Capital at Play March 2017

Bill Dicks

Mike Summey

Carving A Niche p.16

Against All Odds p.74

Western Nor th Carolina's Free Spirit of Enterprise

lo c a l i n d u s t r y

The Business of Books

Self-publishing and independent book publishers in Western North Carolina. p. 33

l e i s u r e & l i b at i o n

READY

PLAYER

ONE

p. 52

Arcades are not a thing of the past in Western North Carolina.

colu m ns

Ghost Wineries

Look to these virtual wineries for remarkable value. p.44

“P� for Planning and Preparation

Each stage your business can benefit from legal counsel. p.66

Volume VII - Edition III complimentary edition

capitalatplay.com

March 2017

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very day, people come up to me on the street and breathlessly ask, “How on earth do you folks at Capital at Play do it? Each month, creating such a quality publication with all the incisive, insightful writing, visionary photography, and eye-catching design—don’t you ever run out of ideas, inspiration, and energy?” Okay, technically it was just one guy at a pub the other night, and I think he was sucking up to me in hopes we’d do a feature on his business. But work with me here.

I won’t pretend there aren’t times when ideas seem iffy, inspiration has apparently taken an unscheduled vacation, and energy reserves are lower than an electric vehicle stuck on I-26 between Hendersonville and Asheville during rush hour. If you’ve ever been involved in publishing a magazine or newspaper, you probably know the score; at least once a month during each publication cycle I find myself waking up at 4AM, fretting about some lingering content problem or production glitch that has to be addressed in just a few short hours. Welcome to my world.

In the end, though, the highs always outweigh the lows. Being part of a talented team and creating a product you’re all proud of is a great feeling, whether it’s publishing a magazine or making widgets. (One recurring theme in our entrepreneur profiles, in fact, is that if you are doing something you love and having fun at it, you’re not really “working” at all.) We do feel like blowing off steam at times, of course, and lately the staff and writers have been marking the arrival of the latest issue with field trips, like our ziplining adventure awhile back and the unofficial bowling tournament we had last month. For March, duly fired up over putting the finishing touches on our report on the current arcade game and pinball revival, we plan to invade one of the local arcades. Galaga, anyone?

As you read this issue, keep the foregoing in mind, because it’s not just relevant to the arcades feature. It also holds true for our look at self-publishing and independent book publishers; nobody’s necessarily getting filthy rich, but some are earning a decent living, and all find it gratifying and fun. Both of the entrepreneurs we interviewed this issue even made the notion explicit. One of them came right out and said that he’s not living for the weekends at all, but for the Monday mornings: “You have the whole week ahead of you and you haven’t had the chance to screw anything up yet. You’ve got another fresh start.”

On balance, then, life is sweet. And if you happen to catch me on the street and feel compelled to tell me how much you like our incisive, insightful writing, our visionary photography, or our eye-catching design, I won’t complain. In fact, next round’s on me.

Sincerely,

Fred Mills

4

| March 2017

Cap MAr17

2/13/17

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Page 1

A 112-Year Heritage of Quality, Value & Classic Style

ASHEVILLE: Historic Biltmore Village 9 Kitchin Place 828-274-2630 STORE HOURS: Mon.-Fri. 9:30am-7pm Sat. 9:30am-6pm Sun. 12pm-5pm March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

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Western North Carolina's Free Spirit of Enterprise

publisher

copy editors

Oby Morgan

Dasha O. Morgan, Brenda Murphy

associate publisher

contributing writers & photogr aphers

Jeffrey Green managing editor

Fred Mills

Derek Halsey, Anthony Harden, Rebecca Carr Hedges, John Kerr, Marla Hardee Milling, Shawndra Russell, Lindsay Parris Thompson

briefs and events editor

Leslee Kulba

gr aphic designer

Bonnie Roberson, Intern Ali Burke

Information & Inquiries Capital At Play is Western North Carolina’s business lifestyle magazine. It embodies the idea that capitalism thrives with creativity—that work requires an element of play. Exploring everything from local industry to the great outdoors, Capital At Play is inspiration for the modern entrepreneur.

In every edition, we profile those who take the risk, those who share that risk, and those who support them—telling the untold story of how capitalists are driven by their ideas and passions.

We cater to those who see the world with curiosity, wonderment, and a thirst for knowledge.

We present information and entertainment that capitalists want, all in one location. We are the free spirit of enterprise.

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| March 2017

gener al advertising inquiries

for editorial inquiries

e-mail advertising@capitalatplay.com or call 828.274.7305

e-mail editor@capitalatplay.com

for subscription information

Roy Brock, David Morgan, Katrina Morgan, Pat Starnes

subscribe online at www.capitalatplay.com or call 828.274.7305

marketing & advertising

Editorial content is selected and produced because of its interest to our readership. Editorial content is not for sale and cannot be bought. Capital At Play is financially sustained by advertisers who find value in exposure alongside our unique content and with the readers who follow it.

This magazine is printed with soy based ink on recycled paper. Please recycle.

Copyright © 2017, Capital At Play, Inc. All rights reserved.

Capital At Play is a trademark of Capital At Play, Inc. Published by Capital At Play, Inc. PO Box 5615, Asheville, NC. 28813

Capital At Play is protec ted through Tr ademar k Regis tr ation in the United States. The content found within this publication does not necessar ily ref lec t the views of Capital At Play, Inc. and its companies. Capital At Play, Inc. and its employees are not liable for any adver tising or editor ial content found in Capital At Play. The ar ticles, photogr aphy, and illus tr ations found in Capital at Play may not be reproduced or used in any fashion without express wr it ten consent by Capital At Play, Inc.

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FINEST QUALITY HANDCRAFTED MATTRESSES MADE IN ASHEVILLE

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andcrafted in Asheville, mattresses by Colton Mattress Factory at 848 Hendersonville Road offer unmatched durability, uncompromising comfort and orthopedic support. Artisan craftsmanship that incorporates the latest in mattress technology with age-old handcrafting techniques makes for the most comfortable night’s sleep you’ve had in years.

Business owner Mike Emerson has been in the mattress business for 35 years. At 13, he started working for a small mattress company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sweeping floors and helping with deliveries. At the age of 20, the owner retired and Emerson bought the company. Over the next 10 years, Emerson expanded the business to 20 stores in 5 midwestern states with over a hundred employees, Emerson still owns half the company and it is still in operation today. Emerson was semi-retired and living in Asheville, feeling bored, and decided to start another mattress factory and named it after his son, Colton.

People here in Asheville really like buying high quality products that are locally made.

Emerson says, “Business has been strong and we can hardly keep up with demand.” He said, “A lot of customers that come into our store are frustrated with the quality of nonflip brand-name mattresses that they have purchased recently that didn’t last as long as they expected. So many products today are made to wear out fairly quickly so you have to replace them. Colton makes mattresses the old-fashioned way so they last longer.”

Asheville’s headquarters for adjustable beds, Colton Mattress can build the bed that is perfect for you. It makes beds with infinite mattress positions that include head and foot massage. Create your own adjustments to relieve back pain, improve circulation, and sleep deeply. Any mattress

Colton Mattress builds can be turned into an adjustable bed.

Want a super-firm mattress, a super-soft mattress or something in between? Colton Mattress can create the precise firmness you desire. It sells a lot of beds made with latex, a natural material that naturally inhibits dust mites, mold and mildew. Derived from the tropical rubber tree, latex instantaneously conforms to the shape of your body, relieving pressure points for an uninterrupted sleep. Talalay latex used by Colton reduces high-pressure areas that shut off capillary blood flow and cause you to toss and turn all night.

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Memory foam mattresses virtually eliminate motion transfer. (you won’t feel your sleep partner move). Emerson stated, “We offer a 30-day comfort guarantee because we want you to love your new mattress.”

When you purchase a new mattress from Colton they will donate your old mattress to people in need if it is still sleepable.

There are 25 different models to choose from at the showroom. Visit with Mike Emerson or Rick Reed and they will help you select the perfect mattress for you.

Colton sells directly to the consumer, eliminating distributors and retail stores, to keep prices competitive with national brands. Colton has mattresses for every budget, prices range from $110- $5000. Colton is committed to manufacturing and selling the highest-quality mattresses and when you buy direct from the factory you save 10-50% every day. Colton builds and stocks a wide selection of mattress types and sizes.

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March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

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| March 2017

Visit and apply now for school year 2017-18.

Join us on campus for events below or schedule a private tour.

thi s page :

Bill Dicks’ ceramic candle lanterns

on the cover : Arcade game at the Asheville Pinball Museum, photos by Anthony Harden

F E AT U R E S vol. vii

16

CARVING A NICHE BILL DICKS

ed. iii

74

AGAINST ALL ODDS MIKE SUMMEY

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

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C ON T EN T S LE QU

RSH m a r c h 2 017

EVOLUTION OF MAN at the Asheville Pinball Musuem.

ke a look at the ay it’s because ble to advance. r challenges, in

solutions

33

lo c a l i n d u s t r y

The Business of Books

52

Self-publishing and independent book publishers in Western North Carolina.

to l e i s u r e & l i b at i o n

Ready Player One

Arcade games and pinball—and even board games—are making a comeback.

colu m ns

insight

briefs

44 Ghost Wineries

12 A sheville Tea Company

28 Carolina in the West 48 The Old North State 70 National & World News

Written by John Kerr

66 “P” for Planning and Preparation

Jessie Dean

River Arts Ballet Christina Schreivogel

Written by Lindsay Parris Thompson

p e o p l e at p l ay

88 Children’s Welfare League Annual Mardi Gras Ball

10

| March 2017

events

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nsight

Tea Time With Asheville Tea Company, Jessie Dean is proving there’s a market for artisanal teas.

W

estern North Carolina is awash in craft beers and premium coffees; why not teas with a special twist as well? In 2015 Jessie Dean decided to address that question by handcrafting teas that blend organic herbs, botanicals, and small-batch artisanal offerings.

“I started the company,” recalls Dean, “because I realized that I could never find any locally-sourced teas on menus or in shops around Asheville. I also have traveled quite a bit and enjoy the every day tea culture in many countries in the world, and wanted to bring that experience to my own town. I was inspired by our area’s strong farm-to-table and craft beverage culture and became very interested in partnering with local farms and proprietors to create something local, beneficial to our community, healthy, and delicious.”

Dean is quick to insist that “locally sourced” is far more than just a buzzword. “Many, or most, tea and tisane companies source ingredients from Asia, Europe, and other countries. We are sourcing everything we can from our region.”

Dean, who lives in West Asheville with her husband and two children, launched Asheville Tea Company via area tailgate markets this past September. The response was uniformly positive, so she began getting her teas into local shops and seeking local cafes to partner with—among them, The Rhu and Ivory Road Café & Kitchen. At the latter they hold “Afternoon Tea Talks” for sampling new teas like Ginger Turmeric, Lemon Yaupon, Chamomile Lavender, and Wild Earl. Customers can also learn about locally-sourced teas and their benefits while enjoying a full “proper afternoon tea service” complete with scones, shortbreads, homemade pastries, jams, and jellies.

Dean additionally credits support from regional farmers as being key to her company’s success to date. “Finding local products and 12

| March 2017

JESSIE DEAN

The sights… the seasons…

the lifestyle.

creating wonderful relationships with farmers in this area has been so influential in getting the business off the ground—and finding a way to keep the focus on locally-sourced ingredients has its challenges [because] many of these products are available from a plethora of international or online sources for much less money. We feel so fortunate to work with amazing local businesses and farms.” Her current partnerships include Rayburn Farm, Epling Farm, Franny’s Farm, Pangea Plants, ASI Yaupon Tea, Table Rock Tea Company, Hoopers Creek Botanicals, GentleHarmony Farm, and Way of Life Farm.

Dean is quick to insist that “locally sourced” is far more than just a buzzword. “Many, or most, tea and tisane companies source ingredients from Asia, Europe, and other countries. We are sourcing everything we can from our region. Not everything is grown or available in this area, but many, many amazing botanicals are, and the locally-grown herbs and botanicals have largely influenced our recipes and blends. For the teas that we cannot find locally yet—green and black tea—we infuse them with local ingredients. We believe that local sourcing has benefits for our local economy, for the environment, and for the healthfulness, freshness, and deliciousness of the teas themselves.”

Dean’s flagship blends include “Wild Earl,” a classic Earl Grey blended with wild bergamot flower; “Minted,” a blend of three types of Asheville-grown mint leaves; the “Relax” and “Wellness” blends, which feature an array of health-conscious locally grown herbs; a gin and tonic inspired blend, “G & Tea,” made with juniper berries and local lime basil; and two Yaupon blends (America’s only native tea plant and the only edible caffeinated plant indigenous to the Southeast), a traditional Lemon Yaupon and Yaupon with local elderberry.

More flavors will be added as other seasonal herbs and spices are ready for harvest.

“Figuring out how to keep our business afloat and successful financially while also staying true to our mission and values is a balancing act,” admits Dean. “We plan to continue to build relationships with local sources to continue to increase the amount of area ingredients we use, and to focus on developing relationships with other businesses and cafes who may wish to carry our products.

“Ultimately, seeing the vision for this company come to fruition has been one of the most amazing experiences.”

Have it all at Deerfield – extraordinary surroundings, activity-

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March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

13

insight

Be Moved For Christina Schreivogel of River Arts Ballet, it’s all about body, mind, and soul.

G

rowing up in Hendersonville, Christina Schreivogel got the ballet bug early on and started training at the age of 10. That training was interrupted five years later, however, when her family moved to Italy. Eventually she was able to resume her passion in the United States, first at the Virginia School of the Arts and later at New York City’s Steps on Broadway, and from there her career took her to such disparate locales as the London Studio Centre, the Omaha Theater Co. Ballet, New York’s Joffrey Ballet School, and the Sacramento Ballet. Yet she felt the tug of Western North Carolina, so in 2011 she and husband (and fellow dancer) Benjamin packed up their three children and moved back to the mountains, with the hopes they’d one day be able to create their own ballet studio.

Hence, the Fletcher-based River Arts Ballet (RAB), which opened its doors on March 1, 2015, with the assistance of a small business loan and advice provided by the Business Planning Class at Mountain BizWorks.

“We designed RAB the ground up to mimic the theater and professional training environment we were accustomed to, and opened our ‘field of dreams,’” Christina explains. “With the body being the ‘instrument,’ we knew the set-up of our studio had to be top of the line in size and condition and [have] nurturing, positive teachers who were excited to share their love of dance and artistic expression.”

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| March 2017

CHRISTINA SCHREIVOGEL photos courtesy River Arts Ballet

Indeed, RAB is a world class facility, featuring state-ofthe-art flooring supported with over 1,000 shock-absorbing foam blocks (to minimize stress on dancer’s muscles and joints), along with eight-foot mirrors and 20-foot-plus ceilings. Christina’s training, and Benjamin’s own extensive background (he studied at the Houston Ballet Academy and went on to dance with professional ballet organizations in Ft. Wayne, Atlanta, and Sacramento), provide their studio impressive instructional power that’s further abetted by a

for leveraging doors in theater and dance backgroundenhanced paths. We cater to major league ballet hopefuls, but we also are inclusive to novices brave enough to come through our doors.”

She also cites, with pride, the successful run of RAB’s first world premiere last May, The Twelve Dancing Princesses Ballet, which was composed and choreographed from scratch. The company has also nearly completed earning certification to offer classes in Dance For PD (Parkinson’s Disease). “We love what we do and we enjoy sharing our passion with others.

We thrive in connecting community and are growing as a beacon to dancers of all ages, shapes, sizes, abilities.

Be moved is our motto: body, mind, and soul.”

Going forward, Christina says that they hope to expand soon. “It has been challenging to be in just one studio space,” she notes. “Three to five studios would be ideal, and ultimately, we would like to have our own black box theater here in Fletcher, as well as an International Ballet Boarding School. The quality of life—family, nature, health, culture—is what drew us back [to Western North Carolina]. I grew up and started my ballet adventure right here, and since then I’ve traveled and danced around the world. Now I’m back full circle.”

“We love what we do and we enjoy sharing our passion with others. We thrive in connecting community and are growing as a beacon to dancers of all ages, shapes, sizes, abilities. Be moved is our motto: body, mind, and soul.” seasoned staff: Casey Kristofferson, Ronnie Zink, Megan Medford, Otto Vasquez, Blue de Leeuw, R. Colby Damon, and David Keener. Classes are available for all ages, including Basic Ballet, Modern, Hip-Hop, Bokwa, Yoga, Homeschool Ballet, and Boy’s Only.

“My faculty and I have been blessed to have made long healthy careers in this physically and emotionally challenging world of dance,” says Christina. “Many instructors teach dance, specifically ballet, but very few have been ‘in the trenches’ of high caliber companies, or long enough, to know how to train dancers aimed for professional careers. We also provide individual guidance

Studio schedules and details can be found online: www.RiverArtsBallet.com.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

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photo by Ken Ketchie, High Country Press

16

| March 2017

Carving A Niche written by derek halsey

|

photos by anthony harden

High Country sign maker and potter Bill Dicks is looking for a fresh start—every week, in fact.

I

t is the classic adage of entrepreneurs and for those seeking to be both productive and happy: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

For Bill Dicks, of The Sign Shop, it is a love for working with his hands and working with wood that has motivated him for most of his life. Dicks is a custom sign maker whose work is found overseas in Australia, England, Israel, and elsewhere, as well as all over the United States. His deluxe signs are easily spotted in his part of Western North Carolina—in particular, Boone and nearby Banner Elk, the mountain resort town where his office studio and wood shop has been located since the ‘70s. The signs are typically handmade and beautiful (useful in an area where governmental restrictions on signage are the norm), and his high-quality gold-leaf work greeting people at the entrances to places such as Lees-McRae College, Sugar Mountain Ski Resort, and Elk River Club Community are familiar and welcome sights in the High Country.

Even though Dicks is now in his seventies and has been working at his craft for many decades, he confesses that he still looks forward March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

17

BILL’S CANDLE lanterns

to the beginning of each week when there is a new project to plan and a chance to work with his hands to create yet another original piece.

“In business, the answer to the question is always ‘Yes,’” says Dicks, as he shows his guest around his studio. “People don’t like to hear you say ‘No.’ If they ask you, ‘Can you do such and such?’ The answer is, ‘Yes,’ and then you figure out how to do it, even if you don’t have a clue. The other thing that is so important is to give people more than they expect to get concerning your product.”

It is the story of Dicks’ unique career path, however, that is inspiring. As with many entrepreneurs, the road to their destiny can be long, with many turns along the way, and it is not unusual for successful people to have worked multiple jobs and considered various directions before finding their muse.

Thinking Outside the Box Nowadays we live in the age of digital technology with the ever-present smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers. Dicks grew up in an age when kids worked with their hands a lot more, building things with wood and other materials. (In his standup comedy act, Parks and Recreation star Nick Offerman, himself a well-known master wood furniture builder, often encourages young folks to take up woodworking so they can appreciate the accomplishment of ‘working with your hands,’ a sentiment Dicks can appreciate.) With Dicks, it was his creative and crafty mother who taught him the art of chip carving as a boy.

“My Mom could do anything,” recalls Dicks, originally a Durham, North Carolina, native. “She showed me chip carving when I was 12, which is done with a single-edge razor blade.

