SENC Winter 2016

SE WINTER 2016

North Carolina EACH ANOTHER’S AUDIENCE Relativity and psychology on the stage

Hands-on Three-part feature on trades in the 21st Century

Voices from the dark land Unraveling the riddles of Green Swamp

We shell sanctuary Oyster restoration continues in the Cape Fear River

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Winter 2016

Restaurant Hours Thursday-Friday 4:30-8:00

Mike’s Farm Full Page

Saturday 4:00-8:00



Thursday-Saturday 12:00-8:00

The Barn offers seating for up to 200 guests. 



Gift Shop & Bakery Hours

Full catering available



Professional Wedding Cakes



Outdoor ceremony locations

Additional Banquet Room with seating for up to 100 guests

Wedding photos courtesy of Dara Bass Photography

Winter 2016

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EDITOR’S NOTE:

Oh, the humanity!

SE North Carolina www.sencmag.com Issue No. 5

Staff / Credits / Contributions PUBLISHER Gary Scott EDITOR Todd Wetherington ASSOCIATE EDITOR Trevor Normile PRODUCTION/ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Becky Wetherington CONTENT & PHOTOGRAPHY Jacqueline Hough Nadya Nataly Trevor Normile Gary Scott Todd Wetherington

Births, surgeries, unexpected medical emergencies... let’s just say the production process for the issue of SE North Carolina you’re currently holding in your hands was somewhat fraught.

Actually, let’s just go ahead and say it was emotionally, physically and spiritually wrenching.

By the last weeks of December, a time when we should have been ramping our editorial and design efforts into high gear, the SENC office was filled not with Christmas cheer, but with the moans and curses of the walking wounded and barely ambulatory, as they waited to go under the knife or pop out a seven-pound squalling human. For a while there, a visitor would not have been far off the mark in thinking they had taken a wrong turn and somehow stumbled into a triage ward.

But here we are, bloodied but unbowed, and the fruits of our sufferings are, we hope, that much sweeter for our travails. So what did we manage to

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHY Belinda Keller Mett Ausley ADVERTISING Becky Cole Alan Wells Evelyn Riggs Gary Scott CIRCULATION Lauren Guy SUBSCRIBE: Four issues (one year) $19.95 plus tax lguy@ncweeklies.com CONTACT senc.ads@nccooke.com senc@nccooke.com 1.910.296.0239 ON THE COVER Wilmington’s Thalian Hall Stein Theater, by Belinda Keller 4

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North Carolina

dredge up from the brink of the abyss?

Our three lead-off features each deal with the theme of ancient professions that are still being practiced in the 21st century. In a world of pristine digital detachment, the artists we found — a farrier, a leather worker, and a guitar builder — have immersed themselves body and soul in the raw, oily magic of flesh, wood, and iron, using techniques that were old when their great, great, great grandparents were just learning to crawl.

We also delve into the psychological intricacies of those among us brave enough to pursue another ancient art, theater performance. The distinguished cast of actors and directors that hone their crafts at Wilmington’s Thalian Hall number themselves among those rare souls willing to step on a brightlylit stage in front of strangers and take part in a ritual practiced by children and geniuses the world over. We salute them!

If that doesn’t pique your interest, how about an extended dive into the murky history of Green Swamp, which may or may not be connected to one of the bloodiest slave uprisings in recorded history, or a look at gangster Frank Lucas, a La Grange native who wound up as one of Harlem’s most notorious drug lords?

Any way you slice it, we’ve weathered the storm and come up with enough razzle dazzle to keep even that previously mentioned seven-pound babe entertained.

Enjoy!

Todd Wetherington, Editor Winter 2016

Mystery Photo

Where in SENC is this?

Where in Southeast North Carolina is this?

A quick explanation, in case it’s needed: Every quarter, SE North Carolina includes a cropped-down version of a landmark or scene in one of SENC’s many signature communities.

Try and guess where and what this structure is.

Hint: In one of Southeastern North Carolina’s larger cities, this is the product of a somewhat controversial effort!

See page 73 for answer

Where we are this winter!

These local areas are featured in this edition of SE North Carolina.

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Goldsboro ....... 10,11,73 La Grange ................. 40 Fort Bragg ................ 48 Fayetteville .......... 11,25 New Bern ............. 11,14 Potters Hill (Jones Co.).. 18 Oriental ..................... 46 r Warsaw................. 33,48 Kenansville .......... 11,48 Duplin County .......... 74 r Davis/Smyrna ........... 53 Morehead City................ 10 r Wallace ................................ 49 Hammocks Beach State Park .. 48 Burgaw ................................. 22,36 Whiteville ........................................ 10 Leland .................................................. 9 Wilmington ............. 10,11,25,32,42,49,62 Green Swamp/Crusoe Island .................. 66 Tabor City .................................................... 49 Carolina Beach ............................................. 56 Fort Fisher ...................................................... 25 Bald Head Island .............................................. 25 Winter 2016

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Light your home with love this winter

The Lighting Gallery

SENIOR MONDAYS - 11am-8pm: $6.49, per person Beverage and tax included.

FRIDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHTS: Steak and Seafood Buffet SUNDAY BUFFET - 11am-5pm: Bring in your church bulletin and receive FREE tea with your meal!

1144 US Hwy. 258 N. Suite B, Kinston, NC 28504 0QFO .PO 'SJ t 4BU

252-523-7878

thelightinggallerync.net litegals@yahoo.com

308 N. Main Street Kenansville, NC

910-296-1220

What they said

Letters

Carrying on the tradition of BULK & MORE

We have all your breakfast needs! /PO (.0 1PSL t #BDPO t .JML t &HHT t 'SFTI (SPVOE 8IPMF 8IFBU t 'MPVS 4VHBS 4QJDFT t 'SFTI 1PQQFE ,FUUMF $PSO t $PPLCPPLT .VDI .PSF

Magazines handed out were a hit We handed out all of the copies of SE North Carolina magazine that you gave us for our booth at the Oktoberfest. Everyone seemed really interested in it. I hope that means good things for circulation.

Thank you so much for helping us out.

%PO U GPSHFU UIF BXFTPNF DIPDPMBUF NJML BOE B GSFTI MPBG PG TPVSEPVHI

Bakery and Bulk Food Family Owned

Tuesday-Saturday 9am-5pm

'PVOUBJOUPXO 3PBE t Beulaville, N.C. (Cedar Fork Community)

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Winter 2016

Connie Gamble Ochse President Onslow County Council for Women Jacksonville

SE

Contents Winter 2016

In Every Issue

Features

62

Forge

14 Black Owl Guitars Rebuilding roots music

Haven

18 Leather Works

56 N.C. Coastal

22 Pender Co. Farriers

62 Battleship N.C.

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66 Green Swamp

Cowhide craftsmanship Forging a new generation

SE-Snapshots

9 Maximum Overdrive

Cult classic road rage horror flick hits 30 Our Picks: Best of the Bad

25 Cape Fear River Rocks

The New Inlet Dam along the Cape Fear faces an uncertain future Our Picks: Cape Fear Finds

Oysters on the rocks Fighting the good fight

53 Crab Pot Christmas Trees

Unique deep sea holiday designs go nationwide Our Picks: Yuletide Folkways

An enduring mystery

Phantasm

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Fashion

The winter coat struggle

32 Theatre Life

Thespian therapy

50

40 Frank Lucas Home-grown gangster

Murmurs

“Savages�

Todd Wetherington

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42 Eagle Point Star-studded golf gala

Events

Check out Play Dates for upcoming events in Southeastern N.C.

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74

Folk

Column of Christmas Past Winter 2016

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You’ve worked hard to make your house a home.

Your insurance should work hard, too.

Kornegay Inc Insurance Kornegay Insurance

939 N Breazeale Ave 939 North Breazeale Avenue 201 West Broadway Street Mount Olive, Mt. NC 28365-1103 Olive, NC 28365 Pink Hill, NC 28572 Fax: 919-658-0962 919-658-6027 252-568-3911 www.kornegayinsurance.com 919-658-6027

S1022 Not all companies are licensed or operate in all states.

Not all products are offered in all states. Go to erieinsurance.com for company licensure and territory information.

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Winter 2016

SE / Snapshot

North Carolina

Hitting 30 in ‘Maximum Overdrive’

Cult-classic movie was filmed in Leland three decades ago this year

T

here’s a certain art to making a bad movie that’s really... kind of good.

Films like Stephen King’s “Maximum Overdrive” are made of the kind of all-American B-movie mettle to which modern day tongue-incheek horror hits like “Sharknado” are really paying homage.

Based on King’s short story “Trucks” and filmed in Leland, “Maximum Overdrive” was lambasted—brutally— upon its release in 1986. With a multimillion dollar budget, it shouldn’t even technically be considered a B-movie.

So badly did the critics hate the movie that King and lead actor Emilio Estevez were given Golden Raspberry Awards for their effort (a badge of honor for any real bad-movie connoisseur).

For those who haven’t seen it, Maximum Overdrive follows the reign of terror caused when machines all over the planet suddenly come to life with murderous zeal.

The film doesn’t exactly explain the problem—it starts in a deus ex machinatype situation, somehow caused by the earth passing through the tail of a comet (Or, considering the plot, would it then be a diaboli ex machina?).

Anyway, we see a baseball coach killed by a vending machine. A child is flattened by a driverless steamroller. A tractor-trailer with a green goblin face terrorizes a group of horrified people trapped in a truck stop diner.

Inside, the hostages have but one hope: street-tough ex-convict Bill Rob-

inson, played by Estevez.

Maybe King, one of the greatest horror authors in human history (certainly one of the most prolific) had simply spun a tale so terrifying it was incomprehensible. Or maybe King was just, as he stated in an interview, “coked out of [his] mind all through its production.”

SE PICKS: Best of the Bad Robot Monster Ro-Man, a murderous moon robot, has but one mission: kill every last human on earth.

Why? Erm, the movie’s kind of hard to follow.

Anyway, Robot Monster is one of the greatest stinkers ever made—so bad it nearly drove its director to suicide.

Battlefield: Earth If you took the Science Fiction genre, threw it in a dumpster with five pounds of broccoli and let it sit for a month, what you’d dig out is Battlefield: Earth.

Set in the year 3000 and an unabashed piece of Scientology propaganda, Battlefield: Earth is full of poorly-interpreted sci-fi memes and sickening camera angles.

It’s also unintentionally hilarious.

The Room

Look at that magnificent poster. Maximum Overdrive, filmed near Wilmington, turns 30 this year. One of the best bad movies ever made, it’s still great three decades on.

Tomato, toe-mah-toe. We don’t care.

Whatever the circumstances surrounding the film’s production, “Maximum Overdrive” stands as one of the best bad movies ever made.

It’s a gem of a film really—full of dark humor, fun and action. And despite the lack of love it got when released, it’s one of our favorites.

SE Winter 2016

Ever driven past a car accident?

You don’t want to look, but you kind of can’t help it. After all, it’s not really safe to take your eyes off the road. And what if someone sees you looking?

It’s obvious, you just shouldn’t look at car accidents. You shouldn’t rubberneck.

It’s uncouth at best and dangerous at worst.

And y’know, there’s the chance you might see something you regret seeing.

The Room is kind of like that.

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Play dates Upcoming things to do in southeastern North Carolina

Hamlet

./6%-"%2 s 7:30 p.m.

J.W. Seabrook Auditorium, 1200 Murchinson Rd., Fayetteville William Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes to life.

Admission $6-$12 Visit sweetteashakespeare.com

Moon Over Buffalo FEB. 12-14

Paramount Theatre, 139 S. Center St., Goldsboro / 7:30 p.m. Friday & Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday Admission $13-$15. Story of George and Charlotte Hay, fading stars of the 1950s, who are performing a repertoire in Buffalo, New York.

On the brink of a disastrous split-up caused by George’s involvement with a young actress, they receive word that they might have one last shot at stardom: Frank Capra is coming to town to see their matinee. Visit goldsboroparamount.com.

SE Flipside: PICK The

Patti Page Story

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9 7:30 p.m.

Thalian Hall, 310 Chestnutt St., WIlmington

Admission $32-$40. Flipside is a new “jukebox musical” about Oklahoma’s own Singing Rage, Miss Patti Page, that has garnered eighteen Kennedy Center Awards.

Visit thalianhall.org.

Carousel

FEB. 24-27; MAR. 4-5

8 p.m., Thalian Hall, 310 Chestnutt St., WIlmington Admission $24-32. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical set in a tight-knit fishing community in New England, the story revolves around the ill-fated love affair between the swaggering, carefree carnival barker Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan, the trusting mill worker whose heart he steals. Visit thalianhall.org.

Italian pianist

Paolo André Gualdi Chocolate festivals

WILMINGTON WINE & CHOCOLATE FESTIVAL, Jan. 29-31

36th annual N.C. Jazz Festival FEB. 4-6

Coastline Convention Center, 503 Nutt St., Wilmington, Admission TBA

Thurs. & Fri. 7:30 p.m., Sat. 10:30 a.m.

Hilton Riverside, 301 Water St., Wilmington

Crystal Coast Civic Center, 3505 Arendell St, Morehead City, Admission $8

Tickets $15 to $60. Visit ncjazzfestival.com.

Galen & Friends, Tribute to the Big Band Era and “Jazz Master” pianist Hod O’Brien. Friday and Saturday nights feature All-Star musicians.

CAROLINA CHOCOLATE FESTIVAL, Feb. 6-7

38th annual Dr. Sharyn Edwards

Piano Festival MARCH 10-12

Time TBA, Southeastern Community College Auditorium, 4564 Chadbourn Highway, Whiteville Special performances for all three days. http://sccnc.edu/event-type/performing-arts/

American Cornhole Association Tournament

Ballet

FRIDAY, FEB. 5 11 a.m. - 11 p.m.

SATURDAY, FEB. 6

Jason Aldean: ‘We Were Here Tour’ with Thomas Rhett and A Thousand Horses

SATURDAY, FEB. 20, 7:30 p.m.

Crown Complex, 1960 Coliseum Dr., Fayetteville

8:30 a.m. - 11:30 p.m.

Duplin County Events Center, 195 Fairgrounds Dr., Kenansville

SAT., MAR. 5 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Cape Fear Community College Humanities and Fine Arts Center, 701 N. Third St., Wilmington

AdmissionTBA. More than 250 players from across the country will be competing in the South Atlantic Division tournament.

Presented by the Wilmington Ballet Company, Cape Fear Community College Humanities and Fine Arts Center, 701 N. Third St., Wilmington.

Admissions $15. Black light ocean scenes, professional ballerina mermaids, and spectacular innovative choreography will create an amazing show. Visit cfcc.edu/capefearstage.

Admission $34.75-$64.75. Live and acoustic performance by Jason Aldean, some tickets include exclusive question and answer session. Visit crowncomplexnc.com.

Visit crowncomplex.com.

Houston Ballet II

TUES., MAR. 22 7:30 p.m.

UNCW Kenan Auditorium, 601 S. College Rd., Wilmington Admission $15-$40. The Houston Ballet’s second company of classically trained and emerging ballet artists will perform fresh choreography in a wide array of dance works. Visit uncw.edu/presents/ currentseason.html.

Sibelius 5

SATURDAY, FEB. 6, 7:30 p.m.

UNCW, Kenan Auditorium, 601 S. College Rd., Wilmington Admission $25$27. Classical performance by the Student Concerto Competition winners featuring Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5. Visit Wilmingtonsymphony. org.

The Little Mermaid Ballet & Princess Party

The Texas Tenors

FRI. FEB. 26 SAT. FEB. 27 1 p.m., 7 p.m.

SUN. FEB. 28 3 p.m.

THURSDAY, FEB. 18, 6:30 p.m.

