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Editor’s Note

The Mojo Factor

SE North Carolina www.sencmag.com Issue No. 7

Staff / Credits / Contributions PUBLISHER Jim Sills EDITOR Todd Wetherington ASSOCIATE EDITOR Trevor Normile PRODUCTION/ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Becky Wetherington Content & Photography L.E. Brown, Jr. Jacqueline Hough Charlie McCurry Nadya Nataly Trevor Normile Gary Scott Todd Wetherington CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHY/art Lindsay Demonch Holly Bergeron

“The blues is everyone’s music.”

That’s how Raleigh native Mojo Collins explains the music he’s obsessed over, nurtured and performed for the last five decades. It’s also a pretty nailon-the-head description of our latest edition of SE North Carolina, which features enough cool bluesy goodness to, hopefully, get our readers through what is sure to be a long, hot summer.

As someone who harbored his own blues-rock dreams back in his long haired, garage band youth, I can only marvel at the stories told by Mr. Mojo Collins in our cover story: a television appearance at age eight, touring the country at 20, and jamming with Janis Joplin, Santana, and the Grateful Dead before he was 25. That the man has carried his love of the blues into the 21st century is a testament to both his bone level dedication and the music’s uncanny power.

I first came across the term “mojo” in the music of Collins’ hero, Chicago bluesman Muddy Waters. Without any real intent on our part, that word, and the blues in general, became a running theme for this issue, which also features stories on the Burgaw-based vintage

Advertising Becky Cole Alan Wells Evelyn Riggs Gary Scott CIRCULATION Lauren Guy SUBSCRIBE: Four issues (one year) $19.95 plus tax lguy@ncweeklies.com

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North Carolina amp company Mojotone and Wilmington music saloon, the Rusty Nail.

Mojotone does things the old fashioned way, by hand, and with a eye for detail and quality still treasured by blues-drenched rock musicians like Zakk Wylde and the hirsute gentlemen of ZZ Top. Sadly, live music venues where blues can be heard and performed are few and far between these days, which makes the Rusty Nail in Wilmington such a vital destination for area blues hounds. As I write, the bar is gearing up to host acts performing at the annual Cape Fear Blues Society Blues Festival.

On a side note, our staff experienced their own form of blues over the last several months in putting this issue of SE North Carolina to bed. We moved our deadline up by approximately one month this time, which means that, beginning with the summer edition you hold in your hands, SE North Carolina’s seasonal issues will be on the stands even earlier for your reading pleasure.

Was there was a lot of time, talent, perspiration, anxiety, and simple meat and potatoes hard work put into this issue, just like all the others? Of course.

But I like to think there was something else also, an ingredient a little more elusive, but just as important in the mix this time.

Call it inspiration, or call it luck. I’ll just call it the Mojo Factor.

CONTACT senc.ads@nccooke.com senc@nccooke.com 1.910.296.0239 ON THE COVER Mojo Collins strums a tune at his home in Nags Head Photo by Todd Wetherington 4

SouthEast North Carolina

Todd Wetherington, Editor

Summer 2016

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SE

Contents Summer 2016

Features

22

Ensemble 14

Mojo Collins

18

Mojotone

22

In Every Issue

Snapshots 9

27

41

A bluesman comes home Vintage amp artisans

Rusty Nail Barroom blues

Revenant 30

34

38

Penderlea Homestead

‘Roots’ memorialized

Cedar Grove Cemetery

A world between worlds

Cherry Point Air Show

Into the wild blue yonder

Sanctum

44

Serpentarium

48

Beach & Tides

34

Dragons’ dream house Walking the path

Summer 2016

Atlantic Skate Park Million dollar rollout

Blockade Runner

Civil War bounty

Afeni Shakur

From grief to giving

EXTRAS 10

Playdates

54

Murmurs

58

People

62

Folk

Upcoming concerts, theatre and more in SouthEast N.C.

“Something and then something and then something else”

Contributions and quirks from interesting people in our region Death of the finger-waggers

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SE Snapshot

SE PICKS: Extreme sports

North Carolina

Coasteering

Atlantic Beach Skatepark opens this summer

Mini-golf, boardwalk enhancements with pavilion and shops, also expected

A

tlantic Beach has the normal beach stuff, the fishing, the kayaking, the cottages. Sand. Lots of sand.

But aside from the usual tourists, the region is home to an estimated 3,000 or more skateboarders.

So, the town had an idea. Give the skaters a place to exercise, and make it big enough to draw their friends and family, too.

A $1.2 million budget was approved for the new 13,000 squarefoot skate park, making it the largest in North Carolina. It’s set to open this month and it’s called... the Atlantic Beach Skatepark.

The project, which has taken years of planning and development, will cater not only to the skating community but to BMX riders and surfers who also enjoy those sports.

“There is not enough stuff for the kids to do in the area. The importance of this project is to provide family-driven entertainment,” said A.B. “Trace” Cooper, mayor of Atlantic Beach.

With the addition of the new park, the town hopes to provide an environment for children to explore or practice a new sport. It could also keep those not involved in traditional sports out of trouble, they hope.

The skate park will include a bowl 11.5 ft. deep and a large section with

elements that will resemble a street, stairs, and rails for the skaters to enjoy the challenge of skating in public places, but without the danger and possible damage to public property.

An artists rendering shows the planned Atlantic Beach Skatepark.

The opening of the skate park will also, planners hope, contribute to the economic impact of the community, as skaters from other parts of the southeastern region visit the new park.

Atlantic Beach Skatepark is part of a larger project to improve the area—an 18-hole mini golf course and an effort to refurbish the famous “Circle” boardwalk.

The mini-golf course was slated to be finished in June as well.

The project’s planners have stated the boardwalk enhancement, which will include a pavilion and some shops, will be done by 2017.

SE Summer 2016

Coasteering may sound more exotic than it is.

Some people can’t simply see a beach as a beach. To the coasteerer, everything is a plaything.

A coasteering session may include adventure swimming, ropeless climbing and a dive or two. The point is, traverse the coast and get wet doing it.

Rallycross Massive turbos, tiny cars and monstrous grip propel these drivers in racing’s most insane sprint challenges.

With the help of drivers like Tanner Foust and Scott Speed, rallycross has become more popular stateside in recent years, with 600-horsepower machines battling for top position on a mixture of dirt and tarmac.

It’s loud, it’s quick and it’s absolutely pulse-quickening.

Wingsuiting The faint of heart need not apply for this last one.

Ever seen a flying squirrel? It’s like that, only, people.

Donning an outfit that webs the arms and feet, a wingsuiter leaps from an aircraft or BASE-jump point and glides through the air for a few minutes before unzipping the suit’s “wings.”

Wingsuiters actually travel much more slowly than those in a freefall, due to drag.

Still, y’all can have that. We’re gonna go watch some Netflix or something.

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Summer 2016

SE Ensemble

North Carolina

Mojo Collins

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Mojo Collins has “soul for a white boy,” and he ain’t afraid to show it.

Beale Street runs through his Nags Head home. Smokestack Lightning is how he takes his morning coffee. His heart beats in a 12-bar rhythm.

Collins is a living legend of the blues, the real blues, the ones that you can’t shake. And he played them for us.

Mojotone

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Through a bit of electowizardry and some good old-fashioned know-how, Mojotone of Burgaw is taking its place as one of America’s premier top-shelf amplifier builders and parts suppliers.

So, we let Assoc. Editor (and guitar nut) Trevor Normile loose in their factory.

Rusty Nail

Spring 2015 Summer 2016

22

The blues come to life at the Rusty Nail of Wilmington.

This little bar in southeastern North Carolina is one of the blues scene’s hidden gems. They also sell beer.

What started in the late ’50s as a quaint neighborhood tavern has become a mecca for lovers of the S blues. outhEast North Carolina 13

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The Mojo Man cometh Story & Photography by Todd Wetherington

Five decades in the blues trenches with N.C.’s six-string sage

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In the waning days of 1966, a year of seething political and social unrest, an aspiring blues-rock musician from Raleigh, William Collins (rechristened “Mojo” by his blues hero Muddy Waters) arrives in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district.

Fresh from a stint in the Air Force and with a band of like-minded music obsessives in tow, the 22-year-old has come to test himself against the city’s emerging rock scene of freewheeling hippie outcasts.

Within a few months, Mojo and his band cut a self-penned single, open concerts for soon-to-be superstar acts such as Jefferson Airplane, Santana and the Grateful Dead, and perform at the original Fillmore Auditorium. The Summer of Love is just around the corner, the band is

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loud and in demand and the young blues fanatic revels in all the sounds, sights and substances the San Francisco scene has to offer.

It all seems a long way from the Sunday front porch jams with family and friends back in North Carolina, where Mojo learned to fingerpick his guitar “Piedmont” style as a young boy. Sometimes, it almost seems as though he’s stepped into one of his rock star daydreams from the long, dull days in Glasgow, Montana, where he formed his first band four years earlier while serving out his Air Force stint.

But like all daydreams, this one won’t last. The band will slip away and the high times will dissolve to reveal a sad and seemingly endless body count of friends Summer 2016

both famous and obscure. Eventually, Mojo Collins, the hotshot guitar kid, will have to ask himself the question all artists face after the initial burst of creativity and youthful joy sputters out — what now? *** To find Mojo Collins during his off hours these days requires a bit of maneuvering, specifically through the crowded parking lot of the Surfin’ Spoon, a frozen yogurt shop situated within shouting distance of the Atlantic Ocean in Nags Head.

When I arrive at his modest two story, double garage home tucked in behind the shop, Mojo’s white Ford touring van, which takes up a good portion of his small front yard, is still packed with amplifiers and other concert gear.

Having played with some of the biggest names in rock and blues, Raleigh native Mojo Collins has found a new outlet for his creative energies — using old lumber and driftwood as canvasses for his rough-hewn wildlife paintings.

After several knocks on the door, the Mojo man emerges, still a little bleary-eyed from a gig the night before. Decked out in a bright turquoise shirt, white slacks and a classic Panama-style hat, he grumbles that he’s only been home a few hours and suggests we head out to a favorite local eatery, Nags Head Pier Restaurant.

During the short drive he runs a finger through his long handlebar moustache and points out a series of condominiums being built a block over from his house, blotting out the view of the beach and ocean.

“That’s all oil money right there. Nothing you can do about it,” he comments.

Over lunch, his mood improves considerably and he offers a more sanguine impression of his adopted hometown. “In the winter it’s cold, but you can wander the beach naked and no one’s around,” he jokes.