They have instructional books about chip carving and they do it with gouges, but I learned to do it with a single-edge razor blade. I really thought it was cool, and when I got older and started having girlfriends it gave me a leg up because I’d make these little boxes and give it to them. I would carve a design on the top of it.”

This ability to carve custom boxes came in handy, he adds, especially when he was an undergraduate majoring in math and physics at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida.

“I was in a fraternity and I had chip-carved a small jewelry box in my room with the Greek fraternity letters on the top, where I kept my fraternity pin. One of the guys came and looked at it and said, ‘This is cool. How much would you charge me to make one of these for my girlfriend?’ I said, ‘I’ll do it for five bucks.’ By the end of the school year, I had made one for almost everybody in the fraternity and several for some of the guys, because when they changed girlfriends, I got another order. At five bucks a piece, you can’t make a living with that, but it was good for spending money in college. That was the start of my woodworking career.”

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| March 2017

PRIMED and ready for another layer of paint.

BILL DICKS

It was during college that Dicks’ life became a series of unplanned opportunities that would ultimately put him on his career path.

“I had a fraternity brother who left school—with one semester to go—with a better than a B average in biology saying, ‘I know what I want to do for a living, and it doesn’t take a college education to do it,’” says Dicks. “He was a tiki carver (Polynesian statues) down in the Florida Keys. He went home to the Keys and he started carving coconut palm logs, which fascinated me. I’d spend as much time as I could with him learning how to carve tikis. I’d give him the ones I carved for room and board whenever I could get down to his home.

“I kept carving tikis, and after I graduated, I had a job working at the national headquarters of my fraternity. I traveled all over the United States, so I didn’t have much chance to carve tikis, but I did do a lot of chip carving because I could take that with me. I worked for the fraternity for three years; after that, I went [back] to Lakeland to become a probation and parole officer for the state of Florida. But I found that I was more interested in coming home in the afternoon and carving logs than I was chasing ex-cons! After two years with the parole commission, I

knew I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life, so I started exploring other options. My interest was still in carving, and I found that Appalachian State University (ASU) had one of the best industrial arts departments in the country.” It was 1970, and by this time Dicks had met and married his girlfriend, Donna, who had become an elementary school teacher while they were living in Lakeland. The two found their way to the North Carolina High Country, and Dicks has lived and worked there ever since.

Learning a Craft—or Two Forty-seven years ago, Appalachian State and the town of Boone were quite different compared to now. “I came to ASU in August of 1970, and Boone was unbelievable,” says Dicks.

“There were two lanes of road into it, one fast food restaurant, one apartment complex, and the Appalachian Theatre was the only act in town. It cost 75 cents to go to a movie, and the neat thing about the theatre was if there was something in the movie that the proprietors felt was inappropriate that was about to come on, you could see the hand come down over the lens until it was gone. People would try to look through the fingers to see what they were missing. Boone was great, as was Blowing Rock. We loved it. It was awesome to be in the mountain air after living in Florida.”

As nice as the nature and the weather was in Boone, however, Dicks came to the area specifically to learn carving at the University. He also decided he wanted to try his hand at earning a living by making crafts while going to school, so he started by referencing his tiki-making days.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 19

“When we moved to Boone,” says Dicks, “the first thing I did was to find a craft shop that would let me sit out front and carve tikis and totem poles. I asked people, ‘What is the best craft shop around here?’ They would say it was Creative Crafts, found between Boone and Blowing Rock. I asked the owners, ‘Would you let me sit out front and carve?’ They said, ‘Yes, if you will give us a little percentage.’ I agreed and started carving, and it went wild. I had people jump out of cars while they were still moving saying, ‘Here is a mountain craftsman!’—and I’m sitting there carving Polynesian tikis.”

During this time, Dicks also turned his skills to sign making.

Initially creating one as a favor to a friend, he quickly learned that in addition to wood-crafted items, there was always a demand for well-designed signs. Carving and woodworking

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wouldn’t be the only talents he developed before graduating from ASU in 1972, either.

“At the industrial arts program at ASU,” recalls Dicks, “I’d go in at seven in the morning and go home at 11 o’clock at night because I enjoyed it so much. ASU had about 6,000 students then, and they pumped a lot of money into the industrial arts department. It was incredible. They were turning out furniture from their woodworking department that was second to none.

Any department that you went into, whether it was electronics, graphic design, metal working, or the crafts department, it was unbelievable. My first semester there, I was introduced to the world of making pottery when I took my first ceramics course. The instructor, Slim Owens, had made some candle lanterns, and when I walked in and saw them, I said, ‘That’s

BILL’S COLLECTION of sanders help make his work smooth.

what I want to do.’ By the end of that semester, I was selling candle lanterns.”

Dicks, it turns out, is known for his original pottery as much as his sign work. In fact, a search of the internet will yield an early newspaper article, originally published in 1972 in the Sumter (South Carolina) Daily Item newspaper, that speaks glowingly of Dicks’ pottery making abilities: “‘He is on his way to becoming one of the best-known design craftsmen in the nation,’ according to Jim Weaver, director of the Blue Ridge Hearthside Crafts Association.” (Read the full story online: tinyurl.com/hx6kvjm.)

In that article of four decades ago, Dicks himself is quoted as saying, “I decided on crafts as my vocation because this is the first time in my life I have been able to work at my profession

for 10 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, without tiring of it and completely enjoying it.” It’s an attitude that still informs his work.

Building a Business After Dicks graduated from ASU, he worked for five years at the Blue Ridge Hearthside Crafts shop on Beech Mountain, selling wooden routed signs and pottery, including his candle lanterns. He also set up at regional craft fairs, and his reputation steadily grew. Eventually, he bought some land at the base of the mountain in Banner Elk. There, Dicks and some friends built an unusually-designed three-story building by hand.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

21

“After five years of renting shop space, it was time to build my own studio/shop.

Three of us built a three-story, 4,000-sq.-ft. shop in three months, and none of us had any construction experience,” says Dicks. “I called my friend who taught me how to carve tikis and I said, ‘Marlin, how about helping me build a shop?’ He was the kind of guy that could do anything. He said, ‘I’d be glad to, but I’ve never done anything like that before.’ I said, ‘Well, we’ve got a couple of chain saws and a sledge hammer. How hard can it be?’”

Along the way, Dicks developed a loyal clientele that now stretches across the country and beyond. How loyal? The Sign Shop doesn’t have a website...Dicks’ customers, though, already know how to find him.

Dicks moved into the workshop in 1977. It’s where, to this day, he continues to create his pottery, signs, and carvings. He has also adapted with the changing times; for example, he learned how to sandblast signs in addition to routing and hand carving them. (“Routing” refers to the process of hollowing out an area of a piece of wood.) He also employs computer software to help him design some of his signs. Along the way, Dicks developed a loyal clientele that now stretches across the country and beyond. How loyal? The Sign Shop doesn’t have a website, and its only online presence appears to be an unofficial Facebook page and unclaimed Yelp and Manta listings, each displaying the address/phone and not much more. Dicks’ customers, though, already know how to find him.

A Lasting Memorial Perhaps the most special project that Dicks has been a part of has been the carving of the names of fallen soldiers on rocks used in memorial gardens on military bases.

“Our son joined the Army right out of high school and after two years, Dave qualified to be a part of the Army parachute team, the Golden Knights. During Dave’s second year on the team, a Special Forces Staff Sergeant named Pedro Munoz joined the Golden Knights. After 17 years of service, Pedro felt he needed a change of pace. After a year on the team, two days after 9/11, Pedro was hiking on the Appalachian Trail with a teammate and learned what had happened. That night he stood up, sang the National Anthem by firelight, and said that he was going back to his Special Forces team: ‘We’re going to war, and they are going to need me.’ He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2004 and was the first Special Forces soldier killed there in January, 2005.”

After Sgt. First Class Munoz was killed overseas—the first soldier in the Army 7th Special Forces Airborne Group to die in action since the Vietnam War—his daughter Dalia Munoz, then a 17-year-old in high school, decided to do a special project in honor of her father. As her Senior Project, she collected rocks from a river in the Blue Ridge Mountains with the intent of engraving them with the names of her dad and his dead comrades for a memorial garden at Fort Bragg.

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BILL’S WORKSHOP displays a variety of his signs | March 2017

BILL’S WALL displays a variety of plaques and photos dedicated to his work on memorials.

“After his death, Dalia visited my shop and she described what she wanted to do,” says Dicks. “By that time, there were five additional soldiers from her father’s unit who had been killed in battle. She wanted to get a river rock for each of the fallen men to sandblast the soldier’s name on it, along with his team designation, where he was killed, and when he was killed. She asked me if that was something that could be done.

I said yes, and that I’d be glad to do it. She said, ‘No. I want you to teach me how to do it, so I can do the work myself.’

She came up here two or three times over a year and we went through the whole process. One Friday in March, she came to Banner Elk and we went to a nearby river and gathered some rocks. On Saturday, she spent the whole day laying them out, sandblasting, and painting them.

When Dalia began to load the rocks in her dad’s truck that night, she realized that half of the rocks had the soldier’s name spelled with upper case letters and half in lower case letters.

“Neither one of us had picked up on the mistake,” continues

Dicks. “I said, ‘Dalia, they are fine. Nobody is going to care about that.’ She looked at me and said, ‘I care.’ So, Sunday morning, we went back in the river to get more rocks, corrected the mistake, and she went back to Fort Bragg to build the memorial garden.”

“Two years later, I got a call from a major of the 1st Battalion 7th Special Forces Group, and I knew immediately what he wanted.

He needed another rocwk. Four days later, they ordered another rock, and two weeks later, they ordered yet another rock. When 1st Battalion 7th Group pulled out of Afghanistan in 2008, there were 17 rocks in the memorial garden.” This is the only memorial like it in the United States Army, and it was so well-received that upon 1st Battalion’s return home, they added four more rocks to honor the four soldiers from their unit who were killed in Vietnam.

The garden was moved from Ft. Bragg to Elgin Air Force Base, along with their headquarters, about five years ago. Dicks was also honored with an official certificate of appreciation and an American flag that had been flown in Afghanistan.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 25

“The best day of the week is Monday” Bill Dicks is a sought-after craftsman whose quality of work has only gotten better over the years. His lovehate relationship with technology is amusing, especially when you walk into his shop and see an ancient piece of proto-computing technology from the 1980s that still works. It is the GSP SuperSprint Series III machine made by Gerber Scientific Products Company.

“Technology drives me nuts,” says Dicks.

“You can’t live with it, and you sure don’t want to live without it. But it changed me from being a backyard craft shop to being a commercial sign shop when I started using computers in 1985 or so. Pre-computer, I laid out everything free hand on grid paper, and I usually had to do it two or three times to get the sign laid out the way I wanted it. Then, I’d transfer the design with carbon paper to sandblast stencil and cut the design with an X-acto knife. Now, you can do the whole thing with computers and a plotter.

When asked what he does when not working with wood or clay or gold leaf, when he is in a recreational mood,

Dicks’ answer is, “I do this. I have people come to my shop regularly, and they look around and say, ‘This is cool. This is what I want to do when I retire.’ So, I figure I retired 45 years ago and this is just my hobby. People ask me when I am going to retire and my answer is, ‘The day before the funeral.’

“I have people come to my shop regularly, and they look around and say, ‘This is what I want to do when I retire.’ So, I figure I retired 45 years ago and this is just my hobby.”

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| March 2017

“I feel for people who are just living to retire, or they can’t wait for the weekends. To me, the best day of the week is Monday because you have the whole week ahead of you and you haven’t had the chance to screw anything up yet.

You’ve got another fresh start.”

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 27

CAROLINA in the

WEST [

news briefs

Why This Grass Is Greener haywood county

High Country Hydroseeding was spotlighted in Forester Daily News for its work at the Asheville Regional Airport.

The airport is upgrading its runway, and the process calls for the construction of a temporary runway, which will serve as a second taxiway after the existing runway is demolished and replaced.

State law requires any land disturbed in construction to be reseeded, so High Country is staying busy. The first step was to install a silt fence and other erosion control measures provided by Pioneer Seed and Supply. The easy part was deciding on a mixture of tall fescue, Kentucky bluegrass, and hard fescue for the flatlands. A mixture of millet and rye was used for nurse seed, as millet fails in

]

frost and rye fails in heat. Twenty-five of the airport’s 175 acres are too steep for mowing, so they were planted with Japanese clover. The grass seed had to be planted instead of sprayed because of the windy conditions at the airport. Bowie hydroseeding machines sprayed fertilizer and hydromulch over the seed in the flat areas. The process was complicated by state requirements for soil pH. Applying 4,000 lbs of lime per acre required special maintenance to prevent scale from building in the hydroseeders. Normally, they would have also blown straw, but High Country had to skip that because straw and jet engines don’t mix. Then there was the weather. Unseasonable aridity in June required dust control, and there was so much rain in July the soil wouldn’t compact. Best management practices don’t exist for dealing with the two inches of rain that fell in half an hour one day.

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ScaleUp WNC is branching out of the Asheville area. The initiative is one of eight launches of the United States Small Business Administration’s (SBA) ScaleUp America program. Offered by Mountain BizWorks, ScaleUp WNC helps existing small businesses develop and implement intentional growth strategies. To participate, one must be either a founder or an executive manager of a business based in Western North Carolina, with at least one full-time employee, and identified opportunities for expansion.

Participants typically have been in business for at least two years, with corporate earnings somewhere between $150,000 and $750,000. They are described as being high-caliber from a diversity of backgrounds. Recruitment efforts target rural programs and businesses owned by women, minorities, and veterans. The program runs cohorts of 15 companies each. Participants are selected in a competitive, merit-based process. The successful candidates enjoy mentorship, management training, connections with potential financiers, and a network of peers. Two cohorts will run this year. The fifth, like all its predecessors, was based

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in Asheville and began in February. The sixth, scheduled to work out of Boone, will convene in June. According to the SBA, businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for 90% of firms in the country and 97% of new jobs. Startups, however, create only 7% of new jobs.

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the old north state

national & world

mission, “to treat every person to an experience befitting a Vanderbilt.” The presentation of the EARL Award will be an annual event.

Count Your Blessings avery county

Taking Time out to Say Thanks buncombe county

Biltmore Farms Hotels attempted to show a small token of appreciation by granting their first ever EARL Award.

Earl stands for “Energetic and Engaged, Authentic, Relationship Builder, and Lovable;” and the first EARL Award ever was presented at a luncheon at the DoubleTree by Hilton Asheville-Biltmore to Earl Robinson, for whom the award is really named. Robinson, otherwise known as Mr. DoubleTree, was retiring after 19 years. He began working for the company as a host at the Biltmore Dairy Bar. When the restaurant closed, he began clerking at the Quality Inn Biltmore, which later became the DoubleTree. Ron Storto, vice president of hospitality for Biltmore Farms, praised Robinson for his “joy and spirit,” and for living up to the company’s

Pema Tshiri Sherpa began working with visitors to his homeland of Nepal as a porter at age sixteen. He had no equipment, boots, or warm clothes; but the group he guided paid him with chocolate, a T-shirt, and pencils. He advanced his career, serving in various capacities as a guide and cook. He would grow to become one of very few guides to walk the entire 960 miles of the Great Himalaya Trail. He has been to the summit of Mount Everest 8 times. Tshiri first visited Grandfather Mountain in 2014 for a cultural-exchange presentation, and was astounded by the natural beauty. North Carolina was different because the mountains of Nepal are mostly above the timberline. Tshiri stayed in touch with staff at Grandfather Mountain, but in 2015, his hometown of Hill in Solu Khumbu, was devastated by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. He established the Sherpa Welfare Nepal Foundation to help with earthquake relief and rebuilding, and he returned to

carolina in the west

Grandfather Mountain this year to raise awareness about the plight of his people.

With sponsorship from the Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation, he scheduled speaking engagements at the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum, Avery County High School, REI outdoor clothing in Asheville, and the Rotary Club of Avery County. To raise funds, he sold handcrafted yak fur Nepalese shawls.

Tap, Tap, You’re There buncombe county

Half a dozen Asheville restaurants are already using Reserve, and the number will soon double. Reserve is a digital reservation system now serving over 500 restaurants in upscale dining markets like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Reserve agreed to make Asheville its eighth venue largely because of the recruiting efforts of the Asheville Independent Restaurant Association, aka AIR Asheville. Reserve allows people looking for a place to eat to search for member venues and make a reservation with a couple taps on a restaurant’s website. The app keeps a floor plan of the restaurant’s dining area updated, not only for reservations, but in order to text walkins when tables open. Reserve maintains

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 29

The two sides of money.

PERSONAL

& TECHNICAL

carolina in the west

guest profiles that are accessible to all restaurants in the network. Profiles can include data like contact information, food allergies, how one likes a meat cooked, and seating preferences. Profile data can also be used to suggest other restaurants the diner might like. Reserve charges restaurants a flat monthly fee and no long-term contracts. AIR Asheville, the country’s largest organization of its type, networks restaurateurs to reach for improvements in areas of common interest. The organization is “dedicated to keeping Asheville’s food scene eclectic, authentic, and flavorful.”

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Brevard-based Muddy Sneakers will be expanding to the Piedmont with a $500,000 one-time appropriation from the North Carolina General Assembly.

Muddy Sneakers works with fifth graders, providing hands-on, experiential learning in lieu of old-fashioned textbooks and more modern simulations. Partnering with educational institutions and local government, participating schools integrate into their curriculum at least six full-day expeditions to places of natural interest within a half-hour’s drive. Executive Director Ryan Olson does not want the excursions to be confused with field trips, as Muddy Sneakers focuses on, “the local over the exotic, the existing over the contrived.” The program aims to help students feel more confident, connected, and awake. The program piloted with two Transylvania County schools in 2007. It grew to include 1,300 students in 28 schools, mostly located in Western North Carolina.

The grant will allow the program to set up a second field office in the Piedmont to serve five more districts and admit 1,400 new students program-wide.

Total instructional days for the upcoming year are estimated at 17,500.

Last year, Digitalsoju TV created a YouTube program in which Korean women sampled American barbecue.

It rapidly received more than 5 million views. So this year, another production treated North Korean refugees to four sauces selected after serious research.

The sauces were bottled by LawLers Barbecue from Alabama; Gates BarB-Q from Kansas City, Missouri; Rudy’s Bar-B-Q of Texas; and Asheville’s own 12 Bones, whose co-owners, Angela and Bryan King, along with pitmaster Shane Heavner and Angela’s sister, Liz, flew to Seoul for the filming. The restaurant’s Lexington Style, Vinegar, and Mustard flavors were sampled on pulled pork, brisket, and burnt ends prepared by Chef Gus Flores. The refugees had escaped a country where meat is affordable only by the privileged class, and pork, dog, chicken, and rabbit are more common than beef. They were impressed by the portions and succulence of the meat and described sauce as a new concept in flavors they wouldn’t have imagined.

A side of 12 Bones’ corn pudding was served as in the grand finale platter.

Runaway Runway macon county

Transportation planners are gearing up for another expansion of the single-runway airport in Macon County. In 2011 a $4.5 million project that extended the runway from 4,400 to 5,000 feet was completed, in spite of spiritual and archaeological concerns about 400 Cherokee graves and artifacts in the area.