New Bern Riverfront Convention Center, 203 South Front St., New Bern Admission $35-$55. Trio performs music from the worlds of country, folk, opera and Broadway, and will entertain with breathtaking vocals, humor and a bit of cowboy charm. Visit newbernhistorical.org or call Pat Traynor, (252) 638-8558.

Paramount Theatre, 139 S. Center St., Goldsboro

Admission $15-$18. The tale of a friendless hero who finds himself on a quest to find and rescue the Princess Fiona.

Visit goldsboroparamount.com.

SE PICK The One Night Stand Comedy Tour

featuring Kier “Junior” Spates, Bill Bellamy, Tony Roberts and Robert Powell

SATURDAY, FEB. 13 8 p.m.

Crown Complex, 1960 Coliseum Dr., Fayetteville Admission is $52.50 per person. One night, one mic, and four hilarious comedians.

Visit crowncomplexnc.com.

Winter 2016

Harlem Globetrotter 90th Anniversary Tour THURS., MAR. 24 7 p.m.

Crown Complex, 1960 Coliseum Dr., Fayetteville

Admission $26.50-$76.50. The world famous team celebrates its 90th anniversary world tour, with over 320 games in North America with a stop in Fayetteville. A star-studded roster performing ball handling wizardry, basketball artistry and one-of-akind family entertainment that thrills fans of all ages.

Visit crowncomplexnc.com.

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No matter how you slice it...

Still Beulaville’s Favorite Restaurant! t1J[[BT t 4VCT t#VSHFST t "QQFUJ[FST t-BTBHOB t 4QBHIFUUJ t"MM :PV $BO &BU 4BMBE #BS

PIZZA VILLAGE

Daily Lunch Buffet, Monday ~ Saturday

811 W. Main Street (N.C. 24 West)

910-298-3346

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Winter 2016

SE Forge

North Carolina

Black Owl Guitars

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Musicians of little means have always used whatever materials they could scrape together to bring the sounds in their heads to the outside world. New Bern guitar maker David English has carried that tradition into the 21st century, using cigar boxes and tobacco sticks to recapture the roots of American music.

Leather Works

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Max Whitley of Potters Hill is one of the few remaining craftsmen who can still work the centuries old magic of stretching, cutting, and sewing leather into functional yet elegant items for the ruggedly fashion minded.

Take a look inside the mind and workshop of this cowhide connoisseur.

Pender County Farrier

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A “farrier” (taken from the Latin word for “iron”) is to a horse as a mechanic is to a car. Farriers not only apply horseshoes but help meet many of the animal’s other needs.

And the Goffs of Pender County do it by hand.

Hands On

TF t forge

An

NEW B TO TH

Story and Photos: Todd Wetherington

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David English, owner/operator of Black Owl Guitars, uses a metal slide to test out the sound of one of his recently completed cigar box guitars at his home workshop in New Bern.

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SouthEast North Carolina

ou wouldn’t automatically peg David English’s former garage as the site of a bustling music instrument business. In one corner, ragged tobacco sticks are strewn helter skelter against the wall; toward the front, wooden shelves hold rows of antique cigar boxes. And then there are the license plates, stacks of them from Kansas, Mississippi and other states.

The space, in fact, looks like nothing so much as the workshop of a slightly eccentric folk artist.

And in a very real sense, that’s exactly what it is.

“I saw an article where a guy had taken a cigar box and took a stick and put some kite string on it. And I started wondering if anyone had done that with real guitar strings,” explains the 35-year-old New Bern resident, detailing the events that led Winter 2016

Modern day craftsmen use talent paired with professionalism to carry on ancient arts

old way of hearing

ERN GUITAR BUILDER GETS BACK E ROOTS OF AMERICAN MUSIC him to become one of the state’s top manufacturers of cigar box guitars.

According to English, the instrument dates back to the early days of slavery, when plantation owners would allow music to be played to boost morale.

“And so the slaves would have these socializations and they would use these pieces of whatever they could find to make music. And then when the Civil War comes on, soldiers don’t have anything either and they start building these instruments,” he explains.

The cigar box instruments later gained popularity in the early-Twentieth century among rural musicians who were unable to shell out money for factory made guitars.

“As you come up through the 1920s and the Depression, people can’t afford their instruments so they start making their own. B.B. King is a great example; his dad built him a one-string cigar box guitar, and that’s what

he started to learn to play on.

Throughout the years, tons and tons of these guys started out playing these instruments — Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters. That’s where you get a lot of your old blues sound.”

When it comes to sound, English knows from whence he speaks. He learned to play guitar 17 years ago by listening to old 45 records. He’s currently a longtime member of the New Bern-based band Merchant’s Road, which specializes in an eclectic mix of bluegrass and Dixieland jazz, with the occasional Queen and Radiohead song thrown in for good measure.

That background has served English well. Going into his seventh year as the owner and operator of Black Owl Guitars, the Fayetteville, Ga. native has tapped into not only an old way of building but an old way of hearing.

After months of trial and error experimentation, English perfected a system that now allows him to construct Winter 2016

SouthEast North Carolina

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Hands On

instruments, by himself, on an assembly line schedule. Beginning with the cigar box, which acts as a sounding board, he uses tobacco sticks scavenged from country barns to construct the guitars’ necks. On many of the instruments he adds a license plate to the front of the cigar box, in effect creating a resonator guitar of the sort heard on many classic country recordings.

“That’s where your sound is coming from, it bounces off the back of the box and gives it this really old school, metallic sound like you would hear in old music. Something that’s very important is that the sound goes with the look of the instrument,” he stresses.

English’s dedication to quality can be seen in the fine details of his work.

He hand-cuts and sets each fret and builds the pickups for each instrument. He also makes his own stains.

During the interview for this story he was in the process of draining the concentrate of a handful of black walnuts into a glass jar, the black ooze slowly draining down to form a tarlike puddle which would later be used to give his instruments their unique sheen.

English’s careful, craftsman-like touches have led others outside of his small coastal hometown to take notice 16

SouthEast North Carolina

of Black Owl Guitars products. He currently has instruments at the Blue Ridge Music Center in Galax, Va., which sells them through the N.C. Parks website.

Word has also spread to a handful of professional musicians in Nashville’s country music scene. The wife of Craig Wiseman, a songwriter who has provided tunes for the likes of Tim McGraw, Dolly Parton, and Kenny Rogers bought one of English’s guitars to present to her husband after he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. She also asked English to make four more guitars, one each for McGraw, Ronnie Dunn of country group Brooks and Dunn, and songwriters Jeffrey Steele and Bob DiPiero.

“After I shipped them, she called back and said ‘Man, these are fantastic. I have a list of 11 more people —Florida Georgia Line, The Warren Brothers, Sarah Buxton, the producer of Nickelback…’ I was like ‘What’s going on here?’”

Though some customers are drawn to the novel appearance of the Black Owl guitars, English stresses that his intention has always been to create instruments that sound as good as they look.

“It means a lot to me when someWinter 2016

one says ‘I can tell you put a lot of time and effort into this because it doesn’t play nor does it sound like a stick in a box. It sounds like a real instrument.’ You get this thing you can plug in and record with but it still has that really, really good quality old sound, that authentic genuine raw sound. That’s what you want, because I can go online and buy a guitar that sounds like a guitar. I want it to sound like something else, I want it to sound real.”

In 2015, Black Owl Guitars turned out 250 instruments, double its output from the previous year. Where English initially built one or two instruments at a time, he now works on 15-20 simultaneously.

“There are people that grow their business too fast and can’t handle it and then there are people who grow too slow and there’s not enough money to keep it going. I think we’ve grown at a pretty proper rate,” says English. “My goal is to double next year what I’ve done this year. So if I push it to 500 guitars, I’m going to need some help.”

English says it took time and patience to perfect his recipe for the perfect instrument. “You want a wooden cigar box, not cardboard. Thickness also matters. Thick tops don’t make a

Top: An assortment of Black Owl guitars and banjos, which feature unusual components such as license plates, cigar boxes, tobacco sticks and metal bolts.

Above/Right: David English works in his shop stringing a new guitar and checks out the finished product.

Winter 2016

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TF t forge

Hands

Cow

POTTERS HILL LEAT Story: Jacqueline Hough Photos: Todd Wetherington

An etching from 1876 is among the earliest evidence of the use of cigar box instruments. The etching shows two Union Army Civil War soldiers at a campsite, with one playing a cigar box fiddle.

very good guitar; the neck won’t fit real well. You want a solid frame but something a lot thinner on top.”

English admits that the sound of his rustic music machines comes down to equal parts science and the idiosyncrasies of his materials. “You can make all the measurements you want, you can do it exactly the way you always do it, but not until you put the strings on do you know what that instrument’s going to sound like.”

In addition to the cigar box guitars, English also builds cigar box dulcimers and banjos made from cookie tins (“The banjos just sound better that way, for some reason”).

His own personal collection of instruments includes a banjo made from a cookie tin that, rumor has it, came from Saddam Hussein’s palace.

But English’s most prized instruments are a mandolin and a violin that were built by his great, great, great uncles, circa the late 1800s. “I never knew there were other instrument builders in my family. It’s in my blood somewhere,” he asserts.

That family connection continues to play a role in English’s dedication to his craft, as he passes on his knowledge to his five-year-old son, Luke, and Rachel, his seven-yearold daughter.

“One of the most important things for me is transferring these things I’ve learned to my children, these skills where my daughter can do guitar wiring and my son loves to build things; working with your hands. These old ways of doing things got lost for so long and then there was a little bit of a revival. I don’t want it to get lost again, I’d like to see the continuation in the interest in authentic music, the roots of American music.”

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Winter 2016

W

orking with his hands and sticking with more traditional ways has allowed Max Whitley to do his own thing for 40 years.

Using leather as his canvas, the artist has carved out a unique life for himself, using tools and techniques passed down for generations.

For Whitley, the fascination with handmade leather goods began at an early age, while traveling the Americas with his family.

“As a kid my father was in the service,” he remembers. “I saw bullfights in Mexico. Then we ended up in El Paso, where my mom taught English. She carved leather as a hobby and it was prevalent in the schools out west.”

Whitley says he is mainly self taught, more through necessity than choice. “There was no one to learn from,” he recalls of those early days. “All the sources had dried up. I learned through trial and error, by working on buggy seats, old saddles, shoes and upholstery.”

Whitley’s first professional venture in the leather goods market started in 1973, when he opened his Easy Street Leather shop in Greenville.

People would bring him everything from horse bridles and buggy seats to saddles and camera straps.

“They would bring all kinds of things that they needed repaired,” says Whitley, relaxing in his workshop beside his home in Potters Hill, between Pink Hill and Comfort in Jones County.

In the early ’70s, there was no place to go to learn leather working, says Whitley, so he experimented, opened the shop and tried different techniques.

“And I tried to stay true to using traditional hand tools and doing it myself,” he says.

Before opening Easy Street Leather, Whitley attended East Carolina University, where he majored in geography and minored in sociology.

On

hide craftsmanship

HER WORKER CARRIES ON HANDMADE TRADITION

Max Whitley, an expert in the fading art of leather working, shows off his stitching skills on one of the handmade leather bags he creates in his studio, located beside his home in the small community of Potters Hill near the Jones/Duplin County line. Whitley and his wife, Kathy, a skilled potter, are longtime veterans of North Carolina’s arts and crafts fairs and festivals.

He says the knowledge he gained during that time has proven useful when meeting people, traveling and procuring supplies for his craft.

While at ECU, Whitley met his future wife, Kathy, an aspiring potter.

In 1976 they moved to Potters Hill, where they now share a studio, with

Kathy at one end and her husband at the other.

Forty years later, they are still practicing and perfecting their respective crafts.

“It has allowed us to work at home,” says Whitley. “You work as much as you want to. If you like to eat, then you keep going.”

Winter 2016

Whitley stresses that his goal is to make quality, handmade items that folks will appreciate. He says he has enjoyed being able to meet the people who buy his items.

Though you won’t find his work being sold in stores, galleries or online, the Whitleys participate in 18 shows a SouthEast North Carolina

19

Hands On

Left: An assortment of finished belts and works in progress cover a table in Max Whitley’s studio. Right: Whitley uses a draw gauge to bevel the edges of a strip of cowhide that will eventually be turned into a finished belt.

year throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

And Whitley has stayed true to the leather working tradition.

Look around his studio and you’ll see scraps of leather, belts in various stages of completion and metal tools, but you won’t see an electric sewing machine or any other modern device. His equipment is a stitching pony, which looks something like a child’s rocking horse, and various hand tools.

“In a business that is about being handmade, there is no room for machinery,” he acknowledges. “You don’t have to plug anything in.”

Whitley primarily makes belts and bags.

His bags are sewn by hand and contain only two pieces—a front and a back.

After cutting out the basic pattern for a belt, Whitley bevels the edges, and then shaves down the area that will hold the buckle. Using wooden strap cutters, he cuts off the hard edges with a beveler and then wets down and textures the leather with stamp tools.

The stitching pony plays a big role when putting the bags together, explains Whitley, because it acts as a third hand.

“It is just a set of jaws that hold it (the leather) together long enough to be able to sew it,” he mentions.

Using the stitching pony, Whitley will sew a little bit, take the pressure off with his foot, and then stitch some more. He 20

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sews with two needles at one time and averages about a foot an hour.

Whitley says he isn’t concerned with turning out a high volume of belts and bags. For him, it’s all about quality.

Whitley’s process is to buy the leather, hand cut his belts and then sell them.

“Then I keep making them,” he laughs. “I sell all the belts I can make. It is not about the number. It’s about making the highest quality item I can.”

Whitley says his belts start with a piece of cow hide that is hand-cut using a draw gauge. He uses it to make sure all of the belt’s hard edges are beveled. “You want the edge to be nice and slick,” Whitley says.

In the course of making one belt, he will use different areas in his workshop. It sometimes takes Whitley days to make that one belt.

In the course of a day, Whitley uses about half a dozen tools, including a strap cutter and a skiver, which is used to thin down the end of the belt.

Whitley also uses a variety of alcohol-based spirit dyes on his belts. Before the dye goes on, he oils them down like a baseball glove using Neatsfoot oil.

“When I dye them, I will pull them through canvas repeatedly,” Whitley says, in order to smooth the leather out.

He uses heavy canvas gloves to pull the leather out and dyes

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Hands

TF t forge

Hoofing throu Story & Photos: Nadya Nataly

Max Whitley discusses the leather engraving process he uses to create the designs on his signature belts.

the edge two to three times.

Finally, he waxes the back of the belt and uses a topcoat wax as well.

According to Whitley, most of the leather he works with comes from Europe “There’s no barbed wire over there, so the skin is cleaner,” he explains.

For the last 20 years, Whitley has experimented with creating textures in the leather using everything from wood and woven leather to, in one instance, a sidewalk.

It helps his textures be one of a kind, he says.

No piece of cowhide is wasted in Whitley’s studio. He has saved all of the ends of his belts to use for new projects.

When asked if he is interested in passing his leather working knowledge along, Whitley smiles and says he has done demonstrations for Scouts and at local high schools.

“I’ll share my skills with anyone who is interested,” he says. “You can’t take it with you. You’ve only got it for a little while.”

When his grandchildren come for a visit, they are encouraged to try to make a pot or tool on a piece of leather.

Whitley says he hopes to continue working with leather until he “drops dead.”

“I am a firm believer of ‘use it or lose it’ when it comes to physical activity,” he says.

Whitley explains his hope is for Kathy and himself to continue to do what they are doing to keep their crafts alive, taking it to festivals here and there around the Southeast for other people to enjoy.

“We always want to share our love of arts and crafts SE with the people we do business with.”