Walking through the restaurant’s dining room, Collins is greeted like the local celebrity he undoubtedly is. “I’ve known her for 40 years, but I couldn’t tell you her name,” he admits, after a waitress calls out to him.

“I never forget a face but…age catches up with ya.”

At 72, Collins appears at least a decade younger. Though he says he’s been sober for the last 22 years, his long, grey flecked hair, dangling Jesus fish earring, and steely grey-blue eyes offer hints of a far wilder past. “Let’s just say I could tell you some tales, but I don’t want to get killed,” he says to me between swigs of iced tea.

In the 1960s, Mojo Collins was part of a generation of young white musicians enthralled with black music, particularly blues, which had been all but overlooked

by the vast majority of Americans outside of the rural South. Unlike most of his garage band contemporaries, however, Collins possessed both the will and talent to not only meet but play alongside many of his heroes.

“I’m what they call a blues purist; I learned from the masters and I put my own little touch to it. When you listen to me you’re listening to everybody you’ve ever heard, ’cause I knew Jimi Hendrix, I knew Janis Joplin, I knew Jim Morrison; I learned from all those people. I knew Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker…”

Learning the language Mojo Collins was born into the type of family that was common during the first half of the 20th century, and is all too rare these days.

“Everybody in my family played; everybody, even my grandmother, Lorraine. She gave me my first lessons in 1948 when I was four years old. She taught me on a four string Stella guitar,” he recalls.

Collins says his first and most lasting musical influence was his father, “Wild Bill” Collins, a professional guitar player whose tastes ranged from the popular country music of the day to the more esoteric sounds of Delta blues and jazz.

“My dad played in four or five bands,” Collins recalls. “He played with a guy named Homer Briarhopper in The Dixie Dudes. They had their own show on Channel 5 WRAL in Raleigh called Daybreak.

And at night he played with a guy called Jim Thornton, who had his own TV show called Saturday Night Country Style. Both of those guys helped pioneer country music in Summer 2016

the Triangle area, from the ’40s right on up.

They also both owned clubs where people would come in and play.”

Collins made his first TV appearance on Thornton’s show at the age of eight.

Through his father he also made the acquaintance of veteran country entertainers and musicians such as Grandpa Jones and Minnie Pearl from the Grand Ole Opry, Chet Atkins, Roy Clark, and Willie Nelson.

“I got to meet all those people. And every one of them always encouraged me.

They’d say ‘That’s pretty good son, but you need to go on back in there and get better.’”

In 1962, at age 18, Collins was drafted into the Air Force. While headed to his assigned base in Glasgow, Montana, Collins says he had a fortuitous encounter with his favorite blues slide guitar player.

“That’s when I met Muddy Waters, snowbound in Chicago. He was taking a bus back to Mississippi and we both were snowed in. I got to jam with him and he told me I had a lot of soul for a white bluesman. He dubbed me Mojo and I’ve been jamming ever since.”

While stationed in Glasgow, Collins formed his first band, Mojo’s Mark IV, a hard driving trio that honed their chops and stage act competing in local battle of the bands competitions.

After being discharged from the Air Force in 1964, Collins toured with the band across the Northwest, Canada and the East Coast for several years before doing what he describes as a “complete 180.” The move would represent a significant leap forward in the group’s professional fortunes. It would also place the 22-year-old guitarist at the center of arguably the most vital music scene in mid-’60s America.

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Everyone’s music If you want to see Mojo Collins smile, just ask him about the blues, a music he began studying, apparently, in utero.

“Before I was even born I knew the rhythm of the blues; I guess someone was playing on my mother’s stomach,” he surmises. “The first music lesson my father ever gave me, he just sat me down and started tapping his foot. He said, ‘Before you play a note, you’ve got to understand this rhythm.’”

Collins paints a picture of the blues as the lynchpin tying together the early rockabilly pioneers of the 1950s with the British Invasion kicked off by The Beatles and the Rolling Stones a decade later.

“American blues inspired Elvis (Presley), Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. They toured Europe and then the British brought it back to America,” he explains.

As a young boy, the already musicobsessed Collins would gather around his grandmother’s radio late at night to listen to the King Biscuit Flower Hour.

“I think the show was out of Missouri or Kansas back then. You could hear people like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Furry Lewis, Big Joe Turner, T Bone Walker, Robert

Johnson, James Cotton. And later on it was Little Richard and the Beboppers…”

Collins describes the blues as an egalitarian force that crosses both social and racial boundaries.

“The blues is everyone’s music. We’ve all had struggles, hardships, or known someone who’s suffered. It was just the feeling; it captured my soul a long time ago. I’ve tried to put the guitar down, but I can’t shake it.”

In another world By 1966, the American music scene had undergone a dramatic shift, with groups of young, long-haired, chemically altered rock, blues and folk devotees spreading from coast to coast.

After several years of hard touring, Mojo Collins and his band, now going by the name The Chosen Few, were ready to join the party.

“We’d heard through the grapevine that something was going on out there in San Francisco, so we sent a couple of roadies to check it out. They were supposed to be gone for a weekend and they showed up three weeks later grinning and laughing.

They said, ‘We need to move there,’ so we decided to head out to seek fame and fortune.”

Landing in Berkeley in late 1966, the

band soon found a house in the hippie enclave of Haight Ashbury just in time for the Summer of Love, when over 100,000 people converged on the neighborhood and cemented its reputation as a melting pot of social, chemical and sexual experimentation.

The band quickly recorded their first single, a Collins-penned scorcher called “Mind Disaster.” The song caught the attention of already-legendary music promoter Bill Graham, who agreed to book the band at local rock venues such at The Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom.

“Our first gig in San Francisco, we opened up for Country Joe and the Fish

Left: Mojo Collins performs with his band, The Initial Shock, during a gig circa-mid ’60s. Right: An Initial Shock press photo shows the band’s early British Invasion influenced style. Top Right: Initial Shock’s first single, “Mind Disaster.”

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Summer 2016

and Jefferson Airplane at the original Fillmore,” Collins remembers.

The band, which had once again changed its name and were now called The Initial Shock (“We were so loud it scared people!”) began opening shows for rising stars such as the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Steve Miller, and The Charlatans.

“One of the reasons we were able to get those gigs was we had accumulated quite a public address system that was able to rival even The Fillmore,” Collins notes with pride. “It was around this time that we changed our image from wearing British Invasion-style costumes on stage to the T-shirt and jeans scene.”

Collins said he felt right at home among the city’s decidedly nonconformist denizens. “I was ready for it, for the whole experience,” he says plainly. “I fell right in with all of it like I had always been there.”

Collins freely admits that he partook in the recreational drug use that was the norm in the music world at the time. But he says he stopped well short of losing himself body and soul to the lifestyle like so many of his friends and heroes.

“I used drugs, I didn’t let drugs use me,” he maintains. “I used them to put myself in a place where I could be creative.

The people I met who were built up to be these big stars, they were down to earth, hardworking people just like me and you.

Unfortunately, the pressure and the drugs got the best of some of them.”

Among Collins’ favorite memories from his San Francisco days is a piece of advice he received from one of those unfortunate friends who succumbed to the pressures of stardom.

“One of the things that I remember about meeting and partying with Janis Joplin was that she told me to ‘sing it like it’s the last time you’ll ever do it... you never know when it might be the last time.’”

Other highlights of The Initial Shock’s heyday include backing up Chuck Berry four nights in a row at The Fillmore and playing at the Human Be-In, a coming out party for 1960s counterculture, in Golden Gate Park in January 1967. “Just about everybody who was anybody played, 35,000 folks,” recalls Collins. “Leonard Nemoy, Dr. Spock from Star Trek, was the guest speaker.”

Collins also singled out a particularly inspiring night of jamming with Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore and Buddy

Mojo Collins relaxes in his backyard in Nags Head by playing some of the Piedmont style blues he learned while growing up in Raleigh.

Miles and Billy Cox, both members of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys.

“Buddy Miles used my white Telecaster. He was wearing a blue fringe leather jacket and he sweated so bad that the color from the coat actually meshed with the white back of the guitar and forever was embedded in the finish.”

Despite their reputation as a lethal live act, The Initial Shock’s failure to break on a national level led to strife among band members. After soldiering on with several replacement musicians, the band finally called it a day in 1970.

“I found myself without a place to live and any money to speak of,” he remembers. “I was a street musician for awhile, panhandling money and playing for food and handouts.”

That same year, Collins put together another band, Sawbuck, with guitarist Ronnie Montrose, who would go on to work with Sammy Hagar, and drummer Chuck Ruff, who later played with Edgar Winter. The band released a self-titled album in 1971 and toured for the next year. Unfortunately, both Montrose and Ruff were soon lured away by higher profile offers from the likes of Van Morrison, effectively ending the group before it had a chance to fully develop.

After six years in the Golden State, Mojo Collins was ready to come back home.

Hometown gig In 1973, Collins returned to Raleigh and tried to form a new version of SawSummer 2016

buck with his brother, David Collins and a few friends. “We toured for awhile but it fizzled out because of lack of support from the record label,” he says.

Shortly after returning to North Carolina, Collins left his home city once again and moved to Nags Head. This time, the move was precipitated not by musical concerns but by a new relationship. “I had met Bonnie, who’s now my wife, and she got a job offer out here,” says Collins.

“I loved it here: fresh air, very little crime and nice folks who know how to treat you like family. The place just had good vibes.”

Over the next two decades, Collins would build a reputation throughout eastern North Carolina as a blues performer par excellence, both as a solo act and with various bands. In 1992 he pulled up roots once again and moved to Wilmington, a city chock full of live music venues and knowledgeable fans.

“Wilmington was a blast,” he recalls.

“I had no competition as far as being a blues performer. My favorite venue there was Water Street Restaurant downtown on the riverfront. I was booked there once a month or so for 16 years.”

In 2008, Mojo and Bonnie returned to Nags Head. Though he admits touring is getting harder, age has barely slowed him down. He played 160 gigs last year, 140 the year before. Though he Continued on page 52 S outhEast North Carolina

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se • ensemble

THEY G From Cali to the Carolina coast, they bring the tone Story & Photos: Trevor Normile

T

The Mojotone warehouse in downtown Burgaw has that bitter, invigorating odor of sawdust and solder resin that Michael McWhorter and his Very Large Dog, Sampson, probably don’t notice as they walk past workshops and mountains of speaker cabinets.

Some are destined for the stage of some sold-out ZZ Top show.

