August 2013 O.Henry

Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and the ladies of the Greensboro Junior League invite you to celebrate the Anniversary of just about everything.

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August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Hillside 1801 Carlisle Road • Old Irving Park • Greensboro, NC

Majestic Georgian overlooking the 17th fairway of Greensboro Country Club. Eminent New York architect Mott Schmidt along with designer Otto Zenke created this masterpiece. It features a free standing circular stairway in separate hallway from the entrance halls. Rich wood flooring, antique brick exterior, west forecourt, auto court, greenhouse, pool and pool house continue to display features that were used to model the home after James River Plantation Estates. This magnificent 10,000 square foot (approximate) home is situated on acreage in the heart of Old Irving Park. Price upon request. By appointment only.

trmrealestate.com • katie@trmrealestate.com (o)336-274-1717•(m)336-430-0219 1401 Sunset Drive |Greensboro, NC 27408

Katie Redhead Broker/Realtor

Information believed to be accurate but in no way guaranteed

M A G A Z I N E VoLUMe 3, no. 8

“I have a fancy that every city has a voice.”

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1848 Banking Street Greensboro, NC 27408 www.ohenrymag.com Jim Dodson, Editor jim@ohenrymag.com Andie Stuart Rose, Creative Director andie@ohenrymag.com David C. Bailey, Senior Editor 336.617.0090 • dbailey@ohenrymag.com Lauren Shumaker, Graphic Designer Brianna Rolfe Cunningham, Graphic Design Intern John Cruickshank, Editorial Intern CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Harry Blair, Maria Johnson, Jim Schlosser CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Lynn Donovan, Sam Froelich, John Gessner CONTRIBUTORS Cynthia Adams, Jane Borden, Emily Frazier Brown, John Cruickshank, Lynn Donavan, Tina Firesheets, TC Frazier, John Gessner, Ron Green Jr., Bill Hancock, Sara King, Meridith Martens, Sara Novitsky, Nancy Oakley, Ogi Overman, Barbara Richie Pond, Susanna Rodell, Noah Salt, Mary Seymour, Stephen E. Smith, Astrid Stellanova, Tim Swink

O.H

David Woronoff, Publisher ADVERTISING SALES Marty Hefner, Sales & Circulation Director 336.707.6893, mhefner@ohenrymag.com Hattie Aderholdt, 336.601.1188 Amy Grove, 336.456.0827 ADVERTISING GRAPHIC DESIGN 910.693.2469, lauren@ohenrymag.com ©Copyright 2013. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

O.Henry Magazine is published by The Pilot LLC

4 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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August 2013 FEATURES

47 48

Linville Longing

50

Supreme Justice

52

Toast of the Town

56

Story of a House

62

The Garden Path

65

Almanac

Poetry by Barbara Richie Pond

Night of the Living (TV) Dead

By Bill Hancock

Billy Ingraham spends way too much time watching old TV shows. Lucky us.

By Maria Johnson

Henry Frye’s long climb to the mountain top

By Jim Schlosser

Seems like everybody has a big anniversary this month

By Mary Seymour

From a shattered life arose a deeper sense of home

By John Cruickshank

Greensboro’s best kept garden secret

By Noah Salt

A toast to deep summer and the garden to-do list

CoVeR PhoToGRaPh CoURTesy oF The GReensBoRo hisToRiCaL MUseUM aRChiVes iLLUsTRaTion This PaGe By haRRy BLaiR 6 O.Henry

August 2013

DEPARTMENTS

9 HOMETOWN

By Jim Dodson 12 SHORT STORIES AND NOW 15 THEN

By Ron Green, Jr. CITY MUSE 17 THE

By Emily Frazier Brown FUNNY 19 LIFE’S

By Maria Johnson READER 21 OMNIVOROUS

By Stephen E. Smith OF SUMMER 25 PLEASURES

By Tim Swink CITY ICON 29 GATE

By Jim Schlosser DISCOMFORT 33 SOUTHERN

By Cynthia Adams

WINE GUY 35 THE

By TC Frazier LEVEL 36 STREET

By Jim Schlosser ON 38 GAME

By Susanna Rodell EVOLVING SPECIES 41 THE

By Ogi Overman OF JANE 45 LIFE

By Jane Borden & ENTERTAINMENT 68 ARTS CALENDAR 87 GREENSCENE

By Lynn Donovan ASTROLOGER 95 ACCIDENTAL

By Astrid Stellanova ENDING 96 O.HENRY

By Cynthia Adams

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

HomeTown

Ceiling Fans and Feet Dancing

By JiM DoDson

Some years ago we moved into a historic

house loaded with charm and only one thing missing — air conditioning. To be fair, the old place actually came with an antiquated central air-conditioning system, a jerryrigged unit that provided a bit of excitement the first hot night I attempted to switch it on in search of cool air.

The unit caught fire and I needed the garden hose to douse the flames. A “climate-control technician” arrived the next day to replace a burned-up compressor motor and several parts in the outside unit, then climbed up into the cobwebbed attic to have a look at the indoor compressor whose job it was to convey chilled air through the second floor ceiling vents, in theory cooling the place from top to bottom. The house, you see, is such a solidly built dowager from the Gilded Age (complete with foot-thick masonry walls) that apparently putting vents downstairs proved nigh impossible.

“Wow,” the tech said as we stood together in the dim, hot, cloistered air beneath the rafters, “this system is older than I am.” He calculated it to be circa 1969, the year of Woodstock and the moonwalk, then glanced around the dusty attic and pointed to a disassembled attic fan leaning against a wall near the peak vent. “I’ll bet that thing sucked the hot air out of this place back in the old days.

Those guys knew what they were doing when they built this house. That was nature’s air conditioning.”

“I wouldn’t mind having those old days back or at least that attic fan,” I couldn’t resist saying, explaining how I’d grown up in a house before the coming of central air that was equipped with a similar attic fan that drew in the air from the yard and adjacent woods all night long, cooling things down and soothing fevered dreams.

“Bet it was nice, huh?” he said. “I’ve never slept in anything but air conditioning.”

“I still love to sleep beneath a fan,” I admitted. “Air conditioning sometimes makes me feel like a side of beef in the freezer.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet you won’t say that come August.” He gave me a sweaty grin.

Following his thorough check-over, he cranked up the dear old system again, producing a few faint cool breaths of air from the upstairs ceiling vents. “I’m afraid 77 degrees is about the coolest it will ever get,” he said a bit sheepishly, takThe Art & Soul of Greensboro

ing a final reading. “And it may be lucky to break 80 when August gets here.”

I thanked him for his efforts, switched off the system, and promptly drove to Lowe’s to purchase a couple of large pedestal fans.

If it’s true what poets and child psychologists say — namely that our world views are shaped by the first ten years of life — then perhaps I’m simply a product of a slower, un-air-conditioned world.

The first fully air-conditioned buildings I can recall were the newspaper buildings where my father worked in the late 1950s. About the same time, a cute penguin who looked like Chilly Willy appeared in the front window of our local Piggly Wiggly store with the beguiling enticement: “Please come inside where it’s cooooooool! Enjoy our lovely air conditioning. It’s free!”

These days it’s no longer the fashion to speak of having had maids or cooks of any race, I suppose, but our African-American maid, Jesse May Richardson, was a rock of domestic life who I now think may have actually saved my family’s life and certainly nurtured us through a difficult transition period after my mother suffered a late-term miscarriage days before we moved home to North Carolina.

Among other enduring gifts, Miss Jesse May taught my mother how to cook in true Southern style and my skinny older brother and me how to “feet dance” to gospel music from her kitchen transistor radio.

The downside of this proposition was that Miss Jesse May had pretty much absolute and unimpeachable authority over my daily life and didn’t hesitate to use it. While my mother rested though the warm afternoons, it was she who first led me along to the new air-conditioned Piggly Wiggly store for her weekly shopping visit, demanding first that I “wash them filthy bare feet good” and put on the new leather church sandals I hated more than just about anything, an affront to true summer adventuring, warning me in no uncertain terms not to “go wild like some little Indian inside that nice store.”

I assured her I wouldn’t, though the first thing I did when Jesse May turned out of sight was yank off those wretched sandals and slide my bare feet over the chilled tiled floor of the new air-conditioned grocery store like it was a skating rink, thrilled by the unnatural coldness of the floor. I wound up in the baking aisle, fashioning what my brother and I liked to call “King seats” out of large sacks of flour. I was perched there pondering life and soaking up the refrigerated coolness when, unfortunately, Miss Jesse May Richardson wheeled around the corner of the aisle with her cart. She saw me and stopped cold, giving me the wooly eyeball.

“Well, look at you,” she declared, “sittin’ there like a big-shot with your skinny hiney on somebody else’s flour.”

“I’m just enjoying the lovely air conditioning. It’s free!” I pointed out to her.