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H

istorically, the practice of farriery was associated with the work of a blacksmith. With time though, farriers have become jacks of all trades—forgers, welders, toolmakers,

On

gh it

PENDER CO. FATHER AND SON TEAM CARRY ON THE FARRIER TRADITION

shoemakers, anatomists to provide a program and physiologists. for young apprentices Though not veterinarfrom all over the United ians, one of the key tasks States. With over a dozof a farrier is the humane en apprentices in about care of wounded and sick a 10-year period, Ritner horses. A farrier must be says being an apprentice able to diagnose when is just one of the first lameness is foot-related, steps toward becoming treat the symptoms of the an AFA-certified farrier. lameness and come up R.J.’s younger brother, with a plan of action for Blake Rivenbark, is one of Pender County farriers Ritner Goff (left), apprentice Blake Rivenbark each horse. (center), and R.J. Goff (right) have spent years perfecting the craft of the apprentices working For the last 35 years, on becoming a certified customizing and fitting horseshoes. Below: Ritner and R.J. in 1999.

Ritner Goff of Burgaw in farrier.

Pender County has been “I went to farrier providing equestrian care through his school in Oklahoma. Back then, they expertise as a respected farrier. didn’t have apprentice programs. I had Upon meeting Ritner, one is greeted to learn a lot of this on my own. I had to by a classic American cowboy with hat pick the old guys’ brains; most of them and boots to match. He smiles as he were very secretive, they didn’t want to extends his hand and welcomes visishare their skill. Nowadays, we’re really tors and their horses to the self-named open because we’re really confident about business, Ritner & R.J. Goff Pro our skill level,” explains Ritner.

Horseshoeing Services.

R.J. spent a good portion of his childBecoming a father and son team in hood observing his father from the other the last eight years, Ritner and his son, side of the barn as he trimmed and balR.J., offer services through two fully anced horse hooves. stocked Stonewell Mobile Farrier Rigs R.J.’s curiosity was piqued and he that travel throughout the Southeastern North Carolina became fascinated with farrier work. By the time he was nine region. They also have a barn and shop at their own home. years old, he got his first pair of chaps and started working Both Ritner and R.J. are certified by the American Farrialongside his father. ers Association, considered one of the more prestigious certi“He grew up in the front seat of a horseshoe rig,” fiers and recognized in England and throughout Europe. remembers Ritner, a wide smile creasing his rugged face.

“You have to show your skills to pass the AFA certifica“I was a single parent. He went to year-round school and tion,” says Ritner. when he wasn’t at school he was in the truck with me.”

Ritner was officially certified in the early 1990s and R.J. Realizing he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps joined the family business in 2009. Ritner has decided to and learn under his guidance and support, R.J. traded high retire within the next year, with R.J. taking over the reins. school for a pair of chaps and a hoof nipper.

Changing the name to R.J. Goff Pro Horseshoeing SerGraduating from farrier school at the top of his class, R.J. vices, R.J. says he is elated to continue his father’s legacy. went immediately to work alongside his dad. “Knowing that In spite of the shaky economy, Ritner has been able I was leaving high school, the only option I had was to get to Apprentice Blake Rivenbark has followed in the footsteps of his brother, R.J. Goff and is working to become a certified farrier.

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Hands On

R.J. Goff (left) and Ritner Goff (right) have become a father-son team, working side by side since R.J. was nine years old.

work,” R.J. explains.

“The rule (my dad set for me), he was fine with me dropping out, as long as I started a career and did something with my life. I was ready to go to work.”

R.J. works with great care in customizing the horseshoes and cleaning and trimming their hooves.

The way Ritner and R.J. see it, their work combines the skills of a blacksmith and farrier.

The biggest difference between the two is the former works with iron and other metals and the latter makes horseshoes or shoes horses.

This father-son duo do both. The Goffs often find themselves making shoes and tools, but their art is the precise ability to put those shoes onto horses.

Committed to providing excellence in their craft, R.J. is pursuing certification as a journeyman farrier,

which is the highest level of farrier certification and skill.

“By the time I get done with my certification, I will know, and I’m not saying I know as much as a vet, but I’ll know about the anatomy, the physiology, the pathology, the hooves, the legs. It is something like a sort of degree when you get done with all of the tests.”

The Goffs have also experimented with spending personal time working on art pieces they make from horseshoes or other metals.

Though on the brink of what Ritner Goff calls being” “semi-retired,” he says he will still manage the day-to-day work at the barn.

R.J. Goff will spend most of his time on the road making home visits to horse owners, carrying on the farrier tradition that has enriched the lives of both father and son.

SE

R.J. Goff has followed in his father’s footsteps and at the age of 26 is a professional farrier. Goff is working toward becoming a certified journeyman farrier, the highest level of farrier certification. At right, the Goffs also produce some artsy designs.

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SE Snapshot

SE PICKS: Cape Fear Finds

North Carolina

Bald Head Lighthouse

State pushes for the removal of ‘The Rocks” from the Cape Fear River Local coastal communities question state plans for New Inlet Dam

T

he New Inlet Dam near Zeke’s Island, also known as the “The Rocks” face possible removal by the N.C. state legislature. The state is currently making plans to study and discuss the rocks, citing “ecosystem restoration and protection of navigational safety.”

The Rocks were built in the 1870s by the Army Corps of Engineers. Separating the inlet and Cape Fear River from the Atlantic Ocean and creating a basin north of Zeke’s Island, it’s split in two sections, north and south of the island. It is the lower section that is being targeted by the state.

If the rocks were to be removed, part of the funding for removal would come from Deep Draft Navigation Channel Dredging and Maintenance, reserved for projects that improve ships’ access to state ports.

Since discussing the demolition of The Rocks, the coastal governments have vocally opposed the removal. Ten regional municipalities and one association have passed resolutions in opposition to

the plan. Many of the opponents also say the shoreline and coastal environments around Southport and Bald Head Island would be the most affected. Some have even predicted serious and negative results as, Southport officials believe, the rocks are important in regulating and maintaining the current depths of the Cape Fear River. Further, Southport, according to coastal engineers, would be at risk for flooding due to storm surges.

Other negative effects in removing the rocks could include increased shoaling in the Cape Fear River and erosion on Bald Head Island’s East Beach. The removal would also shift the boundary of Zeke’s Island Reserve 200 feet east toward the Atlantic Ocean Though locals and community leaders speculate the removal of the rocks will prompt the state to re-open New Inlet and make way for an international port in N.C., no official statements have been issued by the state government on what would happen if the rocks were removed.

SE Winter 2016

Bald Head Lighthouse, or Old Baldy, is the oldest lighthouse still standing in North Carolina. It is the second of three lighthouses that have been built on Bald Head Island since the 18th century to help guide ships past Cape Fear’s shoals. mouth of the Cape Fear river.

Cape Fear Museum The Cape Fear Museum of History and Science is the oldest history museum in North Carolina. Located in Wilmington, the institution was originally founded to preserve Confederate objects and Confederate memories of the Civil War. It now features a collection of more than 52,000 items relating to the history, science, and cultures of the Lower Cape Fear.

Cape Fear Botanical Garden Founded in 1989, Cape Fear Botanical Garden is situated on an impressive 80 acres nestled between the Cape Fear River and Cross Creek just two miles from downtown Fayetteville.

The Garden’s highlights include Camellia, Daylilly and Shade Gardens, a Butterfly Stroll and Children’s Garden, and the Heritage Garden featuring 1886 agricultural structures and a homestead.

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TF t fashion

It’s always sum

The winter coat strug Truth is, there is a possibility Southeasterners might freeze outside along the coastal plain in hoodies, cargo shorts, and flip flops — the confusing coastal attire some seem to chose during the winter months. It’s not the lack of common sense, “Hey, it’s cold out there,” but the lack of proper winter attire to wear outside.

The coast’s winters tends to have bipolar tendencies.

Last December, a few communities woke up to tornado

Story: Nadya Nataly

Leather Jacket

Hoodie/ Windbreaker

(men/women)

(men/women)

Hoodie/Windbreaker (men/women) A hoodie or windbreaker is the lightest and most compact coat option. It’s breathable and in the 65 degree weather it’s ideal to find a good medium between staying comfortable and warm. The hoodie can look stylish and layers well over shirts, blazers and other garments.

Leather Jacket (men/women) Leather jackets are seen especially in the fall season. The catch 26

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Winter 2016

about leather jackets is there are a lot of styles to choose from.

There are soft leather jackets, hard leather jackets, bomber jackets, motorcycle jackets, and car coats. People know it’s fall when they start to see increasing numbers and styles of leather jackets.

For the most part they provide good weather protection. They’re excellent windbreakers, some are water-resistant, and they provide a “je ne sais quoi” bad boy/bad girl look. Add dark jeans, T-shirt with boots and possibly pull off a hipster look — that is

mer somewhere

gle for SENClanders warnings and gray rainy skies.

Now at the top of 2016, January through March weather may call for either flip-flops or a hoodie, as it may be cold in the mornings but lukewarm by lunchtime. Naturally, folks around here have been spotted wearing both. This is the beach — flip-flops come with the uniform.

While Northerners may view the act of wearing anything outside their Montclair coats, scarves, and gloves as

sacrilege in winter, the reality is this: weather is frustrating. The forecast rarely stays the same long enough to consistently wear one specific coat all winter. There are instances where a jacket, a windbreaker, a sweater, a blazer, or pea coat are all worn in a single week. The struggle is real. Unless one has lived at least two winter seasons in the region, there will not be a complete understanding of why the winter attire is inconsistent.

Trench Coat

if you can find dad’s old vintage motorcycle jacket.

Trench Coat The trench coat has become a fashion staple since its original creation for British and French soldiers during World War I. It has morphed into a rainy day go-to coat and is perfect in cool weather. Oftentimes, the trench coat is layered over another jacket as it may not be warm by itself in colder weather. Most coats are made of wool or

But there’s no need to trudge through the weather looking like a dowdy sleeping bag. Brave the cold without having to sacrifice style or having to decide whether to sweat or freeze. Seriously, Southeasterners do tend to sweat on days when the mornings start at 40 degrees only to rise into the 70s by the early afternoon.

Types of winter coats worn in a single Southeastern winter are profiled below and on page 28.

Pea Coat

(men/women)

waxed cotton fabric and of water-resistant/waterproof material. They come in single or double-breasted military style falling right below the knee. A black trench coat coupled with a business suit is a becoming as common in Evertytown, N.C. as on Wall Street, N.Y.C. Colored trench coats also add another dimension to an outfit’s cleverness. Adding jeans and a sweater and draping it over the shoulder to wear as a cape will dress up a casual outfit in a jiffy. There is something Winter 2016

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27

... winter coat struggle

classically chic about wearing a trench coat for an evening look too. It adds a cool factor to just about any outfit.

Pea Coat (men/women) It’s often 40-45 degree weather that calls for a hip length, double breasted coat made of coarse wool — the pea coat. While most pea coats are blue, over the years more colors have surfaced. The pea coat has a collar that can be turned up when the weather gets colder and can also look stylish if layered over blazers and other garments. Though the pea coat is a classic menswear coat, women have adorned themselves in them too. It is a fantastic choice for staying warm and stylish.

Parka Coat Parka Bring on Coat the snow! The parka coat can be described in two words: weather resistant. Lined with fur or faux fur and insulated, it is designed to prevent hypothermia while hunting, skiing, or other outdoor activities. When gearing up for freezing temperatures, the parka is comfortable and extremely warm. The only complaint is it can actually feel heavy and bulky, but one of those furry, face-framing hoods can keep snow from causing havoc on a hairdo or keeping a bald head warm.

Though parkas can be poofy and some say unflattering to a figure, a belted coat will keep you looking slim during the blustery cold.

SE 28

SouthEast North Carolina

Winter 2016

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SE Phantasm

North Carolina

32

Theater life

The stage of the Stein Theater at Wilmington’s Thalian Hall Center for the Performing Arts is a universe unto itself, one where actors and audiences form a complex relationship bound by time and space, belief and artifice. The “players, performers, and portrayers” put it all on the line with each performance, as they enact their ancient masquerade.

Frank Lucas

40

La Grange native Frank Lucas made a beeline for New York and quickly established himself as one of Harlem’s most notorious heroin dealers. What kind of man brags about smuggling dope in the coffins of dead soldiers?

The leader of one of the most notorious international drug gangs ever.

The golf pros are coming!

42

The Eagle Point Golf Club in Wilmington will be the site for the Wells Fargo PGA tour stop next year. This unexpected gift to golf fans in Eastern North Carolina has a reputation for attracting some of the biggest names on the tour, from Phil Mickelson to Tiger Woods.

All the world’s

TF t phantasm

In many ways, the theater stage is a reection of the universe at large. With every production, a new world is born.

indeed a stage Story: Trevor Normile Photos: Belinda Keller (pg. 34-35, 38-39), Trevor Normile

W

hen Einstein’s theories on the reticulation of things were published, what mankind had likely suspected for eons was finally vindicated.

Atoms began to dance in the dreams of the commoner and Mr. Hubble discovered the universe.

More importantly though, humans had proven that every Thing is probably relative to every other Thing.

Thanks to that discovery—or perhaps description of an inward, yet complex and murky truth—the relativity not just of particles and gravity and time, but of non-physical things, has been described as well, from linguistics to the modern view of morality.

Enter Tony Rivenbark, executive director of Thalian Hall, Wilmington.

Mr. Rivenbark is also many other things, none of which, he readily admits, seem to have coalesced into another single person in the same, singular way. If it’s true that a different universe is built every night upon Thalian Hall’s stage, the singular Mr. Rivenbark is the singularity at the center.

“I’m always either in the future or in the past, seldom I’m in the present, except when in the case of On Golden Pond, which is when I’m in another mode entirely, actor mode,” Rivenbark says in his office, a prop fishing hat from his recent

production of On Golden Pond resting nearby.

It was a memorable performance in Thalian Hall’s Stein Theater Oct. 30, not just because he and Suellen Yates’s portrayal of Norman and Ethel Thayer was explosive, but because it was sincere. At 67, Rivenbark is quite a few years Norman Thayer’s junior, but he has the chops to make it work.

On Golden Pond is the story of the Thayers, a longmarried couple in the twilight of their lives, visiting their cabin on Golden Pond. It explores Norman’s estranged relationship with the couple’s daughter, his fear of growing old and the nature of reconciliation. The couple in the play are residents of Wilmington, Delaware. The production’s location in Wilmington, N.C. provides a first lesson in relativity.

“We didn’t change not one word, they’re not from Wilmington, North Carolina, they’re from Wilmington, Delaware,” Rivenbark laughs.

“You as an audience member chose to believe he’s from North Carolina, but we didn’t change a word!”

A native of Warsaw, N.C., Rivenbark’s father ran a Pontiac dealership during a time when, he says, children were mostly left to their own devices during their free time. In the way children often do, Rivenbark says he spent much of his time in his own head, building worlds of his own.

“I was just an odd child, I guess. I did plays in the back yard, I did plays in the garage. I was growing up in the early ’50s, when television was coming around, had one of the first televisions on the block—all the first TVs in Warsaw came from Milford Quinn—he bought a whole bunch of them, sold them off and promptly went out of the TV

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“Yeah, that’s great, it makes you feel good. But the idea I’d forgotten how much I’d enjoyed doing theater ... It’s business. Smart guy,” he remembers.

“Two situational comedies were on television at the time; I Married Joan was a very [popular] one, and there’s a great sequence when she puts on a play for the ladies’ club, but they go to the wrong place. So all the ladies go to one place to do the show, and she arrives with all the scenery and costumes and props at a another place, and she puts on the play by herself.

“And so I used to do that. I’d hang a sheet or whatever and play all the roles. And all the neighborhood kids had to come watch my plays. Or, they were in them.”

Years later, Rivenbark was accepted into UNC-Chapel Hill, but chose to study closer to home in Wilmington. He was just starting college there when he heard presentations from Doug Swink of the school’s drama department and Claude Howell of the art department.