In 2013 the Macon Airport Authority secured approvals to repave and widen the runway from 75 to 100 feet. Now, the North Carolina Department of Transportation is planning to expand the runway another 1,000 feet in a second $4.5 million project. In recent years, the Macon County Commissioners have appropriated a 10% match for each of the

Soup To Nuts buncombe county

In early February, Collins & Company president Mark Collins, of Asheville, hosted an “auction dinner” to benefit the Western North Carolina AIDS Project (WNCAP). Collins, also president of the WNCAP board, has held the dinner for the past six years and it is typically the highest-bid item for the annual WNCAP fundraiser, raising as much as $8,000. On this evening the eight top bidders dined at Collins’ house upon a multi-course meal created by some of the city’s top chefs: Michel Baudouin of Bouchon, Joe Scully of Corner Kitchen and Chestnut, Anthony Cerrato of Strada and The Social Lounge, and Eric Scheffer, restauranteur/sommelier of Vinnie’s Neighborhood Italian. The event started in the kitchen, where Collins spoke about HIV-AIDS and the current heroin epidemic in Appalachia. Then the attendees—several of whom indicated they had lost a friend or family member to AIDS, or were active in prevention education for school age students—enjoyed, as Collins put it, “spectacular food and wine pairings.” He added that the chefs were doubly generous, “serving not just food, but their own brand of social justice—that’s the common thread, from start to finish, soup to nuts.”

EILEEN FISHER

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two $4.5 million expansions; $290,000 for widening, repaving, and lighting; and additional amounts for various capital improvements. In addition, the county has been paying $40,000 to $50,000 a year for airport operations. Both runway extensions were justified as improvements to airport safety. Lengthening the runway will also allow more types of airplanes to use the airport. The current runway is described by users as adequate for takeoff, but forcing unnecessary burning of rubber on landings.

Conditions are worse in the dark and/or rain. The airport is used heavily by local industry leaders. For example, Drake Enterprises flies out six days a week.

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local industry

Business THE

Books OF

written by shawndr a russell

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

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local industry

The creed in the publishing community that reverberates up and down the hierarchy is that you are never 100% sure which books will become huge hits and lead to Hollywood movies or which books will barely cover the cost of creating, printing, and distributing them.

However, glimmers of a renewed interest in publishing as a viable business have been shining through recently, with The Girls author Emma Cline recently scooping up a $2 million advance and selling the film rights to Scott Rudin, producer for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Another debut novelist, Paula Hawkins, also hit it big—at least six figures, but the deal was kept hush hush—for her smash hit, The Girl on the Train.

(The film of the same name, starring Emily Blunt and Allison Janney, hit theaters last fall.)

Three other authors, all female, also earned six figure deals for the books Sweetbitter, The Nest, and Behold the Dreamers, while self-published rockstar Amanda Hocking earned $2 million for her young adult four-book series deal with St. Martin’s Press. Even celebrities are getting in on the publishing game in recent years, with Lena Dunham, Gwyneth Paltrow, Johnny Depp, Chelsea Handler, and Oprah Winfrey curating titles for new publishing imprints.

Meanwhile, here in Western North Carolina, the occasional breakout success of regional authors continues to be a source of encouragement to other writers: Charles Frazier’s 1997 historical novel Cold Mountain won the National Book Award for Fiction and was turned into an Academy Award-winning film; while more recently, Robert Beatty (profiled in this magazine in October 2015) topped the New York Times best-seller list for 2015’s Serafina and the Black Cloak. The third book in his 34

| March 2017

ROBERT BEAT T Y photo by Anthony Harden

Serafina series, incidentally, is set to come out in July 2017 through Disney’s publishing arm. Set at the Biltmore Estate, the series has caused rumors to swirl that Serafina movies one day could be filmed at the famous Vanderbilt mansion in Asheville.

Does all this cash flow mean the publishing industry has recovered from the introduction of eBooks and explosion of digital distractions? Not exactly. Last year an Entertainment Weekly report, “Why Publishers are Betting Big on Debut Novels,” noted, “Given the amount of books a publisher needs to sell in order to make a profit, it’s possible that none of these novels will actually make money. But Random House publisher Susan Kamil believes that the honor of having a sparkling literary talent on your list can offset any financial loss. ‘We want to have the best writers in the world at Random House,’ Kamil says. ‘Sometimes those writers come at a premium—and we have paid it.’”

That’s music to authors’ ears after years of uncertainty and fear driving the decisions of the Big Six, the book publishers who have been the gatekeepers for eons. The Big Six included HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, The Penguin Group, Hachette, Random House, and Macmillan, but mergers and acquisitions have reduced it to the Big Four. This recovery for print books has given a renewed sense of hope to these publishers, evident by their willingness to write big checks to new authors. Just like discovering the next chart-topping singer is a reality TV obsession, scouring for the Next Big

A Quick

Self-Publishing Checklist

Thing in books is once again a potentially lucrative endeavor.

In truth, it’s one of the last Great American Dreams: to strike it rich by the cleverness of your words, the intelligence in your ideas—something you created with just your mind and becomes your Golden Ticket to the good life.

follow in order

o First and foremost, write your story and edit it several times yourself.

Self-Publishing Rising

o Hire a cover designer. Many authors opt to do the cover themselves, but these sometimes look amateurish. Graphic designers, illustrators, and/or artists sometimes offer cover design services, or even a very affordable online marketplace like Fiverr can produce good-quality results.

So, it’s no surprise that the number of self-published titles has concurrently been creeping up as well, to nearly 500,000 per year. As a result, self-published books’ share of the market has risen in the United States up to twelve percent, to seven percent globally, and to 22 percent in the United Kingdom. While self-published authors undoubtedly decide why to self-publish for a slew of reasons—from capturing a family’s history, to telling the true story of his or her life, to finally resurrecting that novel manuscript that had been in a dusty box under the bed, to simply wanting to leave a physical legacy—I’m hard-pressed to believe that not even the tiniest shred of hope of “hitting it big” exists in every self-published author. Think about it: All self-published authors put themselves out there in a very public, brave, and vulnerable way. They often put their name on their thoughts and feelings that are packaged in an attempt to win the hearts of readers across the globe, earn millions of dollars, travel to events worldwide, and see their story on the big screen.

The harsh reality, though, is that only 40 self-published authors have earned the one-million-books-sold mark since 2011.

If someone really just wanted to write a story down, he or she could merely save it on a Word document on their computer, never share it with anyone except closest family and friends, and call it a day. Instead, self-published authors have to research how to self-publish—a fairly difficult process to go through the first time, as I experienced from my initial go-round in 2012 with my debut novel, Couple Friends. Authors go through hours of editing, formatting, and polishing whether we’ve landed an amazing book deal or are releasing it ourselves. Then comes the daunting task of self-promotion once it’s live, something only the Chelsea Handlers and Oprah Winfreys of the world truly enjoy, are genuinely good at doing, and net excellent, profitable results. Truthfully, a lot of writers want the success to happen on the merit of the writing itself. Yet the reality is that the most fabulous writing could be sitting on a shelf right now and we don’t know about it because the author didn’t spend much time, money, or energy promoting the book, and therefore a major influencer hasn’t discovered it yet.

So what does the ecosystem of self-publishing look like?

Well, there are a lot of moving parts and not one single, perfect formula for success. Success can come in a slew of forms: thriller, romance, mystery, horror, fantasy, desire, self-help, business. It’s truly one of the most diverse fields in terms of retail success. One business might sell only the best electronics, or best BBQ sauce; but in publishing, hundreds of different recipes can lead to that smash hit that flies off the shelves and makes all your biggest dreams come true.

o Find a professional editor to line edit. If this editor doesn’t also offer copyediting or proofreading, hire a second editor for a final edit. o Before your final edit, have 3-5 unpaid prereaders (likely, family or friends) read it and give you detailed feedback. Alternatively, you might opt to do this step before hiring any editors. o Set up your Kindle Direct Publishing account and follow their step-by-step instructions to publish your eBook (or hire a contractor).

Option to also publish with Barnes & Noble and other eBook vendors. o If you want to release printed copies, decide between an on-demand printing service like CreateSpace or IngramSpark, or find a printer directly. o Create a marketing plan that includes building a website, marketing on social media, contacting bookstores, book clubs, and book reviewers, and other opportunities to spread the word about your book. The sooner you do this, the better. o Register your book with the Library of Congress. o Never stop promoting! (Or, be happy that it’s published and move on with your life.)

✁

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

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local industry

LOCAL AUTHOR events are a great way to get noticed, photo courtesy Malaprop’s Bookstore

The Local Stage

Western North Carolina obviously has a storied literary history and has attracted creatives to its mountain lifestyle for centuries. We have great pride for local literary legends Thomas Wolfe and Carl Sandburg, and modern-day wordsmiths such as the above-mentioned Frazier and Beatty. Not long ago, award-winning author Sara Gruen (Water For Elephants, Ape House) told the Asheville Citizen-Times she moved to the area because “there’s just a magical, open creative energy here”— Asheville in particular. The nationally-recognized Malaprop’s Bookstore, located in downtown Asheville, often features worldclass authors doing readings and signings; the store vows their mission is to “provide a space where freedom of expression is supported, where important literature—from authors backed by major publishers to those who self-publish—is available to all.”

Together, the ingredients are on hand for the North Carolina mountain region to make its mark in the publishing world.

Local Bookstores

Thirty-four-year-strong Malaprop’s is considered an ally to many regional and local self-published authors, yet things become complicated if that author also wants to distribute books via Amazon’s on-demand printing service, CreateSpace.

“Many indie booksellers will not carry books printed by CreateSpace because of Amazon’s predatory practices toward authors, publishers, and other booksellers. We do carry CreateSpace authors, but do not order directly from them,” explains Malaprop’s general manager, Linda-Marie Barrett. She adds that for Asheville authors only, they offer a consignment program, which has been utilized by successful authors Cecil Bothwell, Trish Brown, Charles Gershon, April Moon, and Jean Boone Benfield, among others. Barrett also offers this advice to self-published authors: “The more you talk with indie booksellers, especially the indie booksellers in your community, the better your chances of their support pushing your book out into the world.”

The reality is that these independent booksellers, just like authors, have to think about their target audiences and carve out their own niches and reputation. Like the team at Malaprop’s, the people behind West Asheville’s co-op bookstore Firestorm review indie author submissions and decide which books are a good fit for their clientele—acting, in some ways, like the gatekeepers at large publishing houses in carefully curating their list of offerings. Firestorm member/owner Libertie Valance cautions, “Indie authors should review our store contents before submitting, as we are a general interest bookstore with a very well-defined flavor, i.e. many indie titles will not be a good fit.”

Plainly, publishing is a tough industry from top to bottom, but Valance emphases one of the advantages of being a local fixture compared to a chain store: “[We] have an extremely strong community of local authors—indie and traditional—from which indie authors can draw encouragement and support.”

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| March 2017

ROBIN RUSSELL GAISER , a Pisgah Press author, signing books, photo courtesy Pisgah Press

Local Independent Publishers

Western North Carolina is home to several independent publishers. These publishers act in many ways like the Big Four, with similar publishing terms and their own set of publishable criteria. Anyone can start a publishing house; it’s just a matter of setting up your LLC, S-Corp, or Sole Proprietorship. The fastest-growing indie publishing houses typically release at least 50+ titles per year, with Nashville being home to a 2015 top-12 house in Turner Publishing. Our region boasts about a dozen indie publishers, including Black Mountain Press (seeking Thomas Wolfe-inspired authors) and Asheville’s Grateful Steps, which focuses on their mission to “provide voices for those who might not be heard and to help preserve Appalachian history.” Others are super niche, like Amazing Dreams Publishing (also in downtown Asheville, and specializing in LGBT books), or Native Ground Books & Music (located between Asheville and Swannanoa, they publish Southern Appalachian music-related titles).

As with writing, the endeavor of operating an independent publishing house is a labor of love with no guarantee of breaking even, let alone earning profits. The owner of regional publisher, Pisgah Press, Andy Reed, explains, “When I publish a book that I like, the cost is on me, just like a traditional publisher. The support I ask of the authors relates to publicity and marketing.” To subsidize Pisgah Press, Reed also assists authors who want to self-publish by providing editing, designing, and formatting services. “Authors come to me needing bits and pieces and hire me as a packager—I basically serve as a vanity press in that case, and these titles

are not part of the Pisgah Press imprint. That helps subsidize the real literature, and I aim to do as thorough a job that I would do on any of my books.”

For both authors and indie publishers, the key to success is reputation. “If people read one book from Pisgah Press and like it, they might try a second title, and if they like that one too, they might decide to keep buying books from Pisgah Press,” Reed explains. He also believes that Asheville has the ingredients to become a publishing mecca with the right support and efforts. “Asheville BookFest needs to grow. [The annual literary arts celebration organized by the Grateful Steps Foundation is held in December and features regional authors and local publishers.] Using the Ollie Center would be great to help institutionalize it. I’ve been on the planning committee with Micki from Grateful Steps for years, and if we could grow the way Decatur Book Festival has grown—it’s one of the largest in the Southeast—that would be fantastic.”

Another necessary element in Reed’s opinion? Investors. “One of the ways to break through the glass ceiling would be for an investor to say, okay, for the next six books, we are going to do this publicity, pay for PR and reviews, do proper book tours, etc.” An interesting concept considering Asheville was ranked

by Small Business Trends as a top-7 startup hub.

Vanity Presses and Self-Publishing Assistance

Publishers dubbed “vanity presses” collect a fee from authors to publish their books—often using Amazon’s services Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace. In truth, there’s March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 37

local industry

TOM DAVIS, in his off ice of Sylva’s Old Mountain Press

Educational Opportunities WARREN WILSON COLLEGE

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GREAT SMOKIES WRITING PROGRAM

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THE WRITERS’ WORKSHOP OF ASHEVILLE Offers workshops, seminars, retreats, contests, readings, and more.

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A-B TECH CONTINUING EDUCATION WRITING CLASSES Varies by semester and includes genre-specific as well as skill-specific courses.

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| March 2017

little difference between self-publishing and utilizing a vanity press; authors who opt for this route to publication often do not want to deal with the details of designing and formatting their own books and would rather pay someone with prior experience to handle the execution once they’ve written and edited their manuscript. Authors are often advised to beware of vanity presses, as they can charge thousands of dollars when what they actually do can be accomplished for much cheaper, either by learning how to do the formatting and distributing through Amazon, or by hiring a company or subcontractor that charges minimal fees. Executive Director for the North Carolina Writer’s Network, Ed Southern, urges, “Rather than giving money to a ‘vanity press,’ authors can use one of several reputable online services that walk them through the process [of publishing print books], but leave control in their hands. Publishing your own eBook is even easier.”

Tom Davis, of Sylva’s Old Mountain Press (OMP), falls into the subcontractor category. He launched OMP in 1992 in order to publish his first authored book—a fairly common practice among self-published authors who want to separate their personal finances from their book publishing dreams. “Back in the early 1990s, everyone was horrendously expensive, asking around $10,000 just to do my collection of short stories. It was really hard to find a small press in those days, so I decided to just do it myself. I typeset it and got 500

Self-published Authors

BILL R AMSEY, has published four books on his own.

copies printed.” The printer he used explained that there was quite a demand for people who could typeset, so Davis decided to assist other self-publishers as a side gig while continuing to serve in the military. Although this venture didn’t make him a ton of money, it did provide a nice nest egg, and many of his personal titles continue to provide a small revenue stream of about $100-200 per month.

Authors that decide to skip pitching literary agents and publishing houses, or prefer not to hire a vanity press or subcontractor, can publish directly through Amazon in what the company lays out as three steps: prepare, publish, promote. However, this oversimplification leaves out several important steps, the top priority of which is hiring a professional editor. For my first book, I spent about $2500 working with an editor listed on the Editorial Freelancers Association directory. Many editors specialize in either line editing (content, style, and language), copy editing (technical flaws like grammar and spelling), or proofreading (final minor mistakes). Unfortunately, many self-published authors opt to skip hiring an editor, to the detriment of their book and the credibility of the self-publishing industry as a whole. Both Pisgah’s Reed and OMP’s Davis have turned away authors who refused to have their manuscripts edited and suggested quality editing might be the most important aspect of publishing.

That, and a great story, of course.

One local self-published author, Clara Bitter, echoes this sentiment. “My advice is to invest in copy editing and get a lot of people to pre-read your book—I wish I’d have had even more pre-readers.” Restless in retirement, Bitter decided it was finally time to publish the story of her family’s 15 years of reunions at their Pawleys Island vacation home, which she titled Arrogantly Shabby: A Pawleys Island Memoir.

“I wanted to share these stories with the entire family, including the younger generations,” says Bitter. “I believe in writing your life story so your grandchildren’s grandchildren can enjoy it.” To prepare, Bitter took several online writing classes at A-B Tech, joined writing groups, and attended writing conferences.

“If you go to conferences, talk to the other attendees—you’ll learn just as much or more from these authors as you do the speakers,” she advises.

Like Bitter, local self-published author Bill Ramsey (father of Band of Horses lead guitarist, Tyler Ramsey) has enjoyed publishing as an encore career. “If you start later in life, you can spend the rest of your life looking for a publisher. I had to short-circuit the process.” Besides publishing four books, Ramsey founded the Blue Ridge Bookfest that ran for eight years before closing its doors in April 2016 due to declining attendance and rising costs.

“It’s just really tough—so much competes for people’s attention, and there are so many books published each year.” And not just for indie authors. Ramsey once attended a book signing with Sara Gruen on the heels of her Water

“I ask them first, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ If they answer to become famous or make a lot of money, I don’t work with them.

They have to have realistic expectations and recognize that making it big is rare.”

At this point, he mostly spends time coaching and counseling authors. “I ask them first, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ If they answer to become famous or make a lot of money, I don’t work with them. They have to have realistic expectations and recognize that making it big is rare.”

Davis says he stays in the game because he hates seeing authors get taken advantage of by predatory vanity presses.

“It breaks my heart when people go to vanity publishers and the product and cost are terrible.”

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 39

local industry

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LOOKING GLASS ROCK WRITERS CONFERENCE Hosted by Brevard College, there will be a collection of workshops and keynote speakers to inspire writers in Western North Carolina.

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SEPTEMBER CAROLINA MOUNTAINS LITERARY FESTIVAL Held annually in Burnsville, North Carolina, with free readings and several ticketed events, including writing workshops by genre and keynotes.

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DECEMBER ASHEVILLE BOOKFEST Features regional authors and local publishers and organized by Grateful Steps Foundation.

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for Elephants success, and, shockingly, only five people were in attendance. To grow our publishing community, this kind of low turnout just can’t happen.

Despite success in publishing being a long shot, Ramsey believes everyone should publish at least one book (“You owe it to yourself!”) and when you do, write honestly. “Honest writing is one of the hardest things to do, but we have to absolutely do it for your sake and your readers,” he advocates.

Photography presents additional challenges for publishers, both independent and traditional, since they are more expensive to produce, have a narrower audience, and publishers typically only want to print 3,000 per run. Yet seeing your vision come to fruition can make these additional hurdles all the more worthwhile. Just ask five-time published “photograuthor” Tim Barnwell. When he pitched his first book concept to traditional publishers, no one could seem to grasp what he envisioned.

Not one to sit on his heels—just look at some of the stunning shots at BarnwellPhoto.com—in 2000, he hired a graphic artist to collaborate on a prototype. “I spent one night a week with him over a six-month period and designed the book the way I imagined it. I hired a friend, who was a newspaper editor, to edit the text. I took the files to an office supply store, printed it out, and had it spiral bound. I made two copies and sent them to a North Carolina publisher and my photography mentor and friend’s editor at W.W. Norton in New York. Within weeks I had offers from both companies. I firmly believe that producing the prototype was the key to getting it published.”

