us: • June & Burton Kennedy, Keller Williams Realty of Greensboro
• Beth Wenhart, Carolina Relocation & Transition Specialists
6100 West Friendly Avenue • Greensboro, NC 27410 Phone (336) 292-9952 • www.friendshomes.org
• Linda Bradshaw, Pull It Together, Senior Move Management
The Real Thing
Spirits
Skip the mix and please your guests
By Tony Cross
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIN BRADY
About a year or so
ago, Carter, my very good friend, and I were at a restaurant bar scoping out their cocktail list. Now, my friend doesn’t geek out as much as I’ve been known to when we frequent restaurant bars; however, he does appreciate a good drink, and has picked up a knack for calling out poorly made ones. We decided to order a few apps and cocktails to start. I ordered a Manhattan, and Carter chose their house margarita. Our bartender posed a question to Carter that perplexed the two of us: Would he like fresh juice in his drink? We both sat there puzzled, our minds blown. “Yes?...” Carter replied after a moment of sitting, and staring at the bartender in a (sober) stupor. We soon realized after studying the menu that having fresh-pressed juice was a $2 upcharge. You know, because limes are expensive. The only thing that made me laugh more was the fact that Carter had just spent $14 (that’s right) on one of the worst margaritas of his life. I tried it, and it was pretty bad. Point being — it’s the 21st century; why isn’t everyone using fresh citrus? Sour mix is everywhere: in all of the chain restaurants and dive bars. It’s also in many independent restaurants, private clubs and country clubs. It’s available from wine distributors and food distribution companies. Part of me doesn’t understand how an establishment that prides itself on using fresh ingredients won’t carry the same thought process behind the bar. It’s safe to say that no chef would ever use a lemon juice substitute when creating a sauce. So why are bar-
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
tenders ordering container after container of this gooey, high-fructose corn syrupy mess, and putting them in their cocktails? The answer’s pretty simple. You’re paying for them. One after another. Using fresh citrus is crucial when concocting a drink for your guests. Here’s the thing with lemons and limes, though: Their juice loses its “pop” within four to six hours. It’s even shorter for orange juice. I’ve been to places that will juice enough citrus for the week, and call it a day. You’ve got to juice for the moment, be that the afternoon, or for your shift. Yes, juice the next day is better than corn syrupy imitation juice, but that’s not the point. Try making the same cocktail with fresh juice, and juice from the day before, and you’ll notice immediately what is wrong with the latter. Some professional bartenders want juice that has just been pressed, while others like using juice that’s had a few hours to breathe. I like having my juice sitting for about two hours; I feel like it opens up a bit, and doesn’t bite as much. I know that makes no sense to you, so you’re going to have to trust me. Here are a few cocktails that you can put to the test. Invite a friend over, give them the drink with the sour mix, give yourself the one with fresh citrus. Then, give ’em a taste.
Margarita
Now, this is the most asexual drink there is on the planet. Every grocery store has some type of margarita mix, and we’ve all probably purchased them at one time or another. Remember, give your friend the ’Rita with the bad mix. After they taste yours with the fresh juice, they’ll want to switch, and that’s OK. Just be sure to charge ’em two bucks. 2 ounces blanco tequila (I like Milagro Silver) 1/2 ounce Cointreau 3/4 ounce lime juice 1/2 ounce simple syrup (2:1) Salt (optional) Lime wedge Combine all ingredients in a Boston shaker with ice, and shake like hell for 10 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass over ice. If you’d like salt, just rim half of your rocks glass with a lime wedge, and then carefully roll it over salt. I like using October 2016
O.Henry 37
Spirits half of the glass; that way if you want to switch, you can rotate the glass to the non-salty side. Add a wedge of lime.
Whiskey Sour
Like most first encounters I’ve had over the years with cocktails, the whiskey sour definitely was not love at first gulp. And that’s because it was made with some crap whiskey, and (you guessed it) sour mix. When made correctly, a true whiskey sour is made with rye whiskey, fresh lemon and sugar. It’s that simple. I love it with an egg white, too. Don’t make that face; it gives the cocktail a velvety mouthfeel, and brings a whole new dimension to the drink.
eatatcrafted.com
2 ounces rye whiskey (I like Rittenhouse) 3/4 ounce lemon juice 1/2 ounce simple syrup (2:1) (With an egg white, add it to the shaker first, and then the above ingredients. If you add it last, you run the risk of getting the yolk into the mix, thus ruining it. I’d still drink it.) Combine all ingredients in a Boston shaker with ice, and shake for 10 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass over ice. Take a lemon or orange peel, expressing the oils over the cocktail, and then dropping it into the drink. If you want to try something different, take 1/2 ounce of a dry red wine (I like using malbec or syrah), floating it on top of the cocktail. Now you have a New York Sour.
Shadowplay
I was having a hard time deciding if I wanted a beer or cocktail one afternoon. This spawned a combo that I am quite happy with. I named it after the only song it seems that anyone knows from the 1970s band “Joy Division.” Not that you care, but when I’m making drinks, I usually have a song stuck in my head, which ultimately becomes the name of that drink. In this case, it was the infamous “Joy Division” tune.
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October 2016
1 1/2 ounces Don Julio Blanco 1/4 ounce Aperol 1/2 ounce grapefruit juice 1/4 ounce lime juice 1/4 ounce light agave syrup 2 dashes Scrappy’s Lime Bitters (optional) 1 ounce of your favorite local IPA Repeat the adding and shaking from above, pouring this over ice. Top off with Man of Law. Garnish with a grapefruit peel, expressing the oils over the drink before violently throwing it in your cocktail. Good stuff. OH Tony Cross is a bartender who runs cocktail catering company Reverie Cocktails in Southern Pines.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
autumn in
old salem september 6 – october 31, 2o16
Spectacular colors. Harvest-time tastes. Hands-on activities.
Autumn in Old Salem. A season for the senses. October 15 harvest day at old salem! Fall foods, hands-on activities for all ages October 28, 29 legends and lanterns tours October 29, 30 pumpkin carving, trick or treat November 12 shops at old salem holiday open house Food, shopping, and more! For a full list of events, classes & concerts, visit oldsalem.org or call 336-721-735o
old salem museums & gardens, winston-salem, north carolina
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
O.Henry 39
Proper Details
Come Out and Play
By Annie Ferguson
Sandy Brim’s store has a way
of wowing its customers. Literally. Brim gets a kick out of seeing customers walk in, mouths agape. Handmade stone and silver jewelry, an antique parlor table, vintage dresses, local pottery and photography, playbills from the 1800s and even an iron grill that once adorned a window in 19th-century New York City. The treasures are almost endless in Hearth & Home Consignments in Burlington. The store’s centerpiece is a huge fireplace with a distinctive wood mantel, fashioned from a hand-hewn beam salvaged from Burlington’s former Baker and Cammack Hosiery Mill.
One customer offered $1,500 for the mantel, but Brim had to tell him it wasn’t for sale. After all, where would a store called Hearth & Home be without a hearth with some history? Yet consigning with various vendors isn’t Brim’s only game — far from it, actually. Thanks in part to two gifted parents — her father a carpenter, her mother
40 O.Henry
October 2016
a talented seamstress — she picked up most of the skills she needed to transform a building that housed a rundown bar into a store that not only sells crafts and antiques but also educates customers through DIY classes in areas such as mosaic tiling, reupholstery, lamp rewiring and chair recaning. “My love of wood came from my father, but my passion for reclaiming furnishings comes from my mother,” Brim explains. A Nebraska native, she worked as a registered respiratory therapist for thirty years after studying at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and St. John’s Regional Medical Center/Southwest Missouri State. In 1984, a job at Duke University Medical Center brought Brim to North Carolina. She later moved to Greensboro and worked at Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital and later at Greensboro’s Women’s Hospital. In 2010 she began working at a consignment store with a friend, and in September 2015, events in her personal life led her to seriously consider opening her own store. She drove past the building that is now Hearth & Home: Consignments, Refinements and DIY Classes seven times before she made a call to inquire about leasing the space. When she first toured the space with the building manager, the “Halloween decorations” were still up. Brim wiped away cobweb after cobweb but knew this was the space for her new business. Though her success had a lot to do with the skills she learned from her parents, the support from her husband, Billy, and heaps of hard work took her the rest of the way and beyond. Brim leased the space in September of 2015 and opened at seemingly lightning speed after she, Billy, and a couple friends worked 10- to 16-hour days until its grand opening on November 1, 2015. The space is now The Art & Soul of Greensboro
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMY FREEMAN
Burlington’s Hearth & Home Consignments is DIY Central
clean, beautiful, and, the once-pothole-ridden lot is freshly paved. Brim and her team that includes associates Dana (pronounced Donna) Thramann and Joy Lugo, work with customers on refurbishing items whether they’re bought in-store or not. One customer just wanted a place to work on a new project — something she’s never tried before. “If she comes, there’s likely someone here who can help her,” Brim says.
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“We have many customers who like to just come in and spend some time.” The store certainly has a way of giving new meaning to the term retail therapy. “One of our customers has early-onset Alzheimer’s. She comes in and touches many of our treasures, and her husband sips tea or coffee while she does,” Brim says, her welcoming spirit becoming evident the more she talks about her customers. In fact, after Thramann visited the store several times asking about the vintage sheet music she brought in Brim ended up hiring her, saying, “Want to come play with us?” OH If You Plan to Go: Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 1 to 6 p.m. Every weekend Hearth & Home Consignments hosts a yard sale, and classes are held Sunday afternoons from 3 to 5 p.m. This fall, look for holiday decorating classes with artificial florals for making wreaths and arrangements, as well as a session on a unique technique that that allows you to repurpose and embellish vintage linens. Info: 7300 Burlington Road, Burlington. (336) 447-4800 or www.hearthhomenc.com. Annie Ferguson is a frequent contributor to O.Henry
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Bring your Best 4-legged friend to Country Park for the
Saturday, OctOber 22, 2016 • 10 aM registration and information at
www.earlier.org
October 2016
O.Henry 41
Explore. Listen. Love.
Music and stories that are smart, fun, serious, and entertaining all at once . . . with host Paul Brown.
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9/9/16 2:37 PM The Art & Soul of Greensboro
On the Street Where you Live
Spring Garden of Earthly Delights A Saturday stroll on one of Greensboro’s most eclectic retail thoroughfares
Story & Illustration by Robin Sutton Anders
Don’t be fooled by its dreamy-
sounding moniker: Spring Garden Street doesn’t entirely live up to its name.
Starting downtown, the street runs about 5 miles, lazing through UNCG’s shady, green campus, hustling past a dense stretch of shops and businesses, and then zipping over to Market Street, where it morphs into MuirsChapel Road. Sure, the stretch from downtown through campus is plenty lush, but any sort of perennial-lined utopia “Spring Garden” might suggest is far outweighed by the next section of road crisscrossed with powerlines and flanked by college housing. Let’s take a walk along the 1-mile hustle and bustle made up of some of Greensboro’s most vibrant shops, pubs and restaurants between Aycock Street and Scott Avenue — more of a raggedy gathering of wildflowers than Biltmoreworthy grounds We’ll peek inside a few of these small businesses thriving (some more than twenty years) because of their owners’ ingenuity and commitment to family and community. We won’t have time to wander through each of the treasures sheltered by this stretch of Spring Garden, but you’ll see enough to schedule your return trip.
Jack’s Corner Mediterranean Deli,
1601 Spring Garden Street If you’re hungry, let’s start at the corner of Aycock and Spring Garden, where Jack himself is likely to greet you from behind the counter. Back in 1991, 17-year-old Jack Bishara was a Smith High School senior who dreaded the thought of leaving for college. The feeling was mutual for his stay-at-home mom, Najwah, who’d already kissed Jack’s three older siblings goodbye. So the two hatched a plan. They road-tripped it up to Detroit and down to Houston for a crash course on the restaurant biz from family entrepreneurs. Then they put Najwah’s cooking skills to new use on a slice of family land a stone’s throw from UNCG. “We had no idea what we were doing, and the Mediterranean food we wanted to serve wasn’t popular in this area,” Jack says. “Hence the name Jack’s Corner.” The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
O.Henry 43
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October 2016
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
On the Street Where you Live
Starting with just a few Greek and Arabic staples — gyros, hummus, falafel, tabouli —alongside American favorites like turkey clubs and burgers, Jack’s Corner met with instant success. In fact, Najwah’s family recipes turned out to be such a hit, she and Jack added “Mediterranean Deli” to the name two years later. Jack’s 27-year-old niece, Zeena, now joins her uncle and grandmother behind the counter. “All our food is homemade, and we use local ingredients when we can,” Zeena says. “It’s what we’ve been making forever. We like to share in the hospitality.”
The Artery Gallery, 1711 Spring Garden Street
You’d expect a wall of frame samples in a store specializing in custom framing. But nobody expects the quantity — and quality — David Thomas and Esia Ackley offer at The Artery, a frame shop David opened in a small pink house more than twenty years ago. Any wall not decked with local artists’ originals is plastered with corner frame samples in every material imaginable. The 3,000-plus collection comes in handy if a customer needs a quick turnaround or has an unusual request. “You can come in with a kid’s drawing or an antique that needs to be hand-sewn on archival board. It doesn’t matter if your project is monetarily valuable or sentimental, we give everything the same attention and care,” Esia says.
Home, where family and friends gather. Let us help welcome you home! We think the Triad is a pretty special place to call home. Whether you are moving to the area or across town, refinancing or purchasing that
At the Ritz Costumes, 1831 Spring Garden Street
Halloween is obviously a bustling time for patrons of At the Ritz Costumes, aka the “world’s largest closet.” But it doesn’t compare to the steady demand for costumes inspired by the 1970s, says Bob Smithey, the shop’s official Costume Guru, who runs the shop alongside founding owner and Costume Goddess Fay McPherson-Nelson. “You wouldn’t believe how many people come in here looking for bell bottoms,” he says, remembering a day a few years back when Christmas fell on a Saturday. “Somebody came in on Christmas Day looking for a ’70s-themed costume to wear to a party that night.” Whether their customers want a Great Gatsby–style flapper dress or a tuxedo for a cocktail party, Smithey and McPherson-Nelson always deliver. Stop in and “have a fun dress-up experience,” as the store’s tagline promises. You’ll walk out feeling like a giddy 5-year-old.
John Neal Bookseller, 1833 Spring Garden Street
Open the front door, and you’ll suspect you’ve walked into a small office building — not the world’s preeminent supplier of bookbinding and calligraphy supplies. In fact, the only evidence of John Neal Bookseller’s wares comes from dozens of envelopes Scotch-taped to the walls above the desks of three employees — usually heads-down, filling catalog and online orders. Each envelope is delicately addressed to John Neal Bookseller, 1833 Spring Garden Street. And every one of them is penned by worldwide Copperplate and Spencerian masters who’ve scripted the letters with iridescent inks, illuminated decorative birds from gold leaf, and lined their envelopes in handmade paper — then mailed their thanks to the Spring Garden supplier committed to supporting their art form. Ask one of the associates if you can look around in the back rooms. An unfathomable number of pens, markers, sketch paper, brushes, guidebooks, nibs, inks, gouaches and fountain pens await an artist’s studio.
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Pages Past, 837 Spring Garden Street
Even before proprietor Roger March opened his Spring Garden storefront twenty years ago, he bought large collections of books and sold them out of his house. Those early years of gathering and sorting at home explain his knack for diving through a box of dusty, leatherbound titles and emerging with a four-leaf clover. Today, his literary treasures with a regional focus on the Civil War, travel and early American history fill floor-to-ceiling shelves, boxes lining the aisles, and four additional storage units.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Ron Kimrey
NMLS ID #72526 Greensboro
Bobby Lemons
NMLS ID #93775 Greensboro
Greensboro: 336.272.3061
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www.cunninghammortgage.com October 2016
O.Henry 45
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Beautiful Cape Cod on 2.19 acres overlooks the 2nd hole of GCC Farm Golf Course. Gourmet kitchen with stainless appliances leads to private patio & pool/hot tub. Main level Master features gas fireplace, plantation shutters, walk-in closet & luxury bath. 2nd Master upstairs! Finished basement with Wet Bar & large fireplace opens to covered porch. Green House. 2 Car attached Garage. New Roof 2012.
Charlotte Davidson Quinn 336-314-4105
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46 O.Henry
October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
On the Street March has garnered an impressive online following from antiquarian collectors across the country watching his selections and waiting to bid on rare manuscripts. There’s the 1783 book on hydraulics machines autographed by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, whose signature also appears on the Declaration of Independence; the very first book published in the South during the Civil War, signed by the editor and containing a calligraphed letter from then-N.C. governor and UNC-Chapel Hill president David L. Swain (this one lists for $12,500); and the first American edition of War and Peace.
The Tasting Room,
901 South Chapman Street If you like wine even a little bit, we’ll duck inside the Tasting Room, a cozy wine bar on the corner of Chapman and Spring Garden where manager Alison Breen is usually behind the bar waiting to help you find your new favorite variety. Since it opened five years ago, the Tasting Room has surprised and delighted customers with a superior selection of reds and whites from all over the world. Breen doesn’t serve food, but customers are welcome to bring it in — Freeman’s across the street has great sandwiches, and the Tasting Room’s sister restaurant next door, 913 Whiskey Bar and Southern Kitchen, will deliver their famous mac and cheese to your table. “Wine is very personal,” Breen says. “I like to take the time to find out what our customers like and help them through their wine journey.” Through the Tasting Room’s wine club, members receive a bottle of red and white each month, and they’re invited to free tastings every week. “We’ve had people join the club only drinking sweet white wines, and now they’ve branched out and are amazed that they like the biggest, boldest heavy reds out there,” Breen says. “We really do celebrate the exploration.”
Spring Garden Bakery and Coffeehouse, 1932 Spring Garden Street
This coffeehouse gives you its best, every day: Cheerful bakers who love their jobs and proudly offer vegan pumpkin-chocolate chip muffins along with flaky cherry and cheese Danishes. Neighborhood patrons are grateful for a warm place — even on icy weather days, the bakery is open — filled with aromas of freshly baked bread to share with a cup of coffee. Have a cappuccino and treat yourself to one of baker Larry Clayton’s nutribuns. For the past thirty years, Clayton has been arriving before sunrise to knead the dough for the bakery’s famous, giant whole-wheat buns filled with melted cheddar cheese, sesame and sunflower seeds. Then grab a sugar cookie for the road.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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October 2016
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
On the Street Revolution Cycles, 1907 Spring Garden Street As Greensboro’s cycling community grows, so does its need for a gathering place where enthusiasts can service their bikes, shop for new and used models, and gather for a drink before and after they finish a race or casual ride. “It’s not just commerce, it’s community,” say the store’s experts/ bartenders, who offer their expertise along with ten beers on tap.