“So this is where we test out the amps,” McWhorter says, opening the door to a small room lined with amplifiers, most of them Mojotones.

They have an amp room. Of course they have an amp room.

Does a beer company not serve beer at its board meetings?

Shouldn’t it?

Rows of amplifiers, some Mojotone, some of other very secret, quite unmentionable brands, line the rack of to-be-tested equipment.

If the best kind of work is the work that feels like play, then McWhorter has chosen his mode of employment prudently—as prudently as one who sells amps and guitar parts for a living, could.

It started in 2000, in WinstonSalem, McWhorter explains later in his office, as his gargantuan canid relaxes in the corner. He was attending Wake Forest (Michael,

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OT THEIR MOJO WORKIN’

not the dog), with designs on entering medical school. In his off time, he worked for a man named Andy Turner in a shop called “Nothing Shocking,” fixing keyboards and amplifiers.

“I just thought it was really cool, what Andy did, so I got a job working for him fixing keyboards, guitar amps, PA equipment.

Meanwhile when I was at Wake, I played in a band. Andy eventually left the music store and started his own repair shop downtown [in Winston-Salem],” he says.

His backup plan, if rockstardom didn’t work out, was medical school, the Mojotone CEO says.

“I applied to med school and I had five or six months before I was going to hear back, so I was volunteering at the hospital. I hadn’t seen Andy in a few years, and he had gotten into buying up surplus. This was right when

Top: Michael McWhorter, Mojotone CEO, tells how the company has grown from vintage parts supplier to what it is today. Bottom: Maria Bautista works on an amplifier head unit. Mojotone, of Burgaw, now produces finished amplifiers and custom-wound guitar pickups.

Summer 2016

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Left: A macho man resides in the Mojotone workshop. Awww yeah. Right: Noble O’Rourke hand-winds a guitar pickup.

MOJO WORKIN’ Continued from page 19

eBay had started, late ’90s.

“He was buying surplus, buying pallets of transformers or speakers from eBay. And through his surplus buys and repair shop, he got to know the old owner of Mojo Musical Supply, which was in Petaluma, California.”

Mojo Musical Supply catered to a unique customer, the lady or man who preferred vintage sound from their audio equipment. Tube amplifiers. Vintage guitars. Stuff that sounded so good an occasional dust short was forgiven.

“That guy was going bankrupt and was trying to liquidate his stuff. So Andy made a deal with him to buy all of the assets of Mojo Musical Supply.

I ran into Andy while he was in the middle of moving everything from Petaluma to Winston-Salem. We found this old R.J. Reynolds tobacco warehouse to put everything in. He ran into me, said, ‘You gotta help me, man.’

He had this old office upstairs and he’d have two phones up to his ear and one ringing on the desk, there was junk everywhere. So I jumped in.”

At this point, it’s worth explaining a few things to those non-audiophiles who don’t know the difference between a capacitor and a cappuccino.

Which is fine, because electronics is complicated. Here’s the rub: it’s a known and incontrovertible fact that rock music is best played through early 1900s tech20

SouthEast North Carolina

nology, which is what amplifiers, good ones anyway, are still mostly made out of today.

It then stands to reason that the guts of those amps are made out of things that are subject to being either rare or delicate or both.

So when [X] for [Insert Vintage Amp here] was hard to get, people who very much preferred using [Insert Vintage Amp here] got very uncomfortable— that’s where Mojo Musical Supply and later, Turner and McWhorter’s revitalized Mojotone, came in.

McWhorter says his associate moved the old toll-free number from the California business to their tobacco warehouse in Winston-Salem “as kind of an afterthought,” which then led to a frantic response from players who needed parts.

“Our plan was to surplus it all off and be done. The phone kept ringing, guy says ‘I got a 1959 Fender Bassman, I need a new power transformer, this is the only place that has them; I’ll pay whatever, just send it to me.’”

McWhorter and Turner went all-in soon after, once the former was waitlisted for medical school. For the first year and a half, the two answered phones from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, pausing for dinner before loading the day’s orders onto a pallet for shipping.

Soon Mojotone, still selling bits and pieces for electronics, took a major step toward its current business model. They started building... furniture.

“For the first year and a half it was Summer 2016

the two of us, then we got a cabinet guy who worked by himself in a room in the warehouse, an older guy, who made one cabinet at a time,” McWhorter says, speaking of the wooden boxes that are traditionally used to hold speakers for amplifiers.

“It would take him about 30 days to make one. Really good stuff, but it was just one-at-a-time. Then we hired a warehouse guy and slowly started adding onto the catalogue. A few years later we found our current wood shop manager who had a background in production furniture building. Coming from furniture to building a box, pretty simple stuff. He could easily think in terms of quantity.”

To put that quantity into perspective, Mojotone once turned out one speaker cabinet per month. Since then, the company has increased to 800 to 1,000 per month. Assuming the wood shop’s having a particularly productive month, that means Mojotone now turns out one cabinet every 44 minutes.

Inside, a team of woodcutters and shapers work to construct the boxes, made out of Baltic birch (for British style cabinets) and pine (for American style ones). Since the finger joints used in the cabinets’ construction cannot be cut with an automated machine, wood workers need to be trained to work by hand.

The same goes for covering the wood work at Mojotone (and presumably, any higher-end producer). Inside the shop, the company keeps large rolls of vinyl and other materials used both for new prod-

Left: Nick Eldred begins making a new single-coil pickup. Right: McWhorter shows one of Mojotone’s speaker cabinets.

ucts and to sell for restoration projects.

Like the finger joints of the wooden cabinets, the vinyl coverings require a level of expertise to meet acceptable standards, and about 90 days’ hands-on training. No player wants to see bubbles in the vinyl of a brand new $2,600 amplifier, after all.

The shop itself, patrolled by Sampson the Very Large Dog, is a maze of materials and finished products. Supermarket aisles of vacuum tubes (or “valves,” if you prefer), knobs and more stand inside, as workers busily attend to their duties in a musical maze, a tinkerer’s dream house.

Just a few years ago however, nothing was in there. Mojotone’s only residents were a pack of raccoons and some tall grass. Their lease ending on their repurposed tobacco warehouse, the duo set their sights on the coast, drew a 30-mile radius around Wilmington, and started searching for a new building.

What they found was a run-down, seven years-abandoned factory in Burgaw that had a hole busted in it from a felled pine tree. The original owner was dead and his daughters, who inherited the property, were living in Ohio—and that was only part of the story.

“There was groundwater contamination, so they were wrapped up in this crazy superfund stuff. Nobody wanted to touch it; it had been raining in the building for seven years. The grass was growing on the inside,” the CEO explains, laughing.

“I brought my wife and said, ‘Hey, we finally found a building, I can’t wait!’ I pulled up, and she wouldn’t even get out of the car. Just a pack of raccoons living in here. So we got a good deal on the building.”

But wild packs of raccoons are a superficial problem at worst. It was the contamination from the old, leaking transformer dip tank inside that caused the most concern.

So, the company rolled the building into the North Carolina Brownfields program. The Brownfields Property Reuse Act essentially holds the party responsible for the contamination at blame, not the property’s new owner.

Mojotone had to agree not to build a swimming pool on the grounds (which would be ridiculous anyway) and monitor two wells for five years.

The Brownfields program is far from the only government help small business owners can find these days— the revived North Carolina Rural Center has been shouting these lessons from the top of its collective lungs recently—if business owners know where to look.

For example, Mojotone received N.C. Department of Commerce funds to reimburse international trade show costs, making it possible to attend the Musical Instruments Fair in Tokyo this November. And thanks to the federal Export-Import Bank, if dealers in Japan want to Summer 2016

carry Mojotone equipment, the company can insure their shipments.

McWhorter says however that local industry starts with local support.

“The town couldn’t have been more welcoming in the very beginning, and they continued. The mayor [Eugene Mulligan] stops by every other month just to pop his head in,” he explains.

“It’s a really cool community, of course. They have the North Carolina Blueberry Festival, and I’m in the Rotary Club here, which is a small 35-member group that’s mostly lawyers, the CEO of the hospital. Great people. It’s always great to see some of the older guys in the club were actually from Burgaw and have gone out and come back, or they’ve never left and stayed here.”

As of now, Burgaw is home to, as McWhorter asserts, the largest source for vintage replacement music parts anywhere. They’re also growing, he says. Mojotone supports a fleet of boutique (see: “fancy”) amplifier builders, many of whom are located in North Carolina. Some might have the know-how to specify their electronics, but not he tooling to build speaker cabinets, for example.

It doesn’t end there. Alex Lifeson of the legendary prog-rock trio Rush had the company build a line of amps under the “Lerxst” name. Les Paul, the man, the very famous guitar man, Continued on page 52 S outhEast North Carolina

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Cradle of

se • ensemble

Quaint, acoustic-friendly downtown venue welco Story & Photos:

I

Nadya Nataly

n 1958, a time when Bo Diddley and Fats Domino began to change the melancholy face of blues and to influence rock and roll, the Rusty Nail of Wilmington was known as Beatty’s Tavern—the neighborhood bar.

The establishment was passed down from one owner to the next, until Sandy Williams took it over in 2000.

“We just celebrated my 16th year anniversary. I had originally bought [the bar] on March 17, 2000, St. Patrick’s

“”

“I go into business with all of my musicians; that’s why it works. If I do well, they do well. We invest in one another.”

—Sandy Williams

Day. My mother was visiting from New Jersey and that just happened to be the day we were waiting and waiting for the liquor license to come.

Finally it came and we had to run to the store to legally buy beer that we can sell,” shared Williams.

“My mother was toting beer here into the bar so we could actually sell beer (our first day open).”

Sixteen years later, the Rusty Nail has transformed into a charming vintage juke joint and is a cradle of traditional

22

New York blues rocker David Fields gets up close and personal with a fan during his May 2016 performance at the Rusty Nail. The club regularly host blues, rock, and soul acts.

and contemporary blues music in southeast North Carolina.

Upon entering the bar I’m greeted by the bartender and customers sitting on rotating vinyl-clad bar stools.

Patrons drink cold beer and sip top-shelf spirits as they tap their feet, bob their heads, and dance along to the classic rock,

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Summer 2016

blues, and jazz in the background.

There’s a modern jukebox at the center, near a portrait of Texas bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughn. Other memorabilia from music legends hangs throughout the bar with a billiard table to the right of the entrance

the blues

mes local and national bluesmen and devoted fans

Rusty Nail owner Sandy Williams mixes up one of her famous Tetanus Shots, the bar’s signature drink. The Wilmington club has become a haven for blues lovers.