“That so? Well, child, I suggest you get up straightaway from them flour sacks August 2013

O.Henry 9

HomeTown and put your shoes back on them feet or you’ll find yourself sittin’ out in the car sweatin’ like a sinner on Judgment Day.” To this day, I can’t step into an intensely airconditioned grocery store on a broiling summer day without suddenly thinking of Miss Jesse May Richardson, the woman who saved my family’s life and taught me to feet dance, though I still sometimes have the urge to make a “King seat” in the flour sacks.

Most Southerners of my generation experienced their first air conditioning at a movie house or public building around 1960, but according to the comprehensive Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, air conditioning first appeared in the South at a cotton mill in Belmont, North Carolina, in 1906. By 1920, the device was being used to cool fabric mills, tobaccostemming rooms, and bakeries across the South.

Use in department stores, cafes, libraries and private homes, however, didn’t broadly develop until after World War II, at which point “air conditioning became an immutable part of Southern life,” according to the book on Southern culture. “In varying degrees,” the authors note, “virtually all Southerners have been affected, directly or indirectly, by the technology of climate control. Air conditioning has influenced everything from architecture to sleeping habits and has contributed to the erosion of several traditions, most notably cultural isolation, agrarianism, romanticism, poverty, neighborliness, a strong sense of place, and a relatively slow pace of life.”

Mississippi writer Eudora Welty was once asked by a Northern journalist why the South produced so many excellent writers. “Porches,” she reportedly gave as a one-word answer. In an age before mechanical air conditioning, went her logic, porches were where Southerners gathered to cool off and spin tales after a long hot summer day.

My own view, shaped by a childhood cooled by a lazily turning fan blade of some sort, is that there’s no finer sleep to be found than by an open window with a fan bringing the smell of the outdoors into your very bed — the mingling scents of new mown grass and August honeysuckle in bloom, or simply the cool musk of the nearby woodlands. Sleeping by an open window permits a body to feel connected to the natural world, rather than sealed inside a climatecontrolled box. Some of my happiest summer nights were spent lying in my bed listening to approaching thunderstorms and feeling the wind of the approaching storm through a gently rippling screen.

Sadly for me, the year I went off to college in 1971 with a suitcase and portable fan in hand, my parents finally installed central air conditioning in their home. My old bedroom was never quite the same again, except those nights when I shut my bedroom door, closed the air-conditioning vents, and cranked open the windows to sample nature’s air conditioning. It was about that time I noticed that fewer and

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August 2013

fewer people, including my parents, sat on the porch to catch the evening breeze and talk.

“The unnecessary refrigeration of America has become a chronic disease,” political pundit Joe Klein, obviously a kindred spirit, wrote in Time magazine a couple of summers back, noting how, as summers grow warmer, many Americans have simply grown accustomed to keeping their houses cooler in summer than in winter, using up more British Thermal Units annually than the total energy consumption of all but twenty-one countries. Quoting an energy expert who claims Americans could save 4 percent in energy costs for every degree warmer they set their central-air thermostats, Klein proposed that we all set our air-conditioning units at 75 degrees — “a comfortable, if slightly chilly number to my mind” — and thereby do the right thing to preserve energy and stay cool on the hottest summer day.

At our house, for what it’s worth, we fared reasonably well through the dry heats of June and July relying on pedestal fans and the occasional evening thunderstorm to cool things off, though I concede there were a handful of stuffy nights, when even I woke up bathed in a sticky sweat, feeling as if we were sleeping over at an all-night bakery.

These occasions gave me a good reason to go sleep in the guest room with its fabulous ceiling fan and old-fashioned roll-out windows, a chance to be transported back to an un-air-conditioned South that doesn’t really exist anymore. Does anyone still feet dance in the kitchen?

Unfortunately, with the dragon’s breath of August on the doorstep, we hit a fierce fortnight where the nighttime temps never dropped below 90 and the howls of heatstroke intensified, resulting in the arrival of a crew that installed a smart new energy-efficient air-conditioning system that quickly had everyone in the house smiling but me feeling, at times, like a fellow trapped inside a beer cooler.

With the new state-of-the-art thermostat set at an environmentally sensible 75 degrees, my Yankee wife, the kids and the dogs are sleeping nicely through these fabled dog days of summer.

I, on the other hand, sometimes find myself goose-bumped from the unnatural coolness and get up in the middle of the night to wander out to our back terrace and sit in my favorite Adirondack chair, soaking in the sounds and smells of the summer night. The other night my wife followed me out there and wondered if everything was all right.

There was a welcome rumble of a far-off thunderstorm, a flicker of blue in the pines. “Is something wrong?” she wondered. “Bad dreams?”

“Nope,” I assured her, scratching a bare foot that hasn’t been gloriously filthy, alas, in many decades.

“I’m just waiting for a storm to cool things off a bit and enjoying nature’s lovely air conditioning. It’s free, you know.” OH Contact editor Jim Dodson at Jim@ohenrymag.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Your Life in 1,000 Words

Flannery O’Connor, who once described herself as a “pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-mealone-or-I’ll-bite-you” complex, also said that those who survive childhood have enough writing material to last them for the rest of their days. Perhaps you agree? O.Henry magazine invites you to share a brief chapter from your inimitable real life story — told in a thousand words or less — by entering our 2014 O. Henry Magazine Memoir Contest.

The guidelines are simple: Memoirs should not exceed 1,000 words.

Original, unpublished manuscripts only One submission per entrant Deadline: October 1, 2013 How to submit: Email your submission to davidclaudebailey@ohenrymag. com using the subject line “O.Henry Memoir Contest.”

Be sure to include your name, telephone number and mailing address in the body of the email.

Winning entries will be published in O.Henry magazine.

Contest is open to any resident of Guilford County.

Fringe Benefits

As the classical melodies of the Eastern Music Festival waltz into memory, the guitar-picking, bass-thumping, fiddle-sawing sounds of EMFfringe bring some cool notes to Greensboro’s hot August air. Celebrating Americana, Fringe hosts its first concert of the month on August 3, when the Seth Walker Band takes Triad Stage. Much like Fringe itself, Walker is the product of a classical family — both his parents were classically trained string players — but an uncle introduced him to the blues when he was a boy living on a commune in rural North Carolina — and he’s never looked back.

With a swinging blend of R&B, rock, blues, and roots country, Walker’s act offers up soulfulness with sheer vocal prowess. The Fringe series continues on August 7, with Greensboro-native folk ensemble Songs of Water at Mack and Mack. The seven-piece group was lauded as “The Best Independent Band of 2012” by Indie Music Reviewer Magazine. Known for its expansive orchestral arrangements, Songs of Water incorporates everything from the hammered dulcimer to the Irish bouzouki in its percussive, atmospheric tracks. Fringe rounds out the month with a free show August 31 on the Guilford College quad, courtesy of Enter the Haggis—the Toronto group whose acclaimed latest album, The Modest Revolution, is based on the contents of a single day’s newspaper — along with the Steel Wheels, a string quartet from the Blue Ride Mountains whose members cluster around a single microphone, old-school-revival style, for many of their rollicking numbers. So go on, unbutton your collar, trade the red wine for a Red Oak, and hear what the EMF’s easygoing (but no less talented) cousin has to offer.

Info: (336) 333-7450 or easternmusicfestival.org/festival/fringe JC

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August 2013

Coltrane A-Comin’

Al Jarreau, the only singer to win a Grammy in three different categories — jazz, pop, R&B — headlines The John Coltrane International Blues and Jazz Festival at Oak Hollow Festival Park in High Point on August 31, beginning at noon. The show honors Coltrane (1926-1967), a master saxophonist who grew up in High Point. The festival is brimming with talent, thanks to the horn-heavy Dave Coz and Friends; up-and-coming jazz trumpeter Christian Scott; the Music Maker Blues Review; and the North Carolina Coltrane All-Star Band. Tickets are $60 in advance, $70 at the door. Info: (336) 819-5299 or coltranejazzfest.com MJ

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Right: Photograph By LORING MORTENSEN Far Right: Photograph by Liam Frank

Short Stories Sauce of the Month

Greensboro’s own Thomas Gourmet Foods has been saucing up North Carolina since the 1930s with a line of products led by the Original Thomas Sauce, still very much available. But to my taste, their best product is their take on the sauce that was once served at the Boar & Castle on West Market Street from the 1940s through the 1970s. Thomas calls their version Castle Sauce and invites you to slather it on hamburgers, steaks and hot dogs.