Art and Soul, 938 Spring Garden Street
Owner Jenny Stickrath’s new gift shop truly reflects the soul of Spring Garden and its broader community. “I love things that are funky, objects that have flair, and craftspeople who are just doing their thing,” she says, adding that she tries to fill the store with objects made in America with a give-back program, where proceeds go to support causes such as clean water initiatives, fair trade programs for women in Africa or feeding hungry children wherever they are. Stickrath and her staff work hard to curate a selection of one-of-a-kind gifts and see themselves as their patrons’ personal shoppers. “We’ve created an intimate setting where we can have one-on-one customer relationships. I want people to come here and find the perfect, meaningful gift among our wonderful collection.”
Adelaide’s Vintage Home & Garden,
2000 Spring Garden Street For now, our tour ends at a charming 1905 Victorian on the corner of Spring Garden and Milton. Whether you need a new dresser or decorating tips, Adelaide Dillon’s little white cottage has what you’re looking for. Each room feels like a page out of a coastal lifestyle magazine, with shabby-chic furniture and breezy, fresh accessories displayed in their element: colorful, painted glasses and pitchers in the kitchen; a white painted farmhouse table accented with a pair of blue benches and vintage linens in the dining room; oversize framed mirrors and vintage paint-by-number art to accessorize the bedroom’s furniture. No worries if you find the perfect piece that doesn’t match your home’s décor. Dillon will paint it for you — any color you choose. “I love getting to know my customers and their tastes and preferences,” she says. Currently in her third Spring Garden location since she opened Adelaide’s eight years ago, Dillon has witnessed the same patrons as they’ve decorated loft apartments, gotten married and filled their homes with affordable pieces, and shopped for the perfect nursery accessory. OH
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
O.Henry 49
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October 2016
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The O.H. File
The Making of O.Henry William Sydney Porter’s time in Austin, Texas
By Brian Clarey
I find the William
Sydney Porter House, prominently located on Fifth Street on the east side of downtown Austin, Texas, to be mildly offensive.
It’s not the home itself — five simple rooms stacked inside a creamy yellow clapboard — or its contents, which include the man’s shaving brush and mustache comb and a brown hat from his New York City years that he probably stole from a cocktail party in some uptown high-rise. It’s just that . . . O.Henry is our guy. Sure, he spent a few years there, right before his time in the penitentiary. But he only lived in this particular house for a couple of years, certainly not long enough to justify the vulgar National Register of Historic Places plaque posted out front when compared to the crucible of his creative soul that is Greensboro. And let’s face it, O.Henry’s time in Austin did not go well. I understand why Porter went to Texas. He was just a 19-year-old pharmacist selling opiated tinctures and stimulants to the denizens of Elm Street in 1882, his head filled with books and his body wracked with a deep, tubercular cough reminiscent of the one that had eventually taken his mother when he was just 3. And anyway, Cotulla, Texas, was booming when he got there in 1882: a new rail line and depot, a new ranch, and the type of searing, Texas-style heat that soothed his lungs. After a couple of years of that, he made it to Austin and did about what every other 22-year-old would have loved to do: He joined a band. He started a ’zine. He met a woman. And he fell in with a bad crowd. It all began so promisingly. Drawn in by the streetlamps and saloons of downtown Austin — at least twice as many as in his hometown in North Carolina — and flush with cattle and cotton money, he enjoyed a social life beyond anything Greensboro could offer. He met Athol Roach, with whom he would elope in 1887, and used his ranching experience to snag a surveying route with the Texas General Land Office. He and Athol, who was also showing symptoms of tuberculosis, had a child, Margaret. And he started the Rolling Stone, a five-cent one-sheet with short stories, comedic verse and one-liners that made the rounds as far as San Antonio. But it all started to go south when he took a job as a teller at the First National Bank of Austin and set up house with his family in these very rooms. He told the feds that he didn’t do it, that the bank had always played it fast and loose with their accounts, that he was just a patsy. Still, he was indicted in 1896, The Art & Soul of Greensboro
and he took the scoundrel’s way out: He ran, first for New Orleans, and then for Honduras, leaving Margaret and Athol, whose own final bout with tuberculosis had just begun. He wouldn’t return to Austin until his wife’s final days. She died in this very bed, now angled from the wall in a front room of the William Sidney Porter House. And O.Henry went off to jail in Ohio, which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to his career. He adopted his pseudonym in the Ohio Penitentiary to mask the authorship of tales scripted behind bars. Porter didn’t really become O.Henry until after he served his time, when he prolifically produced the bulk of his canon from New York City. Both of these places have a more legitimate connection to O.Henry, I think, than Austin, which seems to have had a worse influence on his life than even a federal prison. “His time here was pretty dubious,” says Curator Melissa Parr. “It borders on the bizarre.” That he was not complicit in the bank fraud is taken almost as gospel here. Less defensible is his hasty exit. “He abandoned his family,” a staffer reminds her. “But he came back,” Parr counters. “When she was dying!” Here among his things, in the house where he lived, it’s not hard to humanize the man, even a hundred years after his death — easy to imagine him rinsing his face at the porcelain bowl of his wooden washstand, to picture Athol sewing the needle book displayed on the wall and presenting it to her young husband, to see the two of them side by side on the porch in these twin cane rocking chairs taking in the sights and sounds of the thoroughfare. Parr defends O.Henry’s relative scoundrelness against the accepted behaviors of his time. “I don’t think he’s a great guy,” she says, “but I don’t think he deserves the kind of vitriol you heap on him.” Once upon a time Austin was home to the youthful O.Henry: a flawed, impulsive young man, prone to living large and making big mistakes. Although he’s certainly treated as a legend, someone who was larger than life, he was just another guy from the East who moved to town and everything went to hell. In Greensboro, where O.Henry was born and raised; where he found his second wife, Sallie Coleman; where his legacy is as much a part of the city’s tapestry as the denim trade and the railroad, we hold dear to the myth that sprouted from our soil and the literary giant that he became along with the body of work that perpetuated it. OH Brian Clarey is the publisher and executive editor of Triad City Beat. October 2016
O.Henry 51
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52 O.Henry
October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Gate City Journal
New Garden, Old Spirits A walk through the mists of time with historian Max Carter
By Billy Ingram
Sometime
around the year 1806, a young boy waited patiently alongside a dirt roadway near what is now New Garden Road as winding coffles of slaves being transported to marketplace passed by. He asked his father why those dark-skinned men and women were bound in chains; his father’s explanation horrified young Levi Coffin. Since the 1770s, the Religious Society of Friends, Quakers like himself, had almost entirely divorced themselves from the institution of slavery. This pernicious notion festered in Levi Coffin’s consciousness. Ultimately it led to one of history’s most remarkable achievements, one that would bend the arc of social justice and forever reshape our nation.
Trolling through the wooded area now known as New Garden searching for farrowing sows, young Levi would, on occasion, encounter frightened slaves escaping. Fetching cornbread and bacon for the fugitives, he would sit in rapt attention as they told harrowing tales of the brutal conditions and inhuman treatment they suffered on plantations to the east. It was not long after his 15th birthday, while attending a late-October community corn husking, that Levi Coffin took notice of a band of slaves that labored under the whip of a prominent trafficker. As white folks answered the dinner bell, congregating around tables inside the farmhouse, likely no one noticed Levi as he slipped away to join the enslaved individuals in order to, in his words, “See if I could render them any service.” It was there he met Stephen, a freeborn African American who had, years earlier, been kidnapped from the home of Philadelphia Quaker Edward Lloyd before being sold to the highest bidder as common chattel. Outraged, Levi wrote to Lloyd to assess him of the situation. After concerted effort, Stephen made the journey back to his rightful home. Tortured souls seeking a better life began following a lightly worn pathway into the New Garden woods to a particular tulip poplar tree that offered concealment from bloodhounds and bounty hunters, with food hidden nearby by sympathetic Quakers. There Levi and his cousin Vestal could direct these men and women toward sympathetic outposts along the various routes away from
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
the state, farmers that could provide temporary shelter and nourishment. In 1821, under the guise of furthering Christianity and spreading the wonders of the Bible to the heathens, the Coffin cousins organized a Sunday School class to teach slaves to read and write. After all, one could hardly make the case that slaves shouldn’t be taught the scripture. This was a short-lived effort, the school was forcibly shuttered when prominent slave owners wised up to the two men’s real intent. It was a deeply held moral opposition to the ingrained culture of slavery that fueled a mass migration of 20,000 Quakers from the South to Indiana, including the Coffin family. Which brings us to the present. . . This Hallows Eve may have you considering an experience among the pines where zombies and ghouls (or those made-up to appear as such anyway) startle terrified ticket holders. Or perhaps a Halloween haunted house at a local church featuring icky abortion mishaps or the grotesque aftereffects of a gruesome drunken automobile accident. More satisfying, by far, would be to spend the evening by lantern light in a graveyard whose inhabitants have lain peacefully since before the city of Greensborough was founded, their eternal slumber having begun decades prior to Nathanael Greene confronting overwhelmingly superior British forces on these grounds in 1781, sending the enemy into retreat. About fifteen years ago Max Carter, retired director of the Friends Center at Guilford College, began an annual Halloween New Garden Friends Cemetery tour. Posing as a white-bearded Gandalf holding aloft the old lantern his father once used to light dairy barns in Indiana, Max leads a merry band of historical thrill seekers from stone to stone, ricocheting across the corridors of time with the help of costumed players portraying many of the luminaries buried there. As to the ancient burial ground’s origin, Carter explains, “Henry Ballinger and Thomas Hunt bought 53 acres in 1757 from Richard Williams for the use of New Garden Friends Meeting for a cemetery and meetinghouse. Richard Williams had a farm where Western Guilford High is now. Guilford College is built on the Williams farm as well. Richard Williams then later contracted smallpox tending to soldiers during the Revolutionary War and died. He’s buried in the cemetery.” As you meander through yesterdays you’ll develop a greater understanding of the threads that weave in and out of our shared history, the backstories behind familiar names that grace our street signs and longtime local businesses: Addison Boren, whose sons turned mud into millions with their terra cotta pipes and bricks; John Van Lindley’s Pomona Hills Nursery, who introduced peaches to the area before he founded an insurance company that ultimately became Jefferson Standard Life; Mary Mendenhall Hobbs, who advocated for female education in the late 1880s, leading to the first public October 2016
O.Henry 53
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October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Gate City Journal
college for women, now known as UNCG. You’ll meet other fascinating and deceased individuals who shaped and molded our community such as John and Mary Woody, who parceled off a significant portion of their land for African Americans to purchase after the Civil War. From his inheritance, their son Waldo donated more land for a nearby school to be built, thereby establishing the Woodyside neighborhood where Hedgecock Lumber was a neighborhood institution near the intersection of West Market and College Road, birthplace of blues musician Lorenzo “Logie” Meachum. The ball-playing Ferrell brothers are also buried here. One of those seven boys, Rick Ferrell, was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame with the American League record for most games caught, a milestone that went unmatched for over forty years. Back in the 1920s, as Max Carter tells it, “The brothers lived on a dairy farm on West Market where Hidden Lakes is now. Sundays you didn’t work, you milked the cows; that’s it. So they played baseball. Two of them went professional, Wes Ferrell was one of the greatest pitchers of the ’20s and ’30s.” There are points along the way when Max will tell a story that leaves the audience gasping; then he drops the mic to quickly move on to another amazing tale. For instance: Clyde Milner, Guilford’s longest serving president Milner assisted the American Friends Service Committee when they freed Japanese-American college students from internment camps during Word War II by transporting them east to receive an education. That international Quaker peace and justice organization also successfully negotiated terms that allowed German Jews to avoid concentration camps just before WWII broke out to resettle in Greensboro. It was also under Milner’s administration that the college was integrated in 1962. Among others those who emigrated in 1939 were Curt and Gertrude Victorius. Curt Victorius was chief economist of the German National Banking Association. Wear your walking shoes; you won’t just cover a lot of ground, you’ll cover a lot of territory. Not far from a mass grave containing 150 British and American soldiers, you’ll gather beside a marker commemorating the Revolutionary Oak that was the victim of a terrorist attack in 1955. Max Carter elaborates, “Quakers were working to help Greensboro integrate the public schools after Brown vs. Board of Education. Surprise, surprise! The local school board was not anxious to do that here. The American Friends Service Committee sent trainers down here to work with the local black and white populations, to ramp up integration but to do it creatively and nonviolently. They invited Eleanor Roosevelt to come down and address an integrated audience, of blacks and whites sitting together in the meeting house at what is now New Garden Hall at the college. While she was addressThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
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October 2016
O.Henry 55
Gate City Journal
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October 2016
ing them, talking all about civil rights and integration, three locals who weren’t overly enthusiastic about her coming stuck dynamite at the base of the oak tree in the cemetery and blew it up as a protest. “It had been there during Revolutionary battles and shaded fallen soldiers. It had become kind of an icon in the community,” Carter says. “It was so massive it didn’t come down immediately. It came down in a storm four years later. When they counted the rings they said it was born in 1492.” There are remnants of that tree all over the community. People made tables, chairs and offering plates out of it. “Just a couple of months ago an old gentleman in Alamance County passed away, but before he died he invited a bunch of us out to see what he wanted to give the college,” Carter continues. “Behind his hen house were planks of sawed lumber from that tree. So there are woodworkers at the college right now turning the last remnants of the Revolutionary Oak into furniture.” Remember Levi Coffin, earlier in this story? Halloween-nighters will encounter his family’s final resting place, as well. That story, remarkable as it is, didn’t end with an aborted but significant attempt to educate local blacks. Over time, with so many African descendants being driven into the New Garden woods from far away counties and states, Levi and his cousin Vestal developed an intricate network of safe houses to shelter runaways as they made their way north or west. The woods at the perimeter of New Garden Cemetery became the initial spur for what became the Underground Railroad in 1819. The tulip poplar that served as a waiting room for fugitives from injustice fleeing North Carolina over 150 years ago still flourishes today. It’s the second largest in the state. “One of the last graves we stop at is Vestal Coffin, he was the First Conductor on the Underground Railroad. He died on his 34th birthday before he could make it out to Indiana,” Carter says. “He left a young widow, his wife Alethea, who had, I think, four kids. She was in her 20s and had a 170-acre farm, where Jefferson Standard Country Club was and she didn’t want to leave the side of her husband. So she continued to farm until her kids were grown up.” The offspring all made the trek as part of a mass exodus out of the state to Indiana but kept begging their mother to join them. She finally acquiesced in the late-1830s, packed up a wagon and headed northwest, “But the wagon was so bumpy she got out and walked the whole way,” Carter goes on. “She stayed there a few months, couldn’t stand being away from what where she and her husband had made their home, so she came back and was matron of the women’s side of the old boarding school for several years until in her old age. She finally went back up to Indiana to live with her family but with the condition that when she died she’d be returned to be buried next to her husband.” Carter pauses before concluding. “She died in 1891, 65 years a widow, The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
629 Green Valley Road, Suite 211 Greensboro, North Carolina 27408
October 2016
O.Henry 57
58 O.Henry
October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Gate City Journal and on her epitaph it says, “Died in Indiana, buried in her wedding dress.” The women in the group always say, “Well, if you’re walking back and forth to Indiana you’ll fit in that dress.” After the first few Halloween tours Max Carter wondered if it might have a broader appeal, “I decided to advertise it a little bit, see if anyone outside the Guilford, New Garden Quaker community would be interested and seventy-five people showed up,” he recalls. “They didn’t have a clue; that was the thing that amazed me. People aren’t aware of that history. And they started talking to their friends about it and it started expanding so we do an alternative Memorial Day tour highlighting those who died in service of their country — traditionally, but also those who risked their lives in service of their country nonviolently. Then we do a Fourth of July tour that focuses not only on the struggle for independence, the Battle of New Garden, Guilford Courthouse were all fought out here, but also the Underground Railroad, civil rights, and other Quaker peace work.” In a resting place this old, especially on Halloween night, you could just bet there’ll be restless spirits, pranking poltergeists, ghostly apparitions that have perplexed and frightened cemetery-goers for generations. In this instance . . . not so much. Max Carter tells folks, “While we’re traipsing through the cemetery, you don’t have to be worried if you step on graves because Quakers are as benign in death as they are in life. The only ghost stories that we know of are the three restless spirits on the Guilford College campus.” One of them is one of the Revolutionary war soldiers “Lucas is his name. He haunts Dana Auditorium. The other haunts Mary Hobbs Hall. Nobody knows anything about her. She’s a young girl, she moves furniture and opens drawers, locks people out of their room if they’ve been ‘naughty girls’ and snuck out after curfew. The third one is up in Founder’s Hall, the ghost of a college nurse who committed suicide in her apartment.” The October 31st lantern-lit walking tour of New Garden Cemetery begins promptly at 8 p.m. I won’t just be there in spirit, I’ll be playing the role of preacher Vance Abner who was known for witticisms such as: “Most American Christian worship starts at 11sharp on Sundays and ends at 12 dull.” Sounds like a swell guy. Join Max Carter’s celebration of those stoic individuals that laid the foundations and defined the character that made our unsure-footed city great, Quaker activists who saw war and sought peace, recognized injustice and brought about change and who, lo these many generations later, continue to inspire and excite. OH
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Billy Ingram always finds it interesting when the subject of an interview declares, “I tell stories, half of ’em are true. You just have to figure out which half.”
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
O.Henry 59
In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Preservation Greensboro and the 5th anniversary of O.Henry Magazine
For Love of Frank Featuring the Las Vegas vocal styling of
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Big Band Orchestra
Recreating Frank Sinatra and the Count Basie Orchestra’s historic 1966 performance at The Sands. Festive attire or your best Rat pack threads.