“It wasn’t an epiphany or anything, but I was fascinated with [Thalian Hall]. I was fascinated by the people, without intellectualizing it. I’d found a home.

But only later did I realize what it was,” Rivenbark says.

“From then on, in one way or another, I was involved in theater, all my life. It was interesting, it was exciting. I just liked it.”

Rivenbark remembers his first time in Thalian Hall when he attended auditions while in college. He could do a mean Charleston, he says, which got him a part in a production.

Rivenbark explains that the hall seemed rather shabby in the Sixties, but also rather magnificent. The building, constructed in 1858, survived after the death of the railroad until the interstate reconnected Wilmington with the rest of the state. He remembers that first audition he attended—watching from a balcony, trying to get his bearings.

“I was out of my comfort zone. I like understanding where I am and what I’m seeing. I like building the world and being in it, and that’s what I always did,” he explains, referring to the afternoons in Warsaw, putting on plays for the neighbor kids.

That’s still true, he says, “There is a certain aspect of being in the space and then doing the lines, that is very important to me. It goes back to where we started in this conversation, being right back in my comfort zone.”

It was on the second night of auditions, Rivenbark says, that he allowed himself to get caught up in the spectacle.

34

Now, perhaps due to his long ties to theater, Mr. Rivenbark has a rather poetic way of defining the world. As the manager of the hall, he doesn’t describe the building’s schedule. He describes its “rhythm.” Much of Rivenbark’s life, as he explains it, seems unstuck in time—his own extensive historical research draws him to the past, while his plans for Thalian Hall, again extensive, pull him to the future. It’s on the stage where Mr. Rivenbark thinks in the present—to the point at which he feels comfortable reading from a page during rehearsals.

When he does perform, Rivenbark says part of theater’s

Above photo: Thalian Hall as viewed from its main stage. The historic theater is finally serving the purSouthEast North Carolina

Winter 2016

a of after going off that high and not having a show? s a high that cannot be gotten any other way...”

beauty is that it is so fleeting.

“There’s nothing like it, the exhilaration of coming off a good show and a good performance and a good production, even though it only lasts for a few minutes and people go home. Shows, they live on in people’s minds, even though they don’t last that long,” says Rivenbark, who adds that he believes in documenting performances with photographs.

“Having done On Golden Pond, you see people in the grocery store or in the restaurant at lunch and they say, ‘On Golden Pond was so wonderful, I loved it, it made me cry, it

pose it was built for, says Tony Rivenbark, Thalian Hall Executive Director. The theater was built in 1858.

was so much better than the movie.’

“Yeah, that’s great, it makes you feel good. But the idea of after going off that high and not having a show?

I’d forgotten how much I’d enjoyed doing theater ... It’s a high that cannot be gotten any other way, it cannot be artificially created. Booze won’t do it, drugs won’t do it, nothin’ won’t do it.

“There are roles and moments that were really great to play, they were great to do. But the theater is like most experiences in some ways, which are more pleasurable in retrospect, because you don’t have the pressure of having to do it. And possibly screwing it up.”

And those moments can’t be replicated. Each rendition of the scene in which Norman Thayer admits his memory troubles to his wife—the most powerful moment of the Oct. 30 production and the one in which the terse old man finally drops his guard for just a second— was different, Rivenbark explains. Each inflection, each pause, the energy of the stage and of the audience is different, each and every night.

“A lot of that happens in the moment of the piece and where you’re pulling from and why you’re pulling it that way. In the end, I can’t define it,” he says.

For years, researchers have been toying with the effects of quantum superposition, a complicated term that simply means the state of something very small (quantum) being in more than one place at once (superposition). Researchers have found evidence that, eerily, the act of simply measuring an object, such as a very small particle of energy, affects its position. That means simply observing the world has, at some level, an effect on the world.

It could be argued the same is true of the universe created on stage; the conditions of the stage are directly affected by the state of being observed; a rehearsal and a performance are two different beasts.

Whereas a film can play a thousand times without variation, the interplay between living actors on stage and the living audience in their seats is integral to the process.

Actor Jason Aycock, a frequent performer at Thalian Hall who was interviewed for the second half of this article, states that the filament between audience and actor isn’t just important, it’s integral to the process of creating a universe up on stage. When that filament is broken, that universe breaks down.

“Every single night, it’s going to be a different show,

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35

just because every audience is different … When people put their phones away and just sit and enjoy, they want to be entertained. An audience is going to be with you right up until they understand that this is not how it was supposed to go,” Aycock explains.

The conditions of a stage performance, in many ways, mirror, or at least appear to mirror the conditions under which our universe exists. The stage relies on time and on space; specifically, Rivenbark remembers wondering how the Stein Theater’s space, a small stage with nearly vertical seating, could be used.

“How do we make this work?” he asks. “How does it work for an actor? How do we communicate with each other? … I don’t know how many more things I’m going to produce in there, but I am showing how that space works.”

Gravity, or at least the sensation of what an onlooker might commonly describe as “gravity,” is lent from powerful performances. There are rules. There are three obvious dimensions, something film cannot reproduce, for all its own merits.

“Film is a total illusion that is masquerading as reality. You think of film as being realistic and theater as being fake. But [film] is totally an illusion, what you’re seeing is two-dimensional, and it’s going to play the same way over and over again. It’s just masquerading as reality,” Rivenbark explains.

“Whereas the theater is the exact opposite. It is reality, because real people are on the stage, touching and talking in real time, but they are masquerading as something they are not.”

Rivenbark, whose principal job is to maintain the platform on which these new, unique universes are created, says a production’s structure is built up on details. For example, if a plastic trash can appears in the background of a play about the 18th Century, he feels it is “jarring” to watch as an audience member.

Such an oversight ruins the illusion, he says.

Such an anomaly causes that illusion, that universe up on stage, to open a black hole and in much catastrophe and calamitous spaghettification of matter, pull the production, a universe unto itself, down by its collar.

“It’s the willing suspension of disbelief, the great quote-line of the theater … There is a lie there, but it is real. That lie becomes real to the audience member, if all the pieces are in place, the lie becomes

believable.”

AND WE ARE MERELY PLAYERS There is another, darker side to On Golden Pond.

Over the course of the play, the Thayers are coming to grips with their age in what they know to be the final years of their lives. In a compelling, haunting way, it also seems to examine Norman and Ethel’s way of keeping themselves busy as death creeps behind them in old age.

During the interview, a keychain sitting on Rivenbark’s desk held the key to a Mini Cooper. Though the actor said he heard echoes of his father in Norman Thayer (one of the character’s fishing hats even sat nearby), the Cooper is not a car for those who have nearly given up. That is what the Dodge Stratus was for.

Unlike the dimming star inside Norman Thayer, Tony Rivenbark is a veritable supernova. How could such a polarity have existed in a person, if only for a short time?

A clue may be found inside the personality of stage actors like Jason Aycock, who Rivenbark describes as one of the “most incredibly talented people [he’s] ever known.” Born and raised in Burgaw and a graduate of Mars Hill University, Aycock’s an instructor at Cripple Creek Corner, the studio he grew up in. He also teaches at a dance workshop in Wilmington, aside from his acting and directing.

Aycock’s insights recall the oft-quoted line from Rush’s 1981 single “Limelight,” which paraphrases Shakespeare’s As You Like It. “All the world’s indeed a stage, and we are merely players, performers and portrayers.”

The song was a reaction from the band to their newfound popularity and the stress that came with it. But that line doesn’t refer to the prog-rock trio alone. Life often carries the essence of theater: The election, the makeup before work, the refusal to let the Joneses see us bleed—the utter fireworks and drama between the night crew of the local McDonald’s, like lye-drenched lines from a soap opera.

But there’s a difference—put the Joneses or the night crew in costume in front of a few hundred seated, quiet patrons, and the spectacle that follows may not necessarily be enjoyable to watch.

And yet, people like Aycock, of Wilmington, do

“It used to be that Thalian Hall was one of the only places to d there have been so many people who want to perform and b places have sprung up” like the new fine arts cent 36

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Jason Aycock, an actor and director, says what draws him to theater work is the ability to affect other people from the stage. It’s a large amount of work, he explains, incurring a cost of both physical and mental energy. Regardless, Aycock plans to continue working in the field “until his knees give out.”

it night after night. Of course, Aycock isn’t a member of a restaurant night crew; he’s a trained actor and director who performs at Thalian Hall and other places.

Aycock’s persona is chummy and affable; he accommodates strange questions about psychology in Thalian Hall’s dark theater lobby days before the Cucalores Film Festival.

The actor has a disarming but confident way about him— he has a talent for posing for photos, but his statements don’t smack with vanity.

Functionally though, there is something that allows Aycock and others like him to do something not everyone can do.

“Every single night, it’s going to be a different show, just because every audience is different,” he says.

“I’ve always been a fairly confident person and my mother [Nancy Aycock] will say that outright. But there have been times she made sure I had the reality check as well. She’s like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’”

His mother’s support, “cautious support” as he put it, is

do something, that and Kenan Auditorium over at UNC-W, but because of how frequently the stage has been occupied, other ter at Cape Fear Community, College in particular.

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Above left and right: Tony Rivenbark plays the hurting (though humorous) Norman Thayer in “On Golden Pond,” presented in Thalian Hall’s Stein Theater. Center: Suellen Yates, as Ethel Thayer, cradles Norman Thayer’s (Rivenbark’s) head after his brush with death.

not ill-founded. Nancy Aycock is a veteran of the performing arts herself, and son grew up spending a large amount of time in her dance studio. But it was the path that Mr. Aycock would take, health insurance be damned.

“I think it was probably the end of high school when I was looking to go to college, and what I wanted to do. At Mars Hill, I was halfway through my first semester when I declared my major, because I’d found something that I loved. It’s not lucrative by any means,” Aycock laughs.

Acting, like any on-stage gig, doesn’t come with health insurance, typically. The actor says he makes a living with his skills, though that path comes with its share of work.

Aycock says he once did 10 productions in a single year; the theater community in Wilmington has survived even as film jobs left the area after tax credits for film production went away in 2014.

He credits much of that continued activity in the theater community to local colleges and their steady supply of young people looking for a mode of expression. Now, Aycock estimates about 15 theater organizations operate in the area.

“It used to be that Thalian Hall was one of the only places to do something, that and Kenan Auditorium over at UNC-W, but there have been so many people who want to perform and because of how frequently the stage has been occupied, other places have sprung up,” he explains, referring to the new fine arts center at Cape Fear Community College in particular.

“I think this area has certainly grown, become more active. It’s always going to be an active area, because ... you always have an influx of people, whether because of the college or [businesses like] PPD, which brought more people in, more jobs. Whether it’s they or their families who want to do something, the way Wilmington changes has helped the theater community thrive.”

Much like Mr. Rivenbark, Aycock got his start acting in playing make-believe as a child. His fixation was on the process of storytelling, now in productions like the musical “Mary Poppins,” put on last summer by the Opera House Theatre 38

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Company.

And Aycock makes no bones about the amount of work involved. His goal is to affect change, he says.

“I think ‘entertainment’ covers the happy side. My wife loves dramas because she likes that angsty, hurt feeling, and I’m more a happy-go-lucky guy. But it’s about affecting people. We lost a member of our community a while back, his name was Don Ansell. They held a memorial here and the place was packed, and everyone had a story about him, because he had affected them, being behind the scenes or on the stage or just having seen a show with him in it,” he remembers.

“And I think that’s beautiful, being able to be changed by what you’ve just seen. That’s why I love doing it.”

But in the pursuit of that high that Tony Rivenbark believes is unique to the stage, Mr. Aycock and his contemporaries must also pay an emotional tax, he explains.

“In my experience, it either takes complete confidence or no confidence, which is a strange dichotomy, but you have to be willing to put yourself out there,” he says.

“A lot of times, to portray a character that is very damaged, it takes a very damaged person to portray that.”

In his experience, personal trauma can inform an actor’s performance. Often, people with less self-confidence find more comfort in darker, more hurt characters.

A self-identified extrovert, Aycock says he sometimes feels the remnants of his characters after a performance. He recently portrayed the part of the Emcee during a production of “Cabaret.” The Emcee’s part is that of a showman in a musical that serves as metaphor for the rise of Nazi Germany.

“Being able to put yourself in those situations, especially night after night, I’ve seen some people have a harder time getting out of it … By the end of Cabaret, [the Emcee] is defeated. There were plenty of nights after the show when people would say, ‘Hey! you wanna go out?’ and I’d say, ‘No, I’d rather just go home and read a book,’ or something that can give me a chance to re-energize myself.

“If you’d asked me at the beginning of the show, I’d

have gone. By the end of the show, it’s a much different story. It takes a toll on anybody who’d be doing it, but especially for a person who’s doing it night after night.”

Aycock says talking helps, too.

The ability to strike up a conversation bolsters his confidence, he says, or perhaps it’s the other way round.

The stress of a performance is also owed to the fact that the audience, whom Mr. Rivenbark and Mr. Aycock have already attested, are fully involved with and inextricable from the show, are also part of a contract:

they’ve purchased tickets and eaten dinner and arrived on time and are sitting quietly. The cast can’t let them down.

“When you’re performing and, you know, needing that assurance of what you’re doing is right for your character, it can be difficult, very difficult. You want to entertain people, you want to affect people with the story you’re telling. If you screw that up, it makes it harder for people to enjoy it,” he yields, though it seems Aycock probably doesn’t let such things get to him.

“I think it’s interesting, because even in the Instagram mentality we have, and the social media we have to catch something that goes horribly wrong, there could be a lot more actors worried ‘Oh, this is going to flop and it’s going to be everywhere.’”

Perhaps there is a brighter side however. As Aycock stated earlier in this story, the audience is with the actor, right up until they know something’s gone awry—a terrifying proposition. But it’s not so bad, they’ll understand, he says. How? “Because they are rooting for you.”

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The life of a theater

Thalian Hall Executive Director Tony Rivenbark puts the old theater, larger-than-life as it is, in realistic terms.

He says Thalian Hall isn’t billed as the “oldest” of such or the “first” of anything, just “one of the oldest and most beautiful historic theaters in America.”

Rivenbark says, “We can stand by that, we don’t have to prove nothin.’ We are that.”

Rivenbark, a self-professed lover of history, spoke extensively during our cover feature interview on Thalian Hall’s history. The author of the theater’s entry in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, he is also a nationally-recognized theater historian.

Thalian Hall was built in 1858 in a $50,000 (about $1.4 million in today’s money) project to knock down the old academy building and construct a new city hall and theater.

Things started out well, with

about 85 performances a season in 1858, but by around 1860 the Thalian Association could no longer pay rent. In that year, the association gave up control and the next 75 years saw private entrepreneurs running the hall.

In 1936, the responsibility for Thalian Hall reverted to the city, and two years later a grant from the Public Works Administration allowed renovations to begin, though a wall collapse sparked a debate over Thalian Hall’s fate.

The building’s defenders prevailed; work was completed in 1940 with the Thalian Association back at the theater’s helm.

The next few years brought some success with events held to entertain visiting soldiers.

By the end of 1946 though, problems were found in the theater’s balconies and the building

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was condemned.

However, a second engineering study gave the theater yet another lease on life. In 1949, voters passed a bond and the theater reopened after two years of work.

In the 1960s, the need to restore and preserve the theater was identified. In 1973, the a fire broke out in the historic theater, probably caused by faulty wiring. Money was raised by the community to restore the theater. Two years later, the theater reopened with the Thalian Hall Commission overseeing it.

In 1981, Rivenbark was hired as executive director of the building.

“It became clear to me that the only way to get this theater right was that more people had to use it and more people had to want it,” he says. ... it had to be important beyond the area.”

“It’s huge. It’s doing today exactly what it was built for in 1858.”