Me, I add just a smidgeon to my BLTs. Now if I could only find some boar bacon. Available in grocery stores throughout the Triad. Info: www.thomasgourmetfoods.com DCB

Part-time State Park Cone-fluence

Henri Matisse is easily one of the most important French painters of the 20th century. But in the early 20th century, when Etta Cone, sister of Cone Mill Corp. founders Moses and Ceasar Cone, spent her summers visiting Paris, he was not a brand name. In 1949, Etta Cone donated dozens of the Matisses she’d collected over the years to the fledgling Weatherspoon Art Musem. Through September 29, you can see a number of them in Resolutely Matisse, along with pieces by other artists who display stylistic similarities. “Two figures, one male and the other female, dance and swirl, surrounded by clouds,” says Elaine Gustafson in describing Cumulus, a sculpture by American artist Robert Moir. Just like Matisse, the human figure “was central in Moir’s art and many of his artworks depict sinuous shapes that undulate in space,” says Gustafson, Weatherspoon’s curator of collections. On loan for the exhibit, the piece belongs to Greensboro’s David and Heidi Freilich, who bought the sculpture twenty years ago in an obscure gallery in Lambertville, Pennsylvania.

In preparing the exhibit, Gustafson found it had been exhibited in 1951 at no less than the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. “So lending it to Weatherspoon has been a win-win situation for the collectors and the museum,” Gustafson says. Info: (336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu. DCB

We’re not sure how you keep 300 acres under the radar, but that’s been the case with Guilford County’s first state park — and perhaps the best kept secret in the Triad — Haw River State Park. Ten years after its authorization, the only part of the park that’s open to you and me is The Summit, a former Episcopal retreat and conference center near Browns Summit. Available to groups of ten or more people who book in advance, the accommodations are ridiculously cheap. For example, a dorm-style cabin with four sets of bunk beds costs $55 per person per day — including three meals a day.

Guests enjoy a fishing lake, trails, gymnasium, amphitheater, baseball diamond, disc golf course (BYO discs) and outdoor pool sans lifeguard. For now, the general public must sign in and observe bankers’ hours — 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday — unless a group is already booked into the park. Non-group visitors can stay until dusk anytime an overnight group is there — including weekends — but they’re limited to the walking trail, disc golf course and lake (fishing license required). By early 2014, the park should open another 1,000-acre section.

That chunk of the park, to be accessible by a new entrance off Church Street, will feature a 3-mile walking loop. “There’s just no money in the budget to do more improvements than that,” says park superintendent Kelley King. Info: (336) 342-6163, ncparks.gov, or friendsofhawriversp.org. MJ

Dine ’Em, Cowboy

This summer the folks over at Grove Winery have been circling the wagons — er, food trucks — every second Sunday of the month. Next stop for the N.C. Food Rodeo: August 11, noon to 4:30 p.m. If you’re looking for Sunday dinner with a kick, hoof it over to the winery at 7360 Brooks Bridge Road seven miles northeast of Greensboro and sample some, whoops, real road food — from burritos to barbecue depending on which trucks show up. No admission, but the grub and grape squeezins will set you back a few bucks. Word is, you should try the cabernet franc. Say that with a smile, partner. Info: (336) 584-4060, www.grovewinery.com. MJ The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 13

When it comes to financing your home, there is no better choice than High Point Bank. We are located right here in the community. So we not only know the Triad but we are able to spend the time with you to find a home loan that fits what you have in mind. Stop by when you are in the neighborhood and let us help you take advantage of today’s low rates in various mortgage options.

Get started today. Visit HighPointBank.com/MortgageInquiry or call a loan advisor at 336.881.3400.

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Winston-Salem

Š 2013 High Point Bank and Trust Company

Then and Now

Slammin’ Sam and the Black Night’s Shag Bag One boy, two legends and a piece of golf history lost but never forgotten

By Ron Green Jr.

I remember my first kiss (a girl named

Vivian Hazelton), my first par (the par-3 ninth at Carolina Golf Club in Charlotte) and my first Bruce Springsteen show (February 28, 1981, in the Greensboro Coliseum).

I also remember the moment professional golf captured my imagination. It was an April Sunday in 1965 and Sam Snead won the Greater Greensboro Open at Sedgefield Country Club, a victory with perhaps as much historic as personal relevance, in as much as it was the first tournament I saw in person.

I have since made a career of writing about golf and have been to sixty-seven major championships and five Ryder Cup matches. But sometimes it feels as if it began that Sunday at Sedgefield a short forty-eight years ago. Snead’s win was historic because it was his eighth victory in Greensboro, a record of unequaled dominance in a single PGA Tour event until Tiger Woods won Arnold Palmer’s event at Bay Hill for the eighth time in March. It was also Snead’s last PGA Tour victory, setting the bar at eighty-two career victories, another record being challenged by Woods.

Snead was a figure of Mount Rushmore proportions in the evolution of professional golf. Long before swing gurus and video cameras became the time stamp of modern players, Snead played the game with a natural grace he developed in the West Virginia hills. His was a true golf swing, athletically elegant in a way that can’t be fully taught, like the soft twang in his voice.

When Snead won for the last time at Greensboro, he was 52 years old and still capable of kicking the top of a doorframe if someone asked him. The details of that Sunday have faded but I remember wanting to see Snead’s straw hat, the The Art & Soul of Greensboro

one with the wide fabric band around it. Like Tiger’s red shirt on Sunday and Jack Nicklaus’ familiar crouch over a putt, Snead’s hat is part of the game’s tapestry. Those were the days of alpaca cardigans and kilties on golf shoes, those floppy appendages that lay across the top of the shoe in what passed for style in an earlier time and are rumored to be making a comeback in some corners.

Seeing the pros doing their work in person, smoking cigarettes and lining up putts while chasing a piece of a $70,000 purse captivated me. So did seeing Snead. The appreciation of the moment grew over the years when it became evident it was his last PGA Tour victory. I had gone to Greensboro with my father, Ron Green Sr., the sports columnist for The Charlotte News in the longgone days of afternoon newspapers before he joined The Charlotte Observer in the latter part of his fifty-year career with the two papers. He will cover his sixtieth consecutive Masters next April, if you’re wondering where I got my love of golf writing. Before Snead finished his round, my dad went into Sedgefield’s Tudor-style clubhouse to spend a few minutes interviewing Gary Player, who would go on to win the U.S. Open two months later. I wasn’t allowed in the clubhouse, security evidently being as tight then as it is today, but Player made me a fan for life when he sent my father out of the clubhouse with his black leather shag bag, a gift to me (at least that’s how I remember it).

Like three-hour tournament rounds, shag bags are a thing of the past.

Players used to carry their own practice balls and Player’s bag had his name sewn on it in a yellow cursive script. The shag bag stayed in the trunk of my father’s car for years until, like all shag bags, it was tossed aside. The memory remains.

I remember that shag bag when I see Rickie Fowler signing flat-bill caps for kids or Phil Mickelson working his way down a fence crowded with fans, taking his time to sign all the autographs while chatting and making eye contact with them. It’s a small thing but a huge gesture, a moment turning into a memory and, perhaps, a life-long connection to the game. That’s how it happened for me. OH Ron Green Jr., who writes for Global Golf Post, a weekly digital golf magazine, says he spends most of his days watching golfers who are far better than he is.

August 2013

O.Henry 15

A Nice Vice

The City Muse

Cheerwine, Camel Lights and pieces of a life

By eMiLy FRaZieR BRoWn

It is the first

PhotogRaPh By EMiLy FRaZiER BRoWN

perfect Saturday of the year.

Freckle-faced triplets are catching their breath on the windowsill swing in Elsewhere, the living art museum. A towering, lanky pair of legs walks purposefully into Civic Threads, and exits with a gentlemanly hair gel that he quickly runs through his “do” while walking toward McGee Street.

The shopkeeper at Fordham’s Drug Store is sweeping outside, which reminds me to dip inside for a glass bottle of Cheerwine and a pack of Camel Lights. He commends my simple purchase, “Everyone should have eight or nine vices.”

“You think?” I prompt, gathering my items.

“Oh yes, I’m a big fan of ’em.” He waits for me to reach the door before he adds, “To be fair, I make my living sellin’ twelve or thirteen.”

On to my 607 South Elm Street destination: Mary’s Antiques.

My father’s childhood home was furnished by Mary’s collection. He kept the house after his grandfather died, and his first purchase was a $200 foyer-room table from the back of the store, where you’ll find the shutters, doors, large pots and gardening tools that make a do-it-yourself project doable. I can vividly recall the first time I packed my childhood bedroom into boxes after high school, envisioning the similarly lovely furniture I would buy with the money I didn’t have.

A petite woman with salt-and-pepper hair is smiling from behind the corner as I enter. She advises a set of customers, and then she asks me if I need assistance.

It’s Mary herself.

She laughs and shyly looks away when I ask, then admits she only got into the business because she realized that she couldn’t afford to keep buying pieces unless she sold some too. Now she distributes nationwide — most notably, she supplies The Fresh Market with the decorative knickknacks that line their top shelves.

Despite the size of her collection, her only storefront location is in Greensboro.

She has a separate warehouse for the items that will be delivered elsewhere, but only we can take a stroll downtown for the perfect salmon-colored brooch.