The

rusty nail 1310 S. 5th AVE., Wilmington

Williams explains that a friend involved in the movie industry in Wilmington helped her design the cinder block bar. She says the Rusty Nail’s acoustics are a big part of the bar’s live show experience.

Williams rolls up her sleeves and reaches into the beer cooler to fetch a beer for a customer.

She also mixes Tetanus Shots, the bar’s signature drink, for the bar dwellers.

A constant wave of laughter moves through the Rusty Nail, and it’s contagious. Despite its quaint size, the bar has a warm openness. Being one of the oldest bars in the Wilmington area is something the patrons take Summer 2016

pride in.

Williams refers to her customers as friends and family and they say the same about her. Williams is referred to as “the lady who couldn’t sing the blues, but sang them anyway,” by a couple of visitors who say they admire her passion not just for the bar she owns, but also for the music and blues scene she’s helped nurture in the region.

As the sole proprietor of the Rusty Nail, Williams is proud of the music hub she has helped create. But she is quick to mention she wouldn’t be where she is without the support of her staff or the regulars of the bar.

The oldest customer in the bar that night claimed to be in her 70s, but said she still comes to the Rusty Nail to quench her love of blues music. The common consensus was “there’s good music here, but the people, the people are great.”

“This is the place; the music makes this place,” said Pamela Watkins, an Atlanta native who has been living in Wilmington for 27 years.

Home of the Cape Fear Blues Society (CFBS), the Rusty Nail has become a home away from home for musicians to visit, enjoy live blues music and jam out themselves.

Each Tuesday and the first Saturday of the month, the CFBS hosts a jam during which musicians of all ages show off

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Summer 2016

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SE Snapshot

SE PICKS: Bounty of the Sea

North Carolina

19th century shipwreck discovered near Oak Island

Evidence indicates ship was a Confederate blockade runner

A

routine sonar assessment of known wrecks off of Oak Island in late February resulted in researchers and archaeologists finding the well-preserved wreckage of a blockade runner steamer from the Civil War. Billy Ray Morris, director of the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the Office of State Archaeology, said the February 27 finding was “amazing.”

The wreckage was found as part of a project funded by the National Park Service through the American Battlefield Protection Program. It is located about 27 miles downstream from Wilmington, near the mouth of the Cape Fear River and Fort Caswell.

The more than 150-year-old ironhulled vessel is believed to be the remains of one of three Confederate blockade runners used to penetrate the wall of Union naval vessels blocking the port of Wilmington, which aimed to keep supplies from reaching the Confederacy through one of its key ports.

There are three blockade runners known to have been lost in the area— Spunkie, Agnes E. Fry, and Georgianna McCaw. “We are absolutely positive it is the Agnes E. Fry,” said Morris.

The Fry was listed as being 236 feet long, while the Spunkie is 190 feet and the McCaw 179 feet.

“The other two were much smaller ships,” he said.

The hull found in February measured in at 225 feet.

Santa Maria The Santa Maria, one of three ships that carried Christopher Columbus to the Americas more than five centuries ago, was identified off the coast of Haiti in 2014.

The Santa Maria sank after striking a reef and Columbus was forced to abandon the ship.

Queen Anne’s Revenge

Experts are positive a shipwreck found in February off of Oak Island is the Agnes E. Fry.

“The wreck is extremely preserved,” he said. “The cargo is still on board. It is very rare we get a blockade runner with cargo.”

Agnes E. Fry sank on Dec. 27, 1864, near Fort Caswell during her fifth attempt to run the Union blockade.

Since the discovery, underwater archaeological crews have gotten a closer look at the wreckage.

“We are not going to bring anything up until we have the funds to preserve it,” Morris said.

He is working on several grants to help preserve the Agnes E. Fry and to do more research.

“We are still figuring out what to do,” Morris said.

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The flagship of Blackbeard, one of the most notorious pirates in history, the Queen Anne’s Revenge was missing for centuries after it ran aground in 1718, the same year that Blackbeard would meet his end. In 1995, the shipwreck was discovered off the coast of North Carolina, but it would take another 15 years for researchers to positively identify the vessel.

Nuestra Señora de Atocha The 1622 wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha is among the most valuable in history.

The Spanish treasure ship had been hauling the wealth of the New World in its cargo hold, laden with jewels and precious metals.

Some 460 years later, the shipwreck would be found by Mel Fisher, an Indiana chicken farmer turned treasure hunter, in 1985 off the Florida coast.

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SouthEast North Carolina

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SE Revenant

North Carolina

Cedar Grove

34

Probably established in response to an outbreak of yellow fever, the Cedar Grove Cemetery was built in 1800 and coincidentally became a macabre who’s-who club for old New Bern.

It’s the resting place for nearly 70 Confederate soldiers and home to a looming black “shell-stone” arch surrounded by local legend.

Time for a tour.

Penderlea Homestead

30

It was 1934, and developer Hugh McRae hatched a plan for a new farming community in Pender County.

What remains is an homage to a different kind of 20th century utopia, unsuccessful though significant.

Take a look into the Penderlea Homestead Museum.

Cherry Point Air Show

Spring 2015 Summer 2016

38

Pirouetting, diving, blasting across the wild blue yonder—vintage jets and next-generation fighters alike scream into the sunset on full burn.

We beat the crowds for photos of the 75th annual MCAS Cherry Point Air Show.

SENC also pays tribute

to fallen pilot, S outhEast North Capt. Jeff Kuss.

se • revenant

‘Roots’ mem

Penderlea Homestead Museum honors

Story: L.E. Brown, Jr. Photos: L.E. Brown,Jr., contributed

W

hen a government project began in 1934 in northwest Pender County — Highway 11 runs just about through the middle of the acreage — it was called Penderlea Farms, the first of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s experimental efforts to establish resettlement homesteading under the New Deal.

Some called the New Deal project 30

SouthEast North Carolina

a subsistence homestead community, and the project may not be as well known to modern generations as the Lea Acres subdivision, developed during the 1970s.

Carolyn Rawls Booth Today the project is most prominently memorialized through a museum there, known as the Penderlea Homestead Summer 2016

Museum, on Garden Road near the town of Willard. The museum sits near the middle of the original project in a former residential home built in 1936. Near the main museum is a barn, housing vintage tractors and a horse-drawn hay wagon, once used on the original farms.

Nearly all of the relics in the museum are there courtesy of those who acquired them through association with the homestead project. Museum collections include copies of newsletters, maps, photographs and recollections of life at Penderlea, as well as objects and artifacts.

A memorable statement in the mu-

l

Raleigh

t

WALLACE

117

40

11

PENDERLEA l

Penderlea Homestead Museum

l 284 Garden Road Willard, NC

Wilmington t

morialized

failed government settlement of 1930s seum’s advertising flyer explains much of why it was created, and why innumerable people, now living far away can trace their roots to Penderlea.

A statement in the flyer says, “The community did not disband but survived, sustaining a sense of community,” even after the government finished auctioning off its remaining property in 1947.

When the project was being developed, each farm was leased for $60 per year. The farms included a house with electricity, a barn, a wash/smoke house, a corn crib, a hog house and a chicken coop.

More than a decade before, in 1922,

a group led by Hugh McRae planned and drew up maps for a 10,000-acre comprehensively-planned “Farm City,” designed to be populated with Euro-

“The introduction of the community center and the industrial section will bring into the farm life the social and economic advantages that are usually associated only with life in the larger cities.”

When the project was being That project failed, but the plan developed, each farm was leased for would become Penderlea with the basic alignment of radial streets $60 per year. The farms included a around a community center and house with electricity, a barn, a wash/ natural drainage areas. smoke house, a corn crib, a hog house It appears that McRae, a promiand a chicken coop. nent Wilmington developer and agriculturist, proposed in 193334 to the Division of Subsistence pean immigrants. A sentence below a Homesteads, U.S. Department of the photo of the proposed farm city reads: Interior, that a homestead project be Summer 2016

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Top left: Ann Cottle is shown with one of nine vintage tractors on display in a barn at the Penderlea Homestead Museum. Top right: a sign from the 1930s directs travelers to Penderlea Farms, “America’s First FarmCity.” Bottom right: a house at the settlement serves as the home of the Penderlea Homestead Museum. established in Pender County. around a school, teacherage, workshops, a In the book is a photo, courtesy of the McRae, also of Grandfather Mountain hosiery factory and a community store.

Library of Congress, showing a sign beside development fame, reportedly sold 4,700 Most structures still remain standing a gravel road which reads: 4 MILES TO acres of cut-over woodland to the federal and some are part of the museum’s visitaPENDERLEA FARMS, AMERICA’S government at a cost of $6.50 per acre tion sites. Some from Duplin County FIRST FARM-CITY, A FARM SETand, subsequently, became the first manmight remember playing basketball in the TLEMENT PROJECT, RESETTLEager of Penderlea Homestead Farms, Inc. gymnasium. Some persons living outside MENT ADMINISTRATION, PROP Early recorded historic architectural Penderlea live in houses constructed in U.S. GOV’T. resources at Penderlea included Potts Penderlea and then moved to their current The survey book puts to rest the myth Memorial Presbyterian Church; a hosiery locations. that the Penderlea site was “virgin forest” mill; Assembly of God Church; Penderlea In 1943 the federal government began in 1933. It was actually heavily wooded Baptist Church; Potato Storehouse; with only about 20 acres of cleared Firehouse and Community Center; high ground. The huge initial Carolyn Booth’s family was among the and the Penderlea School. cost of clearing the land, building It is significant to note that the roads and drainage systems, laying first families selected as homesteaders. settlement began amid the Great water and sewer lines and installing Booth says she was six months old when Depression and was meant to give electricity infrastructure were offset the family moved from Bladen County in tenant farmers and land owners a through use of CCC manpower.

1937. She has written a trilogy about rural way to make a living. As described The CCC, another of the New living in early 20th century southeastern on the Homestead Museum’s webDeal agencies, set up a camp on North Carolina, including A Chosen Few, site, tenant farmers had no money N.C. 11 just north of the project, and land owners were bankrupt. It including barracks, mess hall and which depicts life in Penderlea. was also designed to help unemcommissary. ployed ex-farmers.