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TF t phantasm

the Haint of Harlem Story: Trevor Normile

Forty years ago this year, a

And so Lucas set off for New York City to escape the likely retribution simple La Grange boy was sentenced awaiting him down South. Through to seven decades in prison for his part mostly petty and sometimes violent in a drug empire that crushed New crimes, Lucas caught the attention York’s Harlem neighborhood under of famous Harlem gangster Ellsworth its weight.

“Bumpy” Johnson.

The former drug kingpin who It’s unclear from the news accounts claims to have smuggled heroin in of Lucas’s life whether dead soldiers’ coffins he had acted as Bumpy didn’t serve much of Johnson’s lieutenant (as that sentence though.

Lucas claims), or was His beginning came simply a low-level operative in Lenoir County and in the gangster’s crew (as his flight up North in Johnson’s widow, Mayme pursuit of glory—and claimed), but the fact profit—churned out a remains that after Bumpy man on the other side Johnson’s death in 1968, described by one writer Lucas’s fortunes changed in with New York Magazine a hurry. as a “one-man, hell-bent Bumpy’s death left a crime wave.” vacuum in Harlem, and In that interview, Lucas’s aspirations of Frank Lucas dubbed becoming “Donald Trump himself the “Haint of rich” finally had room to Harlem.” mugshot materialize.

Various sources That year also brought indicate Lucas was born Lucas his—and Harlem’s—biggest Sept. 9, 1930 in an area that he claims connection to the heroin trade. Solwas inhospitably impoverished, espediers from Vietnam returned home cially for black residents. with heroin addictions from their The common story is that his life exposure to the drug in Southeast of crime began after Lucas, age 6, saw Asia. If it could get fit and hardened his 13-year-old cousin murdered by soldiers hooked, the dope could get Ku Klux Klan members for allegedly the civilians hooked, too. This was “eyeballing a white woman.” during the heroin explosion of the In one account, Lucas remembers late 1960s; by the early Seventies, seeing the boy bound up with rope every major U.S. city was dealing and executed with a shotgun. with heroin.

Though interviews conducted So, Lucas bypassed the system—as over the years don’t seem to agree in, buying marked up heroin from the on whether Lucas was 16 or 17 Mafia—to get purer, cheaper stuff from years old when he left town, he Thailand. claims to have fled North Carolina On a trip to Bangkok that year, Lucas after he was caught having sex with meets Ike Atkinson, another Carolina his boss’s daughter while working as boy and a native of Goldsboro who, a truck driver for a pipe company. incidentally, had married a cousin of After cold-cocking the man with a Lucas’s. pipe, Lucas is believed to have stoAt the time, Atkinson ran a bar and len $400 from the business before whorehouse for African American solsetting the building on fire.

Frank Lucas,

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diers and was already in business selling heroin to customers.

Atkinson’s supplier, a Rolls-Roycedriving Thai man named Luetchi Rubiwat (called “007” by Lucas), operated hundreds of acres of poppy fields in the Golden Triangle, where workers in caves refined the plants into heroin.

It was during a trip to Luetchi’s poppy fields that Lucas was able to purchase 132 kilograms of nearly pure heroin for just $4,200 a kilo, less than a tenth the Mafia’s rate of $50,000 per kilo.

Once the operation was set, it was then that Lucas and Atkinson infamously, if perhaps only in legend, used the coffins of dead soldiers to transport the heroin back the United States.

Lucas states in many interviews that he flew in a North Carolina carpenter to create large government-issue coffins with false bottoms to hide the drugs. Atkinson maintained that the duo shipped the heroin inside furniture, not coffins. Both men have denied having sowed the drugs into dead soldiers, as was rumored at one time.

Lucas even claims to have smuggled heroin aboard a plane being used by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger during a visit to Asia. Lucas claimed in an interview he and Atkinson knew the cook on the plane.

Back home in New York, smack poured down 116th Street in Harlem, between 7th and 8th Avenues, the area controlled by the Country Boys, a gang made up of Lucas’s family and closest associates. The gangster’s five brothers even ventured up to New York from La Grange to get a piece of the action.

In one biography, Lucas said he donned a wig and fake beard and rode around in a beaten-up sedan to watch the deals go down on the street. He claimed to have made a million dollars a day in fanatic heroin frenzies that, according to an interview 16 years ago, were so big that buses had to be re-rout-

Photo: Attributed to Klaus Lehnartz

Men walk the streets of Harlem. Frank Lucas is one of the men responsible for the heroin epidemic of the 1970s. Lucas, born in La Grange, N.C. in 1930, claims to have smuggled smack from the East in soldiers’ coffins.

ed around them.

Lucas meanwhile mostly wore casual clothes in public, to keep from drawing attention. With the money rolling in, multiple sources indicate the gangster become involved in business investments and even cattle breeding with his “Paradise Valley” ranch back home in N.C. He even helped fund a defunct blaxploitation film called “The Ripoff,” which was supposed to include real life gangsters playing themselves.

But the shield of ongoing corruption in the New York police protecting Lucas’s operation was about to fall.

In 1975, the Special Narcotics Task Force raided Lucas’s home in Teaneck, New Jersey and one of the Country Boys broke under interrogation. Detective Richard “Ritchie” Roberts pursued a case against Lucas; he and 42 others were arrested.

In the aftermath of his trial, Lucas was

sentenced to 70 years in prison, though it was reported the gangster turned informant on members of the operation, police and others—including Ike Atkinson.

One hundred fifty cases ensued, including three-quarters of the New York DEA and 30 members of Lucas’s family. Lucas’s sentence was reduced to 15 years. He was then released in 1981.

Lucas has repeatedly denied ratting on his associates and says he never testified against them.

Then in 1984, Lucas’s former captor came to his aid after he was busted trying to exchange an ounce of heroin and $13,000 for a kilogram of cocaine.

Ritchie Roberts defended Lucas, who was sentenced to just seven years in prison. Multiple sources indicate the two maintained a friendship following Lucas’s eventual release in 1991.

For the next few years, Lucas mostly stayed out of the limelight. It was reported in secondary sources that he had Winter 2016

been involved with Yellow Brick Roads, a non-profit started by Lucas’s daughter, Francine Lucas-Sinclair, which was intended to support the children of incarcerated parents. The website for the non-profit is now defunct.

Then, in 2007, “American Gangster” was released. The box-office hit starred Denzel Washington in a biography that Lucas and others have contended took liberties with the story of his rise and fall, though Lucas has stated that he enjoyed the film.

Frank Lucas went from rags to riches in a short time—from fleeing small town North Carolina to crippling heroin-hungry Harlem.

Lucas believes, according to his New York Magazine interview, that it was Southern charm that pulled him through so much violence and rascality.

“People like the f--- out of me.”

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Eagle Point to host Wells F

Quail Hollow’s special gift from the Professional Golf Association has given golf fans in eastern North Carolina a rare treat.

The Charlotte Golf Club will host the 2017 PGA Championship and has passed the torch of its annual Wells Fargo tour stop to Eagle Point Golf Club in Wilmington.

Tour pros will battle on the course May 1-4, 2017.

Casual to avid fans won’t want to miss the star-studded field that nearly always shows up for the Wells Fargo Tournament, since it is the final tune-up before the Players Championship. The Players features the top 50 players and the highest purse — $10 million — on the tour.

While Wilmington only gets the event for a year, it is a cultural sports event for fans and an

economic boost for businesses in the greater Wilmington area. Eagle Point is in the Porter’s Neck section of the Port City.

The last professional event in Wilmington — The Azalea Open‚ was at the Cape Fear Country Club in 1971.

“I’m just a fairway Joe fan who plays eight to 10 times a year, but I won’t miss a chance to see this since it’s basically in my backyard,” said Wrightsville Beach resident James Crumpton, a 10-handicap golfer.

Tournament organizers expect about 30,000 spectators during the four-day tournament, which could reap $40 to $60 million for the local economy.

Local and regional charities will also benefit.

The Wells Fargo event, held at Quail Hollow since 2003 has a reputation for attracting the biggest names on the tour, from current stars such as Rory Mcllory, Jordan Speith, Jason Day, Dustin Johnson and Zach Johnson to established veterans such as Phil Mickelson and Tiger

Story: Michael Jaenicke

20

The year big time golf 42

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Fargo PGA event next year Woods to fairway favorites such as Bubba Watson, Ernie Els and John Daly. Any or all of those may tee up at Eagle Point in May 2017.

“I’ll be in golfing heaven,” said Lisa Caldwell, who played golf in college and lives in Wrightville Beach.

“What my family found when they went to a PGA event was an experience that was beyond their wildest expectations. And in a way it changed or hooked them.”

Billy Anderson, PGA professional at Eagle Point who has served on the Carolinas PGA Board of Directors for the past eight years, understands how golf connects people.

“This is incredible news for our state, and eastern North Carolina.”

Anderson said the connection between Eagle Point President Bobby Long and Johnny Harris, his counterpart at Quail Hollow, impressed upper level PGA officials.

Long oversees the Wyndham Championships in Greensboro, while Harris has been at the helm of the Wells Fargo Championships since its inception.

“They have a high golf IQ, and know how to put on a tournament, “Anderson said. “They get the total package. They each have an event in North Carolina and now they’re going to be sharing one together.”

Lee Patterson, communications and media director for the Wells Fargo Championships, said the Port City’s image will be enhanced locally and blasted nationally.

“It’s going to put Wilmington on the map through The Golf Channel and then the final two days on CBS,” Patterson said.

It has already created a buzz.

“Everyone, and I mean everyone, is

Photos: Contributed

17

returns to Wilmington Eagle Point Golf Club in Wilmington will host the 2017 Wells Fargo Tournament, the first professional golf event to be held in the city since 1971.

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excited and people are jumping at the chance to be involved in a professional event.”

Patterson said it’s not too early to buy tickets, volunteer or reserve a tent or suite, which can include food, bar service and other immunities.

He said more than 2,000 volunteers are used for the Wells Fargo at Quail Hollow.

Three-day practice badges are $30.

Single-day tickets are $50 to $60. A week long badge is $165.

Parking and round-trip shuttle service from tournament authorized lots will be free.

The payout for the players is a cool $7.1 million.

Eagle Point was created by iconic golf designer Tom Fazio in 2000.

The par-72 course with 7,268 yards of Bermuda grass hit the Golf Digest America’s Top 100 list in 2009 and has slid off its prestigious greens.

The course layout features more hazards than a Stephen King novel, tough approaches to its greens and shots off the mark are rarely forgivable offenses.

For tickets or to volunteer for the tournament, call (704) 554-8101 or visit www.wilmingtonwellsfargochampionship.com.

Many holes are picturesque.

Undulating terrain and elevated greens are hot spots for the third and fourth holes.

Water and sand are shot-killing monsters everywhere and especially on No. 7 and No. 9, No. 16, No. 17 and No. 18 are each

400-plus yards and better suited for golfers to get to the green with a wedge than a wood.

The last two holes play toward the ocean and into the wind most days. A closing birdie is possible, but only with three well-played shots to a green guarded by a marsh.

Additionally, there is a wonderful nine hole par-3 course where golfers can practice navigating balls into secured greens.

Nearly every tee box has a stunning view.

Tour pros Webb Simpson, Bill Haas and Carl Pettersson, who are club members, love the variety that Fazio built into the course.

The first eight holes are reminiscent of the Sandhills of North Carolina, while the next few are more S.C. Lowcountryinspired.

Marsh lines the left side of the 431yard 9th, with a drive from the back tees having to carry a good portion of the hazard. Perhaps the prettiest view on the course is from the elevated tee on the 186-yard 10th, taking in the marsh and the river behind the green all the way to

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one of Wilminga recent N.C. Golf ton’s bridges.

Panel Top 100 poll The 412-yard (six of the top 10 11th is the course’s are in the Pinehurst only true dogarea), pushed past leg, with a majescourses in Raleigh, tic 130-year-old Greensboro, and hackberry tree at several in the Sand the outside corner Hills to obtain the providing a perfect tournament. aiming point. BirdThroughout ie chances are few Tour pros (from left) Webb Simpson, Bill Haas and Carl Pettersson, who are the years the and far between on Eagle Point Golf Club members, love the variety that designer Tom Fazio event has helped the back, the best built into the course. raise more than one coming on the $18 million for downhill par-five No. 12.

PGA Commissioner Tim Finchem Champions for Education.

Even so, PGA tour players will find said he attended his first professional And secretly there are Cape Fear ways to reach the clubhouse with much event in Wilmington when he was 8 area residents that feel Eagle Point can lower scores than are turned in by club years old. make its case for a regular stop on the members. “I got to see Arnold Palmer for the first PGA tour. “That’s the beauty of the game,� time live,� Finchem said during the press “Shhh,� Crumpton said. “Let’s hold Caldwell said. “I have an 8-handicap but conference to announce the Wells Fargo that talk until everyone sees this course to see touring pros struggle like we do Championships are in Wilmington for and the beauty of the city and area. and then put up fantastic numbers and a year. “I’m doubly excited and looking Hey, it’s tough to get on the tour, but woo the crowd.. man, that’s just golf at its forward to being there in 2017.� this may be as close to an audition as best. I really can’t wait.�

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The Banging of t Keeping the Drago

TF t phantasm

Emerging from his lair once a year to wreck havoc on the tiny fishing village of Oriental, the Dragon saunters forth to the clanking of pots and pans and the yells of the raucous crowd ringing in the new year.

Legend has it that the Dragon was first sighted back in 1962. It made its debut by marching around the streets and bothering dogs while delighting neighbors and then made an appearance at the Rotary Club’s New Year’s Eve Dance.

The Dragon returned every year for the next 10 years, when suddenly he was reported missing. Like a

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he Pots and Pans n at bay in Oriental phoenix rising from the ashes, a new Dragon soon took to the streets. He has been content to limit his forays to New Year’s Eve when he makes two brief appearances on Hodges Street.

Early in the evening children of all ages await the first sign of the colorful beast and begin to bang pots or blow noisemakers in an effort to keep the dragon at bay. Hearty visitors and townspeople (or those who own long underwear) wait patiently in the cold for the second sighting of the Dragon near midnight.

Photos: Todd Wetherington

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SE People

North Carolina

What it means to be ‘family’ Family, in its simplest definition, is two or more people who share goals and values and have long-term commitments to one another.

Family is one of the most cherished aspects of the military lifestyle. Fort Bragg recognizes the sacrifices and commitments made by military families each year by naming a “Fort Bragg Family of the Year.” Out of 18 families nominated, the family of Sgt. William Taylor, a soldier with the 18th Field

Artillery Brigade’s 3rd Battalion, 27th Field Artillery Regiment— Taylor, his wife, Marsharee, and their four children, Javian, 10, Marshawn, 8, Michael, 5, and Jaxson, 1— were chosen for the award. Their selection was announced in December at the Main Post Chapel.

Families are nominated based on strength of family and involvement in the unit and the community.

Continued on page 65

Information and photo courtesy of Hope Myers / Paraglide The Fort Bragg Family of the Year Ceremony happened on Dec. 3 at the Main Post Chapel. The top five families were presented with awards. The Family of the Year was Sgt. William Taylor, 18th Abn. Corps, 18th FA Bde., 3-27 FAR, and his wife, Marsharee, and children Javian, Marshawn, Michael and Jaxson.

New superintendant at Hammocks Beach State Park Sarah Kendrick, a veteran ranger, was named superintendent of Hammocks Beach State Park in Onslow County in December. Kendrick, a native of Jacksonville, succeeds Paul Donnelly, who retired earlier this year.

The park is also expecting a major donation. Jacksonville businessman Jonathan A. Popkin has begun the process to donate Dudley Island, a 450-acre island to the park between Bear Island and Emerald Isle, according the the N.C. Division of Parks and Recreation.