The entranceway is a mixture of books, personal photograph collections from unnamed individuals’ estates, and elegant pieces of furniture (lined by glassware and china and other things I learned at an early age I shouldn’t inspect in the store). Accessories and oddities serve as wallpaper around the counter.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

As I noted earlier, the backroom is for people who want to get their hands dirty; some people are good with a hammer, while others have contractors-in-law who will forgive them for trying.

But Mary’s is made best by the middle room. It is a collection of mirrors, large frames, doorknobs, vintage cameras and outdated barbershop

novelties. And the stamp collection.

Long ago, a printing company owned the space across the street. They produced the stamps or printing plates, as they’re sometimes called, that Duke University and the University of Maryland used on letterheads. Also the city of Greensboro’s seal, a stamp for an early North Carolina McDonald’s franchise, and printing plates from banks and newspapers that have since closed their doors. They fill a chest of drawers in the left-most corner of the middle room.

The collection didn’t spark my interest until I saw a heavy wooden board that held up a collage of these printing plates, each pertaining to North Carolina, at the front of the store. I visited to check the sticker price, pinched pennies at my half-time job as a receptionist, and looked up “tips for haggling” on the Internet for a month. When I finally made my offer, the cashier couldn’t hide her laughter. She called Mary on the phone to explain how I coveted it so, and then gave me a nod. It has hung on the wall of every home I’ve had since — friends often ask to buy it from me.

I mention the board and Mary smiles, “I remember that. Don’t you think something similar would make a good coffee table?” Yes, it would.

She says collecting doesn’t have to be an expensive passtime. There’s a difference between thrifting and antiquing — some people want to turn a profit, while others just fancy things that have gone out of style. Decorating your home can be a combination of frugality and your own manual labor, or a costly investment in exquisite furniture. Her personal favorites are folk art from South Africa — often done by prisoners who are working for pennies per day. They don’t have anything at their disposal to replicate, so it’s always a unique creation from their own heads and hearts.

It was disappointing not to see any such art in her store. But when I finally made my way home and sank into my couch, I noticed the city’s seal in the center of my favorite artwork, and I was reminded that it’s important to keep some things for yourself. OH Emily Frazier Brown is a native of Greensboro and recently graduated from UNC Greensboro She can be reached at emilyfrazierbrown@gmail.com.

August 2013

O.Henry 17

Life’s Funny

Revenge of the Smart Kids Why my home life is in constant Jeopardy

By Maria Johnson

My North Carolina

Photograph Courtesy of Jeopardy

grandmother loved Jeopardy!

She’d sit in her nubby green La-ZBoy with her feet up, toothpick in her mouth, crossword puzzle on her lap, dictionary at her left Alex Trebek and hand. She’d punch the remote Britta Waller control to her TV, a massive Magnavox that she prized as much for its lovely wood cabinet as its picture.

“This… is… JEOPARDY!” the announcer intoned.

I had no clue about most of the clues. But my grandmother did. Her blue eyes sparkled whenever she got one right, which was often. Sometimes, she gave a quick nod when Art Fleming confirmed her answer — I should say her question because Jeopardy! answers are phrased as questions — but my grandmother never bothered to construct a question around her keyword. She cut right to the chase.

I don’t remember my grandfather being in the room at these times, and now I know why: He was a Jeopardy! widower. I feel your pain, Pop. Forty years later, I’m a Jeopardy! widow.

I can’t tell you where I’ll be every weeknight at 7:30, but I can tell you where my husband will be — meeting our contestants. First the challengers, then the champion, who has won a googly amount of cash that makes him or her grin a take-that, everyone-who-gave-me-wedgies-in-elementary-school grin.

Because being a Jeopardy! champion is the Smart Kid’s greatest revenge. And do you know where every Smart Kid in the country is at 7:30 p.m.? Watching Jeopardy! and fantasizing about being champ. If I were a terrorist or a burglar, I’d strike at 7:30, when all of the Smart Kids are occupied with a category like Rivers of Bolivia.

Occasionally, when I feel like seeing but not talking to my family — my husband has Jeopardized our sons, too — I watch with them and throw in a few I knew thats after the fact. Recently, I joined them because Britta Waller, a writer and editor for Pace Communications here in Greensboro, was one of the contestants.

In case you missed it, here’s what happened: Britta, along with a guy named Joel, were challenging the champ, Andrew. Britta was in second place at the end of the first round, which was followed by drug commercials because, apparently, Jeopardy! viewers have sharp minds, but their other parts are limp, leaky and sleepless. After the break, host Alex Trebek did a quick get-to-know-you in which we learned that Joel owned a greyhound retired from racing. Cool.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Britta collected floaty pens, the souvenirs with kitschy symbols suspended in watery compartments. Again, cool.

Andrew coached college-bound kids on how to take the SATs. ’Nuff said.

Britta was clipping right along when she hit the Daily Double. Huzzah! The answer was revealed: the major religion in Malta.

Now, it’s a cinematic fact that they make falcons in Malta, and sometimes those falcons go missing, and big-bellied guys chase after them. So Britta’s reply, “What is Buddhism?” seemed perfectly logical to me.

But Alex said, “Noooo, I’m sorrry” — in that way that told you he wasn’t really — “It’s Roman Catholicism.”

Well, fine, if that’s how you want to play.

Then Britta picked another clue, and whammo, two Daily Doubles in a row.

Double huzzah! Alex read the question: “A map of the Hundred Acre Wood describes Eeyore’s place as this.”

And Britta said, “Sad,” which was a perfectly good answer.

But Alex said, “No. What is gloomy. Gloomy.”

Like we really needed to hear “gloomy” a second time.

Well, by now I’m irked for Britta, partly because of the gloomy thing, and partly because SAT-boy kept mashing his clicker incessantly, trying to buzz in before the other contestants. I would have given him the Slit Eye, but Britta kept her cool. She was in third place going into Final Jeopardy.

The category was geography. This was the answer: “Names of the two geographical features of a postage stamp issued jointly by Nepal and Israel.” Believe it or not, I knew the correct question, which is: “Who gives a fat damn?”

OK, it’s really, “What are Mount Everest and the Dead Sea?” Britta didn’t know it, and neither did SAT-boy or dog-man, but SAT-boy finished with the most money, so he won. Britta came in second. She got a $2,000 consolation prize from a maker of pain relievers, which I think is how Jeopardy people joke.

Later, I called Britta to ask her about the show. She said that, obviously, she was disappointed in her wrong answers. She admitted that she, too, was bothered by SAT-boy’s aggressive clicking, but overall, she was happy with her performance and the people she met. She tried out for the show on a lark, and unlike many folks who attempt to qualify over and over again, she made it the first time. Truth be told, she watches Jeopardy! only occasionally.

And, ooooo, I’m sorrry Jeopheads, but here’s a twist nobody wagered on: When Britta’s home sick with the flu and has her pick of game shows, her favorite is Let’s Make a Deal.

Let’s Make a Deal. OH Maria Johnson wagers that most hard-core Jeopardy! fans would rather have a wedgie than watch Let’s Make a Deal.

August 2013

O.Henry 19

The Omnivorous Reader

Daddy Love

We’ll take Clyde Edgerton over Dr. Spock any old day

By STEPHEn E. SmiTH

The publication

of Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers: Advice to Dads of All Ages will likely come as a surprise to many of Clyde Edgerton’s faithful readers. He’s never offered us a how-to book, and a detailed exposition on child-rearing may seem a curious undertaking for a writer who is known primarily for his fiction.

But any misgivings readers may have regarding the book’s instructive and entertainment values will vanish when Edgerton’s familiar persona emerges from the printed page. It’s immediately apparent that this is the same optimistic author who blessed us with Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Where Trouble Sleeps, The Night Train and other popular novels.

This time out he’s giving us straightforward, lighthearted advice on our most important undertaking in life — the rearing of our children.

But readers are bound to ask: Is Edgerton doing this baby-raising stuff for straight? The answer is an emphatic yes. He’s no child psychologist and doesn’t pretend to be, approaching the subject from his own unique perspective and enhancing his delivery with his familiar brand of self-effacing humor. But there’s no denying that he’s very much on top of his subject, discoursing at length on the finer points of child-rearing — baths, diapers, The Art & Soul of Greensboro

neighbors who visit, nurses, depressed mothers, spoiled babies, games, lice, birthday parties, family meetings, earplugs and night-feeding duties. (The best way for the husband to determine which breast should be used is to “sort of juggle both to see which one is heavier” — thank you, Papadaddy!)

The chapter on childproofing the house is vitally important to new fathers and offers advice on rendering electrical outlets harmless; securing the latches on cabinet doors and drawers; setting the temperature on the hot water heater; storing household cleaners, chemicals and prescriptions; installing child gates; establishing chores; mounting smoke and carbon monoxide detectors; using the stovetop correctly; and securing firearms — all solid information a father might otherwise have to learn by trial and error.