At some point in the 1940s One book author wrote that some liquidating subsistence communities. This Penderlea Homestead was transferred to called the homestead project a utopian allowed Penderlea residents to purchase the newly created Farmers Home Admincommunity, where there would be meettheir farms. istration (FHA) and homesteaders got ings and dances, a school and infirmary, Today, eighty-two years after the projthe right to purchase their farms from the and where, through a hosiery mill, young- ect’s creation, a unique museum memorigovernment through a deed-mortgage arsters could work and have their wages alizes those who settled there. Helping to rangement. The government consolidated docked to help pay the mortgages for their tell the history of the homesteads is a thick the farm into 105 parcels of from 40 acres parents’ homesteads.. composition called the Penderlea Architec- to 125 acres each. The consolidated farms Shortly after its creation, Penderlea tural and Landscape Survey for Penderlea, sold for an average of $3,020. About 50 Farms morphed into Penderlea Homewhich was put together as a prelude to the houses were sold and moved off the projsteads. During the 10 years following 2012 announcement accepting the Pendect to make the larger farms. its creation 142 homes were built. The erlea Homesteads Historic District on the Many of those who help run the mucommunity of small farms was designed National Register of Historic Places. seum today and are on the Board of Di32

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Large phot at left: Photos from the 1930s Penderlea Homestead project are framed at the museum, located south of Wallace.

Right, top: Ann Southerland shows a wheelchair once used by a homestead resident.

Right, bottom: Patsy Olive of New Hill examines a 1930s dress made from feed bags.

rectors of Penderlea Homestead Museum have deep roots in the community; some live in the community, others nearby. Pattye Ebert is board president; David Haase vice president; and Beverly Rivenbark, secretary-treasurer.

Board member Ann Cottle, the former Ann Southerland, of Duplin County, and writer Carolyn Rawls Booth, who lives in Cary, have helped spread the word about Penderlea through their books.

Cottle’s parents, as well as the parents of her husband, Gene, settled at Penderlea during the Great Depression. She is the author of The Roots of Penderlea: A Memory of a New Deal Homestead Community. The book has been described as having the most detailed information about Penderlea. On its cover, a man is pictured stoking wood into the furnace of a tobacco-curing log barn. With him are two small children, one holding a lit kerosene lantern. Another man, seated on what looks like a crude cot, holds an

alert dog.

Included on the inside pages of The Roots of Penderlea are facts about the settlement and its people as well as more photos, including that of Mr. and Mrs. John Gurganous, The couple, with their seven children, were among the first twelve families to arrive at the Penderlea project.

Booth’s family was among the first families selected as homesteaders. Booth says she was six months old when the family moved from Bladen County in 1937. She has written a trilogy about rural living in early 20th century southeastern North Carolina, including A Chosen Few, which depicts life in Penderlea. She recently was a guest on WHQR Public Radio, in Wilmington.

In an address at the museum’s dedication on March 18, 2006, Booth painted a less than utopian picture of Roosevelt’s resettlement project. According to her written account of the speech, Booth quoted an investigative reporter for the Summer 2016

government, Dr. Harold D. Lasswell, as writing that pressure from the government for homesteaders to pay off their debt resulted, in 1939, in the eviction or voluntary removal of about one-sixth of the families in the community with the grounds being almost exclusively “neglect of financial obligations.”

Booth said, “In other words, they couldn’t make it.”

“But,” said Booth, “There were many who did survive. Many of you here today inherited the legacy that your parents left you through their fortitude and hard work. Mine went on to make a living away from farming, but they never stopped giving credit to their start in life at Penderlea, where they came to believe that they were among the chosen few.”

For more information on the Penderlea Homestead Museum, visit: www.penderleahomesteadmuseum.org and www.infor@penderleahomesteadmuseum.org

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Cemete se • revenant

edar Grove Story & Photography Todd WetherinGton

New Bern’s silent sanctuary

34

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ery G

rowing up in New Bern during the late 1970s and early ’80s, I always thought of Cedar Grove Cemetery as the center of my riverfront hometown. For reasons having little to do with geography, the roughly two-and-a-half acre plot of land seemed to represent an unofficial demarcation point between New Bern’s fascinatingly derelict historic district and the newer city of Winn-Dixie grocery stores, mall arcades, and auto dealerships.

Behind its walls embedded with shells, mollusks, and other river invertebrates was a world older even than the city’s towering Ma-

sonic Temple and Harvey Mansion (though not quite as old as Tryon Palace). The Spanish moss draped cedar trees that gave the cemetery its name and the archaically alien mausoleums stood in even starker contrast to a modern society that seemed increasingly infatuated with surface gleam, entertainment and “that new car smell.”

If I had known even a portion of Ceder Grove’s history back then, I would have had even more reason to be enchanted with the burying ground. Established in 1800, the cemetery was owned by Christ Episcopal Church until 1853, when it was transferred to the city of New Bern. According to local Summer 2016

historians, it’s almost certain that the cemetery was established in response to the yellow fever epidemics of 1798-99. During the epidemic “so many persons succumbed that at night trenches were dug in the Christ Episcopal church yard in a line near the adjoining property to the northwest... and the bodies were buried there indiscriminately,” reads one contemporaneous account.

After 1802 the cemetery became the major New Bern burial ground.

The grave markers and cemetery records read like a “Who’s Who” of 19th and 20th century North Carolina’s most influential citizens: William Gaston, congressman, S outhEast North Carolina

35

writer, state supreme court justice, and author of the North Carolina state song; William Williams, a portrait artist who painted from life the only Masonic portrait of George Washington; Moses Griffin, who established a free school and served the state throughout his life; John Stanly, lawyer, politician and public servant; and Mary Bayard Clarke, 19th century New Bern poet and writer.

With a good map, a visitor might even locate the grave of perhaps New Bern’s most famous son, Caleb Bradham, who concocted his Pepsi-Cola formula in a local drugstore in 1893.

Cedar Grove Cemetery also bears witness to the region’s brief but lethal engagement in the Civil War. At the cemetery’s mid-point, a bronze Confederate soldier rises 18 feet above its granite column, parade rifle at rest, a cannonball propped by his right foot and a sword slung at his side. The monument sits above a vault where approximately 67 Confederate soldiers are interred. A Latin inscription at the statue’s feet reads, “Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori,” (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”)

But for all its famous dead and memorials to history’s murderous advance, Cedar Grove Cemetery may be more well known among tourists for its looming black entrance arch than its celebrity occupants. Built from the same “shell stone” as the cemetery’s wall, legend has it that if the arch “weeps” or “bleeds” its sticky, rust colored ooze on a pallbearer passing beneath, the unlucky individual will soon be the guest of honor at his or her own funeral procession.

Inscribed over the arch gates is a hymn composed by Francis Lister Hawks, grandson of Tryon Palace architect John Hawks: “Still hallowed be this spot where lies Each dear loved one in earth’s embrace Our God their treasured dust doth prize Man should protect their resting place.”

In 1972, Cedar Grove Cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Today, three-and-a36

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Summer 2016

half decades after I first toured its grounds as a young boy, the cemetery is part of a downtown that has seen massive revitalization, as the city long ago embraced its heritage and earmarked funds to preserve its historical structures.

For me, the cemetery now feels more than ever like a sanctuary, from the renovated old homes and parks that draw the tourists and from the big box stores that have invaded New Bern’s business district. An island, for the living and the dead, carved from an older and stranger world. I drive past its walls sometimes just to remind myself that it’s still there, and that I am too.

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se • revenant

Into the wild blue yonder ...

Story: Trevor Normile Photos: Trevor Normile, Holly Bergeron It was pleasantly cool on the flight deck on the first day of this year’s world-famous Cherry Point Air Show, with thousands in attendance for the Friday night show.

On Saturday, the event drew crowds so intense they caused traffic headaches in the city of Havelock.

It was a celebration of Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point and the 2nd Aircraft Wing’s 75th anniversary, and of U.S. military might and history.

The Friday event featured appearances by the Budweiser Clydesdales, the 2nd Aircraft Wing Band, wild aerobatics, historic planes, a jet-powered pickup truck and widespread attractions for the crowd—tanks, cargo planes, weapons demonstrations and more.

Among them was “Panchito,” a B-25 bomber-gunship that served in World War

Capt. Jeff Kuss: In memoriam While practicing for the Great Tennessee Airshow June 2, Blue Angel 6, Capt. Jeff Kuss, was killed when his F/A-18 crashed near Smyrna, Tenn.

Kuss, of Colorado, served in Afghanistan and is survived by his wife and two young children.

The pilot was among those performing at the MCAS Cherry Point Airshow in April.

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II. With its metal skin (and substantial armaments) gleaming in the sun, visitors flocked to the old warbird to have their pictures taken alongside. Underneath, Panchito held a bumper sticker that read “I SERVED IN WWII.�

Weekend events included a demonstration of precision piloting by the U.S. Navy Blue Angels, a presentation of the next-generation F-35b Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter and a variety of other current and classic planes. The Royal Canadian Air Force also made an appearance with their team of CF-18 pilots.

Southeast North Carolina Magazine was invited for pictures of the event, including the training session of the Navy Blue Angel pilot team.

Blue Angel 6, Capt. Jeff Kuss, was among the pilots pushing their machines in gravity-defying elegance that weekend.

On June 2, after having delighted spectators American and foreign at the Cherry Point Air Show, Kuss was tragically killed when his F/A-18 crashed near Smyrna, Tennessee during a practice session (see below, opposite).

Precision Piloting Summer 2016

S outhEast North Carolina

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SE Snapshot

SE PICKS: Fathers & Sons

North Carolina

Afeni Shakur: political activist to community philanthropist Mother of hip-hop legend overcame drug addiction to give back to Robeson County

T

he late Tupac Shakur was one of hip-hop’s most iconic figures.

He was shot in 1996 at the age of 25, shortly after becoming a superstar in his

genre.

More of his story will be told to the public at-large with the November big screen release “All Eyez on Me.” His mother Afeni, the executive producer of the release and a Lumberton native, died May 2 at the age of 69 after suffering a heart attack in northern California.

Both mother and son left behind colorful legacies. Afeni’s is about overcoming her personal demons and giving back to her community.

Alice Faye Williams left her Robeson County home at a young age, changed her name and joined the politically active Black Panther movement in the mid-1960s.

But less than a decade later — 1971— she was pregnant, in jail and trying to get free of drugs.

Afeni Shakur was eventually acquitted of conspiring to commit murder and arson, and gave birth to her son shortly after her release.

Twenty years later, Afeni Shakur got clean. Her son was gunned down in Las Vegas five years later —1996. No one has been charged for his death, although conspiracy theories abound.