Kendrick graduated from N.C. State University in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in parks and recreation management, with concentration in marine and coastal resources. Having worked seasonally at Hammocks Beach and Hemlock Bluffs

Nature Preserve, she joined the state parks system full time in 2003 as a ranger at Goose Creek State Park. She moved back to Hammocks Beach in 2005 and has guided the park’s natural resource efforts. Kendrick is certified in environmental education and holds a captain’s license.

Hammocks Beach State Park was established in 1961 and now encompasses 1,155 acres. It recorded 178,376 visitors in 2014.

The new donation is expected in three phases, with about 150 acres donated at a time through 2017. “It’s primary value is habitat,” Sam Bland of the Coastal Federation said. “It’s really a complex of marsh islands in a maze of tidal creeks.”

North Carolina Natural and Cultural Resources photo

Bagging a 695-lb. bear

Contributed photo

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It was big — by any standard.

And if Cody Brown of Kenansville took the time to look closely, that bear might have scared him out of the woods.

The 21-year-old knew one thing — the beast wasn’t about to run or hide. “It was an adrenaline rush for sure,” said Brown. “North Carolina has some of the biggest black bears around. You’ve just got to know where to find them.”

Brown, hunting partner Patrick Byrd and their dogs picked up the scent of a bear on a hunt Nov. 11 between Kenansville and Warsaw. Byrd sent Brown in the direction of the dogs, which had gotten a headstart for the hunt. But no one was expecting the appearance of a 695-pound bear.

“The dogs ran for about 30 minutes and I don’t think the bear ever moved,” Brown said. “But he SouthEast North Carolina

Winter 2016

wasn’t scared.” When Brown got close, he hit the ground and began crawling on his belly.

“I was probably 10 to 20 feet away when I saw it,” Brown said. He reacted quickly, squeezing the trigger of his .45-.70-caliber guide rifle to fell the bear. Brown fired a second shot as a precaution.

“They are a lot meaner after they are wounded. I got excited after the second shot,” Brown said. “That’s when the real rush started.”

It took a small troop to carry the bear from its home.

“Eight or nine people picked him up and put him on top of the dog box on back of the truck,” Brown said. It was weighed by Deanna Noble, N.C. Wildlife Commission’s technical assistant biologist, who used two scales to weigh the bear. Bears this size are extremely uncommon in Southeastern North Carolina.

Brown is having a full-body mount made of the bear. “I may have to construct a building to put him in,” he said.

From Japan to a ‘living treasure’ in N.C. “I believe my inspiration is rooted in my Japanese aesthetic background which often reflects nature in art,” says Hiroshi Sueyoshi, an accomplished artist whose pottery and sculpture has wowed North Carolinians for more than 40 years. The former artist-in-residence at the Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington says, “My work depicts landscapes, movement, and harmony between nature and human forms.

I enjoy creating tension between inside and outside spaces, which draws me to the challenge of creating vessels as sculptural forms.” He now works out of his own studio in Wilmington.

A native of Tokyo, Japan, Sueyoshi studied at Tokyo Aeronautical College and Ochanomizu Design Academy prior to serving an apprenticeship in Mashiko, Japan in 1968. He came to the United States and North Carolina in 1971 to help design and build Humble Mill Pottery in Asheboro.

After further study in Virginia, Sueyoshi returned to North Carolina in 1973. He worked at Seagrove Pottery as a production potter and at Sampson Community College as a pottery instructor. He was a visiting artist at Wilson and

On track for a career as Judge Advocate General Not every high school athlete could imagine that a commitment to fitness and academics would lead to a career that includes world travel and lifestyle perks few get to enjoy.

Former South Columbus High School quarterback Jimmie Bellamy Jr. not only imagines it, he lives it.

The Tabor City native completed Air Force Commissioned Officer Training—the first step in a Judge Advocate General career—last month in Alabama. Through physical conditioning, training, and academic leadership studies, Commissioned Officer Training candidates are transformed into officers and leaders of moral character in the United States Air Force.

To be selected for the highly competitive program, Bellamy’s BA degree from UNC Chapel Hill and law degree from N.C. Central University were necessary.

Contributed photo “Although strong academic credentials were important,” Bellamy said, “board members considered an applicant’s demonstrated leadership skills, work experience, quality of character, ability to overcome adversity, motivation, cultural expertise, performance in an interview, and public service records.”

Continued on page 65

Cape Fear Community Colleges through the N.C. Arts Council.

Sueyoshi has exhibited nationally and internationally.

His works are in many private, corporate and institutional collections around the country including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute.

His recent exhibit Contributed photos “Door Woman” is part of a “Venerated Surfaces,” collection by Hiroshi Sueyoshi with Fritzi Huber housed at UNC Wilmington. was at New Elements Gallery in downtown Wilmington. Sueyoshi has a current exhibit, “Rock Garden,” at the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama.

He’s been featured in a number of publications, including the Washington Post and Our State magazine among others. Honors include being named a “North Carolina Living Treasure” at UNC Wilmington in 2006.

Rolling up the championships He’s a little rough, sometimes a bit gruff, but always ready. Wallace-Rose Hill High School coach Joey Price led the Bulldogs football program to its fifth state championship with a 48-28 win over Mitchell County on December 12 in Winston-Salem. Four of those titles have come under Price’s leadership, back-toback in 2009 and 2010, then again in 2014 and 2015. That’s a remarkable feat few coaches ever achieve.

What’s more, the Bulldogs have been in the state championship game seven times in the past fifteen years. Price also has won or shared six conference championships in seven seasons here, and has won 15 in 19 years overall. His other four teams finished in second place. His Bulldog teams have won 92 and lost only 14, a winning percentage of .868. As a head coach overall, his teams have won 223 games and lost just 41 (.845).

Price came to Wallace-Rose Hill in 2009 after a successful 12-year stint at South Columbus High School in Tabor City. He is a disciple of late coach Jack Holley, and had no qualms about taking over the program that Holley had led to three state-title games in 16 years.

Price also brought something else to Winter 2016

WRH: He and wife Jerilou organized Duplin County’s first Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter and have brought speakers through that effort to the Teachey school such as former Florida State football coaching icon Bobby Bowden.

After this most recent championship game, Price quashed local rumors that he might step down as WRH coach. “I’m a Bulldog,” he said, “and I plan to be a Bulldog. Period.”

A lot of people in southern Duplin County are mighty happy about that.

Duplin Times photo/ Zach Morgan II

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TF t murmurs

Fiction by Todd Wetherington

In the years to come, the two friends would question the details of the events that happened over that final eighth grade semester in late spring, when they were yet children. But there was one thing they would always agree on: it was Martin who first suggested, out loud, that they burn the town.

The idea grew among them slowly, somewhere along the path they walked home through the woods behind their middle school each day.

“The bastards have been lying to us,” Martin told them, gripping a book with an engraving of a horse and an Indian ceremonial headdress on its worn, grey cover.

Joey pushed his glasses up on his nose and stared at Martin. Hunched forward against the weight of his backpack, he clutched his gratified sketchbook against his side and waited.

“Well, are you going to tell us which bastards you’re going on about?” asked Amanda, adjusting her overalls and glaring down at Martin with her slightly askew, jadeflecked eyes.

“What they told us about the Tuscarora last semester, that they were relocated. It’s all crap — they were massacred,” Martin stated calmly, jutting the weathered book out at his friends.

Amanda leaned her head back and slowly took in the bare winter branches of the pines and scrub oaks overhead. “Oh God, not this 50

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again.”

The corner of Joey’s upper lip twitched slightly, a nervous tick he’d acquired at some point during the sixth grade. He hadn’t moved since Martin first spoke.

“Well,” Joey asked evenly, “what have you found out now?”

“Learn your history. You are the sons and daughters of murderers and thieves. We are here to avenge the spirits of those whose voices your ancestors silenced. You’ll never see us coming.”- excerpt from the “Hellion Manifesto” At Martin’s insistence, the three met the following Saturday, gathering at the small lake hidden in an overgrown vacant lot behind Amanda’s grandparents’ trailer. Climbing aboard carefully, they set out on the crude wooden raft some maniac had fashioned out of wooden pallets, duct tape, and plastic tarping.

Martin, dressed in baggy camo gear and black combat boots, stood straddle-legged in the middle of the raft and read from the book he had brandished several days earlier.

“The Tuscarora, an Iroquoian-speaking people, migrated south from the Great Lakes area in some ancient time and occupied this area for hundreds of years before any Europeans arrived. They resisted encroachment by the Europeans, rising up in resistance in 1712.”

“You’ve been going on about this all year,” Amanda moaned. She had stretched her lean, boyish frame out flat across one side of the raft, and was staring up into the featureless mid-morning sky. The cutoff jeans shorts she favored on weekends covered her pale, scabbed knees. “I think something snapped in your brain when you turned

13. I’ve got drum practice at two, so hurry up if you’ve got anything worth hearing.”

“Keep reading,” Joey told Martin, rocking back and forth as the raft swayed beneath his crossed legs.

Martin read at length about the early European settlers of their hometown, how they defeated the Tuscarora after one of the bloodiest uprisings in the state. How the native people were then removed from their homes and forced to settle in another county.

“So you see,” Martin said darkly, tossing the book at Joey’s feet. “That’s what we’re up against.

The descendents of the very same people that took the land from the Indians and then killed them when they complained, they’re the ones who lie to us in history class, who watch you like a thief every time you walk into a store, who shove your face in the dirt and then laugh about it; who bark meaningless orders at you night and day!”

“Now the question is” he said slowly, his breath ragged like he’d just sprinted up a flight of stairs, “what are we going to do about it?”

While Martin spoke, Amanda raised herself up on one elbow and gazed at him with a mixture of wonder and genuine concern, her eyes narrow and the first ghost traces of crow’s feet rising at their corners.

Sitting down the sketch pad where he had inked out a rough, heroic likeness of Martin reading from the book, Joey pushed his glasses up with one finger and blinked.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Martin crouched beside a battered leather briefcase he had brought aboard the raft. Having ignored Amanda’s pleas earlier in the day to tell her what was inside, he now took his time fingering the lock’s combination into place, unlatching the metal clasps, and pulling the top open.

“Oh, for God’s sakes,” Amanda huffed, as she reached past Martin and pried out the contents of the briefcase.

Martin made no move to stop her, but instead crouched patiently as she looked over the sheets of plain notebook paper covered in Martin’s careful, almost feminine script.

When she raised her eyes from the paper, Amanda looked directly into Martin’s clinched, expectant face.

“Are you serious? What exactly are we supposed to do with this?” she asked, trying to balance the fear and anger that had suddenly risen in her stomach.

“It’s our manifesto. We’re the Hellions now,” Martin told her, something like a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “I’ve got everything planned. Like you said, I’ve

been thinking about this since first semester. All we need to do is go over the details.”

“What plan?” Joey asked, trying to rise from the raft and falling back, catching himself just before toppling into the thick, algae-caked water.

“Don’t worry,” said Martin, slowly closing the briefcase and rising up to his full height. “It’ll be perfect.”

“You taught us lies in school, but the truth will always prevail. The blood and bones are heaped beneath your department stores and pretty houses. Watch them burn!!” excerpt from the “Hellion Manifesto” It was like a game, at first. That’s what Amanda told herself , as she and Joey walked or rode their bikes through town in the weeks after the meeting at the lake. Martin’s plan called for them to place the “Hellion Manifesto” in as many store windows, staple it to as many phone poles, and slide it into the menus of as many restaurants as possible.

But they must never, under any circumstances, be caught in the act.

The second part of the plan was simple. Each member would begin pilfering cans of food and bottled water from their homes, a few at a time to avoid detection, and collect them in the bushes beside the partially collapsed, out of service drainage pipe Martin had discovered 50 yards beyond the lake, hidden beneath a canopy of kudzu and fire ant mounds. According to Martin, the pipe opened up into a tunnel large enough to fit an entire family, and led to extraordinary chambers and yawning precipices like those found in prehistoric caves.

Martin also asked them to bring other items: 1 large kitchen knife each; an AM/FM radio; three blankets; matches; all the money they had saved up and any they could pilfer from their parents.

Further instructions would be forthcoming by way of cassette tapes left under the roots of a pair of intertwined maple trees that grew near a ditch bank at the school’s southern perimeter.

“I know it’s dumb, but this is actually kind of fun. At least it gives me something to think about besides my brother’s court date,” Amanda acknowledged one day, as she and Joey walked home through the woods after school.

Martin had decided that he shouldn’t be seen with them for an indeterminate period, not even at school.

But hunched over the tape player in the school’s band

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TF t murmurs room a month after the plan was set in motion, their heads bent to catch Martin’s instructions, Amanda looked up into Joey’s wide, wet eyes and asked, in a quiet child’s voice, “What are we doing?”

“Quiet,” he hissed back testily. “I’m trying to listen.”

“I’m not a savage. I’m not one of those psychopath kids who shoot up schools. I act in the name of justice. Maybe the history books will lie about what I’ve done, but somebody will remember me, and carry on the fight.”-note found in Martin Long’s school locker by police.

The night of the raid, during the final week of spring break, Martin met them at the entrance to the drainage pipe, where he’d lit a fire inside the remnants of a rusted garbage can. He’s been waiting here a long time, Amanda thought, as she led Joey through the mud and soggy leaves beneath the cave-like canopy of the vacant lot.

The last of the evening sun moved thin and pale as ditch water behind Martin’s silhouetted form. He was dressed in the same camo shirt and pants as their meeting at the lake, but now they appeared to engulf him, as if he had lost considerable weight in the intervening weeks. To this costume he’d added a white headband, decorated with what appeared to be blood red Japanese script. Three plastic gas cans and a heap of glass beer bottles were stacked at his feet.

“His eyes are on fire,” Joey whispered to Amanda, as they came to a stop before the burning garbage bin. “When my parents used to let me stay over at his house, I saw his dad look like that one time and…”

“Whatever gets said now is said for everyone,” Martin spoke up suddenly, cutting Joey off. Glaring calmly at Amanda, he slowly placed his hand on the hilt of the machete strapped low on his waist. “No more secrets.”

In the weeks to come, Amanda and Joey would recall the rest of the night only in snatches of nonsense imagery and sound: Martin’s high wavering voice proclaiming that their business that night was not random violence, but a form of revolutionary protest; flames jumping in their hands like New Year’s Eve firecrackers, the smell of gas and burning plastic on their clothes; the shrieks of the nameless old woman smoking a cigarette on her front porch, as Joey leapt up the steps and ripped the stiff, purple-tinted wig from her hairless scalp; the thin smoke rising from the shrubbery in front of the Piggly-Wiggly and the ripple of broken glass on the front window of the post office, Amanda’s grandfather’s

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ball-peen hammer striking it again and again; running hand in hand in the dew soaked grass and waiting for the roar of the propane tanks beside the Mini Mart to ignite in a roar of destruction.

Only when they were pulled out of class and questioned several days later by the police did they learn what had become of Martin, who they had heard nothing from since the night of the raid: After setting ablaze his parents house with what the newspaper would describe as a crude fertilizer-based explosive, he stripped naked, broke into the church that he had attended since he was five, and promptly fell asleep beneath the alter. When he was found the next morning, he was clutching the scorched remains of the book with the horse and Indian headdress engraving on the cover.

It soon became obvious to Amanda that the authorities knew nothing about their involvement in the night’s mayhem, which other than the considerable damage done to Martin’s house, amounted to little besides scorched shrubbery and misdemeanor property damage. It was all blamed on Martin, the son of an Army drill sergeant, a quiet man who, it seemed, had few close friends.

Though everyone in the community expected them to move, the Long family repaired their modest ranch style home and continued living their quiet, solitary lives. Martin was sent away, some said to a private military school, while others conjectured he was confined to a mental hospital upstate.

Some local kids collected copies of the “Hellion Manifesto” and showed them off to friends or taped them up in their lockers. But by the following school year, the matter was all but forgotten.