So what qualifies Edgerton as an expert on child-rearing? Simple enough: He’s been raising children for thirty years. His oldest daughter, Catherine, is an adult and his three younger children, Nathaniel, Ridley and Truma, range in age from 6 to 9. And he’s pushing 70 himself, time enough for anyone to hone his parenting skills. There’s no question that older fathers are capable of being better fathers — experience is the teacher of all things — and thus may be the bearers of good advice on many aspects of parenting.

Moreover, you don’t have to be the world’s leading authority on children to write a thoughtful book of instructions. (I’ll take Edgerton over Dr. Spock all day long.)

Giving advice can be as fatiguing as getting it, but Edgerton manages to maintain the energy in Papadaddy by sprinkling the text with “C.O.D.s” August 2013

O.Henry 21

Reader (messages for Considerably Older Dads) and letters he’s written to his children at significant moments in their lives: “In about three days you’ll be two weeks old. You’re doing just fine in many ways. You’re sleeping well for a tiny baby. Last night, for example, you woke up to feed at about 12:30 and again at about 4:30, and both times you went right back to sleep. We’re putting some drops in your eyes three times a day because of a common tear duct problem. You don’t cry unless something is very wrong. You look around, and you like to sleep.”

There’s nothing earth-shattering in these random jottings, but they’ll probably come in handy when the child is old enough to read and appreciate the sacrifices, however mundane, his parents made when he or she was an infant.

Edgerton doesn’t ignore the dilemmas parents confront when the child has outgrown his or her cuddliness, as when your naked, intoxicated seventeen-year-old daughter, accompanied by a dozen motorcycle gang members, also naked and intoxicated, drives a Harley onto the front lawn. “You walk out onto the porch and think, ‘This is not what I’d hoped for.’” Edgerton refers to these situations as the “Factor Bad,” and he suggests that you choose your battles and leave certain bad behavior alone — as with obsessive doorbell ringing and masturbation (not that there’s an obvious connection between the two).

The remaining unpleasantness can be dealt with by using a simple formula such as FB (Father’s Behavior) = CB (Child’s Behavior) = Learning, which is broken down into Full Strategy, Exchange Strategy and Coercive Strategy, all of which is a trifle complicated. If the technical stuff gets you down, the text is amusingly illustrated with charming line drawings by Edgerton’s friend and fellow writer Daniel Wallace, the author of Big Fish, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician and Ray in Reverse.

So what if you have no children or you’ve already sent your progeny out into the cruel world?

You’ll want to read Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers anyway. Edgerton’s powers of persuasion are so nimble and his self-effacing humor so endearing that it’s impossible to ignore his insights into child behavior — and more importantly, our own. As with all of Edgerton’s books, there’s a genuinely warm smile that belies the seriousness behind the words — and these days, who can afford to ignore good advice from an old friend?

OH Stephen E. Smith’s most recent book of poems is A Short Report on the Fire at Woolworths. He can be reached at travisses@ hotmail.com.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 23

Pleasures of Summer

Roughing It

For thousands of kids growing up in the Gate City, Camp Weaver and its predecessors ­— Nawawka and Camp Herman — took them into the “heart of the forest” and set them on the right path in life

By Tim Swink

photograph courtesy of mike weaver

Dick Andrews, 90,

takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. The memories, faint at first, gradually pour out. It’s 1933 and he’s 10 years old, scanning the smooth surface of Little Polecat Creek at Camp Nawawka, gathering up the courage to jump off the rock dam into the chilly water.

Founded in 1930, Nawawka was Greensboro’s first YMCA camp, just across the Randolph County line. Andrews recalls rustic log bunkhouses and Spartan canvas cots. At night, kerosene lantern light spilled through the screen doors in a golden glow. The outhouse, affectionately named “Aunt Lottie,” sat back in the dark woods. But Andrews, who says his family was poor, didn’t mind roughing it.

Roughing it, after all, was the point. Other families paid full freight so their boys could have the character-building experience of getting close to nature — and using an outhouse for the first time. Andrews, though, had worked hard to raise one dollar, which was matched by six dollars from various Greensboro businessmen so he could become a Camp Nawawka Junior Citizen. “And that’s what we called ourselves,” says Andrews, whose four brothers all attended camp as Junior Citizens. “Not underprivileged, but Junior Citizens.”

As for the businessmen’s investment in young Andrews, Camp Nawawka was apparently a big success. In time, Andrews’ character helped him become The Art & Soul of Greensboro

vice president of Jefferson Pilot Life Insurance Company.

Nawawka is an Indian word meaning “in the heart of the forest,” an apt description until February 1955, when a fire destroyed many of the cabins and much of the pristine woodland.

Torn between whether to rebuild or relocate, Y directors decided to hold the 1955 session at Camp Herman, down a long gravel road through a deep forest in northeast Guilford County near what was then the Old Reidsville Road.

Named for Herman Cone and owned by Cone Mills, Camp Herman was built to provide summer recreation for the families of Cone Mills employees, one of whom was Edgar Weaver, who worked his way up to supervisor of Cone’s Print Works operartion. His son Herman — named after Herman Cone — spent several happy summers at Camp Herman, recalls his son, Michael Weaver.

It was Herman and his wife, Edith, who started W.H. Weaver Construction Co. in 1939, specializing in residential construction. As it prospered, it moved into commercial construction. In 1961, Michael Weaver continued in the family business, founding Weaver Investment Co. in 1968 to expand into real estate development and investment. He also helped found the Quaintance-Weaver Restaurant and Hotels group.

But today, Michael is remembering how his father told him about learning to swim in Lake Herman in the 1920s. He recounts his father’s tales of long hikes in the Carolina pines . . . of pranks played . . . of songs sung . . . of the same ghost stories told year after year . . . and of gazing silently into the flames of an evening campfire.

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O.Henry 25

Pleasures of Summer

Like Dick Andrews, Herman Weaver found summer camp an unforgettable, life-changing experience.

As times changed, so did the camps — and their names. After the year at Camp Herman, the Y opened a summer camp for boys as Camp Triangle Y Ranch in southeast Guilford County. In the 1960s, the name was changed to Camp Tapawingo, reviving the Native American theme. In the 1970s, the YMCA expanded activities for girls and families, turning Tapawingo into the YMCA Family Retreat Center. In the 1980s, the Family Retreat Center became the YMCA Outdoor Center.

During the 1980s, the entire YMCA was struggling. The Outdoor Center, by that time a day camp, had fallen into disrepair. Lack of interest, coupled with bad economic times, just about wrote the final chapter for the camp. In the late 1990s, the YMCA board was forced to take inventory of all its assets, and the possibility of selling the camp’s land was on the table.

When the idea was put to Joe Warwick, CEO of the YMCA from 1992 until 2005 and now retired, he adamantly opposed it. So he took Mike Weaver, who had been involved in fundraising for the camp since 1985, on a tour of the facilities. Warwick remembers that Weaver said very little during the visit. Back in the city, when Weaver got out of the car, he simply said, “Thank you.” Says Warwick, “Man, I really thought I’d blown it.”

Several months later, Weaver and Warwick were at a fact-finding meeting on the camp’s future. After listening to various proposals, Weaver took out his checkbook, signed a check and said, “Let’s get this thing started and fix that camp.” Warwick says he took a quick glance and thought the check was for $15,000, an amount he deemed appropriate to “get this thing started.”

Later, he took a closer look and was stunned. He had missed two zeros. The check, from the Weaver Foundation, was for $1.5 million. “I did it to galva-

26 O.Henry

August 2013

nize the Y board and convince them that this is something we could — and should — do,” he says.

Around 2006, the foundation came forward with another $6 million.

The result: a new 300-seat amphitheater, a new staff house and new cabins. Expanded hiking trails were also built along with a new swimming pool, a new bathhouse, an enlarged 4 1/2-acre lake, new camp offices and a 25,000-square-foot open pavilion. And the name changed once more — when it became no longer politically correct to use Native American names — to Camp Weaver, in honor of Herman Weaver’s memories of his time at Camp Herman.

Andrews recalls the day’s end at Camp Nawawka, as the heat subsided and twilight drew near, and the magic began. The lake you’d splashed in earlier became a dark shadow and the sound of crickets filled the woods. Camp director Frank Casper, a master teller of tales, would conjure up Red-Eye Dick, an escaped killer whose body was lost in a sluice at the dam on little Polecat. With his body forever trapped in the sluice, his shadow remains, waiting for some unwary swimmer.

Tom West, a Greensboro realtor who attended Camp Nawawka in 1950 and Camp Tapawingo in 1955, remembers the ghost stories, as well as the child who first learned to love and respect the outdoors at camp. “That young child still resides in us somewhere,” he says. “And when I talk to my other friends about camp memories, they all get that same feeling. It was a wonderful, happy, amazing time in our lives. I will never forget it.” OH Greensboro essayist Tim Swink knows Camp Herman well. His father used to know the caretaker at the time, Dutch Nunn, who bent the rules and let Tim and his sister swim in the lake. He can be reached at tj.swink@yahoo.com.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Gate City Icon

The Sedgefield Tea House A landmark dedicated to the ministry of beauty

By Jim SCHLOSSER

photograph By cassie ButLer timpy

As golf watchers pour onto the

Sedgefield Country Club grounds this month for the Wyndham Championship, some may recall what their grandparents said of the striking house between the club’s narrow entrance and exit lanes.