He went with W.W. Norton for their superior print quality and their national distribution network, publishing two additional titles with the imprint. Yet for his fifth book, 2016’s Great Smoky Mountain Vistas, Norton didn’t bite and instead suggested he self-publish. “I hired a local graphic artist and a former editor and production manager who had worked for Lark Books [Asheville-based craft books publishing house that was consolidated into its New York City parent company in 2014]. With that team, I was able to design, edit, and print the book under my imprint, Numinous Editions. While I spent more money on design, editing, and paper than a traditional book company would, I got a better quality product. And as I don’t have to allow for their cut, I can sell the title at a reasonable price and still make a profit.”

His advice to DIY-ing a successful book? “Market research and test marketing a prototype to a variety of acquaintances will give you a feel for whether there is enough interest in your theme. There are plenty of books sitting in photographers’ basements that only sold a few hundred copies of the 3,000 they printed.”

TIM BARNWELL’S photography has been published in a dozen magazines, and thus he felt could suppor t books of their own.

Local Advantages

Western North Carolina certainly has the foundation to compete with some of the fastest-growing independent publishing communities like Salem, Massachusetts, and March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 41

local industry

Evanston, Illinois. Both of these cities have a smaller population than Asheville, yet are home to two of the seven fastest-growing independent publishers in the United States as of 2016, according to Publishers Weekly.

Combine this factor with our growing entrepreneurial reputation, support of the creative economy, and booming tourism, and one day becoming a home for a successful independent publishing house is not farfetched.

Regardless, successful self-published authors have and will continue to emerge from our mountains, further promoting the area as a hub of creativity and ingenuity.

conferences, competitions, publicity opportunities, and newsletters. NCWN Director Ed Southern describes Asheville as having “such a powerful literary culture that

The story of this mountain region has long included heralding local literary talent right alongside our amazing makers, artists, musicians, brewers, innovators, chefs, and a wide variety of inherently talented folks.

Writing Groups and Networks

With more than 20 writing groups, ranging from critiquefocused to positive-only feedback, Asheville offers plenty of opportunities to network with fellow writers and improve your writing. The North Carolina Writers’ Network (NCWN)—proud to call North Carolina “The Writingest State”—has loads of resources available to writers, including

an indie author has a built-in advantage, just by being there. You can take some classes in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-A, or with The Writers’ Workshop.

The North Carolina Writers’ Network’s volunteer Regional Rep in Buncombe County is Alli Marshall [a published author and the arts editor of alternative weekly Mountain

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Xpress], and she puts together a Writers’ Social at the Cork & Keg Bar, the first Wednesday of each month. It’s a good chance to connect and trade ideas with other writers.”

Like Ramsey, Reed, and Davis, Southern also urges authors not to pin their hopes on massive success with a book. “Too many authors hear the one-in-a-million success stories of The Martian or Fifty Shades of Grey, and assume that will happen to them,” he explains, referring to two of the self-publishing industry’s greatest success stories.

Tourism

The story of this mountain region has long included heralding local literary talent right alongside our amazing makers, artists, musicians, brewers, innovators, chefs, and a wide variety of inherently talented folks. As a result, we honor Thomas Wolfe and Carl Sandburg in our storytelling, have one of the top indie bookstores in America, and have a thriving, well-rounded cultural scene that continues to attract record-breaking numbers of visitors. Plus, authors enjoy coming here as a getaway, so bookstores and events held here have a better chance of attracting notable authors. Several literary landmarks also entice visitors,

BOOKS FROM regional publisher, Pisgah Press.

including Black Mountain College Museum, the Omni Grove Park Inn (for its long history of hosting authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald), Oakdale and Riverside cemeteries, Carl Sandburg’s home in Flat Rock, and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.

Combined with numerous educational opportunities and literary events (see sidebar p.38 & p.40) we appear to be primed to continue our literary tradition in the digital age.

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column

Ghost Wineries

Look to these virtual wineries for remarkable value.

J

john kerr

is the co-owner of Metro Wines located on Charlotte Street in downtown Asheville.

44

I

A M A LWA Y S A L I T T L E E N V I O U S W H E N my friends tell me about their recent trips to Europe. It’s not so much the museums full of art or the ruins that they see. It’s their stories about paying only $25 for a great Brunello or some other bottle that ranks among the world’s best wines.

That same bottle of Brunello sells for $50 or more in our country. This sad fact is due to the added costs of shipping the wine across the Atlantic to a distributor, who must house and then ship the wine to your local shop. And often there is an importer in the mix who must also be paid.

If you’re thinking you’ve just found a great arbitrage opportunity and plan to have wine shipped directly to you from Europe, think again.

Trust me, the costs of shipping and taxes far exceed the price you’ll pay for that bottle in a domestic wine shop. This venture is largely reserved for the sentimental who want to pour another glass while reminiscing about the little winery they discovered in the Italian countryside.

The bad news for those of us who love the great wines from California and the Pacific Northwest is that there is no domestic price break like there is in Europe. Very few Napa Cabs sell for less than $50 a bottle, and most are in the $60 to $200 range.

| March 2017

But the high prices create a dilemma for America’s premium wineries. Unless you’re a world famous winery like Caymus or Silver Oak, there will be years when you can’t sell it all at the original high price. So, what can they do to move their wine?

Leave it to American ingenuity to solve this problem.

During the Great Recession, the problem was solved by websites which offered 30% to 70% off on quality wines. Since all wineries were facing the same glut, there was less stigma to have their name associated with premium wines sold at pennies on the dollar. But to protect the wineries’ brand, the websites could only sell the wine for just one day or until the wine sold out before day end.

As America’s economy recovered, there were fewer bargains to be had. Generally, these websites now survive by offering lower quality wines or smaller discounts. Some slap a label they create on bulk juice and sell the wine at a price that is a perceived discount. But now, as back then, your

J patience is tested to make this type of discount shopping work. You’ll have to check the website one or more times every day, hoping that the wine you want eventually appears.

Yes, there is a better way to buy a premium wine for a song, and it’s as easy to find as dropping by your local wine shop. The prices of these wines are at least 50% off—often the discounts are much deeper than that.

You can expect to pay less than $30 for

I CALL THESE ENTERPRISES GHOST WINERIES, BECAUSE THE WINERIES DON’ T REALLY EXIST. YOU CAN BUY A BOT TLE OF THEIR WINE. BUT THERE IS NO VINEYARD OR TASTING ROOM THAT YOU CAN VISIT.

a Napa Cab that normally sells for $70 to $100. The best deal we ran across was a $200 Napa Diamond Mountain Cab, which sold for about $25.

These discounts are the result of a few smart entrepreneurs who joined the world of negociants or wine traders.

They buy the wineries’ unsold wine and sell it under their own label. To do this, the negociant must sign a contract swearing that (s)he will never reveal the source of the wine.

I call these enterprises ghost wineries, because the wineries don’t really exist.

You can buy a bottle of their wine. But there is no vineyard or tasting room that you can visit. They keep their costs down (as well as yours) by renting the casks and bottling equipment only when they need them.

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So everyone wins. You get a remarkable wine at an unbelievable price, and the wineries’ names are protected. But there are a couple of downsides to this arrangement. First, if

BECAUSE THERE IS A LIMITED SUPPLY OF THESE WINES, MANY OF THEM ARE SOLD ONLY REGIONALLY. FORTUNATELY, THERE ARE SEVER AL NEGOCIANTS WHO OFFER THEIR WINES IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA.

good news is that the labels show which region the wine comes from. So, if you like the wines from Napa’s Oakville region, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you’re buying. Second, if you really like one of the wines, you’ll never be able to buy that wine again. Since the negociants are buying what’s left of a particular vintage, once it’s gone it’s gone. If you find a wine you like, stock up.

Because there is a limited supply of these wines, many of them are sold only regionally. Fortunately, there are several negociants who offer their wines in Western North Carolina.

Here are most of the negociants who sell wines in the Asheville area, along with a couple of their wines that you can expect to see in the wine shops now.

Treasure Hunter

you care to know exactly which wine you’re serving, you will probably never be able to identify it. I have recognized a few of them, but they were wines I’ve been drinking for years. The

Probably the most likely negociant wine you’ll find in town.

Hunter lives in Napa so that he can stay close to the action.

Most of his wines are from Napa or Sonoma, but he’s also brought in several premium wines from Chile and the Pacific Northwest. Most of the wines he offers are exactly what the winery produced, simply poured into his bottles. One current

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release is “Cellar Door,” a rich Cabernet Sauvignon from Red Mountain, one of the best wine regions in Washington State.

Another is “Crimson Coil,” an old-school style Zinfandel from Mendocino County.

Hunter also blends finished wines to create his own concoction. One of my favorites is “One Time Spaceman,” a blend of Syrahs from Southern California that produced an opulent wine with layers of flavor. To ensure you know that you are not getting a certain winery’s finished product, his own blends do not carry the Treasure Hunter name on the labels.

Vintners Found

End of the Vines

Another favorite, their name implies how they do business.

Their approach is a little different than most other negociants.

There is an ocean of wine out there with 5,500 bonded wineries in California alone. Many of these are tiny wineries with little backing and low access to marketing. End of the Vines helps out small wineries by offering their wines. My current favorite is “Magic Hat,” a Cabernet blend that originally sold for about $85.

These wines may be more expensive than your typical Tuesday night wine. But if you’re willing to accept a little mystery in your glass, you can drink the best that America has to offer for a fraction of the price.

This negociant quietly offers wines from the Napa and Sonoma wineries. It is difficult to find information about this negociant. All I can tell you is that from the few wines I’ve been able to identify, Vintners Found offers some of the best wines made in California. The current release is a Cabernet Franc that is rich but balanced, with enough acidity to avoid Franc’s common problem of being too flabby.

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THE OLD

NORTH

STATE [

news briefs

Cutting the Grass greensboro

Unifi, Incorporated, a manufacturer of recycled fiber, divested itself of its 60% interest in Repreve Renewables, LLC. Repreve Renewables’ main product was Freedom Giant Miscanthus, otherwise known as elephant grass. It grows very fast to heights of 10 feet or so, and is thus a great source of biomass fuel.

Another application has been for poultry bedding, a product Repreve branded as Thrivez. After eight years of developing the line, Unifi spun off the business to cut losses, not wanting to invest in the sales and marketing needed to make the grass profitable. While Unifi lost $1.66 million in the sale, it also reduced its debt by $4 million. Corporate leadership explained the company wanted to focus on its core polyester and yarn products.

]

Unfortunately, sales of all yarn products have decreased, likely due to the closure and downsizing of American apparel retailers. Of Unifi’s yarn products, 65% are used in apparel and hosiery.

Lumberton. Five hundred employees were selected to work at the new plant from over 4,000 applicants; and they trained for a month before the grand opening. The operation runs three shifts: two for processing and one for sanitation. The plant is currently packaging 20,000 chickens a day; but at capacity, 1,1000 workers will handle 12.5 times that volume. St. Pauls was selected for the Mississippi-based chicken company’s eleventh fully-integrated processing facility after citizens of Cumberland County protested its proposed construction there. The new plant was opened to reach more markets in the Eastern Seaboard states.

More than Payments Get Processed

Come Together

st. pauls

durham

Sanderson Farms has opened a $155 million, 180,000-sq.-ft. chicken processing plant and an associated wastewater treatment facility. The plant prepares fresh chicken meat for 40-pound vacuum packs distributed to the food service industry, unlike Sanderson’s plant in Kinston, which packages chicken for retail. Both plants are supplied by a feed mill in Kinston and a hatchery in

Parata Systems, a company specializing in automated pharmacy solutions, is bringing all its operations under one roof. The new, two-story, 100,000 -sq.-ft. headquarters is being built by Brookwood Capital Partners to sensibly accommodate manufacturing and distribution operations and corporate offices.

Collaboration space was a recurring theme in the design, as evidenced by

the free spirit of enterprise

Join us on Social Media! f o r t i c k e t g i v e away s , e x c l u s i v e s , a n d m o r e !

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| March 2017

ample conference rooms, unprogrammed space, and a break room equipped to handle team events. As added features, prospects and clients will get to testdrive equipment in a hands-on, mock-up pharmacy known as the Vision Center; and members of the public will be able to tour the facility, observing manufacturing processes through glass walls.

Parata’s operations have been dispersed since 2007, when the company acquired a number of businesses and decided to stop outsourcing its manufacturing.

$58 Million and 5 Turbines Later kitty hawk

The United States Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management are offering 122,405 acres up for bid for the construction of an offshore commercial wind farm. Bidding will start at an amount equal to $2 per acre, but bids on similar sites have reached several million dollars. The Bureau has qualified nine companies to bid. The successful candidate would construct a farm capable of supplying 1.5 gigawatts for the region. While a contract should be awarded in March, it will be another five

Estate Sales Services

28

70

carolina in the west

national & world

or ten years for the plan to pass all regulatory hurdles. The federal government would pay annual rent until the site is operational and an annual operating fee thereafter. The Kitty Hawk tract is the seventh offshore lease sale to be offered.

Acreage off the Wilmington shore will be combined with South Carolina waters in a future offering. While high bids for oceanic federal lands for wind farms have given the government over $58 million in revenue, only one site, with five turbines off the coast of Rhode Island, is currently operational. Offshore wind remains one of the nation’s most expensive forms for generating electricity.

the old north state

room where drugs were packaged for intravenous injection. He notified management, which took no action for sixteen months. If a company fails to follow Food & Drug Administration standards, it may be prosecuted under the False Claims Act, so Wall filed a complaint. As terms of the settlement, Baxter accepted responsibility for $16 million in penalties and forfeiture. In addition, it will pay $2.158 million in federal civil penalties, 20% of which Wall is entitled to collect. As corrective action, Baxter fired several managers, made improvements to the room in question, and stepped-up monitoring, inspections, and compliance training.

Alternative Facts marion

Big Backyweed

Baxter Healthcare admitted guilt in a settlement with whistleblower Chris Wall. While there was neither evidence of impacted products nor complaints from patients, Baxter representatives wanted to remove any doubt that the problem wasn’t consistent with corporate standards. Back in 2011, Wall, a maintenance employee at the company’s Marion plant since 1979, discovered mold growing on air filters for a clean

The board of Reynolds American, Incorporated, agreed to a buyout by British American Tobacco (BAT), which had owned a 42.2% interest in Reynolds, and talks had been ongoing. The offer was finally accepted when BAT raised its offer another $2.4 billion to $49.4 billion. The offer represents a 26.4% premium on Reynolds stock. The deal must now undergo a four or five-month

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684-0801

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 49

the old north state

review by the Securities Exchange Commission. No insurmountable hurdles are anticipated, since BAT exited the United States market in 2004, and competition won’t factor in as Reynolds products will likely continue to be sold, just under new ownership.

It is unclear how Reynolds’ operations will be structured under BAT, but the British company intends to maintain operations in Tobaccoville, which now employs 2,000-3,000. When the deal is approved, Reynolds shareholders will own 19% of BAT, and BAT will be the world’s largest publicly-traded tobacco company.

The Midas Oath leland

Two groups are competing for a certificate of need to build a surgical center with three operating rooms in Leland. At a public hearing before the North Carolina Department of Health Service Regulation, representatives from Dosher Memorial Hospital, located 26 miles away in Southport, argued that business lost to the new facility could threaten the hospital’s survival. Dosher is currently paying down $13 million in bonds for new construction. Advocates for a new facility, however, say the applicants would generate new business from an expanding population. One applicant, Brunswick Surgery Center, LLC, a subsidiary of EmergeOrtho, would build a $4.2 million ambulatory orthopedic center; the other, Norvant Health, proposes a $14.1 million center that would provide orthopedic surgery and seven other specialized procedures, including plastic surgery. Those at the hearing who argued against either group getting a certificate of need said that Dosher provides an economic impact of $125 million and employs over 300 in Brunswick County. They contended that the 2016 State Medical Facilities Plan said Brunswick County needed only 0.37 additional operating rooms, and Dosher is said to have 0.56 excess 50

| March 2017

rooms. They further warned that people in Smithville Township, midway between the two facilities, would be steered to the new facility to lower costs for insurers.

Six Good Ideas wake forest

Six early-stage technologies invented at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, and currently under development with assistance from Wake Forest Innovations, will share $595,000 from the Catalyst Fund. The recipients will use the funds for developing two treatments for the biochemical abnormalities underlying primary hyperoxaluria, a rare disease characterized by recurrent kidney stones; the Mechanical Tissue Resuscitation project, which creates a localized low-pressure environment to aid healing in vital tissue, like the heart and central nervous system; KPC34, a drug for leukemia that bypasses the body’s natural resistance mechanisms that complicate cancer treatments; eCOMPASS, a personalized electronic action plan for persons with chronic medical conditions that integrates social and functional considerations into care regimens; and Fix8, a stent that uses anchoring hooks to prevent it from migrating. The Catalyst Fund, overseen by the Durham science investment firm Pappas Capital, manages $15 million made available for promising research projects at the medical center.

Some People Are Very Good at Crashing Apps holly springs

RS Software India Limited has elected to employ the services of Paragon Application Systems for testing its electronic payments products.

RS, headquartered in Kolkata, India, has a presence in four continents. RS chose Paragon largely because manual testers, people sitting at desktops

applying repetitive procedures, only look at about 20% of popular scenarios.

Paragon’s automation and visualization test a more comprehensive range of scenarios, reducing risk, turnaround times, and costs. Automation is becoming more popular as financial software testers are expected to do more with less. More end-users are performing more types of higher-risk transactions on more types of devices with an ever-growing assortment of apps. People want their apps 24/7, and regulators are scrutinizing transactions more meticulously. Developers are expected to keep pace with the rapidly-evolving technology, and, of course, they want to beat the competition.

Losing That Inner Glow wilmington

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) has been awarded a three-year contract to participate in the dismantling of two reactors at the Oskarshamn Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden. Historically, the power plant used three boiling water reactors to supply 10% of the nation’s electricity. Reactors 1 and 2 are being permanently closed. Unit 1, commissioned in 1972, is scheduled to close this year. Unit 2, commissioned in 1975, was closed in 2015—a modernization project being canceled midstream. GEH will be removing the reactors’ internals and pressure vessels; perhaps the most difficult task in decommissioning since internals are second only to spent fuel for radiological hazards. GEH will dismantle, cut, and pack the internals for disposal. The company has experience in all phases of decommissioning, having previously worked on projects in Japan and the United States. GE’s Predix platform will be used to keep the project running on-time and on-budget.

Unit 3 will carry on the work of the plant, providing less costly, climate-friendly electricity through 2045.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

51

PL AYING PINBALL, at the Asheville Pinball Museum.

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leisure & libation

READY PLAYER

ONE

written by marl a hardee milling photos by anthony harden

It may sound like just another retro craze, but people are taking vintage pinball and arcade games seriously and turning them into successful businesses.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

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leisure & libation

IN THE GAME ROOM at Asheville Pizza & Brewing, photo by Bren Photography.

T

T.C . DIBE L L A SP O T T ED A

Black Hole pinball machine—his all time favorite— for sale on Craigslist a few years ago and knew he had to have it. He successfully convinced his wife, Brandy, to let him buy it as a birthday present for himself. That purchase quickly led to two more pinball machine acquisitions, and that spiraled into an idea for a brand new business.