7 - 10 pm • October 20, 2016
Food, Libations and Dancing on the grounds at Blandwood Mansion
$75 per person 336.272.5003
For more information & tickets: www.preservationgreensboro.org/event/frank
60 O.Henry
September 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Threads
Cashmere Connection How Kriegsman Luxury Outerwear makes bespoke coats from the world’s finest fabrics
By Waynette Goodson
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMY FREEMAN
Established in 1924, Loro Piana is the
largest and finest manufacturer of cashmere in the Western world. The precious fibers come from hircus goats in the mountains of Northern China and Mongolia, where the luxury Italian fashion brand has offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and Ulaanbaater.
Once a year in the spring, goat herders harvest the animals’ underfleece through a harmless combing process. Each goat yields about 250 grams (9 ounces) of the underfleece, but after the coarser outer fibers are removed, only about half remains — which is why it’s so precious. Most all materials then go to workshops in Italy, where craftsmen still make most of the garments by hand. And a select few merchants outside this rarified circle are allowed to receive bolts of this exceptional fabric — including Kriegsman Luxury Outerwear of Greensboro. “When we went to buy Loro Piana, they vetted us,” owner David Kriegsman recalls. “Then when we got it in, we asked for the labels, and they
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
vetted us again. Just having the rights to purchase the fabric is a feather in our cap. They don’t just sell it to anyone.” And Kriegsman isn’t just anyone. “We are furriers,” he explains. “And that’s what we’ve done for eighty-eight years. My father was a furrier, and my grandfather, and my grandmother, and my uncle. This is what they did in the Old Country —Austria. We’ve sold cashmere and fine woolens for at least thirty-five years.” In 2008, the recession hit, and Kriegsman decided he didn’t want to lay off anyone from his venerable store, which has stood at 502 East Cornwallis Drive for thirty years. “My thought was to make better cloth coats,” he recalls. “I’m not in competition with the department stores. I can’t make a coat for $250 like they make in China. So we started making cashmere garments, and the next thing I know, we started buying cashmere from Loro Piana, who makes the finest fabrics in the world, period.” The store’s chief designer, Stanka Ivanova, hails from Bulgaria. An accomplished artist, she creates garments in a wide range of materials, from fur to leather and from fine wool to cashmere — and all combinations — for women and men. You’ll find the atelier behind their showrooms is full of the machinery to design and make these special garments. Cold storage vaults on the premises contain thousands of furs during the hot summer months. October 2016
O.Henry 61
Threads
“About 80 percent of the garments we make for customers are custom created,” Ivanova says. “We make about one-third of all our inventory ourselves. We create hand-stitched garments the way they should be done. It’s not just bing, bam, boom.” Longtime Greensboro resident Edith Griffin remembers the day she decided she had to have a navy blue leather suit made. “David showed me all the leather samples and gave me the timing,” she says. “I was so excited about it! They commented on how wonderful it looked on me and made me feel so special.” Griffin has shopped at the store for three decades and collected many favorites along the way, such as a custom silk dupioni dress and a black cashmere coat. “They’re so patient and understanding,” she says of the crew at Kriegsman. “I go there when I have some downtime, and I try on the furs, jackets and sweaters, and now they even sell handbags. I have to get one of those, too!” Mention the word “Kriegsman” to Armando Dunn, and he starts rattling off dearly beloved purchases: “Three cashmere coats, two trimmed with chinchilla and one with mink; a full-length otter; a mink and cashmere blend fabric lined with nutria. A German shearling. For this season, I’m going with fox.” Dunn splits his time between High Point and New York, where he enjoys wearing his favorite item, a sheared black, full-length mink coat,
62 O.Henry
October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Threads
perfect for formal black tie attire at the opera. “It’s very difficult, about impossible, to find someone who makes furs for men,” Dunn explains. “The only other person is Tom Ford, at about $40,000 for anything.” And that’s the magic behind Kriegsman. “No one else does this like we do,” he says. “There are just two furriers in the state. If you research you’ll find there are few people in the whole country that make bespoke, custom-made Loro Piana cashmere coats. It’s a very small number, and virtually no one in the South does this. There’s no one like us in the state, and that’s our story.” OH When she’s not dreaming of cashmere and furs, Waynette Goodson pushes a pen for Casual Living as the editor in chief. Old Is New Again Tired of that dusty old stole buried in your
OPAL
closet? Let Kriegsman Luxury Outerwear Store turn it into something new and now. “’We had a girl in high school bring in her grandmother’s fur, a graduation gift, and we used it to design a contemporary leather-and-fur vest,” says owner David Kriegsman. On another occasion, a hunter brought in a deer skin, which also became a vest; the front with deer and the back with cashmere. “We work with everyone from a young graduate to a man who will wear his vest on his Harley,” Kriegsman says. Furs restyled to create bed throws or even stool covers? That, too! Kriegsman Luxury Outerwear is a hidden gem at 502 East Cornwallis Drive, in the same shopping center as La Bamba Mexican restaurant. Be sure to allocate plenty of time to peruse the shelves, chock-full of much more than just coats. Think real cashmere pashminas, leather gloves, hats, belts, cashmere/silk/woolen scarves, mink key charms and flower pins, and a wide selection of handbags, such as the very sculptural and modern German label, Olbrish. kriegsmanfurs.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Birthstone for OCTOBER Opal has a unique play of color to it often featuring orange, yellow, green and blue. 90% of opals come from Australia with the rest coming from Brazil, Mexico and Africa.
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O.Henry 63
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64 O.Henry
October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Evolving Species
Southbound And bound to the South, for good reason
By Elizabeth Edmonds
Once in a while I start to think about what it would be like to live somewhere other than the South. After all, we have crazy weather, ice today, spring tomorrow, and we have mosquitoes whose purpose and virtue I have yet to understand. But then something will happen and remind me of one of the reasons I continue to make my home here. One of those things happened last week and although a small thing on the worldwide grid it still gives me pause, and I remember why I put up with the unpredictable weather and mosquitoes.
A person passed away in my hometown which now has two stoplights instead of one and three if you count the one on the edge of the city limits. She was 96 and had lived alone for more than forty years. She was a beauty in her day, petite and stylish, and had lots of “beaus” as my 102-year-old aunt said. Tragically, her sister, younger by one year, had passed away at age 21, in childbirth and was buried with her baby in the church cemetery next door to where the two sisters and their parents had lived. She never got over the death of her sister and turned her back on any hope of marrying and having children, choosing instead to stay home and care for her parents until they passed. She would occasionally leave the house for groceries or a doctor’s appointment but gradually retreated into her house, never hosting visitors, never letting anyone in, and spent her days feeding the many stray cats in the neighborhood and the birds. Slowly the house began to crumble around her. Family and friends urged her to leave, even offering to take her in or set her up in a safer place. She refused to leave saying she wanted to stay in her house next to the church cemetery where her sister and baby were “sleeping.” Her contact with the outside world was by telephone or at the back porch steps. Only one person gained her trust enough to allow him to come in and try to make the necessary repairs around her just to keep her warm and safe. We all wondered why she would put her trust in a stranger and not turn to family for help, but I some things never elude an explanation. When she did not answer her morning call from her 102-year-old “double first cousin,” the plan was put into place for someone to find the hidden key to her crumbling house and go inside. There she was, on the floor of the room where she spent most of her time. Within three days she passed after suffering a massive stroke. The little town where I grew up has changed dramatically over the years, not so much in how it looks, but in the demographics. More and more people have The Art & Soul of Greensboro
passed on and new people have moved to town choosing to live the small town lifestyle while working in the big cities of Greensboro or High Point, so not many people recognized her name. Even the church her whole family once attended now has a praise band and a jumbo screen to scroll the words to songs she would never have recognized. The little funeral home that has served the town for several generations since it was founded in 1857 handled the preparations for her final journey, the only time she had been out of the house in many, many years. The small group gathered in the funeral home chapel for the service because as she had said in her final hand-written note, “I don’t want a fuss when I die.” The minister spoke as if she had known her for years even though all of their visits had been at the back porch steps. The minister, however, knew things even some of the family did not know. For instance, she had lived on a monthly income equivalent to how much some of us spend just on groceries or on a car payment. And yet, she had never failed to send her tithes to the church in eighty-three years. We didn’t know that she sometimes would opt to feed the cats and birds instead of herself. Oh, it wasn’t for lack of trying to help her that we didn’t know, it was just that she was that private and gave not a hint of her financial situation as she continued to enclose her little $5 bills, sometimes $10 in our Christmas and birthday cards. She was still so tiny, barely 5 feet tall, that it took only four pallbearers to carry the casket to the hearse. As the hearse pulled out of the parking lot with the small procession following it to the same cemetery where her parents and her beloved sister were buried, I suddenly thought, “Yes, this is one of the reasons I still love the South in spite of its warts and all.” As the hearse slowly made its way past the elementary school, past the old curb market, past the laundromat and the local pizza place, and past the church where she had tithed for eighty-three years, I looked to the left. Every car, every school bus, every pickup truck . . . yes, every single one . . . stopped where they were. Not a single vehicle moved until that hearse and the small procession, identified by our headlights on, had passed. I doubt that anyone in those cars, buses and trucks knew who was inside that hearse. All they knew was that someone had passed from this life into the next one and the only way they had to show respect was to stop and allow her to pass with reverence. As we approached one of the two stoplights, although it had changed to green, no one came through the intersection, allowing the small procession to proceed without interruption. That is life in a small Southern town. We may not know who is passing by on the way to their final resting place, but we know that one day we will all take that same ride and this may be the only way we have of showing respect for them, even though we may have only known them over the back porch steps. It’s a small thing, a gesture, but it speaks volumes and it reminds me once again of why I continue to live here with the unpredictable weather and mosquitoes. OH A first-time contributor to O.Henry, Elizabeth Edmonds is also an ordained minister. When she isn’t performing wedding ceremonies, she works as a secretary for Guilford Middle School. October 2016
O.Henry 65
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October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Old Sam Peabody
Birdwatch
The song of the white-throated sparrow heralds winter
By Susan Campbell
Here in central North Carolina, the winged
harbinger of winter is the white-throated sparrow. After summering in the forests of the far north, this bold little bird breeds across Canada and in northern New England at higher elevations. Then it heads south for the winter, probably stopping off in your backyard. A medium-sized sparrow, it is anything but drab, with brown notes on its upper body and white below. Look for bold markings on the head. Pale stripes on the crown and a white throat patch are set off by gray feathers on the face. And to top it all off, white-throateds sport a yellow spot at the base of their stout bill. Interestingly there are two color forms of this species: those with heads that are white-striped and those that are tan-striped. Both forms persist. While white-striped individuals are more aggressive during the breeding season, either type will breed with the other. Following courtship, females handle the nest-making, usually in a depression on the ground under a low-growing tree or shrub. However, should it, not surprisingly, fall victim to predators, the second nest may be placed on low branches.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
If you have not spotted one of these birds, you almost certainly have heard their distinctive loud “seet” call emanating from thick vegetation. Their song, which can be heard even during cold weather, is a recognizable, liquid “oh sweet Canada.” (Others hear “old Sam Peabody.”) Since they tend to flock together, you are likely to encounter small groups along forest edges, farm fields, parks and suburban areas These squatty sparrows actually have a broad diet. Although they primarily feed on a range of seeds during the winter months, their preference shifts during the year. In spring, they are more likely to seek out buds and flowers of fresh vegetation. Luckily, white-throateds love feeding stations, often in association with dark-eyed juncos, another bird of the high country. White-throated sparrows do not walk or run but hop when on the ground. As they forage, they will forcefully scratch backward in leaf litter using both feet and pouncing on tasty bits that they uncover. And if you happen to look out of your window and see leaves taking flight, it is probably white-throated sparrows forcefully flicking aside dead leaves using their bills. In the winter months, pecking orders form within flocks with the more aggressive males dominating. If you want to attract white-throated sparrows this winter, it is easy and inexpensive. Since they tend to stay low, scattering a seed mix in a cleared spot near shrubs or other thick vegetation is all it may take. White-throats will hop up onto a stump or low platform feeder as well. Easier yet, simply leave a portion of your yard unmowed until Spring and these predictable visitors may well turn up to take advantage of the resulting seeds that remain as the growing season winds down. OH Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photographs at susan@ncaves.com. October 2016
O.Henry 67
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Wandering Billy
Rat Pack Reunion Memories of Sinatra, Martin and The Golddiggers
By Billy Eye
“My father said get a regular job already, what are you doing? What is this with the singing? Get a job!” — Frank Sinatra
Ring-a-ding-ding, Hep Cats. Back in
2012, I had the pleasure of creating an extensive oral history of the Alberici Sisters, who, as teens in 1973, joined Dean Martin’s girl group The Golddiggers. For the book, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams, I interviewed dozens of folks who worked with Dean and Frank Sinatra. So, in conjunction with the Sinatra-themed bash this magazine will be throwing on October 20th at Blandwood Mansion, let’s wander back in time for some up-close memories of the one and only concert tour Ol’ Blue Eyes and Ol’ Red Eyes ever undertook together in 1977. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Maria Alberici, Golddigger 1973–1990: We were scheduled to do two shows a night. Pat Henry would go on first, then The Golddiggers, then Dean and finally Frank. After Frank’s set, Dean would join him on stage for some comedy and a long medley of their hits. When the first day of rehearsal arrived, there was an air of respectful anticipation backstage as if history was in the making. They both showed up for rehearsal in tuxes. Frank was a little more casual, he was wearing a black top coat instead of his tux jacket. They faced off onstage like two matadors in search of a bull. Dean had a natural way of making people feel comfortable. He didn’t go out of his way to make an impression or try to be charming, he just was. With Frank you had to know he was in command but, even though he had a takecharge air about him, he displayed a wider range of emotional colors when he performed. Frank was all about getting inside the music. It was the art of seduction for him. Frank was the master chess player, the manipulator of the chessboard. One night he invited us all to dinner in a lovely private room backstage. When it was time for dinner, his bodyguards escorted us to our tables. Helen Costa, wife of Sinatra’s musical arranger Don Costa: The reason they called him Ol’ Blue Eyes — a lot of people have blue eyes but Frank had a tremendous energy coming from his eyes. When he walked into a room, it was electrifying. His eyes were it, I think that’s what really endeared him to the audience because they connected through that energy, and he made every October 2016
O.Henry 69
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Wandering Billy person feel he was singing to them. It was more his talent for phrasing than having the greatest voice ever; it was enough that he had the phrasing and the energy to simulate that intimacy on stage. He had that power. He was very intense all the time. He was particular, had perfect pitch and great ears for any kind of mistakes. Robyn Whatley, Golddigger 1976–1987: Dean was naturally very funny so he had Frank laughing all the time. They had such a routine and fell right back into it even though they had not been together in concert for a decade or so. Dean never rehearsed, but Frank Sinatra was very professional, into details, let’s put it that way. Our dressing room was right next to his and the walls were paper thin. He would literally do vocal rehearsals for at least thirty minutes before every show. And Dean would come in and kinda go, “Ah, is the stage still where we left it?” Linda Alberici, Golddigger 1973–1990: At the start of our run, newspapers all over the country ran photos of Dean and Frank performing together on stage again. The Rat Pack was back and we were right in the thick of it. Frank was the Chairman of the Board and traveled with his kingdom wherever he performed. And the court jesters were these shady wise guys that followed him around everywhere. Every once in a while they would quickly assemble and look like they had something important to attend to, but mostly they would just hang out. It wasn’t all laughs and inside jokes on the tour. Frank fired his longtime friend and opening act Pat Henry over a bad bet or something. I heard Pat never got over that. After that the atmosphere of the tour got a little more tense. I must say, I was tiptoeing around. One evening I asked Dean about our being told before the tour began to “stay away from Mr. Sinatra.” His reply was, “I’m keepin’ away from him too!” Dean explained that Frank was bugging him to stay out late and party with him. I wanted to know more but wouldn’t dare probe into their relationship. Dean, being a man of few words, didn’t go into much detail except to say that Frank’s nocturnal lifestyle was not for him anymore. Just outside the stage door Frank had a big limo waiting with the motor running. As soon as he got offstage he was escorted directly to the limo by a bunch of guys in suits. They were trying to escape before the audience was let out of the theater. It was very much like a scene out of a mafia movie with the bank robbers making their getaway. OH Beyond Our Wildest Dreams is available at bookstores and from Amazon.com. Billy Eye will be attending the soirée on October 20th if the lawyers and insurance people can hash it out in time. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
O.Henry 71
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72 O.Henry
October 2016
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Botanicus
Punk’d
Whether for jack-o’-lanterns or pie, ’tis the season for curcubits
By Ross Howell
As crisp October evenings arrive, no doubt
your mind turns to thoughts of the plant family Cucurbitaceae. Don’t think so?