Still, in the years to come, Amanda and Joey would remember this clearly: Returning to the drainage pipe after completing their assigned missions that night, they had crouched at its entrance, unable or unwilling to go any farther into its gaping black unknown. They had waited for Martin, for how long they could never really say, in holloweyed silence, no words passing between them.

Or almost no words. As they waited, they each listened to the sounds of the night, of the town beyond, for the sirens, the shouts and explosions as the world burned around them.

But there was nothing, only the steady noise of their own breathing and the murmur of frogs and insects from the lake.

Crouched on the concrete floor, his glasses lost somewhere in the frantic, spectral night, Joey gazed towards the tunnels mouth and whispered, “I’m scared.”

“Me too,” answered Amanda, one fingernail tapping rhythmically against her leg. “Me too.”

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SE Snapshot

SE PICKS: Yuletide Folkways

North Carolina

Crab pot trees keep the tradition of crabbing alive in a new life Trees sold all over North Carolina and nation

I

nstead of letting brightly colored crab pots go to waste, Nicky Harvey looked for other uses for them.

Plus he wanted to keep the family business growing so it would be a legacy for his sons.

And soon the Core Sound Crab Pot Tree was created. The unique Christmas decorations were an immediate hit with family and friends.

Harvey and Sons Net and Twine sell the trees from their shop in Davis on Highway 70.

The creation is made from green or white coated crab trap mesh. It comes in various sizes and can be used inside or outside. The trees can be purchased “plain” or “pre-strung” with lights and fold flat for easy storage.

For most of the year, the company acts as a supplier to the commercial fishing industry by selling the brightly colored traps.

In 2009, Harvey made a deal with Fisherman Creations Inc. in Smyrna to manufacture the trees and distribute them nationally.

The pots continue to be made in Harvey’s shop where he once made crab pots.

In addition to serving as Christmas decorations, the Crab Pot Trees are also sold with pink lights to help

Krampus Night Krampus is Santa’s evil twin whose job is to beat and punish all the children who have misbehaved. On Dec. 5 throughout Austria, Hungary, and Bavaria men dress up and drunkenly run around towns hitting people with sticks and switches.

Caga Tio Roughly translated as “the pooping log” Caga Tio is a widespread Christmas tradition in Catalonia.

Consisting of a hollowed out log propped up on leglike sticks, Caga Tió is put in the fireplace on Christmas Eve, beaten with a stick and ordered to “poop.” When he is done dispensing candies, nuts and such, Caga Tió will then give one last push to reveal an onion, a head of garlic or a salt herring. raise breast cancer awareness. Proceeds go to the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center in Chapel Hill during the month of October.

The trees are available three sizes: 2 ft., 3 ft., 4 ft. and 6 ft., with corresponding proceeds of $30, $40, $60, and $90 per tree respectively going to the UNC Cancer Center.

“We hope that together we can all help raise awareness of breast cancer’s dangers and warning signs and likewise contribute to research to find cures for this dreadful disease. We hope you will join us in this battle,” said Harvey.

For more information, visit www. harveyandsons.com, or www. crabpottrees.com.

SE Winter 2016

Footwear Fortunes On Christmas Eve, unmarried Czech women practice a traditional fortune telling method to predict their relationship status for the upcoming year. They stand with their back to a door and toss one shoe over their shoulder. If it lands with the toe facing the door it means they’ll be married within the year. If it lands with the heel facing the door, it’s another 365 days of the single life.

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Feedback: WE WANT YOURS!

It’s winter! And SE North Carolina is here again for southeastern Tar Heels. We are quite pleased with the responses we’ve received and feedback we’ve gotten in producing this new magazine. Now in our second year, this is a continual work in progress, and we remain curious about what readers like, or don’t like, about it. Please let us know what you think.

We hope the information and features herein are the kind of information you want and will look forward to each edition, in portraying our corner of North Carolina in an interesting and honest light.

Content:

senc@nccooke.com Like our features and information this time? Let us hear from you. Got suggestions for future stories? Let us know. Got any thoughts on how this magazine can be improved? We’re all ears. Send us a message at the address above.

ATTENTION WRITERS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS! If you’re interested in submitting content for consideration to be included in this magazine, let us know that too. We’re looking for some quality work from all areas of southeastern North Carolina.

Advertising:

senc.ads@nccooke.com Want to reach southeastern North Carolina with your products and services?

SE North Carolina is the newest, greatest way to reach a sophisticated audience with advertising that will help brand you and tell your business story at an attractive cost. Our printed copies of the magazine were snapped up quickly after publication of our first edition. And even more people have accessed SE North Caroina online at sencmag.com. Email us to find out more information about including your messages.

Intangibles: senc@nccooke.com Tell us what’s on your mind and anything else you’d like to share that would help us provide southeastern North Carolina with a magazine you’ll be excited to look forward to four times a year!

View past & current issues online at sencmag.com

SE Haven

North Carolina

Growing oysters

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Battleship N.C.

62

Oysters have long been one of S.E. North Carolina’s tastiest and most treasured delicacies. Efforts are currently underway to make sure that doesn’t change, with the state Division of Marine Fisheries introducing a number of innovative efforts to ensure the toothsome bivalve regains its foothold in our region’s waterways.

Wilmington’s decorated World War II tourist attraction, the battleship USS North Carolina, is in a fight for its life. More than $4 million is still needed to help with urgently needed hull repairs. Find out about the ongoing efforts to save one of the region’s most enduring memorials.

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From its neon colored carnivorous plants to the tales of French refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution and hiding within its wilderness, the Green Swamp could have been plucked from a storybook. A local author looks back on a childhood spent in this land of enduring beauty, myth and mystery.

AQUA, CU STATE PROJECT TO REVIVE OYSTER POPULATION MAY COME TO CAPE FEAR THIS YEAR Story and photos: Trevor Normile

T

he butter, the Texas Pete, the saltine cracker—these things are not particularly special. They can be obtained nearly anywhere.

What makes them special is the portion of meat in the middle. The portion of meat brings friends to the fire’s side with beers and conversation, and it comes from an oyster.

But oysters are good for more than just eating—they’re living scaffolds and biological water filters for the coastal environment, and work is underway to make sure they stay that way.

An update from the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries indicates

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that an initiative that began in 2011 to encourage oyster growth in North Carolina sanctuaries will soon move to the Southeast.

While the sanctuaries won’t allow oyster harvesting, their purpose is to bolster the oyster population in the area.

Curt Weychert, an oyster sanctuary biologist with the NCDMF, says the state wanted to expand the already ongoing effort to foster oyster population growth.

“All the oyster sanctuaries were in Pamlico Sound, and the state wanted to spread the love,” he explains.

Winter 2016

The initiative included a partnership with a number of groups, including the North Carolina Coastal Federation, to improve conditions for oysters to flourish along the coast. The first two phases included projects in the north and central coastline of the state; the final stage will take place near Carolina Beach.

There’s no substrate like home Workers may deploy what Weychert calls “bulk material,” mostly crushed rock like granite. Though the specific method and material

ULTURE

hadn’t yet been decided at the time of the interview, the biologist says it’s a common method. Oysters can attach to the rough material to grow.

Other methods include large Whiffle Ball-shaped concrete structures, which have been used in North Carolina in the past, according to information from the Coastal Federation.

The upcoming oyster sill will likely be placed near Carolina Beach State Park, near Snow’s Cut, though Weychert stressed the site was not yet definite at the time of the interview last year.

Last spring, the Coastal Federa-

tion did similar work around the park, placing bags of marl and oyster shells to encourage the animals to grow in shoreline reefs.

But the sub-tidal conditions in the lower Cape Fear River aren’t as conducive to oyster growth as they should be, Weychert says, so those involved with the upcoming project came up with a solution.

“It’s not a great sub-tidal habitat, so we thought it would be good to build something inner-tidal, something exposed at low tide and inundated at high tide.”

What that means, essentially, is that the area will be lined—somehow—with a grippy substrate mateWinter 2016

rial for baby oysters to latch onto, but will only be covered in water during high tide.

Oysters obviously need water to survive, but they need to be safe, too.

“In that area, it’s a more likely chance for survival for the oysters.

Exposure to air protects them from predation and disease,” Weychert says.

“And the water quality is questionable as far as oysters are concerned.”

He adds that acid from the pine trees growing in the area make life difficult for tiny “spat,” or juvenile oysters; acidic conditions can prevent

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Photo: Trevor Normile Page 56: The general area in which the state may place a proposed oyster habitat in the Cape Fear River is shown. The location wasn’t definite by the time of publication. Above: Debris has built up on the shore of the Cape Fear River near Carolina Beach. Sediment to attract oyster growth may be deposited in this area this year.

Downtown Wallace, NC

the oysters from forming the hard shells they need to survive.

“Like the barrier islands that protect coastal North Carolina, the same way do oyster rocks protect the shore lands,” Weychert says.

Unlike the barrier islands themselves, oyster populations also provide a bounty of meat.

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Unlike other foods produced in North Carolina—cotton, pork, corn and the like—shellfish don’t make up a significant portion of the area’s livelihood by sheer return on harvest.

The Coastal Federation reports that in one year, 2013, about $3.4 million in oysters were harvested in fisheries, an improvement upon the harvest of a decade earlier (just about $632,000 in 1994).

But 2013 also saw the purchase of pork producer Smithfield Foods by China’s ShuanghuiGroup for a staggering $4.7 billion.

The value of oysters in North Caro-

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lina may lie in a cultural significance, in the backyard oyster steams and restaurants along the coast serving them to amorous couples, whether the food is harvested locally or elsewhere.

Many people still depend on the bivalve bounty, Weychert says. “It’s not a big part of the economy, but a lot of people rely on oysters for income ... for a lot of people, it’s their sole source of income,� he explains, adding that many crab catchers harvest oysters in the off season.

In the latter half of the 19th Century, oysters were more common in North Carolina waters and, the biologist believes, could have become more profitable if the population were betterprotected.

Information provided by Weychert and the Coastal Federation indicates that over-harvesting, coupled with erosion, waterborne disease and storm water runoff caused the commercial oyster population to decline to its mid-Nineties level. “It’s a severe problem, but it’s a severe problem that’s been going on for a long

time,� Weychert says.

Water-bound solution Those involved don’t plan on letting Southeast North Carolina’s oysters go without a fight—and it’s a fight anyone can join, says Weychert.

Oysters rely upon what the biologist calls a “shell budget.� Oysters are different from corn or tobacco, they don’t simply grow and disappear after the harvest.

Like the Vatican’s construction over the ruins of Rome, oysters grow upon the backs of their ancestors.

Put simply, by over-harvesting, not only a crop of oysters is lost, but the substructure of future oyster populations is removed.

The good news: unlike the ruins of Rome, the ruins of oyster kingdoms gone by can be replaced. “One of the best things people can do is recycle oyster shells after roasts,� Weychert explains.

In fact, the state maintains a list of more than 90 drop-off sites at businesses

and landfills so recyclers need not wade into the Cape Fear River themselves (a link to the list is printed at the end of this article).

The shells, Weychert says, are dried and pushed overboard to form new habitats.

As for the coming project, estimated in 2012 to cost about $1.5 million in grants from the state’s Coastal Recreation Fishing License Trust Fund, Weychert says the plan and permitting should be in place by spring.

Work should begin before the end of 2016. The area will be designated a sanctuary, to help the oyster population regain its foothold in the region.

The work is important, he believes, because harvesting the animals “isn’t just taking biomass out, we’re taking the base for future generations of oysters.�

To find a nearby facility that recycles oyster, mussel and clam shells, visit the Department of Environmental Quality at portal.ncdenr.org, or follow this shortened link: goo.gl/WSOLQZ. To find the N.C. Coastal Federation online, visit www.nccoast.org.

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SouthEast North Carolina

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Efforts to raise $17 million for renovations and repair of the popular attraction, Battleship USS North Carolina, continue

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nd, Gray Old Lady More than $4 million is still needed to help repair and preserve the national historic Battleship North Carolina.

The decorated World War II battleship needs donations to help repair its hull so it can continue to educate thousands.

The Generations Campaign started in April 2015 and has continued with the goal of raising $17 million.

Battleship North Carolina has been a fixture of Wilmington’s riverfront for more than 50 years. In 2014, more than 200,000 people visited.

A public-private fundraising campaign has raised $10.9 million toward the estimated $17 million.

The funds will be used to build a cofferdam so water can be pumped out and repairs can be completed in a dry environment.

To meet Navy standards, a ship like the Battleship N.C. should have a high-level hull repair every 20 years.

Battleship NC Executive Director Capt. Terry Bragg said the ship hasn’t had this level of hull repair since 1953.

The Navy wants the ship repaired or scrapped.

Design on the cofferdam has already begun and construction was expected to start in early 2016.

Other additions include a new Expedition Walkway, a 2,300-foot-long, 10-foot-wide boardwalk and adjacent platforms to serve as outdoor classrooms along the river.

A $3 million donation from the State Employees’ Credit Union will allow for the construction of a Veteran’s Memorial Walkway to be built all around the exterior of the battleship.

Battleship N.C. is self-supporting, not bolstered by tax money, and relies primarily upon tour admissions, sales in the ship’s store, donations and investments. No funds for its administration and operation come from appropriations from governmental entities at the local, state or federal levels.

Donations may be made by check to Friends of the Battleship North Carolina; Generations Campaign, P.O. Box 480, Wilmington NC 28402 (note on the memo line “Generations Campaign”); text the word Battleship to the number 41444; or visit www.battleshipnc.com and click on the donate button.

—Jacqueline Hough Winter 2016

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Care, Compassion and Dignity

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William works on a multiple-launch rocket system and is described as a “quiet performer” by his command group. He is a noncommissioned officer who is dependable, flexible, and always takes care of his soldiers.

Marsharee founded “Free Cakes for Kids,” a non-profit organization that provides birthday cakes for needy military children.

Together, the Taylors volunteer in community activities, such as sending holiday packages to deployed soldiers.

The Taylors say the word “loyal” best describes their family. “We are a team and we uplift each other...,” William Taylor said. “We didn’t really expect [to win the award]. We were shocked.”

Ultimately, family seems to be the force that keeps the Taylors going, through deployments, separations and frequent moves.

“No matter how far we travel, we remember what it means to be family.”

Winter 2016

Continued from page 49

Bellamy’s experience included an internship with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He spent three months working with CIA, FBI and Pentagon employees in Washington, D.C. At Maxwell AFB, Bellamy earned the official rank of First Lieutenant, USAF, Assistant Staff Judge Advocate.

The former athlete credited leadership qualities displayed by his former coach, Joey Price, and former principal, Dr. Maudie Davis, as having played an important role in his professional development.

“I believe my experiences with both Coach Price and Dr. Davis have added tremendous value to my life,” Bellamy said.

His grandparents “exposed me to readings about history, politics, the founding of our country and the civil rights movement. Both helped me understand the power of serving others. Service is a part of the fabric that makes up my purpose and calling in life,” he told the Whiteville News Reporter.

Bellamy’s new job is to advance the mission of the USAF from various locations across the world. He is currently stationed at Holloman AFB in New Mexico. He is engaged to be married in May.

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The Green Swamp is home to some of the state’s most exotic wildlife, and a centuriesold genetic riddle Story: Todd Wetherington Photos: Debra Anne Wintsmith, Mett Ausley

ENDURING MYSTERY

S

ince the days when early European

mapmakers would designate unexplored locations with the phrase, “Here there be monsters,” there have been areas of our world that seem to transcend the bounds of everyday reality, where history and myth intertwine until they become virtually indistinguishable.

The geography of Brunswick and Columbus counties that make up the area known as Green Swamp has carried the weight of its mysteries into the 21st century. A land of rare carnivorous plants and a people whose origins remain uncertain at best, it has defied easy categorization for centuries.