DiBella was teaching middle school at the time and his wife was working at Asheville Pizza & Brewing, which offers a popular game room at its Merrimon Avenue location. He told owner Mike Rangel his idea of opening a pinball museum, operating on a flat fee model for people to come in and play pinball and arcade games.

“I told him it sounded like a great idea, but I didn’t think it would ever be a business,” says Rangel. “I said, ‘My advice is don’t do it.’ I’m so glad he didn’t listen to me.”

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Not only has Asheville Pinball Museum thrived with multitudes of repeat players routinely driving in from Knoxville, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greenville, South Carolina, as well as those in the Western North Carolina area, the game room at Asheville Pizza & Brewing has also evolved to contain more arcade games. Plus, Asheville Retrocade celebrated its grand opening in January. It’s located beside Odd’s Café on Haywood Road in West Asheville in the space formerly occupied by Pour Taproom. Then there are places like Asheville’s Fun Depot, bowling alleys, and other select venues in the region that offer a smattering of arcade games.

The resurgence of interest in arcade and pinball games is an interesting phenomenon in an age where many have a smart phone and access to a variety of games to play at a moment’s notice. If you’re of a certain generation, you’ll remember playing the landmark games of the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Space Invaders came on the scene in 1978, followed by a host of other games

including the most successful game ever: Pac-Man, in 1980.

Arcade games were such a draw in the early ‘80s that Time Magazine published a cover story on them in January 1982.

Time noted that at the peak of the fad, there were around 13,000 arcades in the United States—at the time, popular machines were being loaded with $400 worth of quarters a week.

In addition to the pull of nostalgia, the state of tension in the country may also be another reason why arcade businesses are seeing a steady flow of customers. Places like Asheville Pinball Museum and Asheville Retrocade are a time capsule of sorts where one can experience the illusion of stepping back into the 1980s. A time that, by comparison to 2017, seems simpler, safer, and much less stressful.

Bankrolling a Dream

T.C . DIBELL A

GAME SETUP at Asheville Retrocade

After acquiring his first three pinball machines purely for his own interests, T.C. and his wife had a party and one of the guests told him about the Seattle Pinball Museum and said it might be a great idea for Asheville. T.C. loved the idea and quickly set a plan in motion to launch his business. He teamed up with John French, a tech who had worked on the pinball machines he bought. French became a part owner and continues to serve as the tech who maintains and repairs the games.

The DiBellas then dug deep to come up with the capital to start the business. “We maxed out our credit cards,” he says.

“I had a ’67 Cougar and I sold that.” He also had an extensive collection of hockey jerseys and some of those were also sold.

He had so many that he would tell his middle school students that he’d wear a different jersey to school every Friday and they’d never see the same one twice. Some of the ones he held on to now decorate the walls of his business.

He acquired more pinball machines and found a choice location on the bottom floor of the Battery Park Hotel, right across from the Grove Arcade. When he opened the doors on August 20, 2013, he was beginning his 15th year teaching at Enka Middle School. In all, he taught school for 22 years. “We started school on a Wednesday and I opened that Friday.”

Pinball Museum clientele often skews to people in their 40s and 50s who are reliving the days when they popped quarters into the machines for a play. No quarters are needed here. It’s a flat fee of $15 to come in and play any or all of the machines you want, $12 for kids ten and under. It’s a fair price, T.C. believes, saying “You can go into a place like Fun Depot and leave $50 lighter for one kid.”

“We started turning a profit the second month, but I didn’t have employees then, and I wasn’t taking a salary. I was still employed as a teacher,” he says.

He moved the business in April 2015 to the opposite corner of the Battery Park Hotel, a 2500-sq.-ft. space that had been occupied by Havana Comida Latina Restaurant. The new space is much larger than the first, accommodating more machines and more players. He’s always looking for new machines to March 2017 | capitalatplay.com

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buy—classic arcade game The Phoenix is on his short list of games to find—and he has machines in rotation.

Some are pulled for repairs. Others are moved out and stored to make way for newer models. One pinball machine that can’t be moved is the gargantuan Hercules pinball machine that’s in a fixed spot in the far right corner of the business. In addition, they have games to sell if anyone is looking to start or expand their own collection. Tuesday is the only day they close, and they devote that day to repairs and maintenance.

It’s customary to have a line at the door when they open for business. They also have a waiting list of people wanting a chance to play. “We have not had a Saturday with less than 120 people,” T.C. says. Pretty amazing since he has never bought any type of advertising.

The growth of his business has totally been based on word-of-mouth. They currently let in 75 people at a time—that’s the number of available machines.

The atmosphere is punctuated by the pinball flippers smacking the silver balls, bells, beeps, dings, and the frenetic music of unmistakable games like Pac-Man. The whole space boasts an eclectic mixture of arcade games, pinball, multicade tables, a wild assortment of toys and action figures behind the bar area, and an alcove with an Atari Star Wars X-wing cockpit (T.C. describes it as the “holy grail of video games”) with audio from the movie. It’s surrounded by cardboard cut-outs of the characters. T.C. has also suspended stars, planets, and a mini Death Star from the ceiling. The bathrooms are equally appealing, with action figures bolted to the top of the stall in the men’s room, along with Star Wars and action heroes posters; the women’s bathroom focuses on Wonder Woman posters and an assortment of other amusing and delightful wall décor. Standing outside the two restroom doors—bright Ms. Pac-Man Pink for the girls and bright blue for the boys—T.C. says, “My restrooms are the coolest restrooms in Western North Carolina. People will ask, ‘Who does the decorating?’

And I say, ‘That’s me.’”

T.C. has three full-time employees now, but he says he’s also in almost every day. He does admit it’s tempting to play the games, but he doesn’t always have time. “Every once in a while I get a chance to play. I’ll peek at the high score and try to beat it. For instance, if I see the top score on Asteroids over 10,000, I’ll do it as a challenge.” It provides a flashback to his youth growing up in Coats, a small town south of Raleigh.

“There were two traffic lights and a small main street. There were two arcades there, separated by one building. I would go around and collect bottles to turn in for cash.” He’d convert the money into quarters for arcade play.

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SERVICING PINBALL machines is no small task.

ONE OF THE back rooms full of arcade games at the Asheville Pinball Museum.

Will he expand to other locations of the Asheville Pinball Museum? “This is it,” he says, “but I’m confident we could expand.” He says he routinely fields inquiries from others about setting up similar enterprises in nearby cities. He encourages others to open their own place if they’re interested, but he’s not inclined to open more locations saying, “I don’t want to work myself to death.” As to the future of the business, he says it will at least be around until the lease runs out in three and a half years, but he wants to carry it through his twin sons’ college days. They are currently eighth graders at Reynolds Middle School.

Whether they’ll want to continue the business is only a guess at this point.

“They like coming in here, but they don’t come to play,” says T.C. As he walks around the separate rooms (it takes some people awhile to realize there are more rooms past the main pinball area in front), T.C. points out a framed autograph of Ernest Cline, author of the novel Ready Player One. He says Cline was quick to recognize that DiBella had lined up four classic video games—PacMan, Galaga, Tempest, and Joust. “I see what you did there,” he told him.

“I wanted to create a place for people to come and enjoy,” he continued. “I know there are some people hesitant to come into downtown Asheville. We’re a

reason to come downtown, and we’re in one of the safest places to come to.”

Blast from the Past “Every game in here has a story,” says owner Michael Penland, as he makes a sweeping motion with his hand in the direction of the pinball machines and arcade games lined up at Asheville Retrocade.

A story that came to mind involves how he acquired his favorite pinball machine, Demolition Man. “You have to travel all over to buy these games,” says Michael. “I went to Tennessee and in a guy’s garage, under a pile of trash, I could see just a piece of it and I says, ‘Is that a Demolition Man pinball machine?’ The guy says, ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t work.’ I told him I didn’t care. I bought it for $400. Now it’s worth $4000 to $4400, but I won’t ever sell it. When that game retires, it’s going to my house.”

He also has some rare machines including a Japanese soccer game that’s one of only three in America. Word got out that he was looking for one, and a man in Atlanta called and told him he had the game imported from Japan for his son. He no longer used it and it was sitting idle in his home. “I paid $250 for that game, but I had to move it out of his basement,” he says.

“Every game in here has a story.”

Story continued on page 60 March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 57

ROLLING THE DICE HI-STAKES GAME of Codenames, 2016’s off icial Spiel des Jahres (German for Game of the Year).

Opening this month in Asheville, Well Played aims to tap into the recent board game revival.

You won’t hear any beeps and bells of pinball or arcade games, but you might hear cards being shuffled, dice being rolled, and the occasional shout of someone who has solved a challenge or won a game. In March Kevan Frazier and Cortland Mercer will unveil their new board game café in downtown Asheville. It’s called Well Played and located at 58 Wall Street.

Kevan and Cortland met through UNC-Asheville. Kevan was teaching and Cortland was a student and eventually became student body president. Last year, Cortland read an article in the New York Times about the growing phenomenon of board game cafes. He called Kevan—who has many other roles, including serving as executive director of Western Carolina University programs at Biltmore Park, owner of Asheville By The Foot Tours, historian, speaker, and author—and says, “This would be my dream job.” (They also brought in a third partner for the business, Steve Green.)

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| March 2017

That conversation led to a search for more information, as well as travel to cities, like Toronto, where the board game cafés are thriving. They started writing a business plan, and Kevan says, “The more we crunched the numbers, they looked good.” That launched them into a search for a location and securing capital to turn the dream into reality.

They believed the concept would fit the vibe of downtown Asheville, with its proliferation of exquisite restaurants and craft breweries. They believed opening a place to engage with others over a game board instead of a screen of an electronic device would be a great complement to the Asheville scene. But coming up with an adequate location proved challenging. They searched downtown, as well as considering West Asheville, the River Arts District, and the south end of Merrimon Avenue, but they eventually landed on Wall Street. They laugh, pointing out that Wall Street also has what is, in effect, a giant Monopoly piece—the flat iron—marking the way. Their

Arcade games aren’t the only games that are becoming popular; board games are seeing a resurgence, too!

A RENDERING of how Well Played is planned to look

CORTL AND MERCER celebrating a game “well played.”

space accommodates the bar, game library, restrooms, and seats/tables for 90 people.

“Remember going over to your best friend’s house and having their mom take care of you while you played games?” asks Kevan. “That’s the same experience we want to provide here.” They’ll serve up craft beer, wine, La Croix, and other beverages, along with snack foods, things like grilled cheese, empanadas, meat and cheese board done in the style of lunchables, and various desserts.

They’ll have floating table service to give that feeling of mom making sure that you have everything you need.

Customers will pay a $5 gaming fee to play and they’ll find a wide range of choices in the gaming library, with games color coded and divided into category, skill level, and required number of players. They’ll also have what they refer to as “breadstick” games and those are offered for free. “We have hundreds and hundreds of titles,” says Cortland. “We want people to not be afraid of games they haven’t seen before.” Staff will be well versed in how to

play the games to help customers if they need instructions.

While they are gaming focused, they realize it may also be a venue to just share a drink and a conversation. “I think about my wife, Stephanie. She is more interested in it for the social space,” says Cortland. “We want it to be a very comfortable, easy, breezy place.”

Of course, there’s wide opportunity to combine socializing and meeting new people with playing the games. They plan to be a venue for board game meet-ups and will have cards available that people can put on their table inviting others to join in a game. They also plan to have events such as singles’ night or “Meet the Maker” night (where people can meet board game designers), host after-school programs, and offer space for private parties.

“It’s a great community gathering space,” he says.

They’ll have eight to 10 employees to keep the place running, but Cortland says, “We’ll be in on a daily basis making sure that people are having a great experience.

We’ll be in the role of fun ambassadors.”

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 59

leisure & libation

photo by Bren Photography

[ continued from page 57 ]

Michael has engaged in many different businesses over the years, but his love of arcades began about seven years ago when someone brought a Mortal Kombat 2 to his business and he put it out front. He says people played it constantly, and he saw what a money maker the games could be. He collected so many quarters that he has developed a talent for picking up a bucket of the coins and predicting the total within a few dollars.

It’s also satisfying for him to see parents come in and teach their young kids how to play pinball or a favorite arcade game.

No quarters are needed at Asheville Retrocade. It operates on the same model as the Asheville Pinball Museum: a flat fee to enter, with games set to free play. At Asheville Retrocade, 60

| March 2017

50 Daily Flights Allegiant | American | Delta | United

PINBALL CAN be a ver y self competitive game.

the price is $10 to play, and there’s more variety than initially meets the eye. “Including our emulators, we’re at over 5,000 games,” he says. “I’m building one now that will have 12,000 games. Some of the hardcore players don’t care for emulators, but literally, there are some games on there that are extinct.”

He enjoyed the excitement when a man came in recently with his young daughter. He told Penland he had searched everywhere for a place that had his favorite arcade game from his teens—Side Arms—but he had never found it. Michael checked the emulator and told him they had it available. “He played and played that game.” It’s also satisfying for him to see parents come in and teach their young kids how to play pinball or a favorite arcade game. “It happens every day,” he says.

“There’s definitely something for everyone here,” says manager Cari Woodfield. In addition to the arcade games, the space includes a pool table and bar on the main floor and Skee-Ball, as well as other games downstairs. Michael has decorated the walls with vintage beer signs, some going back to the 1930s, to further enhance the retro atmosphere. If there’s a lull in business, Cari will take time to play a game— something that’s highly encouraged by Michael. If work is caught up, he wants his employees to become knowledgeable about the games so they can better assist customers.

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Business trip today

flyavl.com March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 61

Attract Mode

In the mood to play some pinball? Pac-Man? Asteroids?

Foosball, even? Whether you’re a noob or a veteran, you’ve come to the right place! There are opportunities throughout Western North Carolina, with some places offering small arcade rooms to offset their primary attraction (like bowling alleys), while other venues like Fun Depot in Asheville and

AMF STAR LANES

CHUCK E. CHEESE’S

have a gyro, bumper cars, and some arcade games.

Offers small game room with select arcade games.

Arcade games, food, and WiFi. Popular place for bir thday par ties for the kiddy crowd.

facebook.com/FunNWheels

chuckecheese.com/storedetails/nc/asheville/638

HENDERSONVILLE

ASHEVILLE

amf.com/location/amf-star-lanes-asheville

ASHEVILLE PINBALL MUSEUM ASHEVILLE

Large range of pinball machines and arcade games, located in downtown Asheville at Battery Park Hotel. Flat-fee admission; $15; $12 for ages 10 and under.

Games set to free play.

Ashevillepinball.com

ASHEVILLE PIZZA & BREWING ASHEVILLE

Game room at the Merrimon Avenue location only. Geared to kids and adults with classics like Galaga. Operates on token system. Five tokens for $1. Each game takes one token.

ASHEVILLE

THE FACTORY FRANKLIN

Boasts more than 100 arcade games— everything from shooting games, driving skill, dancing, trivia, jamming on the guitar, and more. No admission. To play, customers use a re-loadable Fun Card—the cost of each game is debited from the card. franklinfun.com

FAMOUS BRICK OVEN PIZZERIA BEECH MOUNTAIN

Family-friendly restaurant with arcade games and pool tables.

ashevillebrewing.com

famousbrickoven.com

ASHEVILLE RETROCADE

FUN DEPOT

Newly opened on Haywood Road in West Asheville in January 2017, flat fee $10 admission with games set to free play.

No set admission – put the amount of money you want to spend on a game card and then swipe the card at each game you play, which will deduct the amount for the game. Tickets/prizes on some of the games. Arcade games, bumper cars, lazer tag, go-karts, mini golf.

WEST ASHEVILLE

facebook.com/retrocadeasheville

ASHEVILLE

CHEROKEE FUN PARK

ashevillesfundepot.com

Offers a selection of arcade games, as well as mini-golf, go-karts, and other fun.

FUN ‘N’ WHEELS

facebook.com/CherokeeFunPark

Primarily an outdoor go-kart raceway open May-September, they also

CHEROKEE

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The Factory in Franklin put arcade games more in the spotlight. And then of course there are a handful of locations that literally devote their entire floor space to nothing but the games. Note: All of them cater to families, but be aware that beer and wine are also available for the 21-and-up crowd at many of them.

| March 2017

BOONE

SK8T DEPOT

The owners of SK8T Depot are always looking for new games to add to their offering of arcade games. Win tickets and earn prizes. sk8tdepot.com

SKY LANES

WEST ASHEVILLE Family-friendly bowling center with 24 lanes, pool, air hockey, video games— and, from 9PM to 12AM, karaoke! skylanesasheville.com

SMOKY MOUNTAIN SK8WY & FUN ZONE WAYNESVILLE

Offering 40 arcade games plus roller skating, climbing wall, snack bar, and more. smokymountainsk8way.com

- BOARD GAMES GAMERS HAUNT ASHEVILLE

As with our sidebar about Well Played, this business features board games, typically the dice-rolling, role-playing type. They advertise “magic and gaming accessories, tournaments & events.” facebook.com/pages/GamersHaunt-334831830936

photo by Bren Photography MICHAEL PENL AND f ixing a driving game.

CL ASSICS ON DISPL AY at Asheville Retrocade.

“As long as I don’t have to repair the games, I’m fine,” Cari quips.

She points at Michael saying, “This is our repair guy too.”

Michael, a Western North Carolina native, grew up in Candler and headed to Western Carolina University after graduating from Enka High School. He first thought he’d go after an MBA, but then he read that at the time MBA grads were earning salaries around 50k. He was working as a DJ and already hitting that mark, so he changed his path.

“I didn’t know anything about these games. I have a degree in computer science, but that doesn’t do any good with these games,” he says. “When I started, I knew nothing about voltage or wiring.

The first game I tried to repair, I fried it.” Through trial and error, he’s become adept at repairing games as well as creating new ones.

Parts can be difficult to find, but he’s tapped in to an underground network of sorts that provides connections with people all over the world who can source the parts he needs. “For the older classics like Ms. Pac-Man, I keep the old tube monitors. For the newer games, when the tubes blow I convert to LED,” he says. “I’m always building something. I don’t get a lot of sleep at night. I’ll get caught up in a project and lose track of time.”

Losing track of time is something he hopes his customers will experience. If he had his way, people would shut down their cell phones at the door in order to fully immerse themselves in the experience of going back to the flavor of an old school arcade.

You won’t find TVs broadcasting sports or news, and he keeps a fresh playlist of ‘70s and ‘80s tunes playing. “That’s all we play,” he says. “It’s always going to be this music. We’ve thought of doing themed nights like rock or disco. All it would take is a quick trip to Goodwill to get a leisure suit. Everyone we talk to is excited about the costumes.”

Cari says customers are coming in and saying it’s great to have a place to hang out on Haywood Road. “It’s a bar, but it’s not part of the bar scene,” she says. “It’s a fun scene.” They don’t serve food, March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 63

leisure & libation

but they do serve snacks along with the beverages. It’s a familyfriendly place until 9PM when entrance requires customers to be 21 or older. They are open from noon to 2AM seven days a week. Capacity is 99, but Penland caps it at 80 to ensure that it doesn’t get jam-packed. Customers can come and go with the use of a wristband, but in high-volume times, they may have to wait to get back in.

Michael expects to rent out the basement for private parties.