Pumpkins are “cucurbits”— relatives of squash, zucchini, edible and inedible gourds, watermelons, honeydews, cucumbers and more. Exfoliate this morning with a loofah? Yep. Made from a relative of that jacko’-lantern decorating your front steps. The cucurbits are a fantastically big family, counting about 965 species. And you thought your spouse had a lot of cousins! These cucurbits produce a large portion of the food eaten by human beings. Yet in spite of their prolific diversity, almost all cucurbits produce the signature yellow blossoms we associate with squash and cucumbers. And those blossoms? They may disturb your assumptions deeply. Pumpkins aren’t vegetables, as you might think. They’re fruits. Individual pumpkin vines produce both male and female flowers and are highly dependent on honeybees for successful pollination. Pumpkins are a very generous foodstuff for people. Their blossoms, seeds, and flesh are tasty and nutritious. Pumpkins, like other squash, are thought to have originated in North America, and they’ve been around for a long time. The oldest evidence of their presence on this continent was discovered in Mexico — seeds estimated to date from 5500 to 7000 B.C. The French explorer Jacques Cartier reported finding “gros melons” during his exploration of the St. Lawrence region of North America in the 16th century. Subsequently translated into English as “pompions,” the name has since evolved into the modern “pumpkin,” or commonly here in the South, “punkin.” The most common decorative pumpkin is the Connecticut Field variety,
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
an heirloom plant said to be very similar to the squash grown by Native Americans before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Each fall we see its familiar orange color and smooth, slightly ribbed skin at most every commercial pumpkin patch or church fundraiser. A typical Connecticut Field pumpkin weighs between 15 and 25 pounds. But there are more than thirty pumpkin varieties these days, some deep green, some variegated and others pearlescent white, with skins smooth skin to rough. And as for size, well, they can be a small fruit less than a pound in weight to the size of the behemoth presented by Chris Stevens at the Stillwater, Minnesota, Harvest Fest in October 2010. It weighed 1,810 pounds, 8 ounces! The Harvest Fest pumpkin may be what little Linus van Pelt of Charles Shulz’s Peanuts cartoon envisioned when he proclaimed — unsuccessfully — to Charlie Brown and all the neighborhood kids, “On Halloween night the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with bags of toys for all the children.” For a plant so generous and benign, the pumpkin is treated pretty badly by us humans. At Halloween we’ll discard its innards and carve the pumpkin into all sorts of fanciful visages and shapes, some beautiful, some frightening. Historians ascribe this tradition to Irish immigrants, who before coming to America, performed these rites for centuries on turnips and potatoes. Or musicians from Chicago in the 1980s will name their alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins and release some pretty cool songs along with a selection of completely baffling MTV videos. Or worse, some of us with a mechanical bent will form teams to build elaborate catapults or air cannons that at “Punkin Chunkin’” competitions launch the hapless fruits thousands of feet, smashing them to smithereens. In fact, North Carolina is home to a world champion Punkin Chunkin’ team. Anybody for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie? OH Attempts by Ross Howell Jr. to grow squash or pumpkins in his backyard garden have been foiled by rude and invidious squash bugs. He refuses to accept defeat. October 2016
O.Henry 73
Celebrating
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Recurring Dream I stumble from a ladder, mis-stepping through a rung — preoccupied, peering up to some lofty destination, a change of venue for star-gazing. During the thrill of ascension, I loosen my grip, testing if some trinity might rescue me. And I fall, dream after dream, each time I reach the REM — stratum by stratum, through ice crystals. Snagged in the belly of combed clouds I release all I am into wind free-falling as a piano tinkles a light-hearted etude. — Sam Barbee
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
O.Henry 75
Story of a House
Southern Revival New life for the oldest house in Irving Park By Cynthia Adams • Photographs by Bert VanderVeen
K
atie Bode, (pronounced BODE-ee), a blue-eyed blonde in an aqua sundress, is the laid-back mistress of one of Irving Park’s most historic homes and mother to a brood of four children. Born and raised in the South, she is also a self-described porch person, one who much prefers the living be easy — or as easy as it can be with teenagers at home. Bode is a Southerner right down to her flip-flops. She likes iced tea, social pleasantries and going with the flow. (You won’t catch her angrily honking her horn at a driver.) She doesn’t care for ceremony or care much for pretentiousness. And while she’ll gladly give a running account of her massive dwelling, what she wants is to inspire others to care about history. As she expresses it, you don’t have to be stuffy in order to live with history. She throws the doors wide to her celebrated house on Wentworth Drive, most recently for hundreds of visitors, when it was featured on Preservation
76 O.Henry
October 2016
Greensboro’s Irving Park home tour in the spring (Bode serves with the organization). Despite its status as a protected landmark, Bode knows how to make a slew of visitors feel at ease and right at home. A few weeks afterward, Bode walks through the wide center hall of her stately residence and points out all the many conversational spots she has intentionally created. Downstairs, there are sitting areas, a formal living room, den, study, breakfast nooks, powder room, a laundry room, a guest room with en suite bath, wet room — and more. She was determined to make it both relevant and livable — not a velvet ropes environment at all. “I’m pretty happy here. I cannot imagine myself leaving,” Bode says. Her kids can walk to the Greensboro Country Club for a swim, as it is only blocks away. And then, for another kind of recreation, there is porch-sitting. She smiles, saying the porch is her favorite feature by far. “We use the porch so much more. If eating dinner we may eat inside, but the The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
O.Henry 77
porch is the best place for drinks or coffee. It’s so peaceful; it slows you down. My girlfriends come over and have wine there,” she explains. “We set up tables and chairs out there and my mom set up games there to play with the children. And the teens will go out there and find a place of their own.” While the exact age of the house is up for debate, estimates suggest it was built as early as the late 1800s or as late as 1910. In any case, either date would make Bodes’ residence the oldest home surviving in the Irving Park neighborhood. The house measures an impressive 7,043 square feet. It features ornate fireplaces with special woodworking and detail that preservation officials pointed out when the property was nominated as a historic landmark property in recent years. Yet in essence, the footprint is remarkably unchanged apart from tweaks to the rear and the new garage and guest apartment outside. Of all the things the homeowners value most, they appreciate that this house, known as the McAdoo-Sanders-Tatum house by historians, is comfy. According to the landmark nomination submitted in 2015, the house is associated with some of Greensboro’s business notables, such as real estate de-
78 O.Henry
October 2016
veloper William D. McAdoo, likely the builder of the house. His father, hotelier Col. Walter McAdoo, was also a developer, but moved away from Greensboro when his hotel on South Elm Street burned. The son, William, is on record as having acquired the land — confusion enters because both father and son had the same initials. The son built an unusual three-bay, with Craftsman and Prairie style details that are not commonly seen in Irving Park. (Another similar home is the Alfred M. Scales house nearby on Allendale Road, built in 1917. The Bodes’ residence is clearly older.) The intriguing mystery as to this lady’s exact age remains to be solved. Some students of history propose that McAdoo built the house in the 1890s, perhaps as a more modest farmhouse, built as a rural retreat, which sat on lands later developed circa 1910 as the “Greensboro Country Club Development.” It also appears that the house was extensively remodeled in 1912. Technically, it is the McAdoo-Sanders-Tatum-Rucker-Hatfield-Mann-Bode house, (if one is to count each and every homeowner/occupant.) But that is a mouthful, even for lovers of history. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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The McAdoo-Sanders-Tatum house was a big draw on Preservation Greensboro’s tour, part of a historic homes and gardens fundraiser. “I have been dying to see this house,” confided a middle-aged woman, who stood quite still in the dining room. She oohed and aahed over the room’s green-tiled and coal-burning fireplace, the fine high wainscoting, the original paneling, the original leaded glass and beamed ceiling as she toured through on a sunny May morning. She also admired the hand-painted nature scene (done by a Greensboro artist during the Bodes’ recent renovations) at the top of the original wainscoting. The dining room’s chandelier, not original to the house but an addition acquired from the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, made a special impact. The chandelier is a smaller version of the larger one in the hotel’s lobby, sold when the hotel was being refreshed. Some visitors doubled-back just to see it again before exiting. It enhances the dining room, one that is without a doubt a stunner, and which is arguably the most architecturally intact room in the house. According to Preservation Greensboro’s staffer Judi Kastner, the spring fundraising tour meant an estimated 625–650 ticket buyers toured Bodes’ home. “There were about 750 tickets ‘out’ (includes sold, sponsors, Patrons, comps, etc.) and we estimate about 625–650 attended the weekend. We made approximately $25,000 this year, which is the best year since we started in 2011,” Kastner related in an email. Visitors viewed the downstairs of the Bode house over a single weekend. Katie Bode, her mother and her teenage daughter, Ella, were on hand, answering questions and greeting guests.
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The sheer size of the Bode house meant ample room for bedrooms (five) and baths (five), unusual in a house of such age, but likely attributable to two major interior remodelings. The most significant remodeling occurred before 2013 under the previous owners, the Mann family. The Manns made changes throughout the house, creating modern bathrooms and adding a house around the corner from the main house. Brian and Katie Bode acquired it only two years ago. And then, there is the aforementioned, much-loved, wraparound porch, which is intact. Architecturally, it features a hipped roof and Tuscan columns that sit upon Craftsmen-style granite piers. The piers are made of Mount Airy granite, which feature grapevine mortar joints. The mortar joints are popular in Greensboro, and a sought-after detail, which local stonemason Andrew Leopold Schlosser used as a signature. Truth be told, despite its many points of architectural interest, including an original widow’s walk that can be accessed via the attic, it is the porch that Katie Bode so loves that is rapidly gaining its own dedicated group of fans. (A woman appeared during the fundraising tour where I was a docent, asking if she could bring her architect just to see the Bodes’ porch. She wanted to build something exactly like it.) The porch not only wraps the front of the house in a friendly, sheltering embrace, it also expands the house’s livability. It has a classic bead board ceiling and generous eaves, with enough features to occupy another paragraph alone. But for a young family, the actual square footage of the expansive porch means The Art & Soul of Greensboro
there are several sitting areas for entertaining. Most often, Bode claims dibs on the front porch for afternoon drinks or time with friends or neighbors. “I’m there most afternoons in the summer,” she says, smiling happily. Here she has rediscovered the oldest of Southern traditions — whiling away a little time on the porch, chatting to her neighbors and children. From her perch on the porch, Bode has time to sit and just be with her thoughts — something a mother with little quiet time of her own, treasures. And as she sits, Bode allows the place, situated among oaks and maples, punctuated with walls, gates and fountains, to speak to her. The property has a lot of history to speak about to anyone with an ear inclined towards Greensboro’s past. It appeared in the 1924 publication, Art Work of the Piedmont Section of North Carolina. That picture reveals the house as it was when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. The grounds were different, as the trees were smaller and the boxwood hedge was as well. But the architecture of the house is much the same today. The Wentworth property was included on the National Register in 1994 as a contributing structure within the Irving Park National Register Historic District. When the Bodes made additional refinements in 2014, the restoration was found worthy of a Preservation Award by Preservation Greensboro. The young owner, still in her 40s, says with a shy smile that she has become protective of the house, which has fuelled her interest in historic preservation, not something most young mothers pursue, Bode readily admits. She counts herself lucky to live in a home that is renowned for its historic past but recogThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
nized it needed a nudge into the present. Bode’s first job, she explains, was to adapt the house to work for an active family. When the Bodes first viewed the house in 2012, it was up for sale after the Manns remodeled it. Brian Bode was immediately drawn to it. As Katie confesses, she was a slower convert. “I warmed up to it. But, it felt dated . . . stuffy. There was heavy wallpaper, heavy drapes, and mural paintings.” She admits her heart sank just a little. “Brian liked it more than I did,” she says. It took a year for the idea to click for them both and the circumstances to work. Earth tones, mustard color and a palette that felt passé would have to be righted. “The house fit, the size was great,” she adds. “And what could we do?” The family had already been through a couple of renovations to other homes, most recently a house on Carlisle. The seller wanted to sell the Wentworth house all of a piece, which was then a larger tract including the additional house that had been created as a mother-in-law residence. The deal required skillful negotiations, but the Bode family finalized the deal in 2013. “I was somewhat reluctant to do another remodel,” Bode confesses. “The whole exterior of the house here had to be painted. But it was a solid house. I mainly wanted to change the aesthetics.” Both husband and wife originally met while working in Atlanta for KPMG, the accounting firm. Both were part of a CPA review class. A subsequent job transfer took them to Hartford, Connecticut, where they began their family and remodeled another home. October 2016
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“We owned a 1936 Dutch colonial in Connecticut,” Katie Bode says. “We so fell in love with the charm of that house. Our dream was to have an older house that had been redone.” Their family had grown by the time they were exploring a job offer in Greensboro. They loved Irving Park, where they had family members. “Irving Park is a hard place,” Bode says. They initially rented a house before remodeling the house on Carlisle, yet soon found it was inadequate as their family expanded. “It’s challenging to find something with the space.” Wentworth, with thousands of square footage, offered that. An engineer inspected the house and confirmed there were a few, though not really serious structural concerns that would have to be addressed. “It is never an easy thing,” Bode concedes. The Bodes determined to redo the front rooms of the house after learning that the Wentworth house qualified for state and historical tax credits. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Benjamin Briggs (from Preservation Greensboro) guided the couple through the process, says Katie. “He was very instrumental in helping advise us on the landmark designation. He was very helpful, and I kept growing in my admiration for the historic preservation group. I wanted to give back.” The Bodes altered the already remodeled kitchen, opening it up further by removing a wall and two wood stoves that were not original. “We wanted the oddities in the kitchen resolved.” The reconfiguration created an eating area off the kitchen. They redid the downstairs powder room, adding delicate wallpaper and employing lighter touches. “Becky Clodfelter did the painting in the dining room, as well as the unicorn/sky in [daughter] Ansley’s bedroom,” says Katie Bode. All of these choices involved bringing a sense of lightness into the formerly weighty interiors. They also created an 800-square-foot garage apartment for use by visiting famOctober 2016
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ily and friends. Much of the remaining work to the main house was cosmetic. Bode says North Carolina’s generous tax credits for historic homes enabled them to afford the improvements: “All said and done, we probably spent $120,000 on the updates, and you get 33 percent back in tax credits, which allowed us to do it correctly.” This huge financial boon explains how Katie Bode became more involved in Preservation Greensboro, and ultimately, offered her house for the fundraising tour this spring. It was her desire, as she stated, to “give back.” “The only room we did from scratch was the front room; that was really fun to do. I try to protect the living room,” she says. “I tell the children there are plenty of other places to go hang out.” The Bode brood includes son Trevor, who is 15 years old and a high school sophomore at Bishop McGuinness Catholic High School. Ella, named for her grandmother, is 14 and a rising freshman at Weaver School. The younger Bode children include a son Haydon, who is 11, and Ansley, who is 7. “And, our beloved dog Bandit,” Katie adds. The neighborhood welcomed new life to The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Wentworth Drive. Once again, it was the house’s iconic porch that played a crucial role in the family’s making friends with neighbors. “After we moved in, many of our neighbors came over, introduced themselves and said how excited they were to see a big, young family move in the house. It had been quiet for too long, they said, and they looked forward to it being filled with activity and laughter,” recalls the mother of four lively children. “A lot of our surrounding neighbors are retired, so that brought a smile to my face that they were so welcoming and were actually looking forward to the craziness our family brought to the street. To this day they still tell me how much they enjoy hearing and seeing the children running around. We are blessed to have such great neighbors!” OH Cynthia Adams, a contributing editor to O. Henry Magazine, overheard many of the appreciative comments while the house was open for tour. She also cannot wait to return for a good, old-fashioned, porch sit with a cool drink.
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The Wright Stuff Clinton E. Gravely’s odyssey in Modern architecture By Ross Howell Jr. • Photographs by Bert VanderVeen
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rchitect Clinton E. Gravely is a lithe, erect man — even taller in the cowboy boots he’s wearing. He’s standing with his wife Etta, waiting to greet me at the entrance to their home. Parked at the rear of the house is a tan Corvette. I walk along a curving stone pathway. The house before me is low-slung, built of stone and wood and glass. At the entry is a fountain, its feature an abstract metal sculpture of a horse. The water sparkles in the sunlight, and the sound is calming. “Did you notice the chain downspouts?” Gravely asks. “The Japanese use them.” I’d missed that detail, but notice it now. The Gravelys’ 7,000-square-foot house is situated well back from the road, near the center of an 11-acre parcel of land. Just beyond the house I see stables. “Oh, I’ve been around horses ever since I was a kid,” Gravely says. “We don’t keep them anymore. But they used to have free range of the place. Except I told my three girls they couldn’t ride them up on the patios. Of course the girls are grown and on their own. We use the stables for picnics or family gatherings now.” We shake hands and Gravely opens one of two massive oak doors, the prominent feature of the entrance. The doors are made of varying shades of wood, cut and carved in geometric shapes. “Made by hand,” Gravely says, closing the door behind us. Inside the house the textures are stone and wood — cedar, pine, and redwood. Natural light floods the foyer. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” Etta says. She makes her way down the hallway. There are potted plants beside the door. Before us is a glass-walled atrium and beyond, a living area and dining area. I comment on the chandelier in the foyer. “Yes, that’s my design,” Gravely says. “I drew up that fixture and the ones in the living and dining areas.” Gravely tells me he worked with his associates for a year to complete the drawings for the house. Construction began in 1974 and wasn’t completed until 1977. He coordinated the work of subcontractors and did much of the work himself. “I grew up in the construction business,” Gravely says. “My father, William Jr., and my grandfather, William Sr., were contractors in Reidsville. They built modest family homes, gas stations. When I was in fifth grade, my father would drive me out to their job sites after school, and I’d help with clean-up or odd jobs. “Sometimes customers would ask Dad for house designs,” he continues, “so when I was in high school, I’d do simple drawings for him to present. Then one summer he put me in charge of a building crew. These were guys I’d grown up with. We had to keep everything on schedule, get a structure framed up and roughed in, stay ahead of the subcontractors, who came in to do the finish work.” Gravely and his crew roughed in seven houses that summer, an accomplishment that still fills him with pride. “When I graduated high school in 1955, I decided to go to Howard University to study architecture,” Gravely says. “I was just going to stay a year or two, learn a few things, so I
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could help my father with his business. But one day when I was back home, I saw my high school principal, and he said I ought to go ahead and get a degree.” It was then that the budding architect realized one of the benefits of studying at Howard. “They had working architects come in and review students’ work, so it wasn’t just professors looking at what you’d done — I noticed that these architects who came, they were driving fancy sports cars, and they dressed sharp, and I thought this architect thing could be pretty interesting,” Gravely remembers. “I saw the Corvette outside,” I say. “Yes, they tease me over at North Carolina A&T. Sometimes I’ll sit in on a class, review student work, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s Gravely. He’s the one who always shows up driving the Corvette and wearing cowboy boots.’” He shakes his head. “Anyway, one of those visiting architects at Howard reviewed a project of mine and said he thought I had a future in the business. So I got more serious about my studies. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
“Of course, I’d never seen any Modern design — what we called ‘contemporary design’ back then — working with my father and grandfather in Reidsville,” Gravely says, smiling to himself. “Then I took a class that included the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. His use of stone, wood, and glass to let the outside inside. His use of water. I don’t know — it just spoke to me. I thought, that is the way people should live. I knew then I wanted to do Modern design.” When he graduated from Howard in 1959, Gravely, because he’d been in ROTC, was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, with the Army Corps of Engineers. “My job was to coordinate small construction jobs on the post. There were about thirty people on staff, some of them surveyors, some of them trained architects. It was good experience,” he says. “But I wanted to come back to North Carolina. I got job offers in D.C., but none here, where I’d be able to work some with my Dad. I’d answer an ad in the paper, get invited in for an interview, and then there would be a problem. I remember one place in particular.” Gravely pauses and picks up the thread. October 2016
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“I showed up for my interview, and the secretary looked surprised when she saw I’m African American. She kept me waiting for hours. Then she went back to somebody’s office and came out and said the owner’s nephew had decided to take the job.” I gaze out one of the big windows on the back of the house. It overlooks an expansive stone patio with another fountain — this one featuring a dancer sculpted in metal. Beyond are grass and trees, the canopy dappling the light on the stone. “Then I talked to Ed Loewenstein,” Gravely says. A native of Chicago and graduate of MIT, Loewenstein moved to Greensboro in 1946. His wife’s stepfather, Julius Cone, provided business and personal contacts to assist Loewenstein in building his architectural firm, LoewensteinAtkinson. He was the first white architect in North Carolina to employ black architects. “Ed and I really hit it off because he was a big admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, too. And he was open to recruiting minorities to his firm. He had two black architects working with him then, and he told me one of them, William Gupple, had agreed to take a position with a firm in New York. So Ed said to come back in three months. Returning to Greensboro in 1961, Gravely joined Lowenstein’s firm as “an ‘architect in training,’” he recalls. “I still had to pass the boards in order to be licensed. I worked with a black guy named Edward Jenkins. Ed and I worked in an office away from the other people, and we had a separate restroom. You know, restaurants, hotels . . . everything was segregated back then. Usually things went fairly well. Sometimes a contractor would object if he saw it was Ed or me making an inspection. But Ed Loewenstein would always back us up. “The American Institute of Architects (AIA) was supportive of African Americans, but there was a white group called Greensboro Registered Architects and they did not want black members,” Gravely says. “Eventually they admitted me, but a few years later, the group disbanded.” He passed his license exam and went to an AIA meeting in Wilmington to be inducted — the only minority to do so at the time. “No one came up to talk to me, except for one man. He asked me, ‘Why do you want to be an architect? Only black people will be your clients, and they don’t have any money.’ It’s funny, we talked and talked that night, and he and I became friends. As it turned out, we both moved here to Greensboro to practice. We’ve been friends a long time.” Gravely and I walk into the dining room. There’s a magnificent table The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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he tells me is fashioned from African wood, and around it, eight chairs that any collector of Modern design would covet. Like the others, the room is full of light. “When I started working for Ed Loewenstein, I figured I better come up with some kind of specialty that would help me bring in business for the firm,” Gravely says. “So I signed up for a course at A&T about designing and building fallout shelters. As it turned out, the guy teaching the course was working on a book, and Ed gave me a 6-month leave of absence to help him finish writing it. So afterwards, if we had a shopping center project, Ed would say, ‘Well, Gravely here knows how to build a fallout shelter for your center.’ “Then one day I was working with a client on a shelter, and the client says, ‘Why don’t you just help me with the shopping center, too?’ And I explained I was under contract with Ed; I couldn’t do something like that. But Ed said to go on and help him. I’d talked with him about launching out on my own someday, and Ed was all right with that. Here, let’s go in the living room.” We walk from the dining room to a room with a massive stone fireplace reaching to the ceiling. There’s a large, semi-circular sofa that mimics the curve of the fountain outside. “Have a seat,” Gravely says. As I sit, I kid him about the vintage television console in front of us. “Doesn’t even work anymore,” he says. “We just haven’t hauled it off.” “You should keep it,” I say. “A period piece.” He grins. “When I set out on my own, I had some key people who signed on to join me,” Gravely says. “But it didn’t take long for me to realize there wouldn’t be enough work in Greensboro to support the business.” So on weekends, I’d drive over to Durham, or Raleigh or Charlotte, and look around the right neighborhoods. If I saw a sign where people were going to put up a church, or some other building, I’d write down the information and phone them the next week.” He started getting callbacks and in time, Clinton E. Gravely and Associates grew to twentysix people. “We were registered to do business in eight states and the District of Columbia. Now my partners and I aren’t so young, you know, so we’re down to nine people. We just take the jobs we really want,” Gravely says. “But since we opened the doors for business in 1967,” he notes, “We’ve completed close to 900 projects. That includes a hundred churches, several multifamily housing units, some child care facilities, and the university library at A&T. That’s a pretty good run.” Given circumstances, what could anyone do but agree with him? And admire. OH Ross Howell Jr.’s novel Forsaken, published in February by NewSouth Books, was recently nominated for the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for fiction.
