imagine you were up in Pisgah Forest sitting there cooling your feet in the flow. But turns out it is not so secret after all. Every resident interviewed, no matter his or her age, remembered the joy of rock-hopping in that stream. Mary Hart Orr says she used to enjoy her PB&J in that exact spot. And Kitty Robison recalls how they would take their shoes off and walk in the stream even in the dead of winter. “That was just heaven to me to get down there in that stream,” she says. “ I just loved it, and I was not afraid of creatures.” Turns out that was an important attribute as she had a cousin who delighted in throwing creatures like spiders and crayfish at her, assuming that she was a sissy. “But I would not budge. I would catch it!” Like war and doll tea parties, this game probably persists even in our age of political and gender correctness. Doug Copeland grew up on Magnolia Street and recalls, “On a Saturday you’d leave at 9 in the morning and you had to be home at 6, and where you went in between no one worried about because you were safe.” Former resident Charles “Buddy” Weill agrees. “It was a wonderful neighborhood. There were so many kids on Magnolia Street that we called ourselves the Magnolia Blossoms. That was our handle,” he says. “And we all played in the middle of the street. Everybody left their houses open and nobody had air conditioning, so they all sat on their front porches.” Like one big happy family. But there was sometimes neighborhood discord. Mr. R.D. Douglas, going
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
strong at age 100, is possibly the oldest Greensboro resident who remembers living on Fisher Park Circle in the 1910s. “We lived next door to the Henry Thurmans. One of them, Nell, was learning to play the piano, and on a summer night she would practice resoundingly quite late and keep my mother awake.” Mrs. Thurman told Mrs. Douglas that she was so happy that her daughter wanted to excel in piano that she would not forbid her practicing late at night. (We’re talking 9:30 here.) And so commenced an epic battle. “When Nell would start playing piano, Mother would come wake me up and hand me my bugle, and I would blare out my Boy Scout bugle calls for a half hour. And my bugle was louder than the piano. So finally the mothers had to call a truce.” Yes, Boy Scout training is good for many reasons. Eagle Scout Will Copeland rebuilt the entry staircase at the South Park Elm Street corner and dedicated it to his grandmother, Mary Copeland. “We decided to restore the steps. But we got it uncovered, and as we dug and dug we found out it was really going to be a building project,” says proud father Doug. “We had to dig two feet down here and add two feet up here, so literally every piece of dirt we pulled out was used. There were twenty tons of dirt and rock removed on this project. All with shovels and the Boy Scouts. It was incredible manual labor. It looked like the slaves and the pyramids.” This area of Fisher Park also featured a thirty-foot-wide concrete wading pool
August 2012
O.Henry 67