“They’d have the full run of the place, but we’d keep the top open to the public,” he says. Right before opening, he surprised his nieces and nephews (ages five to 11) with their own private party. “They played for four hours,” he says. “I’m the cool uncle.”

An Evolving Game Room Mike Rangel remembers saving up money mowing lawns to play arcade games back in the day. He also remembers how quickly those games could end, and it would require another quarter to keep playing. The game room at Asheville Pizza & Brewing has evolved quite a bit over the years and has had everything from arcade games to Skee-Ball to air hockey to basketball to a crane machine where kids try to snag a stuffed animal. There were pitfalls. Basketballs would sometimes fly

out of bounds and hit someone’s pizza; kids would take skeeballs to the top of the ramp that leads to the game room and let them fly, which created havoc and some near misses; the air hockey table was loud and intrusive for those wanting to enjoy their meal. And then there was the incident with the crane machine.

Mike says it was about five years ago. He had just left for the evening when he got a text from an employee that says: “Kid stuck in claw game. Story at 11.” He turned his car around and headed back as fast as he could. Meanwhile, the manager had phoned 911, and ultimately firefighters at the station on Merrimon Avenue sprinted down to help, bringing the “jaws of life” with them.

“A kid got inside the machine and got stuck,” says Rangel.

“He was around seven years old. He had gotten his full body in.

His hips got stuck and he was screaming. They busted out the plexiglass to rescue him. He’ll never do that again.”

Today, after a lot of trial and error, the game room has evolved to contain just arcade games and one pinball machine, with another on the way. There’s nothing for anyone to get stuck inside, no loose balls, and no cause for alarm.

When Mike and his former wife, Leigh Oder, first opened Asheville Pizza & Brewing on Merrimon Avenue they envisioned

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the space that’s now the game room as a hip place for live music and cocktails. Then Leigh became pregnant with their son, Simon, who is now a junior at Asheville High School.

“We realized that people with kids need a place to go and drink a beer,” says Mike, and that drove their decision to create a play space with games; and the big screen and other TVs in that area, showing kid-friendly cartoons and other shows. In the beginning, most of the games were of the “kiddy” variety.

The game room would slow down at 7PM. “As a brewery that tries to be family friendly, we can get too kid friendly,” he says.

They added the interactive games and for the reasons mentioned above, they ultimately moved toward the mixture of arcade games they have now. “This last change is something I’ve wanted to do for four or five years. Fifty percent of the time now, the parent blows past the kid to get to the games. Parents say, ‘Ohmigosh you have Galaga,’” says Mike. “The kids still play, but it’s very nostalgic for the adults.”

Machines at the business take tokens and they dole out five for a dollar. They’re thinking of offering specials at

times where they’ll hand out a certain number of tokens based on the size of pizza ordered.

Keeping the games in working order is the greatest challenge. “You have to get good at creative electricship,” he says. Plus, Mike has sought help from T.C. DiBella and his crew, and so has Michael Penland. Penland says he doesn’t

“Fifty percent of the time now, the parent blows past the kid to get to the games.

‘Ohmigosh you have Galaga!’ The kids still play, but it’s very nostalgic for the adults.” see the other businesses as competition. “If anything, we should be partnering,” he says. “I called the Pinball Museum, and they came over. T.C. and I hit it off. They came in and played some games. I call their repair guy when I don’t know how to do something on the pinball machines.”

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 65

column

“P” for Planning and Preparation

Whether it’s in the beginning phases or has been up and running for years, at each stage your business can benefit from legal counsel which can help you protect and grow your legacy.

L

A

lindsay parris thompson

is an Attorney with The Van Winkle Law Firm of Asheville, NC.

66

S AN ENTREPRENEUR, YOU UNDERSTAND

the particulars of your industry, clients, and the day-to-day workflow of the business. You’re busy making payroll, developing products, and securing clients. But you may not always think of the legal matters that can come up during the process of running a business—until you run into a problem.

A Tale of Two Businesses

Take, for example, two entrepreneurs, “Mary” and “Sarah.” Both women have created new cleaning products, and their businesses are booming. Mary decides to hire an attorney in the early stages of her business. Sarah opts not to hire an attorney, thinking this will save her money as she launches her company.

Mary’s attorney helps her form an LLC through which to conduct her business to help protect her personal assets, files a patent application for her cleaning product, and helps her negotiate a reasonable lease for her product warehouse. Sarah did not know she needed a corporate entity or a patent, and since business was prosperous, she quickly signed a lease using her landlord’s onesided form lease for a warehouse near her home.

| March 2017

Unfortunately, a large company learned about Sarah’s cleaning product, and since it was not protected with a patent, the company “reverse engineered” her product, filed for a patent, and relaunched the product under its own brand— and are now selling it for 20 percent less than Sarah’s product.

Sarah was forced to stop selling her cleaning product.

Sarah can no longer make her rent payments and she needs to get out of her lease. Unfortunately, she signed an ironclad lease agreement that doesn’t expire for two more years, and if she doesn’t come up with a way to pay her rent, her landlord will be able to sue her personally and could get a judgment against her, which attaches to her personal residence.

L Meanwhile, because she enjoyed early success in her business, Mary was able to maintain her lease, and she had also negotiated with her landlord that in the event she needed to reduce her expenditures or move to a larger space, she would be able to terminate her lease early by giving a 90-day notice and paying a reasonable termination fee.

When Mary was ready to purchase her own building as an investment (and because the monthly mortgage would cost less than her current lease), her attorney helped her set up a holding company, which then leased the warehouse to her operating company, resulting in some tax benefits for her. A title search was also performed to make sure she was getting clean title to the property.

WHEN YOU COMPARE THE COST OF SET TING UP YOUR BUSINESS CORRECTLY ON THE FRONT END TO FIXING MAJOR ISSUES DOWN THE ROAD, PREVENTING A PROBLEM IS ALMOST ALWAYS LESS EXPENSIVE THAN FIXING IT.

Mary was able to hire more employees, create new products, and double her profits in a year. When she was faced with a lawsuit for wrongful termination, she had already been advised early on to create an employee handbook that clearly laid out certain unacceptable behaviors, and, additionally, how to document instances of employee non-compliance, as well as warnings and steps that were given to that employee.

Mary’s preemptive planning ultimately protected her livelihood, her personal assets, her family, and her business in the long run.

These are somewhat extreme examples, but they highlight the importance of legal counsel for a business owner. Lawsuits in particular are a potential challenge for any company, and the risk varies based on the industry. You may face a lawsuit if an employee feels he or she was wrongfully terminated, a client is not happy with your work, or a supplier fails to deliver.

In the Early Stages of Business Is a business attorney affordable? When you compare the cost of setting up your business correctly on the front end to fixing major issues down the road, preventing a problem is almost always less expensive than fixing it. When you start a business, you are creating the foundation you will build upon for years to come. As with a home, a weak foundation

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in your business can lead to serious issues down the road, so there are certain key areas that should be addressed early on.

Corporate Structure: It is crucial to have governing documents that address your particular situation to form and govern your company.

This is why it is so important to make sure your legal documents are tailored to your unique circumstances. It’s worth noting, too, that online documents not created by attorneys who are licensed to practice law in North Carolina—where we have specific laws that are not always consistent with those of other states and countries—can often turn out to be problematic.

Tax Planning: Having the right structures in place can create tax advantages to maximize your resources for years to come.

Insurance: It is important to evaluate the different types of insurance you may need, from general liability to business interruption insurance.

Hiring: As you write employee handbooks, decide which interview questions you can legally ask applicants, and determine how to compensate your employees, it is important to know the legal implications. You will want to have these tasks completed properly to avoid governmental penalties and potential lawsuits.

Leases: Many leases are written in “legalese” and their wording may not be intuitive. You may or may not be in a long-term relationship with your landlord, but once you have signed your lease, you lose much of your bargaining power, so it is important to understand exactly to what you are agreeing.

Contracts: You will want to have contracts with necessary protections for you as the business owner to use as templates for specific customer orders.

A Tale of Three Brothers Many people are tempted to rely on free online legal services or products, such as printable, fill-in-the-blank forms. In general, though, these generic documents can really create nightmares and you may end up spending more money fixing problems created by these documents than if you had consulted an attorney in the first place. The familiar warning “you get what you pay for” holds true in the legal world.

Let’s say “Dave” uses an online operating agreement form for the restaurant he owns with his two brothers. This generic document doesn’t provide any option agreements or buy-out provisions if one brother wants to sell his interest in the restaurant. Suppose that a few years from now, the three brothers have a falling out and one of them decides to sell his interest in the restaurant to someone who is not in the family.

The other two brothers envisioned keeping the restaurant as a family business and one day passing it down to their children.

Now they are faced with a stranger owning a significant portion of their business.

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| March 2017

THE BOT TOM LINE: AS AN ENTREPRENEUR, DON’ T LET FEAR PAR ALYZE YOUR BUSINESS.

Business Transitions After years of running a business, you may need assistance with growing, selling, or transitioning your company.

As you grow, you may choose to franchise your business, open additional locations, purchase extra property, or hire more employees. If you decide to franchise your restaurant, for example, there are specific regulations that you will need to navigate, and you will also want a comprehensive agreement with the franchisee to determine—among other things—what their building will look like and which food supplier they must use so you maintain uniformity and protect the brand you worked so hard to create.

When selling your business, keep in mind that a third party will be looking at your books, scrutinizing your operations, and more. This can feel invasive, so it is important that you are organized and prepared to get through this process successfully. As a bonus, having your legal “ducks in a row” with well-organized documents and financial records can make your business more valuable and appealing to a buyer, because the buyer won’t have to spend months digging through your various records and contracts.

If you have created a business and plan to retire in a few years, you may wish to pass the company on to your children or to a trusted employee. Ideally, your business attorney can start working with you and your planned successor for a few years prior to your retirement to make the transition as seamless as possible.

The bottom line: As an entrepreneur, don’t let fear paralyze your business. With some good advice and preparation, you can anticipate and mitigate potential problems so that you can focus your time, energy, and dollars on developing, running, and, ultimately, expanding your business.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 69

UPDATES FOR

&

NATIONAL WORLD [

news briefs

Leaning Tower of the West san francisco, california

S a n F r a nc i s c o’s $75 0 m i l l ion Millennium Tower is tilting and sinking.

The building opened in 2008 as the most luxurious tower in the city, attracting tech millionaires, venture capitalists, and even football great Joe Montana.

But on May 10, 2016, at a homeowners association meeting, residents learned the building had sunk 16 inches and was tilting 15 inches at the top. The building is constructed on filled marshland in proximity to the San Andreas and Hayward faults. At least twenty residents have filed lawsuits against the developer, the City of San Francisco, and the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.

Some believe construction of the transit

]

station next-door, with the underground tunnels it collects, could be at fault. The developer is insured for $100 million in damages, and policies held by ancillary contractors might be able to double that amount; but renters will need a lot more to be made whole. What’s more, structural flaws could void the insurance coverage. To date, there is no easy way to stabilize and straighten the building.

Don’t Worry, Bee Happy bloomington, indiana

Indiana University alumni have launched an agriculture technology company, the Bee Corporation, to monitor conditions in commercial beehives. Bestin-class sensors have been acquired from around the world to capture information

on the needs and behaviors of colonies, and, in particular, learn about the cause of colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon first observed in 2007. Beekeepers now typically lose about 30% of their hives each year. The Bee Corporation owns and manages over 100 hives in south-central Indiana. Researchers will collect data from their colonies over the next six months. Then, they will analyze it and develop prototypes for happy, healthy hives. The research is funded largely by a $100,000 award from the Indiana University Building Entrepreneurs in Software and Technology competition.

The Bee Corporation continues to benefit from mentoring by IU alumni.

Vintage Retail Model chicago, illinois

Following a bailout last year from CEO Edward Lampert’s personal hedge fund, Sears Holdings announced another round of closings and layoffs.

Numerous Kmart and Sears stores (108 and 42, respectively) will close, and an untold number of full-time employees and assistant managers will be let go.

Liquidation sales have already begun, and some stores that remain open are

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cutting corners by bypassing the stockroom and moving deliveries directly to display shelves. While the company did not publish details, the layoffs appear to affect almost all 800 remaining Kmart stores. Sears also sold its Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker for $525 million at closing and $250 million plus a percent of sales to new customers over the next three years. Fitch Ratings continues to project a dismal outlook as Sears’ sales and debt are moving in opposite directions. The company is running out of stores to sell off, but it might still sell its Kenmore and Home Services brands.

Memory Loss

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carolina in the west

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national & world

losses incurred from construction delays on its nuclear plants in Georgia and South Carolina. Toshiba invested heavily in Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactors, which turned out to be more difficult to build than anticipated. The investment has cost the company $4.4 billion, which was compounded by a $1.9 million accounting scandal, allegedly caused by construction managers trying to hide overruns. Soon after announcing it would sell a stake to Western Digital, Toshiba announced its intentions to exit the nuclear power business.

Michelmore of MMG, Ltd., explained that acquisitions are out of the question when nobody has copper, zinc, or nickel.

Strategies for more efficient exploration include working in countries with stable governments and access to high-end technology. Innovations helping exploration companies prospect deeper and cheaper include underground drones and atomic dielectric resonance. On-site testing and faster drills can further hasten finds. Another sign that exploration is on the rise is increased activity at companies that supply equipment used in geological exploration.

Mine Your Own Business

iFleet cork, ireland

tokyo, japan

worldwide

Toshiba Corporation announced plans to spin its NAND memory chip business off as a separate entity and seek a minority investor. Executives had hoped to sell as much as they could without being required by Japanese law to give the investor representation on their board. Toshiba is second only to Samsung in memory chip sales, which account for 75% of the company’s profits.

Proceeds from the sale would offset the write-down necessitated by Toshiba’s

After years of slumping, mineral exploration is turning around. Business had been sagging as investors expressed disappointment in their returns while commodity prices steadily fell. For the first quarter of 2017, however, exploration spending increased for the first time in five years. Some corporate leaders now believe market prices have now recovered enough to justify the risk; others are running out of in-demand metals such as copper. Andrew

Apple is moving iTunes, Apple Music, the App Store, and iBooks from one tax haven to another, from Luxembourg to Ireland. The move was announced in September, at which time the company began transferring assets. Apple has historically exploited tax loopholes that are not straightforward. Like Google and a dozen other large companies, it has avoided paying taxes on intellectual property by invoking the Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich strategy. The loopholes are now closed, but companies

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national & world news

currently exploiting them are grandfathered-in for a few more years. In the meantime, Ireland offered Apple a .005 % tax rate. Then, the European Union (EU) judged the deal to be anticompetitive and constituting illegal state aid, and ordered Ireland to collect $14 billion in back taxes from the company. Both Apple and Ireland are challenging the EU in court. Apple employs about 5,500 in Cork with plans to expand by another 1,000. The company is also in the process of building a $900 million data center in Athenry.

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Lloyds Banking Group fell victim to a 48-hour online attack that was finally resolved on Friday, January 13.

In a ploy affecting 20 million accounts, cybercriminals bombarded the bank with millions of fake requests in order to jam online services. This is not a new trick; cybercriminals have been doing it for years and then asking ransom to be paid in Bitcoin. This time, however, Lloyds paid no ransom, and no accounts appear to have been hacked or compromised. During the outage, Lloyds’ security technologists played a game of cat-and-mouse with the cybercriminals. The strategy, known as geo-blocking, is described as dropping a portcullis over the offending server as soon as it was identified; at which time the perpetrator would move to another server. This kept the problem roving for two days, affecting only a small percentage of customers at any given time, but also interfering with legitimate transactions attempted on the affected servers. The Lloyds hack has spurred a call for merging all the nation’s cybersecurity forces, in the name of achieving higher levels of scrutiny and accountability.

Success Is Killing Them seattle, washington

Starbucks’ business sagged in the last fiscal quarter due to the classic challenge of being too successful. Because it was an early adopter of mobile ordering and payment, some of its busier stores were losing customers. As phone orders deluged baristas, walk-ins walked out.

Revenue from same store sales was down 2% as walk-in alienation exacerbated the overall reduction in mall and restaurant traffic. CEO Howard Schultz at first suggested the market was overreacting, and assured the public that Starbucks would handle the situation as it always does. In the past, the store decided to close its La Boulange bakery because baristas were taking too much time warming pastries. Starbucks also changed its loyalty program to reward dollars spent instead of transactions to prevent system gamers from ringing order items separately. Schultz says people will continue to buy Starbucks as more and more brick-and-mortar retail outlets shutter, because its customers are purchasing “an emotional experience.”

All One nyc , new york

Speculation abounds about media merger s. For ex a mple, Ver i zon Communications, Incorporated, the choice of 114 million subscribers and the nation’s largest phone company, opened informal discussions with Charter Communications on a possible merger. Meanwhile AT&T is working on acquiring Time Warner, which owns HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, and Warner Brothers. The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) limits on how much market share a single company can own are very wide. For example, a company can own as many television stations as it wants, as long as

its stations don’t reach more than 39% of the country’s population. Industry experts are expecting regulations to become more lax under the new FCC chair, Ajit Pai. Mergers are trending because acquiring infrastructure is far less expensive than building it from scratch. Also, the more products a company can bundle, the more likely it is to attract and keep customers and profit from more expensive data plans.

No-Good Deeds Go Unpaid kauai, hawaii

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is dropping his attempt to force the sale of lands in Hawaii through quiet title filing. In 2014 Zuckerberg paid almost $100 million for 700 assembled acres on the north shore of Kauai. The quiet title process is a standard operating procedure for locating and buying out owners in the absence of recorded deeds. In Hawaii it is not unusual to find broken chains of title or parcels within parcels. Zuckerberg’s agents filed eight quiet title lawsuits and spent several months identifying and working with owners, but some parcels he was trying to acquire appeared to be owned by unnamed persons. Zuckerberg expected some owners would appreciate being handsomely rewarded for the transfer of property they didn’t even know they owned. Instead, Zuckerberg’s actions were challenged by threats of public demonstration and a bill state legislator Kaniela Ing will file to put an end to ambiguous land titles.

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Against

Odds ALL

written by rebecca carr hedges

|

photos by anthony harden

Mike Summey built a financial empire by believing in the three D’s— Desire, Discipline, and Dedication.

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March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 75

SUMMEY in front of Xanadu

M

MIKE SUMMEY SPENT MOST OF HIS

childhood in a low-slung, rock-dust-grey house in the tiny coal town of War, West Virginia. The town was aptly named, as it felt like a war sometimes just to survive there. The drinking water smelled like rotten eggs from sulfur. Sewage waste streamed right into the nearby river. Trains coughed black smoke and spread dust from the coal spilling out of railcars.

Today, Summey lives on a 27-acre gated estate called Xanadu, named after the Bahamian resort once owned by Howard Hughes. Xanadu, nestled on top of a hill overlooking Asheville, features an acrylic cushion tennis court with tournament quality lighting, a 52-foot long pool, a children’s playground that would rival any city park, and a 25-yard firing range. The main house, with majestic white pillars, is large enough to be a private club. When Summey wants to attend a game at his beloved Florida State University (his son is an alumnus), he flies his family in his own Beechcraft King Air Turbo Prop Jet. Palpable success, indeed. Over the years, Summey has amassed a real estate portfolio more than 500-addresses thick, one that generates several million in annual revenue.