It was the Sedgefield Tea House, and as ads in the late 1920s boasted it as “The Perfect Tea House . . . to meet the demands of the most discriminating and to fill a long need in this section of the state.”

The house’s history is as murky as a cup of tea. It’s difficult to pinpoint when the place, facing High Point Road across from the old Pilot Life Insurance Co. campus, ceased tea pouring and became a private home. It was probably during the Depression of the 1930s.

“It looked like a cottage,” says Henry Coble, a 94-year-old Sedgefield resident for nearly sixty years and a visitor since the community was founded in 1926–27. “I remember eating there occasionally with my mother.”

He recalls the tea house consisting of a dining room and a kitchen.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

A partial photo in a late-1920s ad shows the front with columns and a veranda, much like the house there today.

Coble says the tea house had long closed by the time he moved to Sedgefield in 1954. It was by then a private home. Owners had made changes. Today, the cottage he remembers has eleven rooms spread over 4,000 square feet.

Just as in the old days, a brook passes the house on one side, and the lawn is lush. A large garden looking out on a park — the wooded area between the entrance and exit lanes — was part of the tea house’s ambience.

According to information in scrapbooks compiled by Sedgefield member Carol Tuggle and given to the club, the tea house cost $20,000 to build, a mighty sum in the 1920s.

The tea house aimed “to make Sedgefield a place of rare beauty — a jewel set between the two cities,” an ad proclaimed. The tea house was almost exactly midway between Greensboro and High Point.

The tea house was not part of the country club but was owned by the huge, Tudor-style Sedgefield Inn that opened in July 1927. The country club used part of the inn as its clubhouse, but they were separate operations.

Both club and inn used the 18-hole golf course that architect Donald Ross completed in 1926.

August 2013

O.Henry 29

Gate City Icon

The sixty-four-room inn remained a lodging place until about 1990. After an extensive remodeling — the exterior didn’t change — the club now occupies the entire former inn.

That the inn and tea house were linked appears in a lawsuit filed in May, 1927. A New York architect claimed he had been paid insufficiently for design work on the inn, the tea house and its garden and, surprise, a railroad station. The latter — aimed at Northerners who liked to spend time staying at the inn, golfing and riding Sedgefield’s bridle trails — likely would have been behind the Pilot Life headquarters. Pilot was next to the eastern main line of what’s now Norfolk Southern Railroad. The station was never built.

Agatha Christie would have loved the tea house. She enjoyed her afternoon tea in Brown’s Hotel in London. The hotel became “At the Beatram,” in her 1965 mystery starring the elderly amateur sleuth Jane Marple. The former Sedgefield Tea House had the ingredients for a Christie mystery, including murderrrrrrr!

In 1991, a woman was shot and killed there.

The victim’s relative by marriage was indicted for murder but was acquitted.The crime remained cold until a grand jury in 2006 indicted a man and the former relative. The man was charged with murder. Double jeopardy prevented the former relative from being charged with murder again. Instead, he was charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Neither case went to trial. According to Capt.

Tom Sheppard of the Guilford County Sheriff’s Department, who lives in Sedgefield and investigated the crime, the prosecutor’s office felt it lacked evidence to make a case.

Jere Ayers, in his early 70s and a Sedgefield resident all his life, doesn’t remember the tea house. But he does recall a lavish wedding in 1947 or ’48 held in the house after it had become a private home occupied by the inn’s manager.

There, the manager’s daughter married a member of the Hilton Hotel chain ownership. Ayers says the manager promptly became manager of the Beverly Hills Hilton.

The former tea house’s current owner asked not to be included in this story. He and his wife have the house for sale. He says they love the place but as empty nesters don’t need that much space.

Henry Coble is among the dwindling few — maybe the last — who remember the house on High Point Road as something other than a house. As the ads of long ago said, the “perfect tea house” was part of a new Sedgefield community “dedicated to the ministry of beauty.” OH Jim Schlosser is a contributing editor of O.Henry Magazine. He can be reached at jim@ohenrymag.com.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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August 2013

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Southern Discomfort

Grilled Off Wallace Pfeffernoodle has a fancy new grill this summer. But soon he’ll jilt her, too

Happy 2nd Anniversary O.Henry Magazine!

Museum Framing/ Archival Quality

By Cynthia Adams

Wallace Pfeffernoodle, a friend of a friend, is

the envy of all the men who know him. Our mutal friend, Hot Pete, is a grilling expert. But his expertise pales beside Wallace Pfeffernoodle’s. Pfeffernoodle, he says, stands alone. Pfeffernoodle is a grilling king, and his long, shining stainless steel grill is the talk of their Winston-Salem neighborhood. I know this with absolute certainty as several men were discussing it at a cookout where I I eavesdropped.

“That Wallace,” Pete said admiringly, hot mitts in hand, “he’s got the best-looking grill in town.” Balding heads nodded.

Pete should know. He loves to grill, and Hot Pete’s grill is nothing to sneeze at. At four feet long, his commanding grill takes over the entire patio.

It has side burners, two tanks large enough to fuel a dirigible, flamethrowers and a self-cleaning whatchamacallit.

But Wallace Pfeffernoodle’s surpasses this. He has the most amazing grill of all. And even more amazingly, Pfeffernoodle didn’t pay for his last four grills, each of which was successively better than the last.

Pfeffernoodle has made a study of grill returns, and has learned that a certain area retailer will accept his grill back under an unconditional guarantee if he has the slightest complaint. Pfeffernoodle has made it his job to perfect the art of complaint. He is the grill grafter.

With each grilling season, he watches closely until the retailer has discontinued his present grill model, then hauls it in with a bona fide (I use this term broadly) complaint, and gets upgraded to the latest thing. In this way, Pfeffernoodle has upgraded himself from what would be the equivalent of moving from ownership of a two-passenger Piper prop plane to a Learjet. At no cost whatsoever!

“Genius,” Hot Pete muttered, adjusting his flame levels.

Which made me wonder: When was the last time a woman got a substitute better item than she had paid for? I took my research survey to women on the patio. Here’s what I found: NEVER!!!

Which, actually, makes my middle-aged self burn at a slightly hotter temperature than Wallace Pfeffernoodle’s newest grill. OH The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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August 2013

O.Henry 33

34 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Wine Guy

Merlot Makes a Comeback How one line from a popular movie sent the noble grape of Bordeaux sideways in sales

By TC Frazier

“If they order any merlot I’m out

of here; I’m not drinking any f@#$%^! merlot!” It’s funny how one line in a movie can affect an entire industry. If you don’t recall this now famous line from the film Sideways, you probably have at least felt its effects when shopping for wine or ordering a bottle at your favorite restaurant. By that I mean a surge in the popularity of pinot noir, and a “pooh-poohing” of merlot.

The wine industry is not much different from other consumer-based industries. Trends tend to defy the marketplace, then fade into the wind like yesterday’s bellbottoms. Usually these chic transitions happen gradually, starting in big cities, then making their way to the rest of us. However, the aforementioned line from Sideways had such a profound and immediate impact, we are just now seeing signs of recovery as fewer and fewer people are asking for pinot noir, and merlot becomes less and less of a dirty word.

If you ask most people in the U.S. to name a commercially grown grape that is used to make wine, you’ll probably hear “merlot,” and for good reason. Merlot is the source for some of the most long-lived, sought-after and highest-rated wines on the market. Merlot can be big, rich and very masculine, like a cabernet sauvignon, or depending on the amount of time it spends in oak, can be made into a light, quaffable, fruit-forward wine.

Perhaps merlot’s greatest attribute is its greatest weakness. It’s relatively easier to grow than other grapes, and goes with an array of cuisines. Therefore, merlot tends to receive a “been there . . . done that” reputation.

Today merlot is grown all over the world, although some may argue it grows best in Bordeaux, France, and the Napa Valley in California. That’s not to underestimate great merlots from Italy, Spain, South America or even Washington state. All of these places make world-class merlot. But if you want that “aha” moment, that time when the lights dim, your toes curl and Luther Vandross plays in the background, the label on the bottle will probably have the designation of Napa or Bordeaux. It’s like wondering why potatoes from Idaho or oranges from Florida are so famous. It’s not because they’re the only states growing potatoes and oranges, but something in the soil, the weather and passion of the farmers makes these areas known for

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

their craft, much like Bordeaux and Napa Valley are known for growing merlot grapes.