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The Garden Guys
A few revealing — and hilarious — moments with the South’s most beloved garden designers By Jim Dodson • Photograph by Amy Freeman
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reensboro residents Chip Callaway and Randy McManus aren’t just two of America’s most beloved garden designers but close friends for more than two decades, not to menion pals of O.Henry magazine. Having designed more than 1,000 gardens ranging from classical estates to backyard patios, landscape architect Chip Callaway — based in a pair of Fisher Park, Mission Style bungalows — has been called “The Garden Artist” by Garden & Gun Magazine. Greensboro native Randy McManus’ innovative floral designs have made him one of the South’s leading special event designers with encomiums from the likes of Southern Accents, This Old House and many other leading home and garden publications. On a recent balmy Indian summer evening, we invited Greensboro’s Garden Guys for a little wine and garden talk in Chip’s garden. A lot of laughter ensued — and no small amount of green wisdom was shared.
jkl OH: So, how exctly did you guys meet? CC: How else? In somebody’s garden. Mary Hart Orr had a fantastic garden here in town, and I was helping her with some of my ideas. Randy showed up with some flower arrangements for a party she was giving and we just hit it off, a great friendship right off the bat. Not long afterwards I invited him up to my house in the mountains, and soon he had to have his own mountain house — with a sodded roof, no less, absolutely amazing. We’ve been good friends ever since.
jkl OH: Speaking of mountain houses, Randy, how is your amazing house [near Floyd, Virginia] with its gorgeous roof garden? RM: As a matter of fact, I sold it to another friend not long ago. I found that when I was up there I was always working on the gardens and playing maintenance-man, never quite relaxing. When Chip was there, on the other hand, he was always relaxing. CC: Now he comes to my house. Randy’s the best houseguest you could ever have. He’ll come to visit and wind up working on your yard for free. RM: Actually, Chip hates to invite me over to his house, because he says I drink up all his mixers. CC: It’s true. He does. I have all the liquor you can imagine, but when Randy leaves, there’s not a lick of club soda or mixers in the house. RM: Plain tap water isn’t good enough for Chip. He says fish do a lot of things in water you just don’t want to know about. CC: Oh, indeed they do. It’s horrible. I strictly advise using tap water only on your garden.
jkl OH: They say you never forget your first love. What about first gardens? CC: I sure remember mine. I was 8 years old and ordered a dozen roses for a dollar from the Sunday rotogravure magazine. This was up in Mount Airy. My daddy had hunting dogs in a run that was full of waste. I planted those roses in that area and you can’t believe how they grew. I sold the blooms for a nickel apiece to my mama’s friends and got amazingly rich. One day I came home to find that some lunatic had cut them all down for a wedding party and I nearly had a breakdown and had to be carried off. There went my Popsicle money! RM: My story’s not quite as dramatic. I made a little area at the back of my family’s farm south of Greensboro. I relocated some maples and cedars, and mowed the grass, creating a little park. I was about 9. Mowing grass was how I started my business by the 12th grade. Both sets of my grandparents were
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people who grew their own food, very self-sustained. They put up vegetables for the winter. I always liked that. I started rooting everything in sight and built my own green houses and started selling plants to people. That’s how I got started. CC: [Laughing] On the contrary, your story is so totally inspiring. Sex and the single plant!
jkl OH: So what is it about gardening that grabs us so deeply — whether young or old? RM: Gardening is great therapy — whether you’re making a garden or just enjoying one someone else built. [Gardens] take you somewhere calmer and settle the mind. If working with plants pleases you, you’re probably a gardener. CC: Randy’s right. Most of my clients are high-energy folks with demanding jobs who, when they get home in the evening, just want to chill in the garden, like disappearing into Eden, away from their working lives. That’s an ancient instinct in everyone. A garden brings it alive.
jkl OH: I read somewhere that all gardeners are show-offs at heart — and very generous. True? CC: Absolutely true. Gardeners are some of the most generous people on Earth. They love sharing their knowledge and plants. I think it’s a genetic thing, something in our DNA. We hail from an earlier time when we had to share wisdom about growing plants and food or else the tribe would fail. RM: If you grow it and give it away, it’s almost like knitting someone a sweater, an act of simple kindness. Kindness and humor are strong personal traits of gardeners. For a lot of us, gathering and sharing seeds from our plants is even more fun. Gardeners love to share their favorite plants with you. CC: Especially if they’re invasive! RM: I love invasive plants. You can always contain an invasive plant. I can’t stand plants you have to pray over — like roses of any kind. CC: Amen! I told a client who asked me what she should do with all her roses, as I was finishing up her garden: Dig them up and put them on the curb for the trash man on Thursday. Wouldn’t you know, I drove by her house the next week, and she had this man digging up those sorry tea roses and planting them along the border of her driveway. Some people just don’t listen. RM: The clay and humidity here make roses such a challenge. All the spraying, mold, bugs. We shouldn’t even grow roses in North Carolina. So much work for so little reward. OH: Wow. So you guys don’t like roses, eh? Where should one grow them? CC: In someone else’s garden! Preferably in a galaxy far, far away or at least some place where there are sandy soils and not so much heat and humidity. Maine? Michigan? England? Take your pick.
jkl OH: So what garden plants in the Piedmont are you keen on? What’s hot for late summer or even early fall? CC: I don’t really like clematis that much but I have a hardy clematis called Starlight that I just let go around Fourth of July and it goes wild with gorgeous blooms. I’m also keen on Confederate Jasmine, which people now politely call Madison Jasmine. Incredible smell and beautiful green foliage. I’m also a believer in using companion vines like moon vine and morning glories, too. RM: I love moon vine. When I was restoring the Ayers estate in Sedgefield [the project that launched Randy’s career] I needed something to cover up a chain link fence around a swimming pool. I soaked the seed of moon vines and planted a seed every foot. In almost no time, those vines completely covered The Art & Soul of Greensboro
that fence, putting out a wall of green and putting out the loveliest perfume when they opened at dusk. They had a wedding there in the fall that year. People loved it. CC: Moon vines attract an amazing moth too — these huge, gorgeous hummingbird moths that look like Walt Disney created them. They put on a show.
jkl OH: How about favorite trees for this area? Fall being a great time to real plant them . . . RM: Magnolias. I know some people realy despise them. But I love magnolias. Their waxy green leaves and creamy blooms make such a beautiful background to a garden. Also, they stay green through winter which gives you color in a garden through the year. CC: I like magnolias, too — as long as they’re in my neighbor’s yard. I’m terribly high on Autumnalis cherries. They bloom twice a year — spring and sometimes into mild winter in these parts — and are more heat-tolerant and hardy and long-lived than other varieties of cherry trees. Wonderful trees. OH: What about bluebells? I have a friend in Fisher Prk who gave me a bunch of English bluebells. Where should I plant them? RM: They like to have damp feet and some sun and shade. Like a union worker, you have to give ‘em a break in the middle of the day.
jkl OH: Speaking of trees, Randy, how are your banana trees doing? RM: [Laughing] Just great. I love my banana trees. I once took a chain saw and cut them off and they came back bigger and better than ever the next summer. I even stopped mulching them. They’re so excotic and growing in popularity around here. They make my house [a restored Mid-Century bungalow in Browntown] look like the home of an elderly Miami Jewish lady. CC: I dislike their big leaves. They hide the entire garden. Besides, I’m a great believer in growing what is natural to your zone. I’m big into historic garden plants, too. RM: That’s what I like about banana trees. Mine give me great privacy.
water. If you water your plants long and deep at least once a week, especially as autumn shifts to winter, they will put down deeper, better roots. That results in much healthier plants.
jkl OH: So what do you guys do over winter? CC: Besides going some place insanely warm and sunny? RM: I love gathering seeds from my plants. That’s going on now. I’ll gather seeds all fall and winter. I’d rather have seeds from a seed swap than from a catalogue, because you know exactly where they came from and can talk to the people who grew the parent plants. I just wish there were more seed swaps like there used to be. CC: Randy is brilliant at gathering and rooting seeds. My seeds tend to come up in the parking lot of my business, unfortunately. But this is the time to divide and conquer your perennials and mulch your garden and start thinking about what you want to do next year. I’m already doing that for my customers now. OH: So 2017 will be the year of moss yards and banna trees? RM: Moss is very primal. And you don’t have to mow it!
jkl OH: Is it true you can you can make moss by blending pieces of it with buttermilk in a blender and spreading it on a surface. CC: Yes you can. But you have to throw away the blender. There are better uses for a good blender, I must say.
jkl OH: Have you guys ever thought of doing your own radio call-in show? You could be the plant world’s answer to Click and Clack. RM: [With a coy smile] What a frightening thought. CC: Don’t kid yourself. He’d love it. OH
CC: Maybe you just need to have great privacy. Banana trees wouldn’t work in my home garden because I change things constantly. I had some elephant ears that were very pretty this year, but they won’t be back next summer. On the other hand, some things just get better with time I love summer phlox. They’re beautiful and smell delightful. Also, obedient plant, which is really not obedient at all and will run like crazy everywhere if you don’t keep an eye on it like an unruly child. RM: You have great moss in your garden, too. My garden went from being a sun garden with grass to a shade garden with moss. If you keep the leaves off it and slightly watered, moss will do beautifully over the winter and come back like crazy when the winter sun hits it.
jkl OH: So how about some basic tips for local gardeners as we transition from fall into winter? RM: To be a gardener you really have to be prepared for change. A garden doesn’t stand still. It grows and changes with time. Planning ahead for a garden that will change, for instance, from sun to shade is very important. So is irrigation. Knowing when and how to water is something even many experienced gardeners fail to understand. Some automatic sprinkling systems just waste water and never do the job properly. Everyone should read their irrigation manual and watch how it waters their gardens. CC: I totally agree. That brings us back where we started — talking about The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Long Live the Kings
Gale Byers’ mission to save the monarch butterfly
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Photographs and Story by Lynn Donovan
rom March to October, you’re likely to catch sight of Gale Byers in the fields of southeast Guilford County as she searches the roadsides, hoping to find milkweed to feed her brood of monarch caterpillars. She also rescues any eggs and caterpillars already feeding on its leaves. Byers brings the plants back home, puts the larger caterpillars in her butterfly cages built for her by her husband Bob, and carefully arranges the leaves with eggs and smaller larvae on a table in her sunroom. It’s just one of many forays to gather milkweed, given that one caterpillar consumes an entire leaf in less than five minutes. Because of weed-resistant chemicals, herbicides and development of grasslands, the once abundant supply of native milkweed is dwindling, and along with it, 90 percent of the monarch population. Milkweed is the only food caterpillars eat and without it monarchs will disappear. So Byers
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Caterpillars or larvae hang by silk to transform into the chrysalis or pupa
Lasting ten to fourteen days, the chrysalis stage is where the metamorphosis takes place.
Chrysalises and larvae hang from the cage ceiling. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
O.Henry 99
The final stage of chrysalis with an adult butterfly emerging
Monarchs hang to dry their wings before being released.