He has written four best-selling financial books as part of his 76

| March 2017

“Weekend Millionaire” series, and produced an audio program on investments, and he recently published a new title, the Financial Security Bible: How to Build Wealth and Be Happy.

Part memoir and part self-help book, it details his experiences over the years, what he learned from those experiences— including the failures—and how others can learn from their own. It’s a book that weaves personal tales of inspiration with practical instruction on how others can strive to get ahead.

S u m m ey ’s j o u r n ey f r o m t h e southernmost town of West Virginia to Xanadu is more than just book-worthy; it’s almost like a Johnny Cash song come to life. The power to propel him there can be traced back to a handwritten goal that he wrote to himself in 1967 after being laid off from an Asheville defense plant: I will become a millionaire by age 30 and retire by age 50.

At the time, Summey was just 21 years old, but those words, written on a carefully folded slip of yellow lined paper, have been tucked inside Mike Summey’s wallet and mind for the past 51 years. To him, it is a reminder of where he came from and the power of believing in what he calls the three D’s—desire, discipline, and dedication—to achieve whatever goal you set.

The idea struck him in the middle of the night when, in the aftermath of losing his job, he was restless with worry about his future. He bolted upright in bed and said, “Why can’t I be rich?”

His wife at the time rolled over and said, “Because you ain’t doing anything to become rich. Now go back to sleep.”

This was the impetus that inspired him. And he realized that if he was going to make something of himself, he first needed to set a goal. The next day, thinking hard and weighing his options, he decided that rather than follow the example of his fellow co-workers who’d also lost their jobs in the plant’s downsizing—i.e., register for unemployment benefits or look for another factory job—he would start his own business.

While working at the plant, Summey had developed a talent for painting signs. It was a marketable skill, and he believed he could convince local businesses to buy his signs. He spent his $300 severance pay to buy a used van and supplies to get started. He also vowed never to work for someone else again.

But it was not easy. In his first year, he earned just $3,400, well below the $4,160 he had been earning annually at the defense factory. He kept telling himself that the difference was that he was now independent and working for himself, and not vulnerable to being fired or laid off. He plowed his earnings back into the business, resisting the temptation to quit and go back to the relative safety of a factory job. Most of all, he focused on improving his product so that it would be cheaper yet more professional looking than the competition.

“I was struggling just to keep food on the table,” he reflects now. “It would have been very easy to give up and quit. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I was gradually developing the toughness and tenacity I would need to achieve success later.”

Becoming a millionaire is a lofty goal for anyone, to be sure, but particularly so for a young adult with no college credentials, connections, or money to do much of anything. Undeterred, those words became fighting words for Mike Summey. Words that he would look to again and again for inner strength whenever he had to face a challenge or overcome a hurdle—the limits of deeply entrenched Appalachian poverty; a stepfather he felt had been abusive toward him; a long-lost biological father who openly mocked his decision to start a business; and, crucially, a financial world that seemed stacked against men of his modest beginnings and background.

“Character is built in the crucible of hard times,” is how Summey describes his childhood in one of his clipped, commonsense sentences found throughout Financial Security Bible.

Billboard King Over the course of three decades, Summey’s sign-making business grew from a small local company into a multimillion dollar billboard company with offices in North and South Carolina. Its expansion was gradual, but steady, and it also had the proverbial “Eureka!” moment. In the late 1960s, when the billboard industry came under fire from highway

PART OF Summey’s billboard patent.

beautification advocates led by Lady Byrd Johnson, Summey invented and patented a solution: the single pole billboard, one which would replace the ground-based billboards lining the nation’s highways.

Summey is not sure how he came up with the idea of a single-pole billboard. “When you have a problem, you look for a solution,” he says. At the time, people complained that billboards were built with multiple poles low to the ground and with a mish-mash of lattice work that not only blocked views, they made it a perfect place for vermin to hide behind. He started experimenting with small signs in Asheville that were erected on one steel pole. “It was quite successful because the vermin were gone and you could see the view,” he explains.

Soon, in the Biltmore area of downtown Asheville, Summey had two four-sided signs with single-pole supports.

The single-pole solution was a revolutionary change for the industry and was adopted around the globe. The design is still used today. But that is not where Summey grew wealthy, because he also shared the information about the single pole invention with his competitors and never collected a dime from royalties. (Sharing his experiences and knowledge has March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 77

become a consistent theme in Summey’s life.) It would be in the late 1970s, when the industry was facing opposition from highway safety advocates who contended billboards were distracting for drivers, that Summey’s accountant advised him to diversify his financial holdings. One plausible and attractive option: the rental real estate market.

Busy Life, Passive Income After several months of searching, Summey purchased his first rental property, a three-bedroom, one-bath starter ranch house in the Camelot subdivision of Asheville. He did not make money in his first year, spending all of the rental income on the $223 mortgage and insurance and paying a property management company to serve as landlord. But the next year, he raised the rent and cleared a $25 monthly profit. It was not much, but it was a start, and he began looking for additional properties.

As the principal owed on his real estate investments’ mortgages went down, Summey saw more money streaming into his bank account, with little work required to maintain it. From the beginning, Summey set up a special bank account where he deposited all of the income from his properties and paid all of the expenses. Rather than spend money on hobbies or expensive vacations, he lived frugally, intending also to put at least 20 percent of his annually earned income from the sign business into buying more properties.

By reinvesting the money, he was able to expand and build an income stream, something he refers to as “passive income.”

In Summey’s view, wealth is not having the big house, the fancy car, the country club membership, or the private plane. Wealth is about being able to maintain your standard of living if you are suddenly no longer able to work and earn money. In other words, wealth is a passive income stream for which you do not have to trade labor.

“Those living a modest lifestyle that the income from their investments will support are wealthier than those living a lavish lifestyle they can’t sustain if they suddenly lose their job,” he says. “I’ve known people who were flying high financially, but crashed and burned in a couple months after losing their income.”

One of those people was a close friend who lived lavishly until he suffered a massive brain aneurism and died. Upon his death, his family learned that he left them penniless and in debt. That death had a lasting impact on Summey. He wanted to make sure his own family was protected. Summey was determined to not just plan for the future with insurance policies, but to create a stream of income from rental properties that would provide for his family when he died.

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SUMMEY’S off icer photo.

If You Really Want It, You Will Find A Way To Get It Life is full of defining moments, points in time when a complicated mess of a situation suddenly becomes clear. Summey’s first recollection of such a moment came when he was eight and his best friend got a brand new bicycle.

In 1954, the town of War had not yet undergone the economic devastation that the eventual decline of the coal mining industry would bring. But it was still the type of place where for a kid living there, a new toy of any kind was considered special, but a bicycle meant independent mobility, the freedom to ride all over town.

She taught him that by believing in himself, he could do anything he set his mind to doing.

Summey wanted one to pedal around with his friend. He needed help from his mother and stepfather, Paul.

His mother told him they could not afford a bike, but that if he really wanted one, she bet he could “find a way to get it.”

“Although I did not realize it at the time, the way she reacted to my wanting a new bicycle taught me my first life lesson: Everyone is not equal, but opportunities are,” Summey says, adding that he believes that the confidence his mother instilled in him that day was a crucial building block for his life. She taught him that March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 79

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by believing in himself, he could do anything he set his mind to doing.

The bike store owner, who was also his friend’s mother, told him he could finance the bike over 34 weeks if he could pay $1 per week. That was a lot of money in the 1950s, but Summey was determined to earn every penny.

He picked up bottles, scrap metals, and coal from the train tracks and resold them for cash. It was tough going. The most he could eke out was 45 cents, less than half of what he needed each week.

Then, he spotted an advertisement to sell a national weekly newspaper called Grit for a nickel a copy. The company let its sellers keep two cents for every paper sold. If he could sell 50 papers a week, he could pay $1 toward the bicycle each week. With the help of his teacher, he set out to sign up 50 regular subscribers. When word spread that an eight-year-old boy was working to buy his own bike, Summey got even more subscribers. He was able to meet his financial commitment and then some.

The day he picked up his bike, he concluded that his mother was right. If you wanted something badly enough, you could find a way to get it. “What would have happened if my mother, knowing how much I wanted a bicycle, had simply given me one? No gift could have taken the place of the life lessons I learned from this experience.”

It would have been much easier to feel sorry for himself or jealous about his friend having a bike. “It’s much harder to stand up and do something about it.”

The bicycle purchase taught Summey about financial independence, credit, and making a good impression. Credit is a good thing, he realized, when used to buy something that can be used to earn money—such as buying a bicycle to deliver papers. The responsible way he independently paid for his bike caught the eye of new subscribers (he was now up to 73), as well as the town’s Western Union telegraph manager, who hired him to deliver telegraphs at 25 cents per delivery. Back then, a quarter was a lot of money.

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Summey’s teacher advised him to save the extra money as backup in case he could not earn the full dollar for some reason. In the end, he paid off the bike in three months, less than half the time he initially anticipated. And he learned the importance of maintaining a cash reserve for emergencies, a lesson that would help him later on.

“I realized then that people help people who are willing to help themselves,” Summey says.

The Hard Knock Road to Asheville A few years later, in 1958, Summey’s stepfather, Paul, got a promotion and moved the family to a three-bedroom house in Bluefield, Virginia. It should have felt like paradise after War, but it didn’t. Summey’s relationship with Paul had already been somewhat tense, and in the new town, it worsened. In retrospect, Summey is not sure if the resentment stemmed from the arrival of half-siblings—two brothers and a sister—or from not knowing his own father and why he originally left. He believes it also had a lot to do with the chores that Paul would make him do to “earn his keep.” For example, he was forced to haul mounds of dirt up a long steep driveway to build a large terrace in the area where his mother wanted to put a clothesline.

That might not sound unreasonable, but the exacting way it was doled out and the length of time it would take—two years—built resentment with each load. Each day, Paul would assign a certain number of loads for him to dump. He was not allowed to spread it until Paul came home to make sure he had hauled enough loads. On the days when he did not haul enough dirt to meet Paul’s expectations, he would have to go out after dark to finish. Summey was 13 and new in town, but rather than meet friends, he went home after school and went straight to the task of hauling dirt. Other kids teased him, calling him “dirt digger” and “Mud Dauber,” names that followed him to high school.

Summey’s animosity toward Paul finally erupted into a physical fight one night.

Paul verbally attacked him, saying he was so stupid that he did not have the “sense

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“Everyone faces problems, but as I learned, it’s not the problems: It is how you respond to them that determines your success or failure in life.”

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that God gave a dumb goose.” Summey swung back with his fist.

Paul knocked him in a corner and kicked him into submission.

Summey said he crawled back to his bedroom, vowing to himself that he would get out of the situation as soon as possible. His chance came a few weeks later. The family made a weekend visit to his grandmother’s home in Abingdon, Virginia, and Summey made his move. As the family got ready to return home on Sunday afternoon, Summey went out the back door with no money and no plans. He just knew he wasn’t going back to Bluefield.

“When I walked out that back door and ran, I did so with the total commitment that I would never return to the life I had known up to that time. Was I scared? Absolutely.” He had learned the importance of making a decision and then making it work.

This is something that he has carried with him his entire life.

The rolling hills of the area offered very little cover to hide when Paul came searching for him. The only place nearby

house to earn his own keep. His grandmother called his mother, agreeing that it would be best for him to get away from Paul.

His mother, reluctantly, agreed to let him stay and shipped his clothes overnight on a bus.

It was there, in March 1963, in the attic of his grandmother’s house, that he discovered a letter in handwriting similar to his own, stuck inside an old cigar box. The letter was written by his biological father to his mother some 16 years before when he left the family. The envelope had a return address, so Summey wrote the letter he had wanted to write his entire life.

“My hands were trembling, my heart was racing and an overwhelming feeling of anxiety spread over me,” Summey said. He had a strong desire to know his real father because of the animosity he felt from his stepfather.

The discovery led to the father and son connecting by phone and then in person. When it came time to graduate

that he could find cover was a swamp filled with cattails. He submerged himself up to his neck so that the color of his clothes would not give him away. Water snakes, muskrats, and other swamp creatures swam around him as he stood there until dusk. Only when Paul stopped calling his name did he feel it was safe to come out.

He was cold, wet, and tired. But he was free. He made his way to a dam that backed up the swamp and washed the mud off in the water spilling over the dam. He spent the night in a corn crib. The next morning, when he was sure his family had returned to Bluefield, he went back to see his grandmother.

She had always taken his side about his fights with Paul, and he hoped that she would let him finish out high school in Abingdon with her, telling her that he would work around her

from high school a few months later, Summey decided he would board a bus and head to North Carolina to live with his father in Asheville.

“Everyone faces problems, but as I learned, it’s not the problems: It is how you respond to them that determines your success or failure in life,” Summey says. “Reflecting back on that year, the biggest lesson I learned is that you don’t become successful with a head full of anger, resentment, and negative thoughts. Positive, positive, positive is the way to go. Growing requires stretching, getting out of your comfort zone.”

Summey’s first job in Asheville was working as a lab technician at the Sayles Biltmore Bleachery, a textile factory. For a time, his life stabilized. He had a steady job, a 1959 Studebaker Lark, and some new clothes.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 83

ON SUMMEY’S desk is a replica of his own plane.

But, inside, he wanted more.

He saw an ad offering $80 per week, about $20 more than he was earning at the factory, to get families to accept a free set of encyclopedias in exchange for writing a positive endorsement that the company could use in its marketing campaigns. When he told his father, he became furious and told Summey if he was going to leave a safe factory job to go sell encyclopedias, he might as well find a new place to live because he was not going to support him.

Summey took the encyclopedia job and moved out of his father’s house into a small attic apartment in downtown Asheville.

Not Too Fast To Fail In his mind, he was determined to do well. “Winners,” says Summey, “understand that making mistakes, learning from them, and then applying what they learn is the secret to accomplishment. It didn’t matter to me whether we would be giving away free encyclopedias or selling them. What was important to me was the opportunity to make more money than I’d ever made.”

Summey did so well at convincing couples to put encyclopedias in their homes that the company promoted him into management within six months. He was on the fast track when he learned the hard way that if you get promoted too fast, promoted before you are capable of the next rung in the ladder, you will likely fail.

The first morning in his new post as office manager, two of his sales managers quit with no notice. They were upset that he had leapfrogged over them to become their boss. His secretary also quit.

Summey’s educational background did not include organizational skills, people skills or management techniques—all things he could learn and would learn along the way. But at this stage, he was not yet ready to supervise employees. Instead of growing the office from 25 to 50 employees, he lost employees and morale was at an all-time low. Summey learned an important lesson from the experience: The ability to do and the skill to manage are very different traits. He was successful doing the work himself, but teaching and encouraging other people to do the work was something in which he had no experience.

“Management is getting things done through other people, not yourself. Leadership is not jumping in front of a crowd and yelling, ‘Follow me.’ It is being the kind of person others want to follow. My limited education at the time prevented me from understanding these basic principles of management.”

Summey eventually resigned from the encyclopedia company and found a job working as a lab technician at Northrop Carolina, Incorporated, the defense plant in Asheville. He took a pay cut and a step down in the financial ladder in order to leave his management post at

SUMMEY’S books are published in many other languages.

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MANAGEMENT ADVISORY SERVICE BOOKKEEPING COMPUTER SERVICES

the encyclopedia company and return to factory life, but Summey unwittingly ended up acquiring a new skill at the plant that would help cement his financial success: How to paint signs.

One morning, the plant’s chief chemist asked him to find a place to make three “Danger—Keep Out” signs for a test area he would be using. Summey called around town, but no one could do it on such short notice. Rather than come up empty-handed, Summey offered to do the work using plywood and paint from the company store. The chemist was so impressed by Summey’s ability to get the job done before the testing date that he brought up it up at the management meeting. Soon, Summey was earning extra income from multiple departments at the plant painting signs.

For the first time since the encyclopedia company, he was able to save money.

“When I undertook the project, I had no idea that it would lead me down a life-changing path.”

A few months later, the same chemist who had praised him for his hustle with the signs was forced to let him go. It was 1967, and defense contracts for the Vietnam war had started to dry up.

And it was at this point that Summey had his middle-of-the-night epiphany to get rich. When he told his father of his plans to start his own sign company, his father had a similar reaction to the decision to sell encyclopedias. “’That’s the biggest crock of &%#$ I’ve ever heard of,’” Summey recalls his father yelling at him. “‘You’d better get a job and go to work. That’s even worse than that stupid idea you had about selling encyclopedias.’”

As noted above, Summey’s sign business would eventually grow into a multi-million dollar billboard company.

Summey sold Summey Outdoor Advertising in 1997 and “functionally retired” at age 50—right on time. By then he had also served as president of the North Carolina Outdoor Advertising Association, as well as the National Speakers Association-Carolinas. He founded and served as president of the

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Council of Independent Business Owners. And North Carolina governor Jim Hunt awarded him the prestigious Order of the Long Leaf Pine, an award that recognizes extraordinary service to the community.

All In The Family The basic principles that Summey has learned along the way—to borrow money only to purchase assets that earn enough to pay back debt and make a profit; to not go into debt for expensive luxury goods like cars—positioned him well over the years. And that lesson he learned with his Grit paper route—maintain adequate cash reserves to meet obligations no matter what the conditions might be—was a lesson that clearly paid off.

At the end of 2008, after the country had entered the worst recession since the Great Depression, Summey set up an LLC, and the following year he began purchasing additional properties with his two sons, Jason and Matt. He had the cash reserves (as well as impeccable credit) to allow him to purchase more than 200 properties with the young men. That family effort continues to this day, and it’s a point of pride for him that his sons have achieved their own success in the real estate investing business.

As he walks me through Xanadu, Summey pauses at a room, gesturing at what he calls his “man cave.” There is a twostory wall crammed with books, and another wall devoted to four flat screen TVs so that he and his sons can watch four football games at once. This is his home, a place where his five grandchildren visit often and feel free to play with their toys cluttering the floor under the coffee table. Mike Summey is a man at peace. He’s proud of the fact that he was able to mend fences with both his stepfather and his biological father, to the point where his mother and Paul moved to Asheville in 1990 to live near him, and his father wound up working for him the last ten years of his life. His grown sons are both happy and successful in their own right: Jason had a career in law enforcement before entering the nursing profession, while Matt is an Apache helicopter instructor pilot with the United States Army. And like their father did while he ran his sign business, the sons are investing in real estate together to build their own passive income streams.

Yet as successful as he is, don’t think that Summey has acquired pretentious airs with his wealth. He might drive the latest BMW and pilot his own airplane, but he also likes to bowl, hunt, and volunteer. On the day of our interview, he fields multiple calls from the six squads of active reserves that

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he oversees as a lieutenant for the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office. He pulls out his wallet and proudly shows his lieutenant’s badge.

Summey’s father introduced him to former Buncombe sheriff Harry P. Clay, who was impressed enough to swear

Along with his role as the “Weekend Millionaire” author, Summey has frequently appeared on radio and television shows as a financial expert. For a number of years he also wrote a popular “tips for financial success” column for the Asheville Citizen-Times, and he has been a regular financial columnist in the past to this publication as well (you can view his columns at CapitalatPlay. com).Summey says it is difficult to rank which of these “jobs” has been his favorite, as all have been very rewarding. What has clearly been the most meaningful, however, is achieving his goal of retiring at 50, and watching his grandchildren run happily around Xanadu.