A thin-skinned grape, merlot ripens earlier in the season than cabernet sauvignon and is less prone to a variety of ailments. It is more adaptable to cool climates than cabernet sauvignon, but similarly prefers a relatively warm growing environment. Merlot’s popularity is due to the fact that it is softer, fruitier and earlier-maturing than cabernet sauvignon, yet displays many of the same aromas and flavors — black cherry, currant, even cedar and green olive — along with mint, tobacco and tea-leaf tones. Although enjoyable as a varietal wine, it is probably most successful when blended with cabernet sauvignon, which contributes to the structure and depth of flavor.

Probably the most ironic thing about the movie Sideways is that after Miles, played by Paul Giamatti, bashes merlot, he goes on and on about a bottle of cheval blanc that he has been waiting years to drink — and finally does toward the end of the movie. The interesting thing is that cheval blanc is predominately merlot and it’s not unusual for vintages to receive between 97 and 100 points from wine critics every year. This is not to say you have to buy merlot only grown in the Bordeaux region. Think of it as more full-bodied than pinot noir, but more elegant than cabernet sauvignon. Perceptions sometimes morph into reality in the wine world. So let’s help change the perception of merlot and help people realize what a fascinating beverage a glass of merlot truly can be. Cheers!

Merlots to Consider: Plumpjack Winery Merlot, Napa Valley, California

In a brilliant juxtaposition of dense fruit and light acidity, aromas of black cherry, baked plums and blackberry are followed with warm notes of dark fudge and vanilla bean. On the palate, raspberry cordial, cherry-pie filling and cedar box mingle with hints of cinnamon. If you can afford it, a stunning example of all the best merlot has to offer, the lush mouth-feel and complexity of flavors culminate in a rich finish.

Chateau Bellevue St. Emilion Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France

The terroir here renders exceptionally grown fruit. All twelve acres of the clay and limestone vineyards are farmed organically and were certified through the French agency Ecocert in 2002. All grapes are destemmed and only native yeasts are used. Wines are aged in the subterranean cellars for two years before bottling.

TC Frazier lives in Greensboro and has been in the hospitality business since he was 14. He currently is employed with Tryon Distributors.

August 2013

O.Henry 35

Street Level

Small is Beautiful

By Jim Schlosser

The woman faced

a dilemma. She wanted to go up, but the tiny elevator was packed with people already headed in that direction. Another group waited to go down.

“This is like Europe,” she declared. “But I love it.”

By “it,” she meant not so much the elevator as the vintage building that houses it, The Greensboro Biltmore Hotel, 111 West Washington Street. The hotel’s antique conveyance can be a monumental pain at times. But the woman knows she won’t find anything else like it for miles around.

The elevator, dating from the early 1920s, can hold maybe four people without luggage. The accordion-like bronze gate must be pulled in place before any of the three buttons will send the elevator in motion.

You know the type, seen mostly in small, continental hotels. It was installed when the three-story building that’s now the Biltmore was a sales office for a textile company.

“You feel like James Cagney is going to walk out anytime,” says Milton Kern, part owner of the Biltmore since 2007.

The Biltmore is celebrating its eightieth anniversary as a lodging place and thirtieth as an upscale, downtown boutique hotel (for other anniversaries, see page 56). It opened as the Greenwich in 1933, which developed into a not-sonice place offering furnished rooms. In the early 1950s the name “hotel” was added to Greenwich, but it did little to elevate its status to more than a boarding house.

A group of investors arrived in 1983 and set about transforming the lobby and rooms from squalor to quaintness. The lobby took on the look of an English hunting/gentlemen’s club. The rehabilitated hotel, with twenty-six rooms, gained a pedigree because of the man who oversaw the interior design, Otto Zenke. He had studios in Greensboro, Palm Beach and London and advertised in no less than The New Yorker magazine. The Greenwich — which kept its old name for a while before changing to The Greensboro Biltmore Hotel — may have been Zenke’s last design before his death.

With a new look and feel, the hotel attracted — and still attracts — people looking for something different in accommodations. Several companies book VIPs there, as well as people being courted for important jobs. Some

36 O.Henry

August 2013

people check in even though they live in Greensboro.

“Four women come in once a month,” Kern says. “They rent one room with double beds. It’s sort of a girls’ night out.”

Business could be better but it’s not bad, says Kern, who is sometimes called Greensboro’s downtown mayor because of his many renovations of old buildings.

“It had about a 20 percent occupancy rate when we bought it. It’s up to 50 percent now. If we could have a John Edwards trial every year, it would be up to 70 percent,” he says.

The Edwards trial, in which the former vice presidential candidate was acquitted of one charge of misusing campaign funds and virtually cleared of others because of a hung jury, lasted for weeks. It brought such Fourth Estate stars to the Biltmore as Bob Woodward, famous for breaking the Watergate story with Carl Bernstein.

The Biltmore was once the kind of place Woodward or any respectable person wouldn’t have put head to pillow.

Brian Coleman, the general manager, says grown grandchildren have come in and gleefully proclaimed that Grandmother once lived at the old Greenwich.

It is hoped they have the place confused with the Benbow Arcade, a big rooming building on nearby South Elm Street.

From 1933 to 1948, the Greenwich rooming house attracted mostly women, Coleman will tell you. It was managed by a woman who reportedly answered to a group of shady owners in Washington. Bluntly, Coleman says, the Greenwich during that period bordered on being a bordello. The bawdy days ended in 1948 when the basement boiler exploded.

“Most likely she was making whiskey down there,” Coleman says.

The woman disappeared after the explosion, which happened during a period when Greensboro barred liquor sales. Rumor has it the Greenwich basement was a speakeasy.

All of this is legend mixed with speculation. Some doubt if the Greenwich was ever a place of ill repute, just a cheap rooming house for single women and the occasional male visitor. After 1948, men dominated as residents, some elderly. They could be seen in chairs in the mostly bare lobby watching the passing scene on Washington Street. They had a pretty good deal. Rent was reasonable, each room had a bed and bath, and each floor had a kitchen that prepared three meals a day.

Tenants had to depart in 1983 when the investor group, which included stock broker Wallace Freemon of Greensboro, bought it and hired Zenke. The The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Photograph by Sam Froelich

From flophouse to fine boutique hotel, the beloved Biltmore Hotel — eighty years old this year — has seen it all

Street Level investors said downtown lacked a small, elegant hotel, and they were determined to create one. Freemon says he never heard the bordello story or the one about a speakeasy. He says the roomers when he arrived tended to be winos. At the time, the south end of downtown had a sizable population of men who fortified themselves with Richard’s Wild Irish Rose before wandering the streets.

Since the makeover, the Biltmore’s ownership and occupancy rates have changed often, but not the atmosphere and decor. The giant portrait of the English gentleman in the lobby behind a leather sofa stares down from the paneled wall, a Zenke touch. Built-in cases are filled with books, which guests are welcome to take to their rooms The other night my wife and I checked into the hotel and enjoyed mixing with other guests while wine and cheese were served in the lobby. We then walked across the street, where we sampled the rarefied fare and elegant ambience of Liberty Oak Restaurant. Finally, we returned to the Biltmore lobby — and our room — to soak up more atmosphere.

The nicely appointed rooms with reproduction antiques on three floors range from $95 to $159 a night. The kitchens on each floor have vanished, but that doesn’t bother guests. They can take advantage of the Biltmore’s location, an easy walk to the many restaurants on South Elm, whatever the time of day. And in the morning, the hotel does offer a continental breakfast of pastries, cereal and fruit.

Heather Modlin was in the breakfast room the other morning. It was her wedding day. Many in her wedding party were staying at the Biltmore. She’s another from Greensboro, where she’s on the staff at Page High School, who occasionally check into the Biltmore for a respite.

“I like staying here. It’s the proximity of the shops and restaurants. You can walk everywhere,” she says. During her stay, Modlin visited the Y, with which the hotel has an agreement allowing guests use of the facilities.

And for extra exercise, she could have walked to her wedding, held at

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Blandwood Mansion, only two-and-a-half blocks away.

The Biltmore isn’t for everyone, especially those with reservations about the hustle and bustle of downtowns. At the Biltmore, night noises can be inviting or bothersome, depending on one’s taste. The other night, freight trains either serenaded you or blared their whistles as they approached the South Elm crossing, competing with police sirens. South Elm was either jumping or crowded with Friday-night revelers. It was, in fact, First Friday, a monthly happening when shops stay open later, and people linger on the streets. One street group held signs that said “Hug Me.” Asked what they meant, a woman said she was part of a social interaction group, whatever that is. But why not?

The Biltmore building is so old that lodging accounts for only about threefourths of its history. Moses Cone and his wife bought what was then a vacant lot in 1895. By 1902, the current building opened as the Cone Export and Commission Co., the sales office for the Cone Mills textile empire. Cone moved to a larger sales offices around the corner on South Greene Street circa 1924. Two years, later by 1926, four insurance companies had taken up residence. In 1928, the U.S. Post Office began using the building as an annex for four years. Then, in 1933, came the Greenwich, offering furnished rooms, according to that year’s Greensboro City Directory.