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not only searches the fields for milkweed but also plants it and nectar flowers in her certified Monarch Waystation to assure that hundreds of her released monarchs will survive the amazing 2,000-plus mile migration to Mexico, where they will winter until their return next spring. There are four stages in the monarch life cycle. The eggs are laid on the milkweed leaves and hatch in three to four days. The caterpillars (larvae) eat milkweed for 10 to 14 days, molting their skin five times before transforming into pupae, then chrysalises. The chrysalis stage also lasts ten to fourteen days as the larva inside goes through metamorphosis emerging as an adult butterfly. It takes four generations of butterflies to complete a life cycle. From February through March, the first generation comes out of hibernation and migrates from Mexico to the East coast of the United States to mate and begin laying eggs. In March and April, caterpillars become butterflies of the second generation; they feed for two to six weeks, lay eggs and then die. These eggs become the third generation from May to June and complete the life cycle, living just fifteen to fifty days before dying. The fourth and final generation emerges in September and October, filling the autumn air with wings, before migrating to Mexico to hibernate until the cycle begins again in February. OH Lynn Donovan is a contributing photographer to O.Henry The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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The Nutty Professor
Meet the man responsible for saving and spreading chestnut trees
T
his harvest season, if you find yourself sipping wine or enjoying dishes made with chestnuts, you might toast Robert Dunstan, a wiry little man whose brilliant backyard tinkering revived chestnut trees in the United States and helped to save thousands of acres of French wine grapes. Dunstan was a professor of Romance languages at Greensboro College from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. When he wasn’t teaching or grading papers, Professor Dunstan, who lived on two acres near present-day Interstate 40 and Four Seasons Town Centre mall, played in his yard. An amateur plant breeder, his passion was creating hybrids. He dabbled mostly in trees and grapes. He made his first mark with grapes. In the late 1930s, Dunstan plant-sat for a friend, a Duke University professor who left his roses in Dunstan’s care while he was on sabbatical in France. As a gift for tending the roses, the friend brought Dunstan some French grape plants. Dunstan tucked the plants into Piedmont soil. The grapes struggled and withered. “Grandpa became interested in why the grapes died,” says his grandson, Robert Wallace of Alachua, Florida.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNN DONOVAN
By Maria Johnson
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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Dunstan had grown up in Windsor, North Carolina, on the lip of Albemarle Sound, where native muscadine grapes flourished. Dunstan, too, had come from hardy stock. His father, H.V. Dunstan, a Civil War surgeon, walked 500 miles from a Confederate hospital in Georgia to his home in Windsor, when the war ended. Family lore holds that U.S. General William Sherman, whose campaigns ravaged the South, had spared H.V. Dunstan’s home while he was away because of the Masonic symbol over the fireplace; Sherman was a Freemason, too. When H.V.’s wife died after the war, he remarried and fathered a second round of children. Born in 1901, Robert Dunstan was among them. “Grandpa was the runt pig of the last litter,” says Wallace. Dunstan almost died of whooping cough in infancy. “Great-grandfather gave up on him,” says Wallace. “His black nanny painted his chest with tar and he survived.” Small but sparky, Dunstan spent his childhood navigating the swamps and sounds around his home in a dugout cypress canoe. He trapped and hunted. He sold thousands of pelts to pay his way through Trinity College (now Duke University), where he discovered a knack for language. “He had the gift of his ear,” says Wallace. “He could hear and learn language very easily.” Dunstan earned a doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Wisconsin, where he met and married his wife. “In 1927, at age 26, he became the youngest department head, the baldest and the most popular teacher at Greensboro College, a liberal arts Methodist girls’ college, where he stayed, still the baldest and most popular teacher for thity-six years. At home, for fun, he spoke French with his wife Katherine, an artist, and two little girls,” according to a family history written by Dustan’s daughter Aurelia Wallace, who died in 2011. Former Greensboro College students remember Dunstan as a spritely, mustachioed man who dressed the part of a college professor. “He always wore a bow tie and a beret. He was a short little fellow. He just scooted along campus. We all thought he was kind of cute,” says 80-year-old alumna Gene Jones, from the class of 1958. “He didn’t let any grass grow under his feet,” she says. At home, though, Dunstan was all about cultivating green. In 1929, he bought a house and two acres on Pinecroft Road, off of what was then High Point Road. During the Great Depression, when his professor’s salary was cut in half, he grew a bountiful garden. His family feasted on tomatoes, greens, potatoes, peaches, apples and a
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novelty in the Piedmont, white cherries. “Nobody in this neck of Carolina had even seen such things!” his daughter Aurelia wrote in the family history. In the late summers, neighbors gathered around Dunstan’s arbors, heavy with muscadine grapes. When Dunstan’s professor friend from Duke went on sabbatical, Dunstan had the perfect place for his former teacher’s roses. Dunstan went to Durham, dug up the plants, and transplanted them to his yard, where he tended them for a year. His friend returned with a present: thirty French grape plants, which were rare in this country. To Dunstan’s disappointment, the French grapes began to die of Pierce’s Disease, a bacterial infection. The hardy native muscadines in his garden were not affected. The professor-horticulturalist tried to cross the French grapes with the muscadines to get a resistant variety. Dusting pollen among his plants, Dunstan, who often had a twinkle in his eye and dirt under his nails, joked that he was “pimping grapes.” Dunstan’s first attempts at hybridizing failed because the two grape species had different numbers of chromosomes. So he used a mutagenic chemical called colchicine to double the number of chromosomes in each species. This enabled successful crossbreeding with fertile seed. On a trip to a national grape conference at Cornell University, Dunstan met U.S. Department of Agriculture cytologist Dr. Haig Dermen. They hit it off because as a linguist Dunstan knew how to pronounce his name — DARE-men instead of DER-min, as most people said, rhyming his name with vermin. Dunstan sent his new friend the European-American mixes, and Dermen confirmed the hybridization. Dunstan published his findings in the Journal of Heredity and in its French equivalent. French grape growers guzzled the news. Dunstan’s hybrid was also resistant to a root fungus that was crippling French vineyards. The French grafted their wine grapes onto rootstock of Dunstan’s hybrids. “It saved thousands of acres,” says Dunstan’s grandson, Wallace. Back home, vineyard owners in the Southeast started using Dunstan’s hybridization techniques to make their wine and table grapes resistant to fungus. Dunstan’s friends took to calling him “grape-nut,” probably a play on the Grape- Nuts breakfast cereal, which goes back to 1897. But Dunstan didn’t confine his curiosity to vines. For years, he’d been tinkering with trees, crossing pecan trees with native The Art & Soul of Greensboro
hickory trees to produce “he-can” trees. At times, his matchmaking resulted in a sideshow. “On one tree, with a hammock slung under it, he grafted thirty-seven varieties of nuts, a neighborhood’s “seventh wonder of the world,” according to his daughter. In the 1940s, one of Dunstan’s nut-growing friends was on a pheasant-hunting trip in Ohio when he stumbled across a lone healthy chestnut tree in a grove of dead trees. Since slipping into a New York harbor in 1904, the chestnut blight, a fungus transmitted by airborne spores, had ravaged chestnuts in the Eastern United States, erasing the sprawling hardwood trees as a source of shade, lumber and food for both people and wildlife. Unlike most nuts, chestnuts are high in carbohydrates. “Nutritionally, they’re like brown rice that grows on trees,” says Dunstan’s grandson, Wallace. By 1940, the chestnut blight had killed nearly every native tree in the United States, one of the biggest botanical catastrophes in the country’s history. The surviving tree that Dunstan’s friend found in Ohio probably contained a natural a genetic mutation that enabled it to survive. The friend tried to infect the tree by inoculating it with blight, but the tree shrugged it off. Then he shipped some of the magical budwood to Dunstan, who got to work. He grafted the cuttings to Chinese chestnut rootstock. He groomed those to flowering, harvested the seed, grew those seeds to maturity and then, once again playing pollinator, back-crossed those trees to the Chinese-American parents. The result, which Dunstan created in Greensboro, was the blight-proof Dunstan Chestnut. In 1963, Dunstan retired and moved with his wife to Florida to be near their daughter Aurelia and her husband, Alvin Wallace, who’d received the first doctorate in statistical plant genetics from N.C. State. He later became the head of agricultural research at the University of Florida at Gainesville. When Dunstan left Greensboro, he took some of his hybrid grape vines, along with the second generation of his hybrid chestnut seedlings. He planted again in Florida. He left behind the trees and vineyards that he’d tended near High Point Road. Dunstan sold the land to Joe Koury, who developed Four Seasons Town Centre and the nearby Sheraton hotel. Wallace said his father-in-law squeezed a little more money out of Koury by selling his house separately, a fact that delighted Dunstan. A city directory from 1963 lists Dunstan’s address as 2129 Pinecroft Road. Aerial maps show the address is now covered by parking lots and buildings around Four Seasons Town Centre. Robert Wallace said his grandfather’s home was on a hillside. He believes the site is occupied by a hotel. He doubts that any of Dunstan’s trees and vines survive. Florida is another story. When Wallace graduated from college, his grandfather took him aside and shared a business idea: Sell the hardy chestnut trees. “He said, ‘This was the most important tree in the Eastern U.S. Here’s something you can sell to orchardists to create an industry and replace the American chestnut in the forests.’” “My grandfather was very influential in my thinking at that time. I had coffee with him every morning until he died in 1987. He was a really engaging conversationalist. He had a great sense of humor,” says Wallace, who in the 1980s patented the Dunstan Chestnut, the only chestnut to receive a U.S. plant patent. Wallace now lives in his grandfather’s old house and runs Chestnut Hill Nursery & Farms, a 300-acre fruit, nut and flowering tree business in the north central part of Florida, near Gainesville. “Eighty to ninety percent of chestnut trees in North America right now have come from our trees. No one has ever had one to die of blight — unless you count tractor blight,” says Wallace, who inherited his grandfather’s wit. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Wallace sells most of his chestnut trees to hunters, who plant them to attract deer. There are very few commercial chestnut farms in United States, but one of them is in Rockingham County, just north of Guilford County. Richard Teague owns High Rock Farm, which is home to 500 Dunstan Chestnut trees. Teague planted his first Dunstan trees in 1991, a year after buying the farm, which included a home built by U.S. Senator John McCain’s fourth great-grandfather, Joseph McCain, in 1807. The agricultural extension agent in Rockingham County recommended chestnuts trees as a way for Teague to diversify a nut crop. Teague was shopping for trees from Wallace’s tree farm in Florida when he learned of Dunstan’s connection to the area. “I thought the most interesting thing was that he was a professor of Romance languages,” says Teague. “That’s quite a step from horticulture.” Dunstan kept his two passions separate. He rarely talked about plant breeding with his education colleagues. But in a 1984 letter to his friend Fred Jones, a former administrator at Greensboro College, a retired Dunstan wrote about finishing radiation treatment for cancer and getting back to his second hobby of plant breeding. “I say second hobby because teaching languages, altho [sic] it was our bread and butter, gave me (except for quizzes and exams) a lot of pleasure,” Dunstan said. In his final years, he focused on finding the correct answers to botanical questions. “There is still so much to be done in that field, especially for our Southeast,” Dunstan wrote. His legacy grows strong Teague says the Dunstan trees have flourished on his land. “They’re well suited for both the climate and the soil. They’ve been the most successful nut trees we’ve tried here,” he observes. After the chestnut harvest, which is going on now, Teague sells whole chestnuts — he says the nutmeat has a mild flavor — as well as chestnut flour, a low-gluten alternative to wheat flour. His favorite recipes include Italian desserts made with chestnuts, chestnut soups and chestnut ice cream. Teague says chestnut ice cream is very popular in France, despite the nut’s historical association with peasants. “There was a famous saying after the French Revolution: ‘The aristocrats are so poor, they’re eating chestnuts,’” he says. If you want to see what a Dunstan Chestnut tree looks like, check out High Rock Farm’s annual Chestnut Roasting Festival on Sunday, November 6, from noon to 5 p.m. (www.high-rock-farm.org). There, you can buy whole chestnuts and chestnut flour, get a tour of the historic home, and nibble on Dunstan Chestnuts that have been roasted on an open fire — just 30 miles from where Dunstan created the hardy nut on a knoll sixty years ago. If there’s wine in heaven, Dunstan is no doubt raising a glass to Teague. Wallace, Dunstan’s grandson, recalls a conversation that he had with his grandfather right before he died. Dunstan, who had been in a coma, awoke, sat upright in bed and talked to Wallace about what a great future he would have with the chestnuts. “Those were the last words he spoke,” says Wallace. “I think that he would be incredibly pleased today to see all that has come to pass, not just with the High Rock chestnut orchard, but with all of the Dunstan Chestnuts planted all over the nation, literally hundreds of thousands of trees. His vision has become reality: bringing chestnuts back to America.” OH Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. October 2016
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The Queen of Wild Ginger The life and times and gardens of Professor Peyton Hudson By Ross Howell Jr. • Photographs By Lynn Donovan
I
f you enjoy adventurous spirits, then you need to meet Peyton Hudson. Hailing from Maryland, she began her college studies at the University of Delaware. Though her father, a physician, wanted her to study medicine, she found her passion in textiles and fashion. After a divorce in 1968, Hudson moved cross-country with two young daughters, Adrienne and Peyton, to Nevada, where she taught, worked as an extension agent and began working on a doctorate in textiles. “I don’t know how I did it,” she said in a News & Record interview years ago. “I’m working on a degree, I’m teaching all the time, I’m putting a hot meal on the table every night, and it’s not out of a box.” Hudson came to UNCG in 1971 to complete her Ph.D. A popular professor at the university, she later accepted a position at the N.C. State School of Textiles, now the College of Textiles. She was something of a pioneer, one of just three women in that program. She wrote a textbook on manufacturing apparel and cowrote a textbook on the science of textiles. In 1995, she left academics to launch a successful consulting business. Perhaps her most adventurous decision was made in 1975 when Hudson decided to purchase the main house and a 6-acre tract of land in Guilford College that was part of the old Guy M. Turner estate. Built in 1939, the big house had been added onto when Turner’s wife, Ida, was still living. “Ida was from Virginia and she was a real gardener with true imagina-
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tion,” Hudson says. “We’ve been able to reclaim most of her beds. You can still feel her spirit here, even though she passed away long before I bought this property. She must have seen herself as an FFV [First Family of Virginia], since she always had a cook and a maid to keep house — not to mention a full-time gardener.” Hudson would have no such help. Worse, the property had been left vacant for three years. The house had mold problems and the gardens were choked with vines and weeds. But Hudson was undaunted. “I wanted to have a place where my daughters could ride their horses,” she says. “I could only get together enough financing for half the purchase price. So my parents signed a note for the other half.” And then came a job offer in Raleigh: “I still had one daughter in high school in Greensboro,” she recalls. “It just didn’t seem right to try to go back and forth to work with a teenage daughter at home.” But she says her daughter, Peyton, insisted that she take the job. “Lo and behold,” Hudson says, “she was one of the students selected for the first group to study at the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham.” Enter Howard Coble. The basement of the house was empty but had a huge fireplace and Hudson often used it for entertaining. “Well, one evening Howard Coble was over,” she says, referring to late U.S. Congressman (a UNCG scholarship was recently established in his memory.) “He was an officer in the Coast Guard then, still living at home with his parents,” Hudson continues. “He said he thought the basement would be a great place for him to The Art & Soul of Greensboro
live. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll fix up an apartment for you, Howard, but it will take a while, because I don’t have much money.’” Over time she added a bathroom, refrigerator, cook stove . . . “everything anybody would need to live there, and in 1978, Howard started renting it from me for $225 a month.” After a number of years, Coble decided to run for Congress and was elected. “I decided since his situation and finances had improved, I’d raise his rent,” Hudson says. “Howard was very frugal, you know, and when I told him I was going to raise his rent to $250, he said he thought that was an absolutely outrageous amount to pay. So he bought a nice condominium in Guilford College. “I think, too, he felt he’d reached a stage in his career where he believed some people would think it unseemly for him to be living in a basement apartment in somebody else’s house.” Later, an assistant district attorney for Guilford County, Susan Bray, rented the apartment, which had come to be known as the “Congressional Suite.” Bray later bought a house nearby and is now the Resident Judge, North Carolina Superior Court, Eighteenth Judicial District. “When Susan was living in the basement apartment,” Hudson says, “she used to joke that we should call it the ‘Congressional and Judicial Suite.’” Hudson is telling me all this over the phone, as she prepares for yet another adventure, this time in the Midwest. “I have so many things to take care of today, I think it would be just too rushed for us to get together now,” she says. If Hudson is feeling rushed, you’d never know it. Her speech is measured, enthusiastic, confident. She’s booked tickets for a nine-day excursion October 2016
O.Henry 107
on the Mississippi River aboard a paddle-wheeler sailing from Minneapolis (Red Wing), Minnesota, to St. Louis (Alton), Missouri — to celebrate her 81st birthday. “Mark Twain has always been one of my favorite authors,” she says. “My daughter Peyton and I are sailing on a part of the river he used to navigate as a steamboat captain.” She pauses. “But you must have a look at the gardens. Just get in touch with Jim while I’m away. I’ll give you his number.” And that brings us to the current basement apartment occupant, retired Greensboro police officer James Crabtree. “When Jim moved in the apartment, Susan Bray said we should just call it ‘Law and Order,’” Hudson says. “She’s so clever! Anyway, Jim’s a great help with the gardens. But you know men. They won’t weed. And they never seem to think they’re accomplishing anything unless they’re making a lot of noise with something with a motor attached.” That she’s sharing this view on the phone with a male gardener gives her no pause. I express her sentiment to Crabtree after I park my car in the drive of Hudson’s home. The day is humid. He’s been working outside and his brow is sweaty. He listens, pursing his lips, so his moustache rises on one side. “Seems like ladies always sing from the same hymnal,” he says. “I’d say I’m pretty good about the weeding. As for the motors, I always tell Peyton if she doesn’t keep her equipment in working order, then it won’t be there for her when she needs it.” In Crabtree’s defense, there’s a lot to maintain. Hudson’s beds start with plantings at the entrance, continuing down a long brick circular drive. There’s a profusion of Japanese maples, elephant ears, hydrangeas, coreopsis, cone flowers, wisteria, and many other plants and shrubs under a canopy of oaks, maples, magnolias, tulip poplars and mimosa. In front of the house is a massive bed of old azaleas. In our conversation Hudson had told me to look for a post in the bed. I see it. Facing me, nearly covered with clematis, is a black metal plate in the shape of a steam locomotive
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with a number and the name, “Guy M. Turner.” A Chesapeake & Ohio locomotive bell, removed by a previous owner, had been mounted atop the post. Before Turner, the original owner of the property, started his own business, he had worked for the C&O Railway. Near the post is a big owl statue, carved from cypress by an artist in Colfax. There are smaller forest creatures carved in the wood, including a terrapin and a frog. Near the owl statue is a garden where water spills over stone steps into a pool with water hyacinths boasting spectacular purple blossoms. Next to the house is a bed of Queen Anne’s lace and dill, and at the foundations, a bed of ferns. Chocolate vine, trumpet vine, and wisteria festoon a bower beside the house and railings along the deck at the side all the way to the back of the house. There are plants growing everywhere, not all of them invited. Bamboo grass and ragweed peek from some of the beds, and here and there, a poplar or oak sprouts. The sheer volume of vegetative life is comforting, and nearly overwhelming. Oak sprouts sparked considerable consternation a few years back. “Peyton just hates acorns,” Crabtree says, “because they’ll sprout in her beds. Well, one of her business clients wove these wide swaths of fabric on special machines — imported from Italy, I think.” Crabtree explains how the fabric was stretched on cables from tree to tree. “It was real shimmery, used mostly to make women’s underclothes and nightgowns, that kind of thing. ‘Nylon tricot’ is what Peyton calls it. “Well, the canopies kept the acorns out of the beds like a charm,” Crabtree explains, “but the neighbors wondered what the heck was going on, with all this pink and blue stuff hanging in the trees. Some got pretty worked up about it.” Crabtree grins, looking at me over the rims of his glasses. “And Peyton hadn’t thought about Google,” he says. “You go to Google Maps and search the neighborhood, you’ll see a picture with big patches of pink and blue in the woods!” The Art & Soul of Greensboro
I grin too, thinking about unintended consequences, and look across the brick drive to a vegetable garden with an electric fence to dissuade deer. Beyond is a garage with a small greenhouse attached. From there the land falls toward a lake, with a variety of plants under a continuing canopy of hardwoods. We walk along the deck to the back of the house. There’s a door, the entrance to the basement apartment. By it is a plaque that reads, “J. Howard Coble U.S. House of Representatives Longest Serving N.C. Republican 2010 Slept Here 1978–1983.” “I’d show you inside,” Crabtree says, “but I’m not much of a housekeeper.” He’s carefully weaving chocolate vine runners into the mass of foliage along the deck railing. I peer over the side, looking toward the lake. Directly below us is a gleaming white terrace, mulched with oyster shells. “Before she decided on the brick,” Crabtree says, “Peyton was going to put in a tabby drive. I hauled those shells in a trailer from the old Green’s Supper Club. I was grinding them for the tabby, but then the grinder gave out, so Peyton decided to use them on the terrace.” Crabtree explains that bamboo had invaded the area. “We were able to get rid of it using a formula of vinegar and salt. But a few stalks still volunteer. Peyton paints them with weed killer by hand.” I notice little pink flags scattered on the bank near the lake. “Oh, Peyton’s very careful to mark the wild ginger,” Crabtree says. “She says it’s common in the mountains, but here in the piedmont, it’s rare.” The wild ginger hugs the earth, its heart-shaped, dark green variegated leaves glistening in the sunlight. A hummingbird whirs toward a flower bed beside the house, where yellow swallowtail butterflies are sampling blooms. Cicadas drone in the trees. “People don’t realize all this is here,” Crabtree says. “Right here in Guilford College.” The cicadas fall silent for a moment, as if breathless for the return of the lady of the house. And in a few days, return she does. With a tale of adventure greater than a mere excursion on the mighty Mississippi. On her flights back from Missouri, a computer system failure left her stranded in the Atlanta airport for nearly twenty hours. “They didn’t even offer us a cup of coffee,” Hudson says. “Just a cheap red polyester blanket! I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours. Did Jim show you the wild ginger?” She’s chatty, articulate, funny, as we speak on the phone. If she’s tired, you’d never know it. Peyton Hudson — professor, businesswoman, passionate gardener. OH Ross Howell Jr. is at work on the project he wrote about in “So Delightful an Occupation,” an essay about Jefferson’s gardens in last month’s O. Henry, and, with a lone leaf clinging to a single stem of the Carolina allspice given him by a friend, hoping for a miracle.