Above all, Summey hopes that his story will encourage others to achieve financial independence. He sums up his feelings in the first sentence of the Financial Security Bible: “I believe the greatest injustice successful people can do to their fellow man is to go to their graves and take with them the knowledge that brought them success.”

“I believe the greatest injustice successful people can do to their fellow man is to go to their graves and take with them the knowledge that brought them success.” him as a special deputy in 1964. Summey has been volunteering ever since, for 53 years. As he puts it, “It’s been a way to give back to the community other than just writing a check to a charity.” Summey’s squads, for example, provided round-the-clock law enforcement while firefighters battled the huge Party Rock fire at Lake Lure last fall. They also register sex offenders in Buncombe County and control traffic at events such as the Smoky Mountain Toy Run and other large fundraisers.

March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 87

People Play at

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1. Jan Davis, Brenda Hopper, and Mike Burke 2. Greg and Ann Goosmann 3. Dave Steel’s Jeff Dave has a winning bid, called

by Kari Williams

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4. Joanna and Scott Best, sponsors of the mask challenge 5. Carla Willis, vice chancellor for university advancement at UNC-A and her husband Ed

6. President Kay Beardsley celebrating with Mardi Gras queen Binford Jennings 7. Kaye and Randy McKinney 8. Debbie and Jerry Williams

The Children’s Welfare League Annual Mardi Gras Ball Raising funds for disadvantaged students in Buncombe County (cwl-asheville.org) Crowne Plaza Resort | February 11, 2017 | Photos by Bill & Mardy Murphy

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9. Carolyn Moore, Nathan Ramsey, and President of A-B Tech Dennis King 10. Daniel & Chanel Polich and Casey & Kim Hite of Aeroflow

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11. Sharing a laugh, Bill and Christian Theodossiou 12. Julie and Kevin Smith in serious feathered masks!

13. Brigid Eckerd discusses the auction with Shelia Elingburg 14. Clint and Glenda Weinert 15. George and Carolyn Moore March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 89

events

march

EVENTS

Mark Jones will direct performances of Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown’s songs about life’s watershed moments, sung by relatable, modern-day characters.

>Tickets: $22 > 828-254-1320 > ashevilletheatre.org march 4

Fly Fishing Film Tour 7PM Highland Brewing Company 12 Old Charlotte Hwy Asheville, NC

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Consult schedule for times Flat Rock Playhouse 2661 Greenville Hwy, Flat Rock, NC Jason Petty and Katie Deal will walk down memory lane, one song at a time.

Featured artists include “Dolly, Hank, Patsy, Tammy, George, Merle, and many, many more.”

>Tickets: $15-$50 > 828-693-0731 > flatrockplayhouse.org

MARCH 5

Tesla String Quartet 3PM

First Congregational Church 1735 5th Ave West, Hendersonville, NC The Juilliard-trained quartet came together with a cosmic, theosophical view of music. For ten years now, they’ve been seeking to connect P2P through their music. The program lists Mozart’s String Quartet in D minor, K. 421; Caroline Shaw’s “Entr’acte” and “Valencia;” and Sibelius’ String Quartet in D minor, Op. 56 Voces Intimae.

>Tickets: $25 > 828-808-2314 > hendersonvillechambermusic.org

The F3T lets you sit back in a warm and dry place and watch other people

INSIGHT

Classic Nashville Roadshow

>Tickets: $15 > 828-252-3005 > hunterbanks.com

march 3 - 5 , 10 -12 , 17-19 Songs for a New World 7:30PM (Fri & Sat), 2:30 (Sun) Asheville Community Theatre: 35below 35 East Walnut St, Asheville, NC

MARCH 8-18

catch amazing fish in amazing places from around the world. (No mud was visible in the trailer.) Last year, this event packed the house, so this year, it is expanding to the deck. The films promise to be bigger, brighter, and higher-quality than ever, thanks to an unnamed tech company.

LOCAL INDUSTRY

LEISURE & LIBATION

march 9

The Everyone Orchestra and The Trongone Band 9PM-12AM

Salvage Station 468 Riverside Dr, Asheville, NC To say a band is “improvisational” or “experimental” is often equivalent to saying, “Bless their hearts.” But these guys are all right. They groove and harmonize in a pleasant, semi-psychedelic way.

Audience participation is part of the act.

BRIEFS

EVENTS

insight

lo c a l i n d u s t ry

news briefs

Wisdom can come in many forms, but observing successful entrepreneurs and local businesses is one of our favorites.

Getting down to business on local and regional industries. After all, this is a business publication.

From the town you’re in and around the globe—you won’t find the same information in one magazine anywhere else.

c r e d i b l e co l u m n i s t s

l e i s u r e & l i b at i o n

events

Articles by local people recognized regionally, nationally, and globally for their knowledge and experience.

Working as hard as you do, it’s more work to just plan a good time—let us help you.

Head out of your office and see what's going on in the community this month.

| March 2017

>Tickets: Advance $18, Door $20 > 850-291-6239 > salvagestation.com march 10 -19 Asheville Amadeus 2017 Multiple venues Downtown Asheville, NC

This is a ten-day event chock full of Mozart madness. Features include performances by the Asheville Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Jerusalem Quartet, and numerous other groups. There will even be a Mozart Requiem Sing-Along and a progressive chamber music “Walk with Wolfgang” hosted by Pan Harmonia.

Master classes, lectures, and kiddie activities add that educational component. The festival will then come to a crashing end when famed violinist Midori plays the grand finale with the Asheville Symphony Orchestra.

> 828-254-1761 > ashevillesymphony.org march 10

The Bellamy Brothers 7-9PM

Wilkes Community College, The Walker Center 1328 South Collegiate Dr, Wilkesboro, NC For forty years, Howard and David have been playing real music “in a genre that has become increasingly enamored with style over substance, glitz over grit, and fleeting celebrity over artistic vision.”

The brothers have earned multiple No. 1 hits by writing accessible songs with musical integrity, though the lyrics may be getting sillier as the years go by. Gotta love the harmonies and steel guitar. So go, and “Let Your Love Flow.”

>Tickets: Adult $39, Senior $37 > 336-838-6260 > walkercenteronline.org march 11-12

Asheville Gun & Knife Show

9AM-5PM (Sat), 10AM-4PM (Sun) WNC Ag Center 1301 Fanning Bridge Rd, Fletcher, NC You’ve heard it on the commercials every year, so repeat after me: Western North Carolina’s biggest gun and knife show featuring over 500 tables of guns, knives, ammo, and accessories. As

David Bowie used to say, it’s a total blam-blam.

> Admission: Adult $8, Child (0-12) Free > 770-630-7296 > mkshows.com march 17-18 Annual Sip & Shop

10AM-5:30PM Grovewood Gallery 111 Grovewood Rd, Asheville, NC Stroll the quaint, Olde Worlde gallery where everything that is made is still handmade. All items will be sold at a 10% discount. Crafters will perform from 11-4 daily. Wine and cookies will be served. P.S. The painting of the Grove Park Inn by Bryan Koontz included in the announcement is delightful.

> FREE > 828-253-7651 > grovewood.com march 17-19 The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe 7:30PM (Fri), 2:30PM (Sat & Sun)

Western North Carolina’s Free Spirit of Enterprise Pick-Up Locations on an easy to use Google map

Archives of full articles from past editions

C A P I TA L AT P L AY. C O M

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Free Digital Magazine

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events

LOCAL INSTITUTE NOW OFFERING STEM CELL THERAPY

Some of you are too young to remember the days when art celebrated the triumph of brilliant compassion and caring and basic consideration over reckless waste. Why not go back to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia where exotic beings in a magical wonderland teach lessons in love, faith, courage, and giving? Sounds good to me. The Youth Production Class of the Asheville Community Theatre will perform three shows in a Romanesque theatre in the round.

“In time, it’s our hope that this truly amazing therapy will eliminate the need for drugs and surgery.”

>Tickets: $6 > 828-251-6610 > calendar.unca.edu

- Dr. Andrew Wells, DC.

Superior Healthcare is now offering state-of-the-art stem cell therapy at its Asheville and Hendersonville locations. For more information on this amazing regenerative treatment, call (828) 575-6244.

This painless and safe stem cell injections are particularly effective in treating such conditions as: DEGENERATIVE ARTHRITIS BONE SPURS DEGENERATIVE JOINT DISEASE

DEGENERATIVE CARTILAGE AND LIGAMENTS BURSITIS TENDONITIS

They do this by pinpointing the impaired areas, removing the swelling with powerful anti-inflammatory properties and healing them by regenerating new cells and tissue.

The practice will be holding a

FREE EDUCATIONAL SEMINAR on stem cell therapy

at the Country Inn and Suites in the Westgate Shopping Center near Earth Fare and downtown Asheville.

Please call for the date and times, and to reserve your seat, as space is limited!

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UNC-A, Carol Belk Theatre One University Heights, Asheville, NC

Superior Healthcare | SuperiorHealthcareAsheville.com March Asheville 2017 38 Westgate| Pkwy, NC 28806

march 17-19 WNC Home, Garden, and Green Living Show US Cellular Center 87 Haywood St, Asheville, NC

Seminars, workshops, and product displays/demos will abound for three days of green living notions as regards building materials, home furnishings and decor, HVAC, transportation, lawn and garden care, pools and spas, health and financing, home entertainment, sporting goods, pet products, etc.

> Admission: Senior (65+) $7, Adult $9, Student $7, Child (0-12) FREE > 828-259-5736 > uscellularcenterasheville.com

march 17-19 & 24 - 26

Copenhagen

7:30PM (Fri & Sat), 2PM (Sun) Hendersonville Community Theatre, 2nd Stage 229 South Washington St, Hendersonville, NC WWII was a very dark era, where science was harvested to work devastation to stop devastation. Copenhagen explores a 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

The meeting actually occurred, and the words used are often directly those of the real-world characters, but in this heady drama, the characters search intent and probe probabilities of outcomes woulda coulda shoulda. The play takes place “somewhere between heaven and the atom.”

>Tickets: $16 > 828-692-1082 > hendersonvilletheatre.org

YOUR WHOLE WORLD IN

EXPERT HANDS march 19

Oltremontano

3PM Oakley United Methodist Church 607 Fairview Rd, Asheville, NC The season finale of Asheville Baroque Concerts is sure to thrill your soul. Before there was the British Invasion, there was an Italian Invasion c. 1650. It permeated Europe with the passion Italians can’t help putting in their music, the virtuosity of the musicians themselves, and the talents of the Flemish composers. ABC will showcase the works of Cazzati, Castello, A Kempis, and van Wichel, as interpreted by virtuoso Frances Blaker on recorder, Gail Ann Schroeder on viola da gamba, and Barbara Weiss on harpsichord.

>Tickets: $15 > 828-254-7123 > panharmonia.org

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march 24

The History of Modern Israel through Song and Poetry

3-5PM UNC Asheville, Reuter Center 102 One University Heights, Asheville, NC The Center for Jewish Studies is hosting a presentation by world-renowned musician, composer, performer, and educator Danny Maseng, who first came to the United States to star in the Broadway play Only Fools Are Sad. He has since served as an evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts, held positions with congregations in New York and Hollywood, and enjoyed many invitations to be a scholar or artist in residence.

Maseng celebrates the Torah, Kabbalah, and Jewish art and culture through his performances.

> FREE > 828-251-6576 > calendar.unca.edu

Skyland Automotive, Inc.

255 Smoky Park Hwy, Asheville, NC 28806• 828-667-5213 www.skylandmercedesbenz.com March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 93

events

march 22

Celtic Woman: Voices of Angels 7:30PM US Cellular Center, Thomas Wolfe Auditorium 87 Haywood St, Asheville, NC

URBAN

Like the name of their new album suggests, these women really do have voices of angels. They deserve every single award they’ve ever received, and the list is too long to mention. Susan McFadden, Mairead Carlin, and Eabha McMahon will be joined by new violinist Tara McNeill. The music is embellished with stage sets, wardrobe, choreography, backing musicians, and dancers.

>Tickets: $41.50-$1-8.50 > 828-259-5736 > uscellularcenterasheville.com march 24 -april 2

March 11, 6:30 p.m.

The Wedge @ Foundation Life is our medium; education, enrichment and advocacy are our palette; and this vibrant city is our community canvas.

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Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka, Jr. Flat Rock Playhouse 2661 Greenville Hwy, Flat Rock, NC This is the stage adaptation of a cross between the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its adaptation for the silver screen in which Wonka frightened young audiences with his strange sense of humor.

>Tickets: $12.50-$25 > 828-693-0731 > flatrockplayhouse.org march 25

George Winston

8-10PM Tryon Fine Arts Center 34 Melrose Ave, Tryon, NC Invest in a child, strengthen a community

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World-renowned pianist and New Age avatar George Winston returns with his soothing sounds. Winston has released

over a dozen albums, including tributes to Vince Guaraldi and The Doors, often for Windham Hill, and many of them went gold or platinum. Recent releases have explored New Orleans jazz and blues. Part of the event will be a voluntary canned food drive.

>Tickets: Adult $35, Student $17 > 828-859-8322 > tryonarts.org march 25

The Master & the Virtuoso

7:30PM Blue Ridge Community College, Conference Hall 180 West College Dr, Flat Rock, NC T he He nd er s onv i l le S y mphony Orchestra will celebrate French masterpieces with Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and excerpts from Bizet’s Carmen. Returning guest pianist Jorge Federico Osorio will play Beethoven’s Concerto No. 1 and No. 2.

>Tickets: $40 > 828-697-5884 > hendersonvillesymphony.org march 25

Black Violin 8PM Diana Wortham Theatre 2 South Pack Square, Asheville, NC Violinists Kev Marcus and Will B, along with their DJ, slide effortlessly from one genre to another in what they call “from Beyoncé to Bach.” They’re proficient and polished, and there should be something in the show for everybody. Their mission is “to embolden people to step out of their stereotypes.”

>Tickets: $21.40-$37.45 > 828-257-4530 > dwtheatre.com

march 25

4th Annual Asheville Food Truck Showdown

11AM-7PM WNC Ag Center 1301 Fanning Bridge Rd, Fletcher, NC There will probably be food. What’s that Grateful Dead song everyone loves?

Three celebrity judges will choose which truck deserves to be call the “Best Food Truck in Asheville,” after eating food submissions from all 17 food trucks!

> 828-687-1414 > wncagcenter.org march 26

The Zodiac Trio

3PM First Congregational Church 1735 5th Ave West, Hendersonville, NC This trio, on clarinet, violin, and piano, harks from the Manhattan School of Music. Their music is modern and abstract with a high level of difficulty, but each mood is delivered professionally.

The program includes a mix of modern compositions, Bela Bartok’s Contrasts perhaps being the most recognizable.

>Tickets: $25 > 828-808-2314 > hendersonvillechambermusic.org march 27

The Fed Speaks

4-6PM UNC Asheville, Humanities Hall One University Heights, Asheville, NC Pay attention. Matt Martin, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, will share financial and economic news. A short Q&A will follow. This is a great opportunity to cut through low-information hype and

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events

LOCAL BEERS ON TAP OVER 50 TEQUILAS FRESH JUICE MARGARITAS

- historic biltmore village (828)505-7682 call ahead for preffered seating OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK CATERING AND PRIVATE DINING AVAILABLE

rumor and sharpen your understanding of how money works and where it’s going.

Doors open at 3:30. Attendees must register, and 48 hours’ advance notice is appreciated. The event is sponsored by the Family Business Forum.

> FREE > 828-273-6223 > fbf.unca.edu march 28 & 31

Harlem Globetrotters

7-9PM 28th: Appalachian State University, 111 Rivers Street, Boone 31st: US Cellular Center, 87 Haywood St, Asheville, NC The world record-breaking basketball clowns and masters of the trick shot continue to amaze with family fun.

(Says CaP editor Fred Mills, “I saw ‘em when I was 10, and then again in 2015; each time, I was mesmerized.) In their 90-year career, they have trotted 122 countries and territories on six continents. This year, they’ll hit 250 North American venues while visiting 30 countries.

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>Tickets: $50, $26, $21, $16 > 828-262-7890 > theholmescenter.appstate.edu march 29

Steve Miller Band

8PM US Cellular Center, Thomas Wolfe Auditorium 87 Haywood St, Asheville, NC What was once the cutting edge of psychedelic blues in the club scene of San Francisco has for the past three decades constituted standard fare on FM radios across America. Miller grew up surrounded by guitar greats, pursued a long-lived rock-and-roll

career, and now serves in multiple academy capacities.

>Tickets: $65-$130 > 828-259-5736 > uscellularcenterasheville.com april 4

The Nile Project

7PM Appalachian State University, Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts 733 Rivers St, Boone, NC No, not a Pink Floyd tribute. The Nile Project debuted in 2013, their eclectic mix of ancient and modern instruments combined with Eastern chants winning them the description of “a committed, euphoric, international coalition” from the New York Times. You can close your eyes and imagine yourself floating on a Nile barge—but then you’d miss all the color.

>Tickets: Adult $25, Student $10 > 800-841-2787 > theschaefercenter.org april 6

Taylor Hicks

7-9PM Wilkes Community College, Walker Center 1328 South Collegiate Dr, Wilkesboro, NC Hicks was the Season 5 winner of American Idol. His bluesy covers won him gobs of votes leading to a debut single three weeks later that charted No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, Pop 100, and Single Sales charts. His first album went platinum. If you don’t like the music, you’ll at least want to go to see what color his hair is.

>Tickets: Adult $39, Senior $37 > 336-838-6260 > walkercenteronline.org

april 6 - 9

Cherry Cherry

Consult schedule for times Flat Rock Playhouse 2661 Greenville Hwy, Flat Rock, NC Famed Neil Diamond cover artist Cherry Cherry and his nine-piece band will recreate songs that take you back to the ’60s and ’70s, when life was simple, the economy was healthy, and music was intended to make each other feel good.

Install LED light bulbs Remember to bring reusable bags to grocery store Create a financial plan that reflects my values Invest in sustainable and responsible companies

You’ve got the small stuff covered. Let us help you make a greater lasting impact. We’ve been helping people put their money to good use, with socially responsible investments and customized financial plans, for more than 16 years.

So, if you’d like to work with a small, independent, local business deeply invested in our great community, call us.

>Tickets: $33 > 828-693-0731 > flatrockplayhouse.org april 8

Potters of Madison County Market

9AM-4PM Marshall High Studios 115 Blannahassett Island, Marshall, NC

440 Montford Avenue, Asheville NC, 28801 | 828-285-8777 | 877-285-7537 | www.starksfinancial.com Securities offered through Raymond James Financial Services, Member FINRA/SIPC.

POMC is a small group of local potters who have gotten together to put on a big annual sale. They are collaborating with big-time potters from throughout the Southeast. Glazed, fired clayworks range from the abstract and shabby-chic to the classic and quaint.

> FREE > pottersofmadisoncounty.com

If your organization has any local press releases for our briefs section, or events that you would like to see here, feel free to email us at events@capitalatplay.com.

Please submit your event at least six weeks in advance.

Custom pools and spas.

We create unique backyard environments 1200-C Hendersonville Rd. Asheville, NC • 828-277-8041 • waterworkswnc.com March 2017 | capitalatplay.com 97

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PLAYING IS FOR THE YOUNG AND YOUNG AT HEART. STAY THAT WAY.

Never stop playing.

It’s always play time in Abingdon. visitabingdonvirginia.com • 888.489.4144

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