Even as the modern world encroaches its boundaries, Green Swamp holds to its secrets ever tighter.

Among its more notable peculiarities is the fact that very little of Green Swamp contains any actual swampland. Located about 20 miles from Wilmington, much of the area is a remnant of the giant longleaf pine forest that once stretched across the Southeast from Virginia to Texas, a unique ecosystem that relies on periodic forest fires to burst the longleaf pine cones, release seeds and bring new growth.

Designated a National Natural Landmark in 1974, the area is also home to 14 species of insectivorous

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TF t haven

Any number of wild tales have flown about concerning the ancestors of the Crusoe Island even try to link them to the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island. Linguistic clues suggest they plants, including the Venus Flytrap, as well as a number of endangered animal species. American alligators, fox squirrels, black bear and bobcats can all be found here, among the rare orchids, milkweed and wire grass.

As unique as its plant and wildlife may be, the story of Green Swamp’s human inhabitants is where fact and fiction begin to merge and tangle like the roots beneath the land’s sandy loam.

Green Swamp is the current tribal homeland of the Waccamaw Siouan tribe, one of eight state-recognized Native American tribal nations in North Carolina.

Located primarily in the communities of St. James, Buckhead, and Council, the Waccamaw Siouan tribal homeland is situated on the edge of Green Swamp, seven miles from Lake Waccamaw, which is part of the 15,907-acre Green Swamp Preserve.

According to the Waccamaw Siouan Indians, Lake Waccamaw came into being thousands of years ago, when an immense meteor flaming with the brilliance of innumerable suns crashed to earth.

The waters of the surrounding swamps Green Swamp resident Annie Maland rivers flowed into pass, at the time an unwed teenage the crater and the mother, is shown with her infant son, Mason, around 1931. lake was born.

As fanciful as that tale may be, it seems almost plausible when compared to the garbled historical anecdotes offered about the residents of perhaps Green Swamp’s most famous locale — Crusoe Island.

Situated about a dozen miles from Old Dock, the island (actually more of an elevated knoll) is home to a unique, long-remote community noted for its unusual accent, which seems to hearken back to 18th Century England.

Any number of wild tales have flown about concerning the ancestors of the Crusoe Island natives. Some have claimed they were a colony of pirates. Perhaps inevitably, some sources 68

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even try to link them to the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island. Linguistic clues suggest they are a mixture of European and Indian settlers who wandered into the area and intermarried.

The islanders — mostly small farmers and hunters — are noted for their handmade wooden boats, often dugouts, in a fashion that seems descended from Native American models.

But the most persistent, most adventure novel-like explanation for the area’s less than welcoming inhabitants is one put forth by U.S. Congressman Alfred Moore Waddell in the 1800s: Waddell thought the Crusoe Islanders were descendents of French planters who had escaped the slave uprising in Haiti in the 1790s.

Strangely enough, a 1931 New York Herald Tribune article

by Ben Dixon MacNeill seems to lend some credence to that theory. In the article, MacNeill relates details of the island’s inhabitants and architecture as told to him by amateur historian Kinchen D. Council.

“Twenty years ago it was a country to be avoided. It abounded in all sorts of wild game, especially bear and deer. But it also abounded in a strange people with whom it was thought best to have little to do. They lived almost Sisters Doris and Mildred Denton wholly in and by the swamps. People from relax in front of Green Swamp’s Waccamaw Institute in the early1950s. the uplands dreaded The school was founded by local any encounter with Seventh-Day Adventists. them,” writes MacNeill.

According to the story, Council befriended an elderly Crusoe Island resident named Buck Clewis, who enabled Council to discover a remnant of French aristocrats who escaped the slave revolt in Haiti 127 years earlier. Though Council described the Green Swamp inhabitants as “without schools or churches or any formal civilization,” in their homes he saw what he believed to be familiar patterns of French-influenced design.

“The appearance of the house had something strange, a little incongruous about it. To be sure, it was a rough thing of unhewn logs, but there was about it an echo of a grace, a shadowy charm that did not belong in the dim swamps,”

natives. Some have claimed they were a colony of pirates. Perhaps inevitably, some sources are a mixture of European and Indian settlers who wandered into the area and intermarried.

“One odd thing about the Adventist community, we MacNeill related. seemed to have an usually high incidence of hauntings and As further proof of Council’s theory, he noted the inhabithard-to explain events,” she remembers. “The Adventist school ants’ almost pathological fear of neighboring black residents. house was quickly rumored to be haunted after it was built.

“Negroes could not be driven through the swamps. The Strange lights were seen in it when no one was supposedly inswamp people, so the stories run, were likely go berserk at the side. My aunt was there alone one day, practicing on the piano sight of a black man.” when her practice was interrupted by the sound of chains Understandably, the modern day inhabitants of Green grinding in the stairwell that separated the school side from the Swamp have gained a reputation for being suspicious of outsiders. But for at least one former resident, the memories of the church side of the building.”

Wintsmith also recalled a spate of strange activity in the verdant, isolated land have inspired works of art and a career 1970s. far beyond her childhood home.

Debra Anne Wintsmith grew up in Green Swamp from 1955-66 on what is now S. Green Swamp Road north of the Brunswick County line.

“My father’s people had lived in the Green Swamp and Cape Fear area since the 1700s,” recalls Wintsmith. “He was born to an unwed teenage mother named Annie Malpass. He was raised by his grandparents, Dave and Ellen Malpass, off Livingston Chapel Road south of Freeman. My mother’s people were part of a group of Seventh-Day Adventists who came mostly from the north, as well as including a few immigrant families.”

According to Wintsmith, in 1937 the group founded Waccamaw Institute, a self-supporting school and religious community designed to be secluded from the world until the Second Coming, on what is now S. Green Swamp Road.

“Many of the men in the Adventists community were loggers. Even my Grandpa Denton who was a school teacher, was a logger when he wasn’t teaching or farming,” she remembers.

Wintsmith’s recollections of Green Swamp are speckled with vivid descriptions of everyday life, befitting the author she would become after leaving the Mason Malpass stands with his grandmother, Ellen Malpass at area. the family’s home near Freeman in Green Swamp. Tree stumps “My father repaired chainsaws, so I remember the used to support the house can be seen in the background. sound of chainsaws as a gentle, bumblebee sort of noise in the background of my life...I remember the “After the railroad tracks were pulled up in Maco, the famen in overalls, usually dusty from working, or walking along mous Maco light — which was seen by several members of my the sandy roads,” Wintsmtih says. “Women stayed at home family — went away. No one knows where it went but I know and worked the gardens, and cooked everything from scratch. what route it took to get there. It went right down Hwy. 211 The Adventists made the best whole wheat bread ever made on and scared several members of the community as it bobbed this planet.” past them.”

Of a brief encounter with the area’s Waccamaw Sioux, Wintsmith says many of the older generation living in Wintsmith recalls, “I remember that the boys were wild and the girls were strong, and there were ancient ladies who seemed Green Swamp when she was a child had never traveled more than 50 miles from where they were born. to preside over everything in the community.”

“Some who could read had read only the one book, the Green Swamp’s mystique is more than borne out by Holy Bible, and others who couldn’t read still quoted Bible Wintsmith’s memories.

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TF t haven passages verbatim. Mr. Dave Malpass was a root doctor and was said to be able to heal a toothache with his touch.”

Wintsmith also has vivid memories of Crusoe Island, which she visited with her grandparents during their missionary work.

“There was a family there named Long who had daughters named Willowree and Minnie Pearl ... The Longs had a house that was even more rustic than the Malpass place. The steps were made of lumber so rough that it was more like parts of trees. The yard was sandy and fenced in with chicken coop wire on the side...I loved the way the Crusoe Island folks talked. People made Dave Malpass, a Green Swamp root doctor who was said to have the power to heal toothfun of their talk, but there was aches with his touch, stands in a cotton field with his children, most likely some time in the early 1940s. The Malpass family was one of the most prominent at the time in the Green music in it.”

Though she can’t confirm any Swamp area, where many of the men worked as loggers. of the legends about the island’s Stopping by Julian’s Pond on the way to school and finding residents, she says she’s open to any possibility. animal tracks in the sand, mostly deer and bird tracks; “I heard that the Crusoe Islanders were from the Lost ColBending close to ponder the carnivorous nature of sundew, ony. As far as what I think of the legends and stories, I have pitcher plants and Venus flytraps, having no idea that they were seen enough strange things in life to not discount whichever as rare in the world as I was...; legend they hold to be true about themselves. With the DNA I remember violent lightning storms like nothing I’ve seen testing now available to the general public there might be a since I’ve been grown (and hope I never do). Five members of way to scientifically trace down their roots.” my family were struck by lightning (two at the same time) in the Like those descendents’ shrouded history, perhaps it’s best Green Swamp; to abandon simple explanations and just listen to Wintsmith’s One of my earliest memories is of my uncle lifting his shirt memories of Green Swamp, as they flow forth in a dreamlike to show me the zigzag mark down his chest that the lightning cascade: left ....”

“Going to sleep with my windows open to a bullfrog serenade Over the years, the landscape of Green Swamp has unbroadcast from the canal out front; dergone changes. Water levels have fallen and alligators have Left: A canal cuts through Green Swamp. Middle: The Venus Flytrap is just one of the rare plant species indigenous to the area. Right: Much of the Green Swamp area is made up of sand ridge terrain surrounded by longleaf pine trees.

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come out from the deep bogs.

The way of life has changed also.

The outhouses have vanished. The old dwellings set up from the ground on sawed stumps have fallen to ruin. The old accents are vanishing.

“Nearly everyone has air conditioning. Just about everyone goes to high school now and it isn’t uncommon for people to go further. You no longer find people who have lived within a 50-mile radius their entire lives. The telephone changed things, then TV changed things, now the Internet,” acknowledges Wintsmith.

Little trace remains as well of Green Swamp’s once thriving Adventist community.

“The haunted schoolhouse and my grandparents’ place have vanished into black dirt and sand,” she says.

In 2003, the non-profit Friends of Green Swamp (FOGS) formed in Whiteville to oppose plans for the digging of a large commercial landfill within the swamp. FOGS remains active and has partnered with the Nature Conservancy to buy additional Green Swamp acreage in the Cove Swamp area for preservation.

Today, a 5.5-mile hiking trail runs through part of the Preserve’s property, and the 52-mile Green Swamp Scenic Byway loops through the property along N.C. 211, known locally as “Green Swamp Road.”

The story of the Green Swamp and its history, of the land and its inhabitants, is too deep, too rich to be contained in one article. Debra Anne Wintsmith, who once filled a book with poems about Crusoe Island, knows this.

In her writing, she’s returned again and again to her most “vivid and interesting” memories, to the world of brightly colored carnivorous plants and graceful shadows. In 2012 she moved back to the area, to a stretch of land off N.C. 211 in the nearby community of Chadbourn.

“That’s close enough and a whole lot more convenient in terms of being closer to stores,” she says. “The dirt is black with sandy areas, and the air is soft with now and then a taste of the sea in it, and that feels right to me.”

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The overall Streetscape project was made possible through grant and city monies totaling $14.5 million. The fountain is said to have cost $400,000.

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The sentimental column of Christmas past

C

hristmas is past and it’s a new year now, but the time of Christmas is still on my mind.

I know this, even writing into the future, well before the holiday itself, since the clues are all around now.

Like a woolly bear worm growing her winter coat or a yellow-bellied sapsucker, flittering off to the West Indies until spring, it is a thing I just know.

Of course, more clues abound. A murder of crows is pecking at our beloved White House. Christmas shoppers are filled with vitriol over perceived religious slights in the greetings of tired-eyed Walmart cashiers.

“Happy Holidays.”

Happy Holidays. Happy. Holidays.

Happy.. Holy Days.

Anyway, they are assured by their friends online that they should be mad, and so they will be mad.

And yet, no more than the humidity can ruin a perfect summer afternoon, neither can these things ruin Christmas time, try as they might.

The best hymns are sung at Christmas.

Aunt Kem plays the piano at Christmas and Charley from next door brings his guitar. Aunt Elaine makes her biscuits at Christmas, as she did again this year. Santa Claus could be laid up a year, and no one in the Normile clan (and our many associated clans who have adopted us) would notice, not really.

It’s the time when the ladies at the Baptist and Presbyterian and Methodist churches back home dress their most cosmopolitan, rivaling the fashionistas, I imagine, of the city hubs many miles away.

And those ladies convince their husbands and boyfriends to buy new khakis and George-brand dress shirts and to wash the mud from their pickup trucks before visiting the in-laws (not that the in-laws would necessarily mind either way).

It’s in the countryside too—the little 74

SouthEast North Carolina

Catholic churches thump with happy polka beats of praise for a newborn lord, for a happy Navidad, many of those singers knowing full well that Jesus probably wasn’t born in December, but maybe that’s fine too.

On Christmas Eve, coming home from the office after dark, I see homes lit and warm with the shadows of people moving behind the window shades and I’m happy to see all these people spending time with their family members, many of whom I assume to be elderly; I imagine the happiness of those elders, surrounded by family.

Have you ever been out to see the window lights on Christmas Eve? In colder years, a silken upturned charmeuse of frost covers the drab, dead grass and not a car (save mine) is on the road. A clear Christmas Eve is the clearest of clear nights, and the stars and faraway nebulae seem to twinkle just a little brighter than usual.

The public radio station even turns yuletide—its features on things like the plight of Belorussian turnip farmers, or the philosophical examination of the dichotomy between Amanita abrupta mushrooms and beech trees—changes to Christmas music.

A feeling hangs in the atmosphere.

The air is peaceful and crisp and quiet and renewing.

I know now that Christmas is coming, even from weeks away, because in a display of the irrepressible way of instinct and genetic memory, the young ones across the county hold blowout bonfire parties the second Saturday in December.

In a bizarre coincidence, the same date is set by their elders for the annual Christmas parades, all across Duplin County, as it always has been set.

Whether it’s due to the impending fate of the young to become their parents—or some other, simpler reason, I just don’t know.

And I don’t care, because heady, pointless questions just seem to fall by the wayside for a short time during Christmas.

I don’t even care that in this cynical, post-secular time I am reminded nearly as often that December 25 is the date of SatWinter 2016

urnalia, and that Christmas was originally a pagan affair—as I am reminded that Christmas is what it is now, which is a celebration of the dear baby Jesus and of good will and of hanging candy on trees.

I know that the whole pagan line is an associative error of definitional proportions. Sure, my home was once a bunch of sticks in the woods, and at that time they weren’t a home, but they are now, and that’s all that matters to me when the air turns cold.

And, fine, a bunch of pagans gave gifts and danced naked around a fir tree once a year. So they got rid of the naked pagans and adopted it as a Christian holiday.

That’s perfectly acceptable, and I challenge anyone who deems it otherwise.

And it’s perfectly acceptable to me if all those cynics want to be cynical about Christmas, because they don’t speak for the folks behind the lighted windows, spending time with Grandma and reading from Grandpa’s Bible, because Christmas isn’t about the tree or the date or the gifts or any of those other things the cynics like to slander.

Even those little jabs of disenchantment, the things I know are intended to get people like me down the most, become pointless and powerless by nature of their own existence.

I don’t want the brouhaha. I just want a “Merry Christmas,” and a “Happy Holidays.” I’d even take a “Happy Hanukkah” if you’ve got one to give.

And I’ll take a candy cane and a biscuit or two, or nine, and a fresh cup of coffee on the Lord’s birthday, whether we got the date right or not.

If we’ve had it wrong the last 2,000 years, fixing it now would be too little, too late anyway. Maybe drop a few more bucks in the Salvation Army bucket as penance.

And I think I’ll take a smile, too, since it’s Christmas.

Or it was, rather. It’s January now. I hope you had a Merry Christmas. If you knew then what I know now, I think odds are good that you did.

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