Even in the depths of drug abuse, which included living in the streets, Afeni had a moment of clarity. In the early 1980s, she entered her son into a Harlem theater school. Decades later she would call it “the best thing I could’ve done in my insanity.”

When Tupac confronted his mother with a “get-off-drugs-or-forget-about-

being-involved-in-my-life” ultimatum, Afeni finally came to grips with her drug demons.

After Tupac’s death, Afeni used her son’s $50 million estate to open the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Atlanta, which focused on helping atrisk youth.

Afeni owned two properties in Lumberton, one of which was a 17-acre organic farm.

Afeni Shakur, mother of Tupac Shakur, was a Robeson County native who returned home and gave back to her community.

But perhaps most importantly, she returned to her roots — and then gave to the community.

“I discovered my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were born here, and this just felt right to do,” she told the county’s paper of record, The Robesonian. “I lived most of my life in some sort of city or another and discovered I didn’t know what I was doing there. Turns out I’m a country girl through and through.”

She gave freely to Robeson Community College, UNC-Pembroke and the Public Schools of Robeson County.

“We decided to deal with the living,” she told The Associated Press. “This is justice for me. I need to do what God has put in front of me to do...”

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“Mama Tried” Merle Haggard’s classic apology to a mother who “tried to raise me better” was crafted from experience — the California native served time in San Quentin Prison on robbery charges.

“I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole...”

“Kooks” David Bowie Bowie’s 1971 ode to his own lessthan-conventional family is filled with advice for his newborn son, Zowie.

“I bought you a pair of shoes A trumpet you can blow, And a book of rules On what to say to people When they pick on you ‘Cause if you stay with us you’re gonna be pretty Kookie too”

”Beginning of a Great Adventure” Former Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed has some... unconventional ideas about fatherhood.

“It might be fun to have a kid that I could kick around, create in my own image like a god I’d raise my own pallbearers to carry me to my grave and keep me company when I’m a wizened toothless clod.”

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Serpentarium

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Creepy crawlies aren’t so bad once you get to know them—they’re getting along just like everyone else.

Learn about Dean Ripa’s collection of snakes and other reptiles in Wilmington, and come to love the little critters the way he has.

Dragons, crocodiles and more await visitors to the world-famous serpentarium, behind glass. Thick, strong glass.

Walking, trying to find my way

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Charlie McCurry has been just about everywhere, but the musician still calls “Uptown Emerald Isle” home.

It’s a simple thing: walking the sand, smelling the salt, hearing the waves.

McCurry finds meaning in the churning of the ocean, and of his heart.

Murmurs

Spring 2015 Summer 2016

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It’s sad when even the Company Vehicle won’t talk to you anymore.

But then, this installation of Murmurs isn’t a happy one. The Company. The Documents. The unending days.

Our unnamed character is neither protagonist nor antagonist—

just “agonist.”

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Snak 15 Times Story and Photos: Jacqueline Hough Dean Ripa’s love for snakes and other reptiles has literally bitten him—fifteen times to be exact.

The first time he was bitten was at the age of four, when he tried to catch a snake.

He said no one knew what kind of snake it was. Ripa was taken to the emergency room for treatment.

“They were going to administer the anti-venom but I was hysterical when I saw them coming with the needle,” he says.

“I remember kicking and hitting the doctor’s hand. He looked back in dismay because I had bent the needle.”

While the doctor was getting another needle, someone identified the snake as harmless.

A farmer had killed it, put it in a pizza box and brought to the emergency room.

“I remember vividly the terror that I was going to die introduced to me at this early age of about four,” he said. “I’ve never forgotten it.”

Even with that early life experience, though, his love of snakes continued to grow. At age 13, he was bitten by a five-foot long water moccasin that he caught.

For two weeks, he was in critical condition in the hospital. He lost functional use of his right hand for two years.

It didn’t destroy Dean Ripa

kes

Cape Fear Serpentarium is herpetologist’s answer to growing personal collection

Bitten but still smitten his love of snakes however, and he “I would bring them home and continued to catch and keep snakes, sell them to zoos and collectors. some poisonous, in cages in the attic I was living out of a suitcase,” he of his parents’ home without their remembered. knowledge.

But he wasn’t selling all the “I wish I could stop,” he says. “At snakes he collected, he was keeping this point, I’m almost 60 years old. many of them.

I’ve had some very very serious bites.

To say Ripa was very interested His worst bites were from the in the Bushmaster is an underBushmaster, which is the largest Pit statement.

Viper in the world. He has been bitThe Bushmaster is a huge, thickten seven times. bodied and highly venomous snake Blackthroat Monitor lizards can live up to 20 “I barely survived that,” he said. with a triangular head. years and are most active during the day.

By the time he was in his 20s, Bushmasters live in remote, Ripa was making a living hunting heavily forested tropical jungle Ripa traveled South America, Africa snakes all over the world. He did this terrain. This isolation means their bite and Asia to capture and export snakes for 15 years until he was about 40. is very serious, sometimes fatal and back to this country.

Emerald Tree Boa is a non-venomous boa species found in the rainforests of South America.

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At left, a parrot is one of many rescue animals donated to the Serpentarium. At right is a green mamba, one of the most feared snakes on planet earth. Snakes and visitors are kept safe and separate at the Serpentarium.

“We add scientific facts to educate people about snakes,” Ripa says. “We try to be truthful about them. We are not painting them as saints or anything like that.” He adds that snakes will bite to defend themselves, and some of them can very well kill a human.

Ripa said there are about 2,500 species of snakes though, and most of them are harmless. Of that number, there are 300 to 600 species that are capable of killing a person.

Staff goes into details about the effects of the bites and what the venom will do. Above some of the exhibits are graphic photographs illustrating what the venom of a particular snake will do.

Most snakes at the Serpentarium eat rodents, but there are some in nature that only eat special diets—king cobras for instance, only eat other snakes. Ripa is quick to point out that they don’t feed snakes to cobras. Instead, they trick them into eating other things like turkey necks scented with snake blood.

There are several snakes found in southeastern North Carolina. Ripa said there are probably at least 20 nonvenomous snakes and about five that are venomous.

“We have a higher number of venomous species in this area than you would find in Brazil in a similar area,” Ripa says. “It is because varied geography has created different species.”

But he adds snakes aren’t as numerous here as they would be in the tropics.

This region is home to the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, which is the most dangerous. The next most dangerous is the timber rattlesnake followed by the water moccasin and copperhead.

At Cape Fear Serpentarium, they do all of the veterinary treatments themselves with assistance from local veterinarians.

“With the snakes being so dangerous, it’s hard to get a vet,” Ripa says. “It is hard to know when a snake is sick. He

can’t talk, cry or make any sound. You have to be able to know by looking at it.”

This comes from education and years and years of practice of looking at snakes. “There is no rule about it,” he says. “The challenging part is to be able to recognize when they are ill.”

Snakes are also bred there.

“We don’t want to take in new snakes from other places because of the possibility of a contagious disease, which would affect our collection,” he says.

Snakes carry diseases, not harmful to humans, but to other snakes. Any new snakes must be quarantined before they come in there.

The Cape Fear Serpentarium has been featured on Discovery, Ultimate

Guide to Snakes, Animal Planet, Oxford American Magazine and Fatal Attractions (which described one of his snake bites).

Ripa says his work is more than a dark infatuation with slithering things.

It’s about helping mankind find his place alongside nature..

“We rescue people from snakes and snakes from people.”

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Cape Fear Serpentarium

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601 SE Blvd., Clinton, NC

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Walking ...trying to find my way Story & Photography by Charlie McCurry

Every day, I leave the comfort of my air-conditioned home to walk on the beach.

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I have to walk across the dunes and soft sand, which is strenuous, in order to get to my chosen path. It’s down close to the water’s edge where the sand is packed, to make my walking easier.

Sometimes I am surprised because, instead of being firm, I sink into soft sand, which makes my walk more difficult.

But, despite my desire to make my walk as easy and painless as possible and my surveying to find the perfect

my mesh running shoes and quarter socks won’t get wet. If they do, my feet might chafe and my shoes might collect sand. I’d have to deal with something I’d rather not.

But I keep walking.

And just when I think I have the walking pattern and rhythm of the water and rolling suds figured out, a rogue wave pushes the water farther inland. Despite my attempts to avoid it, my feet get wet anyway.

The ocean always wins. But I press

dried, I must be patient—despite my best efforts and vigorous shaking, the hurtful sand will cling to my wet shoes and socks. I must be patient. If I’m not, I pay a price.

But there is joy in my respite that I did not expect. All I had to do was open my eyes and pay attention.

I see, feel and hear the ocean in front of me. I see shore birds with their webbed feet, following the ocean’s bidding not to walk in a straight line. I laugh. I see the wispy

path, I can’t make it happen.

I’d like to walk in a straight line on hard-packed sand for ease’s sake, but the ocean has its own ideas about that, and the ocean always wins.

The water and tides pushed by the waves drift into the shore in an irregular pattern, forcing me to walk in a line that follows the ocean’s pattern and desire.

I have to yield to the ocean so

on. I drive myself.

Ultimately, I have to stop because the wet sand in my shoes and my wet socks chafe and scrape my feet like four-aught steel wool. I would not choose to interrupt my walk, but I have no choice. It is too painful. I have to take off my shoes and socks and wait for them to dry.

As much as I’d like to shake out the sand faster, before everything

clouds against an astoundingly blue, clear sky. I see the light glistening just below the tips of the waves of the ocean water on the horizon.

I see a beautiful child burst across the tide’s edge and wet her feet. I see a mom, whose work is never done, digging a hole in the sand with her son.

I see a father with a baby in his arms.

I see a granddad playing in the ocean with his grandchild. I see a grand-

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mother looking for shells. And I see a thirty-something being a kid again, building an intricate sand castle of his very own.

And I see a beer-bellied fisherman under an umbrella with his rod holder holding his rod, its line extended and creating an unseen barrier for walkers like me. I feel a ripple of anger for what I consider the fisherman’s lack of consideration for the walker.

But then, I have a second thought.

The fisherman has a right to be there

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and do exactly as he pleases. All the walkers have to do is walk around his line.

I see seagulls squawking and carrying on like a bunch of buyers of the latest Apple release as they all fight over a dead fish on the beach. I see pelicans diving like German Stuka bombers and crashing into the water to scoop up another meal.

I see people of all ages, shapes, sizes and colors on the beach and in the water. I never knew there were so

Summer 2016

many tattoos, or so many places to put them.