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
October 2016
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“Corn and grain, corn and grain, All that falls shall rise again.” –Harvest Chant By Ash Alder
National Runner-up
The Feast of Trumpets
Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on October 2. Also called the Feast of the Trumpets, this two-day Jewish New Year celebration includes the ritualistic sounding of the ancient shofar (ram’s horn) and foods to evoke shana tova u’metukah — a good and sweet year. Since now is the time of the apple harvest, what sweeter way to celebrate than with a Red or Golden delicious, fresh from the tree? By dipping said fruit in honey, of course. Consider this tasty Jewish custom when your neighbor presents you with a basketful of local apples, but don’t let it stop you from experimenting with cobblers and crisps, cinnamon-laced ciders, and in the spirit of Halloween, perhaps even shrunken apple heads. Granny Smiths work well for this — best if cored and peeled. Using the tip of a pen, make indentions to guide your carvings. Cut hollows for the mouth and eyes, and carve away the apple flesh around the nose. Exaggerate the features. Your second apple will be better than the first, et cetera, but failed carvings spell homemade pie, so you might flub a few just for fun. Next, soak the carved apple heads in a mixture of lemon juice (1 cup) and salt (1 tablespoon) for a few minutes to help keep the fruit from molding. Pat dry. Now all that’s left to do is wait. A food dehydrator is the fastest and easiest way to dry out — aka shrink — your apple head, but a warm, well-ventilated area should also work. Since the drying process can take over a week, you’ll want to entertain yourself with other projects. In the spirit of carnival season, how about apple juggling? Speaking of carving, did you know that the first jack-o’-lanterns weren’t made out of pumpkins? Named for the Irish folktale of Stingy Jack — a man who twice fooled the devil yet unknowingly doomed his soul to roam the Earth until the end of time — the tradition of carving grotesque faces into turnips and potatoes to scare off evil spirits is centuries-old. According to legend, Jack’s ghost carries a hollowed turnip aglow with an ember from the fires of Hell. Bet you can guess what happened when Irish immigrants came across their first pumpkin patch. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Marigolds are the birth flower of October. Known as the ‘herb of the sun’, these vibrant yellow, red and orange flowers were carried as love charms in the Middle Ages. Although Victorian flower language experts believe them to be symbols of grief, many associate marigolds with optimism. Burpee president David Burpee must have been among them. In the late 1960s, the seed salesman launched a spirited campaign for marigolds to be named the national flower. We chose the rose.
“Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground.” ― Andrea Gibson, poet
Herbs to Plant this Month: Dill – Aids with digestion and insomnia. Oregano – Used to treat skin conditions. Sage – Increases recall ability. Fennel — Improves kidneys, spleen, liver and lungs.
The Best Planting Time
Tulip and daffodil bulbs will color your spring garden brilliant if you plant them before the ground freezes. Allow yourself to dream. Imagine your home nestled in a grove of golden flowers, fringed blooms spilling out of planters, window boxes, busted rain boots. The more bulbs you plant the better — and plant them at random. Save pumpkin seeds to plant in spring. October 2016
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October 2016 Pots A-Poppin
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October 1 GOLD LEAF. 9 a.m. Or rather gold for leaves. . . at the annual Fall Plant Sale. Paul J. Ciener Botantical Garden, 215 South Main Street, Kernersville. Info: (336) 996-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org. CAROLINA CRU. Noon. Raise a glass to the Old North State’s thriving wine industry at the fourteenth Annual Taste Carolina Wine Festival. White Oak Amphitheatre, Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 7453000 or ticketmaster.com. ROCKS OF AGES. Noon. Local bands, food, handson activities and a police K-9 demonstration are just some of the ways you can enjoy History Rocks! The fundraiser benefits the Adopt-an-Artifact program. High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org. SPOOKY. 5 p.m. The Wreak Havoc Horror festival continues with shorts and features that’ll have your hair standing on end. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com. PARTY ARTY. 8 p.m. Tickets are limited but if you can get a pass to WAM JAM, Weatherspoon’s 75th Anniversary Party, do! Jessica Mashburn and Evan Olsen lead a decade-by-decade dance party, replete with hors d’oeuvres from 1618, crafted cocktails and
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a whole lotta fun. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro. Tickets: In person or online at Triad Stage Box Office or http://weatherspoon. uncg.edu/eventcalendar/
Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 334-3392 or theatre.uncg.edu.
CHORDS FOR DISCORD. 8 p.m. Shostakovich and Prokofiev are at the center of “War and Peace Reimagined,” a Masterworks concert by Greensboro Symphony Orchestra. Dana Auditorium, 5800 West Friendly Avenue, Greensboro. Tickets: (333) 335-5456, ext. 224 or greensborosymphonyorchestra.org.
MATISSE MUST/17DAYS. Lithographs and bronze sculptures take center stage in Henri Matisse: Selections from the Claribel and Etta Cone Collection. Weatherspoon Museum of Art, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
ELMS ON ELM. 2 p.m. & 8 p.m. Catch the South African production company, Abrahamse-Meyer’s interracial production of Desire Under the Elms, by Eugene O’Neill. UpStage Cabaret, Triad Stage, 232 Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.
October 1–30
October 1&2 ALL’S FAIR . . . 8 p.m. & 2 p.m. In love and war, as the saying goes. See the saying writ large in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. The Pyrle, Triad Stage, 232 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets: Tickets: (336) 272-0160 or triadstage.org.
October 1–9 SWEET CAROLINE/17DAYS. 8 p.m. An African American domestic faces a moral dilemma against the backdrop of social change in Caroline or Change, set in 1963 in Louisiana. UNCG Taylor Theatre, 406 Tate
October 1– October 16
WAKE UP. Don’t miss With Open Eyes, an exhibition of Wake Forest’s Student Union art collection. Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), 750 Marguerite Drive, Winston-Salem. Info: (336) 725-1904 or secca.org.
October 1–November 6 OBJETS D’ART/17DAYS. See talented young folks carving out a name for themselves at Insistent Objects: Works by Young NC Sculptors. GreenHill, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7460 or greenhillnc.org.
October 1–November 30 UNI-VERSE-AL STEPS. Downtown’s Visual Poetry Walk, a collaboration between Writers Group of the Triad and local artists, features ten art installations The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Arts Calendar
Happy Birthday, O.Henry!
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that interpret poetry. Don’t miss Leashed, by O.H. contributor Michael Gaspeny, illustrated by sculptor Ben Stinson. From Greensboro Public Library, 219 North Church Street, to ArtMongerz, 619 South Elm Street, Greensboro.
October 1–December 11 DIS-ADVANTAGED. Explore subliminal messages in advertising images — minus the ad copy at Unbranded: A Century of White Women 1915–2015. Weatherspoon Museum of Art, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
October 1–December 31 GREENER PASTURES. Learn the importance of farming in American culture from 1850–1950 at Grant Wood and the American Farm. Reynolda House Museum of American Art, 2250 Reynolda Road, Winston-Salem. Tickets: (888) 663-1149 or reynoldahouse.org.
October 1–Spring 2017 ART HISTORY 101. See the interplay between local history and art in video installations inspired by Janet Echelman’s sculpture in LeBauer Park at Weaving Wonder With Historical Threads. Greensboro Historical Museum, 130 Summit Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2043 or greensborohistory.org. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
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October 2 ART IN NATURE/17DAYS. Noon. See a juried arts and crafts show, participate in interactive art activities while enjoying live entertainment in the open air. Yup, Art in the Arboretum is back. Greensboro Arboretum, 401 Ashland Drive, Greensboro. Info: greensborobeautiful.org. AUTHORS, AUTHORS. 2 p.m. Meet Press 53 poets Pam Uschuk and Terri Kirby Erickson. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. LOVERS AND MADMEN. 4 p.m. What fools these mortals be! See Shared Radiance Theatre’s plein-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 South Main Street, Kernersville. Tickets: (336) 9967888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.
October 3 AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 3 p.m. Meet Kerri Maniscalco, author of Stalking Jack the Ripper. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
October 4–December 23 FOR LOVE OF IVY. Meaning Greg Ivy, Weatherspoon’s founder who believed folks should
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enjoy art of their lifetime. See how well the museum adhered to his vision and the amount of works amassed at Decade by Decade: Art Acquired in Its Time. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5570 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
October 5 HOSE-ANNA IN THE HIGH POINT. 10 a.m. Join speakers Ned Covington and Bob Amos for their discussion of the hosiery industry at a Museum Guild Meeting. Harris & Covington Hosiery Mills, 1250 Hickory Chapel Road, High Point. Info: (336) 8851859 or highpointmusuem.com. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Warren Bingham, author of George Washington’s 1791 Southern Tour. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
October 6 PETAL POWER. 10 a.m. Learn how to create a fall centerpiece from Elaine Wells, master flower judge and leader of a flower-arranging workshop, courtesy of Anniversary Garden Club. Greensboro Council of Garden Clubs, 4301-A Lawndale Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 282-4940. PAUSE FOR A CAUSE. 5:30 p.m. Admire the works of artist Lisa Moore at Alight at Tyler White, a fundOctober 2016
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Arts Calendar
raiser and silent auction on the tenth anniversary of the Alight Foundation, which supports breast cancer patients and their families. Tyler White O’Brien Gallery, 307 State Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 2791124 or tylerwhitegallery.com. THE ART OF CONVERSATION. 6 p.m. Make that, a conversation about art at the NC Outreach Project Roundtable, a discussion between nationally known artists, critics and gallery owners that gives exposure to N.C. artists. GreenHill, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7460 or greenhillnc.org. STING OPERATION. 7:30 p.m. Watch the Charlotte Hornets go toe-to-toe with the Boston Celtics. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com or hornets.com.
October 6–8 BARGAIN BOOKS. Load up on gently used tomes for a worthy cause, Friends of the Greensboro Public Library. Members get first dibs on browsing at a Friday night reception (though non-members can join at the door for a cost of $15). Times vary. Central Library, 219 North Church Street, Greensboro. Info: friendsofthegreensborolibrary.org.
October 7
October 7–9
POTS A-POPPIN’. 6 p.m. Support the Greensboro Urban Ministry’s Feast of Caring by attending a Pop-up Pottery event on First Friday. Center for Visual Artists Gallery, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: greensboroart.org.
CROAK MONSIEUR. The life of an amphibian is the focus of Mr. Toad’s Mad Adventures, a Drama Center production adapted from Kenneth Grahame’s classic Wind and the Willows. Performance times vary. Odell Auditorium, Greensboro College, 815 West Market Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 373-2728 or thedramacenter.com.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT. 8:30 a.m. Mingle with the participants of the NC Outreach Project at a catered breakfast. GreenHill, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Register before October 5 at: or greenhillnc.org/breakfast. WE INSIST. 7 p.m. Enjoy the sounds of Shiloh Hill at the opening reception for Insistent Objects: Works by Young NC Sculptors. GreenHill, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7460 or greenhillnc.org. MIPSO FACTO/17DAYS. 8 p.m. Catch the sounds of Chapel Hill “newgrass” sensation Mipso. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com. LET’S DANCE! 10 p.m. to 1. a.m. DJ Jessica Mashburn dishes up some grooves at Pop-Up Dance Club. Print Works Bistro, 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-0699 or printworksbistro.com.
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October 7–16 TOM FOOLERY. Buried treasure, fence-painting and general mischief are at the heart of Community Theatre of Greensboro’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, adapted from the Mark Twain children’s classic. Starr Theatre, 520 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-7469 or ctgso.org.
October 8 AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 4 p.m. Poet, journalist, editor, playwright and musician Duncan Christy reads from his Running Sonnets. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE. 10 a.m. Those who are widowed can take in live music and brunch at a casual seminar. Friendly Avenue Baptist Church Fellowship Hall, 4800 West Friendly Avenue, Greensboro. To reserve by October 5: (336) 740-0651 or nowwhatwidows@gmail.com.
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Arts Calendar DIGGIN’ THE DIRT. 3 p.m. Find out how to drag the skeletons from your family closet and get the juicy details on your ancestors’ lives, courtesy of Scott Wesson. Morgan Room, High Point Library, 901 North Main Street, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org. ART FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE. 6 p.m. Put in a bid at Hirsch Wellness’ eighth annual silent art auction, Art Lives Here. Revolution Mill, 1175 Revolution Mill Drive, Greensboro. Tickets: hirschwellnessnetwork.org. IT’S A MAD, MADIGAN WORLD/17DAYS. 8 p.m. Meaning, Comedy Central’s Kathleen Madigan, who brings her “Lady Mermaid” Tour to town. Ari-y’all ready? Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
October 9 TWINKLE TOES. 3 p.m. Catch “Only In America,” Fred Astaire Dance Studio’s Fall Showcase benefiting the Alight Foundation. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 3 p.m. Meet novelist Barbara Claypole White, author of Echoes of a Family. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
PROM NIGHT(MARE) 7 p.m. It’s the role that launched Oscar winner Sissy Spacek’s movie career. Carrie comes to the big screen. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 3332605 or carolinatheatre.com.
Whether for covering beds or hanging on walls, quilts dazzle at the Galaxy of Stars, a judged show featuring over a hundred hand-stitched wonders. Have a look and bid in a silent auction, buy a raffle ticket or of just enjoy. Congregational United Church of Christ, 400 Radiance Drive, Greensboro. Tickets available at the door. Info: gatecityquiltguild.org.
October 13
October 15
October 11
SPRING INTO ACTION. Noon. By learning all about spring bulbs from curator Adrienne Roethling. Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 South Main Street, Kernersville. To register: (336) 996-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org. AUTHORS, AUTHORS. 7 p.m. Meet Press 53 poets Barbara Presnell and Gabrielle Freeman. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
October 14 EARTH-RATTLIN’. 8 p.m. And we don’t mean a quake but the Piedmont Land Conservancy’s LandJam, featuring the music of Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
October 14 & 15 QUILT THOU BE MINE?/17DAYS. 9:30 a.m.
REDSKINS AND REDCOATS. 10 a.m. Learn all about the period from the Cherokee War to 1776 at a panel discussion with Robert Rambo, Randell Jones and Nadia DeanHigh Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Reservations: patplaxico@gmail.com. FRIGHTFUL. 10 a.m. Meaning, the weather outside, once winter comes. Learn how early settlers prepared for the coming season. High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 2 p.m. Meet Novelist Sally Whitney, author of Surface and Shadow. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. SOUND THE ISBELL. 7:30 p.m. Your ears will be, er, ringing after hearing the sounds of singer/songwriter and former Drive By-Trucker, Jason Isbell. White Oak Amphitheatre, Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West
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Call 336.617.0900 OR . . .mail payment to: P.O. Box 58 • Southern Pines, NC 28388 $45 in-state • $55 out-of-state
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Arts Calendar Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 7453000 or ticketmaster.com.
7888 or redcrossblood.org (use sponsor code, Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden).
SCORCHING. 8 p.m. That would be the Squirrel Nut Zippers, celebrating two decades since the debut of their most popular album, Hot. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
WHERE THERE’S A WILL . . . 6:30 p.m. Learn how fine details in wills and estates can enhance your genealogical research. Morgan Room, High Point Public Library, 901 North Main Street, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org.
October 15 & 17
October 18
JLP. 8 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Meaning, “JoyLovePeace,” the program for Bel Canto’s thirty-fourth season opener, featuring the Gate City’s newest pipe organ. Ebenezer Lutheran Church, 1905 Walker Avenue, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2220 or belcantocompany.com.
ASTRO TWINS. 7:30 p.m. And no, we don’t mean Castor and Pollux, but astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly, featured speakers at the Bryan Series. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
October 17
October 19
HAIL TO THE CHIEFS. 10 a.m. Join archivist Elise Allison for her Museum Guild discussion, “Presidential Visits to Greensboro.” Greensboro Historical Museum, 130 Summit Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2043 or greensborohistory.org.
CDB? 1 p.m. You’ll be spellbound at the Senior Spelling Bee, courtesy of Senior Resources of Guilford Greensboro Senior Center. Pennybyrn, 109 Penny Road High Point. To register: (336) 373-4816, ext. 237 or seniorcenter@senior-resources-guilford.org.
TAKE IT IN (THE) VEIN. 2:30–7 p.m. Open your arms for the Paul Ciener Blood Drive. Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 South Main Street, Kernersville. To make an appointment: (336) 996-
AUTHORS, AUTHORS. 7 p.m. Meet poets Peter Makuck (Mandatory Evacuation) and Noel Crook (Salt Moon). Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
SARDONIC SEDARIS. 7:30 p.m. David Sedaris speaks. Need we say more? Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 3332605 or carolinatheatre.com.