I feel the sand under my feet. I see dolphin dorsal fins rise and fall like the wooden animals of a merry-goround. I see a lot of life.

Eventually, my shoes and socks dry.

They always do for we walkers. I put my shoes and socks back on and I’m at it again—walking, trying to find my way.

Charlie McCurry is a Nashville musician who resides in Emerald Isle.

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The Mojo Man cometh Continued from page 17

mostly sticks to North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia these days, he’s also played the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the International Slide Guitar Festival and the Pittsburgh Folk Art Society Concert Series.

“I’m 72, I’ve got some miles on me.

I try not to do any big jaunts like I used to,” Collins notes. “There was a time when it was nothing for me to get in the van and go 1,000 miles, head to Austin, Dallas, Houston. I retired in 2008 for eight months. I had played 250 shows in Wilmington that year and I got tendonitis in my wrist. Now I just get cortisone shots every three months and I work more than ever.”

In addition to his touring gigs, Collins plays regularly at such Outer Banks venues as Pops and Inn on the Pamlico in Buxton, and Turner’s High Moon Bar in Avon.

Starting in July he’ll be playing a weekly Monday series at the Tanger Outlet in Nags Head. He’ll also be one of the headliners at this year’s Outer Banks Seafood Festival on October 15.

Collins has also become something of a preservationist over the years, penning songs for efforts to preserve Jockey’s Ridge and to save the Cape Fear lighthouse from washing into the ocean.

Having written over 400 songs, Collins says he rarely plays cover tunes these days.

He recently recorded 10 tracks with a producer in Reno, Nevada that he hopes will be released sometime in the near future. It would be the 25th album of his career.

In 2000, he received the North Carolina Arts Council Music Fellowship in Songwriting.

“I’ll listen to the rhythm of the road when I’m travelling, and I’ll just write a song as I’m going along.”

Blues at sunset “I probably wouldn’t go into music today. You’re always gone, no one can count on you.”

Collins is sitting in a quiet corner of his backyard beneath a spray of late spring honeysuckle.

He’s discussing his latest hobby: using scrap lumber and pieces of driftwood he collects along the beach as canvasses for his landscape and wildlife paintings.

“It’s a getaway from music; I let the 52

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music be in the art pieces,” he explains.

Walking back inside his crowded garage, he shows off a hanging collage consisting of 400 guitar strings, a dulcimer, and other items he’s collected over the last 40 years. “I call it Rock and Roll,” Collins says, pointing out a license plate from his 1969 VW van imbedded in the suspended history of his musical life.

According to Collins, much of his and Bonnie’s life savings has gone to help pay off medical bills for their son, Scooter, who underwent a lung transplant several years ago.

“The last two or three years have been real tough,” he admits. “I’ll see kids walking by smiling and I’ll think ‘I wish I could still smile like that.”’

His dedication to his craft, however, to the music that first set his imagination to roaming as a young boy on the rural outskirts of Raleigh, still remains, says Collins.

“I plan to play until they take me out of here. My dad died at 61 and he’s still the best guitar player I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen most of them. I go to his grave when I get back to Raleigh; it gives me inspiration to write songs.”

Though he appears pessimistic about the future of blues music (“There’s quite a few guys who say they’re into the blues, but it’s Stevie Ray Vaughan and Hendrix, not the old blues that I grew up on”), Collins says he sees hope in the young students he plays for at local elementary schools.

“Kids will come up with their cigar box guitar that I’ve shown them how to build, or their harmonicas and say ‘Look what I can do.’ So there’s some little Mojos out there; they will carry on.”

Collin says he recently got an invitation to jam with former Lynyrd Skynyrd drummer Artimus Pyle in Hickory. “If he wants a guitar player, I may go on the road. We’ll just see how it goes.”

Our interview completed, I get up to leave and Collins walks over, gives me a quick hug and thanks me for coming out.

He’s preparing to play the Potato Festival in Elizabeth City the following weekend, so he’s got some last-minute business to attend to.

As I head down the driveway toward my car, the man named Mojo, the guitar wizard who was praised by Muddy Waters and partied with Janis Joplin, turns and calls back from his doorway.

“I’m a Christian, I believe in the power of prayer. Miracles do happen, so let’s pray for the blues, brother.”

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MOJO WORKIN’

Continued from page 21

owned a Mojotone amplifier. He personally delivered the specifications to McWhorter and others in a Times Square jazz joint.

Their proprietary pickups are now being, er, picked up, by big names, too. Paul Waggoner, player with North Carolina-based progressive metal pioneers Between the Buried and Me, uses Mojotones among his N.C.-built gear.

So, we’ve established that these things are very nice to look at and write about.

But how do they play?

We return to the Amp Room. I plug a Fender Stratocaster, loaded with proprietary Mojotone single coils, into their 50-watt Deacon head. The instrument comes to life.

True to McWhorter’s claims, the guitar’s pickup doesn’t hum as single coils are wont to do, even with the Deacon’s considerable sonic heat, which can actually be dialed in quite gently.

Unlike the more hamfisted approaches of hard-rock focused units, the little demon Deacon sounded great at lower gain levels for the bluesy-at-heart.

The Deacon, joined by the Mt. Pilot and Hatteras models, is part of Mojotone’s new pre-built amp lineup. The company has sold amplifier kits and guitar effect boxes for some time, but the readymade amplifiers debuted just this past January at the famous NAMM show in California.

Then I make the mistake of handing the Strat to McWhorter, who simultaneously claimed to be “garbage” while showing yours truly up on his home turf.

But the Mojo isn’t just in the tone, either. Plenty of companies have built great gear over the last 60 years, but most of them aren’t household names today. Neither is Mojotone, but they damn well want to be.

“I guess the hardest thing is getting our name and image out there and trying to promote everything we actually see, because we don’t just specialize in cabinets or pickups,” says Logan Tabor, who has spent the last nine of his 26 years working in some capacity with Mojotone. Tabor started out working with Audio Engine, a high-end

Continued from page 52

speaker company to which Mojotone contracts out workers. Tabor is currently marketing director of the amp company. In short, his job is to make Mojotone look cool.

“We have a giant stock of parts only a niche group of people are even aware of, or how to use. It’s hard to stop yourself from focusing on one thing, like the amps. [The growth] is awesome, it’s like I didn’t even notice it while it was happening, it just turned into this ... it’s been kind of insane to watch.”

Tabor, also a musician, says his experience with band dudes informs the way he deals with customers. He’s legit.

I checked. A mention of Wilmington’s deceased Soapbox concert hall draws a whispered eulogy. “God bless it.”

“Because I’ve been around band dudes my whole life, I feel like I kind of know the lingo, and the imagery they look for and, just the attitude industry itself, how people are living their lives, so to speak,” Tabor says.

I ask Tabor to consider his position, a young adult with an industry job.

“It’s pretty nice, the demand for rock and roll isn’t really going anywhere.”

McWhorter, 42, holds up a photo of one of his three children. In the picture, his son is standing next to Zakk Wylde, guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne and the Black Label Society.

“It is too often Friday every day here, so we try to buckle down occasionally,” he laughs as Sampson, laying in the corner, keeps his eyes on the strange reporter sitting with his human.

“Having to manage 47 people, that gets to be a bit much when you’ve got 47 different people, 47 different families, everybody has their own life outside Mojo—and we stress the work-life balance—but trying to manage that. And I try to stay involved with everyone’s life outside of Mojo. Luckily, I have some good managers who help with that.

“From the beginning we really just focused on doing good business. I know that sounds generic, but doing good business and whatever the customer wants, we try to make it happen.

By nature, what we’re selling, I think, makes people happy and excited to buy it. We kind of had a head-start on making people happy.”

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Prof banned from school campuses after questioning class’s racial makeup

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North Carolina

Judge goes to jail for a veteran When a combat-decorated former special forces soldier was charged and convicted of driving while impaired in Cumberland County, the judge who was duty-bound to sentence him to jail went to jail with him.

Sgt. Joseph Serna had been through a great deal during his time in Afghanistan during four tours of duty in the U.S. Army.

He was almost killed three times, once by a roadside bomb, then again by a suicide bomber. The last time, the armored truck he was riding in with three other soldiers near Kandahar toppled into a canal. Serna was the only one to survive, breathing in an air pocket underwater after having been saved, released from his seatbelt, by one of his fellow soldiers.

When he came back stateside, Serna suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

After having been found guilty of driving while impaired, the Green Beret with three Purple Hearts and other military accolades entered in a veterans treatment program under the purview of Judge Lou Olivera.

When Olivera had to sentence Serna to an overnight jail sentence for lying about a urine test during a check-in under Olivera’s program, the judge worried that locking the soldier up might trigger a PTSD episode.

When Serna surrendered to Olivera in person to serve his overnight sentence, Olivera personally escorted him to the jail.

“When Joe first came to turn himself in, he 58

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was trembling,” Olivera said, according to a report in The Washington Post. “I decided that I’d spend the night serving with him.”

“Where are we going, judge?” Serna asked, according to The Fayetteville Observer’s Bill Kirby Jr. “We’re going to turn ourselves in,” the judge said.

As Serna sat down on the cot in his cell, he heard the door rattle open again and saw Olivera standing before him. Olivera sat down beside him. Someone came and locked the door.

“This was a one-man cell so we sat on the bunk and I said, ‘You are here for the entire time with me?’” Serna told WTVD. “He said, ‘Yeah that’s what I am doing.’”

The two passed the time in that small jail cell that night trading stories of their military experiences. Serna said, “It was more of a father-son conversation. It was personal.”

Olivera’s concern for Serna was rooted in his concern for all soldiers struggling to make the transition back to private life. “[These soldiers] have worn the uniform and we know they can be contributing members of society,” Olivera said. “We just want to get them back there.”

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Novelist Clyde Edgerton, 72, has a son who is a student at Forest Hills Elementary School in Wilmington. Edgerton is a creative writing professor at UNC Wilmington. He’s earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and some New York Times awards for his books about his love and satirical takes on North Carolina backwoods life. He’s also a 2016 inductee into the N.C. Literary Hall of Fame. His novels include “Raney,” Walking Across Egypt,” and “Killer Diller.”

None of that mattered in a recent bothersome incident that got him banned from all the campuses of New Hanover County Public Schools after he questioned— and alerted other parents—of what amounts to a program practically closed to minorities in his son’s school.

That program, a Spanish “immersion” program that teaches students some courses in English and other courses in Spanish, has an enrollment of 73 percent white students in a 44 percent white total school enrollment.

Edgerton’s son is one of the white students.

Edgerton’s questioning of the enrollment numbers led to his banishment. He was even told initially he’d be unable to attend his son’s fifth grade graduation, but the schools’ superintendent Tim Markley relented. The rest of the ban remained in place at press time of this magazine.

His banishment was the result of a grievance he filed with the school system after being told, Edgerton said, by the school Principal Deborah Greenwood “that minority students and parents who might not know about the Spanish Immersion programs should not be visited, in certain neighborhoods, with information about the program because of ‘safety issues.’” Edgerton also said Greenwood told him of a rumor that some black parents did not want their children in Spanish Immersion because of Spanish gangs in Wilmington.

His contention is that he has collected information and has at least 14 names of families with children at the school he and others believe may have been discriminated against because the school failed to provide information about the immersion program.

Markley’s public comments indicated Edgerton may have illegally obtained confidential student information. Edgerton disputes that allegation. Edgerton also said he had tried for months to resolve the situation with the Spanish program without the problems being publicly aired.

According to a recent Star News report, the New Hanover County School Board allowed Markley to impose the ban, but at least one Board member, Bruce Shell said, “Edgerton is a wellintended, involved parent and community member. He and I have talked a number of times. I think his heart is in the right place.”

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World-renowned saxophonist gets N.C. Heritage Award Beyoncé, James Brown, Prince, Jennifer Lopez, George Clinton. These are a few artists with whom Kinston native Maceo Parker has performed during his stellar career as a jazz musician—a career that earned him a 2016 North Carolina Heritage Award in May. Parker was presented the award by Susan Kluttz, secretary of the N. C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The presentation included a video by filmmaker Rodrigo Dorfman that documented Parker’s artistry, and a short question and answer session.

Parker, 73, first entered the public consciousness 50 years ago as James Brown’s right-hand man. “I just want you to blow, Maceo!” Brown urged on his 1965 breakthrough, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag Part 1.”

That kicked off not just a saxophone solo, but

a cult, according to the Raleigh News and Observer.

Despite playing on a worldwide stage with some of the greatest names in music, Parker has maintained his base in his hometown.

“Kinston has been an extraordinarily musical place for several generations,” said Wayne Martin, executive director of the North Carolina Arts Council. “But it’s relatively small and the fact that Maceo has chosen to stay there is Web photo significant. When he talks about growing up, he had a very rich life of family and church and a neighborhood where he had mentors and experiences with different kinds of music. He felt nurtured there, and I think that’s why he’s still there.”

Maceo, whose brothers played drums and trombone, was well on his way to becoming a musician himself when he overheard some grownups talking derisively about how musicians “just get drunk and

Ex-lawyer’s goal: getting people involved

in legislative processes.

When she moved to the Wilmington area eight years ago, she became government affairs director for the Wilmington Regional Realtors Association, helping fight for lower insurance rates for coastal homeowners. She is also executive director for the Cape Fear Resource Conservation and Development, Inc., which says its mission is to conserve natural resources while encouraging sound economic and community development through project funding and implementation.

Her advocacy in her work is an extension of her passion in her personal life: her family. The Maryland native moved to North Carolina to be closer to her parents. That helped her become even more involved with family matters as a daughter and a mother to her own children.

“My goal is to get people involved and informed,” she said. “You can’t be so married to one idea that ‘this is how it has to be.’ I think it’s important to remain open-minded and flexible.”

When former N.C. Beach, Inlet and Waterway Association executive director Harry Simmons, Jr. was indicted on 18 felony counts of obtaining property under false pretenses last year, Kathleen Reilly stepped in and up to head the group that advocates for the state’s coast and those who love it by encouraging federal and state policies that facilitate environmentally sound solutions for threatened waterways.

“I enjoy listening to people and giving them a voice,” the new executive director told the Coastal Review. “Everybody [at NCBIWA] is focused on moving forward,” Contributed photo Rielly said. “The board is amazing – their passion, their backgrounds, their experience. How they have kept this organization running is amazing. I saw this job as an opportunity to take something really good and grow upon it.”

Reilly is making a habit of these types of positions. As a lawyer in Connecticut, she helped fight the state on behalf of a victim of a rare form of leukemia who had worked on contaminated land there. That experience led her to get more involved

Cat-owning, knitloving, hopelessly stereotypical When New Hanover County Public Librarian Margaret Miles appeared on Jeopardy in April, winning over $40,000 in three appearances, she also won the hearts of a good many of the show’s viewers.

Summer 2016

act silly.” It made a profound impression.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I can show people you can be a traveling musician without doing the whole drunk or high thing,’” he told the N&O. “To this day I’ve never drank a whole beer. Bands I was in would have ‘beer breaks’ during rehearsal. Anything to this? But I tried it and no, not for me. So I’ve never drank no beer, wine, liquor.”

After studying music at North Carolina A& T University in Greensboro, he got his chance to join a touring band in 1964. Maceo and brother Melvin both signed on with Brown just as The Godfather of Soul was evolving from soul to funk.

Parker, his brother, and another Kinston native Nat Jones played a key part in James Brown’s evolution on “Brand New Bag,” ‘’I Got You (I Feel Good),” ‘’Cold Sweat” and other genre-defining hits. Parker was in and out of Brown’s band a number of times between 1964 and the late 1980s, also doing a long stint in George Clinton’s groundbreaking freakfunk collective Parliament-Funkadelic in the 1970s.

On Prince, the musical legend who died recently, Parker said in the N&O interview, “Prince would call me ‘teacher,’” as he looked at a photo of himself onstage in cap and gown, blowing his saxophone with Prince behind him.

Host Alex Trebek, in the contestants’ personal segment of the first night’s show, asked Miles what she does for fun. Her response, according to the Huffington Post, “was nothing but golden.” That response: “Knit—and pet my cats. I’m hopelessly stereotypical.”

She also became a darling of social media, according to the Wilmington Star News, garnering comments such as “totally badass librarian.”

She’s now back at work as the library’s children’s and technical services supervisor. While on the show, she gave a shout-out to her fellow librarians.

Web photo “Librarians are who we are because we love both answers and questions; it’s a pleasure to share what we know, and even more fun to get the chance to learn something new while finding an answer to someone’s question,” she added.”I think it would be especially cool if seeing some buzz about a librarian on Twitter and Facebook reminds people to share some love with their local librarians.”

“It’s great to feel that I flew the flag and represented librarians in a positive light,” Miles said.

More “People” on page 60 S outhEast North Carolina

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SE Folk

North Carolina

The death of the finger-waggers

J

Story & Illustration: Trevor Normile

ust what did I ever do to you people anyway?

All of a sudden, the wagging fingers have disappeared from all but the oldest, dirtiest, most cracked-up windshields of southeastern North Carolina.

Have I gotten uglier?

Am I very unpopular now? Has my writing gotten me into that much trouble, that such a time-honored tradition of welcoming another driver, stranger or friend, on an empty back country road, is now closed to me inexorably and forever?

My grandmother Lib, affectionately known to us as kids as “Grammy,” had quite a different reaction to seeing such a sight.

You see, Grammy was a Sampson County girl, a Sutton, from Suttontown, who attended college and played basketball in Wilmington in the 1940s.

But she met a young Marine and Korean War veteran named Les, who lived in New Jersey.

The two married and moved up north.

Meanwhile, automobiles continued to catch on in North Carolina.

After her husband died and her three sons were grown, Lib returned to Sampson County, to Clinton. Or “Clinnon,” as she pronounced it.

Upon her return, Lib noticed something strange about all the drivers in North Carolina.

“I thought they was giving me the, the, the finger!” I remember her shouting, waving her hands, eyes wide.

Grammy, a woman who as a widow

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SouthEast North Carolina

and single mother once chased a woman armed with a pistol from a big city shoe store (armed, herself, with only a shoe), was surprised and confounded at this sight of fingers poking over steering wheels.

That’s because in New Jersey, no one waves as we do here—one finger extended either up, forward or slightly downward, either on the hand gripping the top of the steering wheel or the hand attached to the arm that is resting out the window.

If you wag your finger at someone in New Jersey today, you will most likely receive the sight of a different finger back as payment. Have tested, can confirm.

Is it wrong to feel ignored, insulted, when my finger waves go unanswered?

Has the nature of my wagging become somehow cynical? Passive aggressive? Is my form wrong?

I can’t be sure, but it’s something I can almost swear is becoming rarer as time goes on.

At one time, a pickup truck was a guaranteed way to draw the fingerwaving adulation of the South. A pickup truck isn’t just a mode of transportation here, it’s a brushstroke in the para bellum oil painting that is Dixie.

But it isn’t that way anymore. When I drive a pickup truck, I draw no more wags than in any other vehicle.

In the last seven days of driving (and I do plenty of driving), passing both neighbor and non-acquaintance, just one driver, an old man in a beat-up Beetle, offered a single finger.

It’s as if the generation of the finger waggers is dying out and being replaced with spoiled children and middle-aged parents with much more important Summer 2016

things on their minds.

“Gosh, can I make the payment on my lawn this month? How many pickup trucks will I have to buy my stepson Quintley, to get him to respect me? Do I need to go visit Mom in the home this weekend?”

I’m under no illusion about the trappings of Southern Hospitality, but it’s not all fake either. The truth’s in the middle: people are friendlier here than they are in most places, but less friendly than the lady on the Bojangles’ commercials.

One might blame American political heartburn. Why would anyone wave at that man in a Saab? He’s probably a yuppie. Or worse, a Democrat.

Or perhaps the fingers are secretly tapping out their greetings on touchscreens, hidden down and away from the eyes of highway patrolmen.

I don’t think it’s all the cynicism of modern times, I think it’s probably something more innocent than that.

It’s the time spent on interstates, where finger wagging is but a vestige of the two-lane. It’s the fact that, in 2016, you’re less likely to see that fingerwagging driver again, on this road, at this time, so perhaps there’s no reason to lift a finger at all.

Things just change, and that’s all right I suppose. It’s not as if a stranger’s hardy hello is a dead tradition of the sidewalk.

A quick head-nod and a “hahdy.”

Even if, one day, the single-digitsalutation is totally replaced by the deadeyed stare of oncoming drivers, you’ll eventually meet my sentimental self on a back road somewhere.

I’m not giving you the finger. I’m just saying, “HEY MANG.” SE

Summer 2016

S outhEast North Carolina

63

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