October 20 CASTING CALL. 1 p.m. Learn how to make plaster cast reliefs by pressing plants into clay and pouring plaster over them at a GreenHill Workshop. GreenHill, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. To register: greenhillnc.org/adult-workshops. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, O.HENRY! 7 p.m. Join us and Preservation Greensboro to celebrate five years of publishing this magazine and fifty years of historic preservation, with food, drink and the music of John Love and the Doug Burns Orchestra. (See Short Stories page 19) Blandwood Mansion, 447 West Washington Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 272-5003 preservationgreensboro.org. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Lee Hull Moses, pastor of Greensboro’s First Christian Church and author of More than Enough: Living Abundantly in a Culture of Excess. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
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October 2016
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Arts Calendar October 20–23
GRAY MATTERS. As in John Gray, author of the best-selling Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Catch the stage adaptation that became an off-Broadway hit. Performance times vary. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
October 22 PUNKIN’ POWOW. 8 a.m. Chow down on some flapjacks courtesy of Chef Alex Amoroso of Cheesecakes by Alex at Pumpkin Pancake Day. Greensboro Farmers Curb Market. 501 Yanceyville Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2402 or gsofarmersmarket.org. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 3 p.m. Meet cookbook author Jennifer Brulé, who penned Learn to Cook 25 Southern Classics 3 Ways. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. EXTRA! EXTRA! 6 p.m. Hear all about it! Grammy Award nominees Newsboys bring their “Love Riot” tour to town. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com. ’TWAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT. 6 p.m. Listen to some spine-tinglers at Ghost Stories in the Park. Admission $2 for nonmembers. High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Press 53 poet Glenis Redmond (What My Hand Say). Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
October 23 AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 3 p.m. Meet poet and novelist Ruth Moose, author of Wedding Bell Blues: A Dixie Dew Mystery. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
October 27 FAB FIVE. 7 p.m. The au-inspirng feats of U.S. Olympians — Gabby Douglas, Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, Nastia Liukin and more — are center stage at the 2016 Kellogg’s Tour of Gymnastics Champions, Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 7 p.m. Meet Beth Macy, author of Factory Man and, her newly released Truevine. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. BLAST FROM THE PAST. 8 p.m. You’ve never heard oldies like this before: Decades Rewind blends hits from the 1960s,’70s and ’80s into one show.
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Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com.
October 28–November 1 HOT-HEADED. Love, jealousy and revenge are at the heart of Puccini’s Tosca, courtesy of Piedmont Opera. Performance dates and times vary. Stevens Center, 405 West Fourth Street, Winston-Salem. Tickets: (336) 721-1945 or piedmontopera.org.
October 28–November 13 HABIT-FORMING. A woman takes refuge in a convent and becomes its unlikely musical director in the comedy Sister Act, staged by Community Theatre of Greensboro. Performance days and times vary. Start Theatre, 520 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-7469 or ctgso.org.
October 29 GO HUSKIES! 10 a.m. Find out how Native Americans and Quaker settlers made dolls from corn husks (at a cost of $1 per doll). High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org. AUTHOR, AUTHOR. 10 a.m. Meet Heidi Campbell (and munch on a bagel), author of Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. AUTHORS, AUTHORS. 4 p.m. Meet poets Stuart Dischell (Good Hope Road) and Alan Shapiro (Life Pig). Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
October 29–February 26, 2017 THE BIG CHILL. Brace yourself for winter with In Falling Snow: Japanese Prints from the Lenoir C. Wright Collection. Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 334-5570 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
October 30 GRAVE MATTERS. 2 p.m. Day of the Dead comes early if you don your walking dogs for a historical and horticultural tour of Green Hill Cemetery, (assuming there is no rain). Admission is $5. Booklets are optional and cost an extra $5. Wharton Street near Fisher Avenue, Greensboro. Info: friendsofgreenhillcemetery.org. EASY MARK(S). 3 p.m. Everybody’s a target during campaign season, and comedian Mark Russell spares no one. It’s impossible not to let forth some belly laughs at his Mark Twain Award–winning political humor. Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre.com. JOYFUL NOISES. 6 p.m. As part of N.C. A&T’s homecoming, the Festival of Praise Tour, starring Hammond, Hezekiah Walker, Kierra Shepard and the
A&T State Gospel Choir, comes to town. Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro. Tickets: (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.
WEEKLY HAPPENINGS Mondays BUZZING. 10 a.m. Your busy little bees engage in a Busy Bees preschool program focusing on music, movement, garden exploration and fun in the kitchen, at the Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 North Church Street, Greensboro. Preregistration: (336) 5742898 or gcmuseum.com. CHAT-EAU. Noon. French leave? Au contraire! Join French Table, a conversation group. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com.
Tuesdays READ ALL ABOUT IT. Treat your little ones to story times: BookWorms (ages 12–24 months) meets at 10 a.m.; Time for Twos meets at 11 a.m. Storyroom; Family Storytime for all ages meets at 6:30 p.m. High Point Public Library, 901 North Main Street, High Point. Info: (336) 883-3666 or highpointpubliclibrary.com. PICKIN’ AND GRINNIN’ 6 until 9 p.m. Y’all come for Songs from a Southern Kitchen — live music featuring Laurelyn Dossett, Scott Manring and Alex McKinney at Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen, 1421 Westover Terrace, Greensboro. Info: (336) 370-0707 or lucky32.com/greensboro_music.htm.
Wednesdays TO MARKET, TO MARKET. 7 a.m. until noon. The produce is fresh and the cut fleurs belles. They can be yours mid-week, through December. Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville Street, Greensboro. Info: gsofarmersmarket.org. MUSSELS, WINE & MUSIC 7 until 10 p.m. Mussels with house-cut fries for $15, wines from $10–15 a bottle and live music by Evan Olson and Jessica Mashburn — at Print Works Bistro, 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-0699 or printworksbistro.com/live_music.htm. ONCE UPON A TIME. 2 p.m. Afterschool Storytime convenes for children of all ages. Storyroom, High Point Public Library, 901 North Main Street, High Point. Info: (336) 883-3666 or highpointpubliclibrary.com.
Thursdays TWICE UPON A TIME. 11 a.m. Preschool Storytime convenes for children ages 3–5. Storyroom, High Point Public Library, 901 North Main Street, High Point. Info: (336) 883-3666 or highpointpubliclibrary.com.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
ALL THAT JAZZ. 5:30 until 8 p.m. Hear live, local jazz featuring Dave Fox Neill Clegg and Matt Kendrick and special guests Charles Johnson (10/6), Nishah DiMeo (10/13), Ken Kennedy (10/20) and Joey Barnes (10/27). All performances are at the O. Henry Hotel Social Lobby Bar. No cover. 624 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 854-2000 or www.ohenryhotel.com/jazz.htm. JAZZ NIGHT. 7 p.m. Fresh-ground, fresh-brewed coffee is served with a side of jazz at Tate Street Coffee House, 334 Tate Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 2752754 or tatestreetcoffeehouse.com. OPEN MIC COMEDY. 8–9:35 p.m. Local pros and amateurs take the mic at the Idiot Box, 2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro. Info: (336) 274-2699 or idiotboxers.com.
Fridays THE HALF OF IT. 5 p.m. Enjoy the hands-on exhibits and activities for half the cost of admission at $4 Fun Fridays. Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 North Church Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 5742898 or gcmuseum.com.
Fridays & Saturdays NIGHTMARES ON ELM STREET. 8 p.m. A 90-minute, historical, candlelit ghost walking tour of Downtown Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 905-4060 or carolinahistoryandhaunts.com/information.
Saturdays
Arts Calendar
Greensboro. Info: (336) 574-2898 or gcmuseum.com.
JAZZY. 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. For the Jazz Series on select Saturdays enjoy the sounds of the Clinton Horton Group (10/1) the Thomas Linger Quartet (10/15) and Benjamin Matlack Quartet (10/22). O.Henry Hotel, 624 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 8542000 or ohenryhotel.com.
MISSING YOUR GRANDMA? 3 p.m. Until it’s gone, tuck into Chef Felicia’s skillet-fried chicken, and mop that cornbread in, your choice, giblet gravy or potlikker. Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen, 1421 Westover Terrace, Greensboro. Info: (336) 370-0707 or lucky32. com/fried_chicken.htm. . OH
TO MARKET, TO MARKET. 7 a.m. until noon. The produce is still fresh and the cut fleurs still belles. Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville Street, Greensboro. Info: gsofarmersmarket.org.
To add an event, email us at ohenrymagcalendar@gmail. com by the first of the month prior to the event.
THRICE UPON A TIME. 11 a.m. Hear a good yarn at Children’s Storytime. Scuppernong Books, 304 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 763-1919 or scuppernongbooks.com. IMPROV COMEDY. 10 p.m. on Saturday, plus an 8 p.m. show appropriate for the whole family. The Idiot Boxers create scenes on the spot and build upon the ideas of others, creating shows that are one-ofa-kind — at the Idiot Box, 2134 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro. Info: (336) 274-2699 or idiotboxers.com.
Sundays HALF FOR HALF-PINTS. 1 p.m. And grown-ups, too. A $4 admission, as opposed to the usual $8, will allow you entry to exhibits and more. Greensboro Children’s Museum, 220 North Church Street,
Arts & Culture Arts & Culture
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G R EENHI L L NC.O R G
From the creator of Madame Butterfly and La Boheme comes an explosive love triangle that is a tragic tale of love and loss. October 28th, 30th & November 1st The Stevens Center of the UNCSA
Ride the Spring Arbor Bus from Greensboro on October 30th! No traffic, no parking, no walking in inclement weather. Weekend packages are available. 336.725.7101 or PiedmontOpera.org
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro 9/14/2016 11:34:53 AM
Arts & Culture
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O.Henry 127
Arts & Culture
Now showing at Southern Lights Bistro
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October 2016
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Sandra Piques Eddy as Carmen
Melinda Whittington as Micaëla
Arts & Culture
Bizet’s
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Stephanie Foley Davis as Mercedes
David Pershall as Escamillo
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January 13 & 15, 2017 UNCG (Aycock) Auditorium
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GreenScene
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
GreenScene Women's Equality Day Breakfast
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State Street
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GreenScene
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Benefitting The Healthy America Initiative Saturday, August 27, 2016 Photographs by Lynn Donovan
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September 2016
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Quebe Sisters Grace, Sophie & Hulda
National Folk Festival
National Council for the Traditional Arts/Arts Greensboro Friday-Sunday, September 9-11, 2016 Photographs by Lynn Donovan
Shruti Temkar, Spandan & Monika Goel
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142 O.Henry
October 2016
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The Accidental Astrologer
Laid-back Libra
Don’t let October become “Rocktober” under the sign of the scales By Astrid Stellanova
There just ain’t no pigeon-holing a Libran.
Bridgette Bardot is a Libran. So is Simon Cowell, Julie Andrews. Sting. And Jesse Jackson. The Libran likes the better things in life, likes taking to a public stage, likes being given lots of room to develop their fine talents, but doesn’t much care for grunt work. The Librans I know also don’t like for people around them to kick up a lot of dust and make a fuss. Ad Astra — Astrid
Libra (September 23–October 22) You got a hand stuck out, being friendly, wanting to make nice with someone who has tested your last nerve — and they think you stuck your hand out for a gimme. They don’t have the class you do, my well-balanced friend, so the first order of business is to keep your hand to yourself and enjoy the jingling of all that silver that is filling your pocket. You have got a lot of prosperity in the stars waiting for you this year. And you also have more friends than a body could ever need, so square your shoulders and go enjoy a big ole slice of birthday cake. Scorpio (October 23–November 21) There was a time when keeping secrets worked for you. This, however, is not that time. You need a strong shoulder to cry on, and given your natural magnetism, plenty will offer one. The pleasure of a kind word can go further than the deep pleasure you take from maintaining personal mystery—so purge, Honey, and let somebody be a good pal to you. Sagittarius (November 22–December 21) A big idea you incubated some time ago is ripe and ready. Don’t hesitate to share it and find the support and dollars you need. Also, this is a good time to look at all your investments (I call this rooting and hunting under the sofa cushions) and see how much you have on hand to back yourself. Your idea is a good one; you weren’t crazy when you claimed you are this close to Making Good, as Grandpa Hornblower says. Capricorn (December 22–January 19) Summer was discombobulating for you, wasn’t it Sugar? And the fall is looking a little dicey. But cheer up; you are just going to love the year end. But first, there are two matters that need to be addressed before you have the personal freedom to move on from something that keeps tripping you up. Darling, they are not going away without you putting down the Fritos bag (and getting up off the sofa) in order to show these two matters the door. Aquarius (January 20–February 18) Whaa-whaa-whaa . . . That, whaa-whaa sound, Honey Child, is your disillusionment when the happy went right out of your red balloon. You have been killing yourself trying to make someone you care for care for you in the same way. There is nothing more you can do. This person is not as giving, generous, nor nearly as much fun as you are. And they are never going to be as demonstrative. You got invested, for sure, but do you love them? Pisces (February 19–March 20) There, there, there. Feel better? Did you take to your bed after Sugar Booger left your heart busted into two big pieces? Well, nobody would have blamed you one bit if you had. They seem to have a contractual obligation to darken your world while you are playing Mary Poppins and trying for sweetness and light. Sweet Thing, shake it off and look for a different type. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Aries (March 21–April 19) You are about two Alka-Seltzers away from driving your friends and families crazy as a bat in the basement. It is true that you can be entertaining and the life of the party, but right now everybody who knows you wishes you could spend at least one day a week boring the crap out of them. Quiet is not a four-letter word. It’s five, Darling. Taurus (April 20–May 20) Someone close to you is convinced you are having a breakthrough just at the very time you feel you are having a breakdown. The other person is right. You have developed a creative genius for seeing a new way to approach a very old problem. It could bring you closer to a dream if you don’t back away. See it through. Gemini (May 21–June 20) A mysterious person — somebody you’ve known for some time but never well — has a connection to you that will soon become clear. This will require you to be open, gentle, pliant and honest in order to enjoy the full benefit of a special revelation. Honey, I know that’s a tall order, but for your own sake, try. Cancer (June 21–July 22) Thankfully, you took old Astrid’s advice about last month and stopped borrowing money and began making your own. Now, Sugar, I want you to stop thinking you can borrow time. This ain’t a dress rehearsal — it’s your life you have been blowing like you were on the easy credit life extension plan. Do. Not. Waste. One. More. Second. You aren’t about to die but you also won’t get endless chances to take care of business. Leo (July 23–August 22) You’ve had a funny feeling about a loved one that actually is your deepest intuition talking to you. Trust it. Rely upon it. You have considerable intuitive abilities that have been building since early adulthood. This is not lottery winning-type information, and doesn’t require a Ouija board, but it sure is about expanding your world, happiness and friendships with others. That, Dearie, is the real jackpot. Virgo (August 23–September 22) Something started for you last month that you might not secretly trust but that you should. It was an unusual gift — and you were deeply puzzled at first. This gift is going to change you, change your life and even change your mind about who you are. Honey, it is going to be a crazy ride for you but there is no question it is your destiny to follow the Yellow Brick Road. Get hopping. OH
For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path. October 2016
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O.Henry Ending
The Lawn Goodbye One writer’s yard work is never done
Two deer drinking
down at the creek sealed the deal for us. And I suppose many decisions that shape our lives rest on just such thin, unlikely coincidences.
My wife, Beth, and I had moved to Greensboro in 2011, rented awhile, and then began house-hunting around the area. We wanted the following: an affordable place with several bedrooms on the first floor to entice mobility-challenged family to visit, a front porch big enough for multiple rocking chairs, an attached garage because that’s what my Northerner wife expected and a yard expansive enough to entertain our overgrown, brown-and-white shelter mutt, Zoe. We toured homes in Greensboro, Summerfield and Browns Summit. All nice places, but in each case there was something that made us keep looking. Then on our first visit to a house out in the country near Oak Ridge, we spied two deer drinking from the creek at the bottom of the property, and that did it. Sold! Not exactly a rational decision, right? We got part of what we wanted in the deal — several first floor bedrooms, a small front porch with a decent-sized back deck, a detached garage and a yard big enough to amuse a pack of hounds. And like me, the yard itself could be described as ornery and rough around the edges. Actually, it’s also rough in the front, middle and back. Wander around and you’re liable to trip over the occasional half-buried boulder, slip on red-clay bare patches, tromp through weeds (some that bear a disturbing resemblance to red-leafed lettuce), a wealth of wildflowers, a sprinkle of rebellious kudzu, and you may even encounter a little real grass I “planted” by throwing grass seed on the dirt spots before rain storms. Our country-fried North Carolina yard is a far cry from the lot we left in northeast Ohio. There we were situated in a tidily packaged neighborhood with houses just a few feet apart and tennis court–size yards. Practically all the neighbors had lawns they fussed over with fertilizer, weed-killer, electric driveway edgers and even leaf blowers to neaten up the cut grass after they had mowed. Meanwhile, I was happy just to mow our yard and let the grass go au naturel. Whatever grew, grew. On the other hand, our next-door neighbors
144 O.Henry
October 2016
actually entered their yard in a beautiful yard contest and got second place. When Beth congratulated them on their award they noted that they would have gotten first place, but somehow a stray dandelion (an apparent escapee from an untnamed neighbor’s unkempt grass) had been found growing in their yard. Oops. On another occasion, I was mowing our yard, but the grass kept clogging the mower. A neighbor walked over to assist. He adjusted the angle of the grass chute. That helped a tiny bit, but the problem persisted. Another neighbor joined us. We set the cutting blades a little higher. A wee bit more improvement. Yet another neighbor joined us and we turned the mower upside down for a closer look, the four of us hovering over it like concerned physicians examining a patient afflicted with some exotic disease. But the cure eluded us. A few days later, Beth took the mower to the shop. The repairman took a quick look and asked, “Has your husband recently tried to sharpen the cutting blades himself?” “Yes,” she said. “Well, he’s put the blades back on upside down.” Ensconced in pastoral Guilford County, I’ve definitely figured out the right way to sharpen and replace mower blades — nowadays for our small lawn tractor. In fact, I’ve even learned how to operate a chainsaw and a 1976 Gravely Commercial 8 Bush Hog. Using the bush hog, I’ve managed to clear away the undergrowth along the creek so you can actually walk along the water. Now frogs, turtles, snakes, fish, beavers, raccoons, all manner of critters, creatures great and small, make appearance and send me straight back to childhood days playing in the woods and by the dairy pond behind my South Carolina boyhood home. And there’s something primal, something calming and healing about walking near water that gurgles and flows in a stream, isn’t there? Of course, life has its seasons, and there will come a time when the computer keys don’t click in front of me and the lawn equipment has long been silent. I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear the Keeper of the Garden say, “Oh, you’re here. Still rough around the edges, I see. Ah well, I suppose you can come in. What’s one more dandelion?” OH When he isn’t doing second rate yard work, Jeff Paschal enjoys feeding spoiled rotten hummingbirds. The Art & Soul of Greensboro
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY BLAIR
By Jeff Paschal
Helping
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