To amplify the magic of Zenke, Kern’s group has gradually spent $300,000 on subtle improvements — and more are coming. With Zenke gone, the designer is now Linda Knight Carr of Greensboro. Kern is never far from the hotel. His office for his business enterprises is in the basement, the alleged speakeasy of old.

Kern appreciates downtown’s history, the good, the bad and the ugly. He doesn’t mind one bit that the Biltmore may have been a bordello. That kind of baggage adds mystique to the oldest hotel in Greensboro.

“We don’t advertise it,” he says, “but we don’t hide it.” OH

August 2013

O.Henry 37

Game On

Starcrossed

By Susanna Rodell

Six riders line

up, two abreast, at the sideline on a field in Pinehurst. The horses snort and toss their heads, the adrenaline barely contained. Facing them, the umpire on her horse throws a ball high over their heads as the riders raise long-handled racquets. One of them snags the ball. The horses wheel, and they’re off down the field, the other players thundering after the ball carrier. An opposing player pulls even with him, her horse neck-to-neck with his, trying to thwart his rush for the goal. He passes the ball to his number-two player as she gallops past him, taking the ball down the field. He gallops after her, passes her, heads for the end zone. She passes to him and he shoots: Goal!

Thirty seconds have elapsed. Five-and-a-half-minutes to go.

Ryan Murphy still remembers when the strange equipment arrived. He was a kid in a horsy family — son of a racetrack veterinarian and a serious dressage rider — and a member of Pony Club, a youth equestrian organization. His local club’s leader showed up with some long-handled racquets with round nets. For 8-year-old Ryan, playing polocrosse was much more fun than trotting endless circles in a riding arena. He was soon learning to pick up the solid foam-rubber ball from his pony’s back, to pass and catch, to gallop down a field and aim for the goal. He hardly could have imagined that these quirky skills would one day take him to Australia, England and Africa to play world-class polocrosse, making him something of a superstar in a very obscure sport.

“I was lucky,” Ryan observes, sitting at a picnic table outside the barn at his farm on Millpoint Road, on the southeast fringe of Greensboro. “My dad’s a vet, and my mom had time to put together the first polocrosse club in the East.”

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August 2013

Polocrosse is just what it sounds like: a hybrid of polo and lacrosse. It was invented in Australia, where horse sports are deeply embedded in the culture and ordinary folks wanted a game that provided the fun of polo without the expense. Unlike polo, polocrosse does not require a string of horses — in fact, the rules specify that a player can play on only one horse. The field is shorter than a polo field, and while a polo ball is made of hard wood, a polocrosse ball is made of firm foam rubber, less likely to cause injury to horse or rider.

The game is well known Down Under, where polocrosse carnivals can draw thousands of spectators. The game is also popular in New Zealand, South Africa and Zimbabwe. It’s now taking off in Ireland, Canada, the U.K. and Zambia. In the United States, there are two main centers of polocrosse activity: Texas and the Sandhills of North Carolina.

Ryan explains the attraction. The English riding disciplines in the United States are usually dominated by girls.

Polocrosse attracted the boys. “I think being able to ride with other boys was a big deal,” he says. Ryan remembers being a chubby little kid: “But once I got the racquet in my hand, I was in love with it.”

A polocrosse field is 160 yards long, with penalty zones at each end, 30 yards from the goal. Games are played in six-minute chukkas, the players trying to send the ball through the upright goal posts at the ends of the field. Each team has three players. Learning to play is hard and requires hours — well, years, actually — of practice to perfect. A skilled A-grade player can bounce the ball, pick it up and shoot for the goal at a full gallop.

So Ryan practiced, day in and day out, both in and out of the saddle.

“Polocrosse gave me an escape from the traditional boring lessons, where you’re so fixated on every little detail,” he says.

By the time he was 14, Ryan was spending his summers out West, learning under the tutelage of some Australian expats and the American pioneers of the sport, who lived in Texas and Colorado. At 17, he was chosen as a member of an under-21 team from the U.S. that was invited to compete in Australia at their regional championships in New South Wales.

“We got our butts kicked,” Ryan remembers ruefully. Because the game is so popular there, players get a lot more experience. “They play every weekend,” he observes, while in the States, players may only be able to play in tournaments five The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Photograph by Sam Froelich

In the obscure but rapidly growing sport of polocrosse, Ryan Murphy and his Australian stock horse are budding stars

or six times a year. In Australia, players number in the thousands; here there are only about four-hundred.

Another eye-opener: They also had great horses. The Australian Stock Horse is the Down Under equivalent of the American Quarter Horse, bred for working cattle and sheep in the vast stations of the Outback. It’s a rangier creature than its American cousin. “They’re a mix of a bunch of different breeds,” Ryan explains.

“Out there in the Outback, it’s survival of the fittest.” In Australia horses are valued for their quiet temperament, athleticism and endurance. They’re also the mount of choice for polocrosse.

Ryan returned home with tales about the fast and handy horses he’d ridden, and his mom, Marilyn, was intrigued. In 2003 she went to Australia herself and brought home a stallion and two mares — and began the first Australian Stock Horse breeding program in the United States. Some of their progeny now live on Ryan’s farm, where he rides and trains them and offers a few for sale.

“The Australian Stock Horse is known for its hardiness,” he enthuses. “They’re built to do a lot of different things.” In the Boer War, they went for days without water, he says. “A lot of players in Australia use their horses on their ranches during the week and then for polocrosse on the weekends. They’re more versatile than the American Quarter Horse, a bit lighter, not as heavy in the hind end.”

Ryan continued playing through high school, and when it came time to go to college, he looked to Texas, then the epicenter of the game in the United States.

He chose Southern Methodist (SMU) in Dallas, where he majored in finance.

Throughout his college years he would travel to Austin on weekends to play with the Lone Star Club.

After graduation, Ryan looked for a place to live where he could make a living and continue to play. By that time, the sport had taken off in North Carolina.

The Carolina Polocrosse Club, which draws its members from all over North and South Carolina, is now the biggest in the country. Practices, clinics and tournaments are held on the well-groomed fields at the historic Pinehurst Harness Track.

Game On

Players come from all over. Many, like Ryan, start out in local pony clubs, where polocrosse is one of the recognized sports.

The state is also a financial center — so it was a natural fit for Ryan. Several of the most active families in the game were in Greensboro, and they needed a coach.

He moved there in 2003 and found a job with the financial services company Primerica.

In the early days, it was hard to find a level expanse of grass 160 by 60 yards whose owners would put up with the damage from pounding hooves. For a couple of years the only field in the Triad that the club could use for practice was owned by a local nudist colony.

In 2003 the sport’s first World Cup was held in Queensland, Australia, and Ryan was chosen as a member of the first U.S.A. team. Once again, the relatively green Americans were overwhelmed. “We were like deer in the headlights,” he remembers, “as far as speed, and the level of competition.” But they learned a lot and managed to finish fifth out of the eight teams competing.

Since then, Ryan has played for U.S. teams in Australia again, in the U.K. and in Zambia. Competing overseas is tough; unlike polo, polocrosse has yet to attract commercial sponsors, so players have to scramble, work and save for airfare.

When teams travel abroad, their horses are supplied by the host country. The highlight of Ryan’s career was the 2011 World Cup, held in the U.K., in which the U.S. team beat the Brits — their traditional rivals — on their home turf, and finished fourth.

Recently engaged, Ryan now concentrates on his coaching, building his finance career and improving his farm. “I’m hoping to pass the torch to some of the younger players,” he says. “I’ll do anything I can to promote the game.” OH Susanna Rodell, a freelance writer and lifelong horse person who lives in Winston-Salem, has been known to pick up a racquet and make a fool of herself on a polocrosse field. She can be reached at susannarodell@gmail.com.

real estate is local. so are we.

336.274.1717 trmrealestate.com

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 39

Greensboro builders AssociAtion

MARK HOLDER JEWELLER

Tour of Remodeled Homes Friday, Saturday & Sunday August 23-25, 2013 12 Noon until 5:00 pm each day The following companies will showcase professional remodeling projects for the 16th annual Tour of Remodeled Homes: Booe Building & Remodeling with Omega Creations Kitchen & Bath Design Brickwood Builders, Inc. | Builders MD, LLC | DLM Builders, Inc. with Windsor’s Cabinetry for Kitchens & Baths | Homes Built by Design, Inc. JLB Remodeling, Inc. | Kevin Jones Design-Build Ron Foister Custom Homes, LLC | Wolfe Homes

Special Thanks to our Tour Sponsors Ferguson Enterprises, Inc. | New Home Building Supply Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at any Tour home, providing access to tour all 13 homes. Magazines will be available at Harris Teeter & Lowe’s Home Improvement stores as well as each Tour home.

Tour projects are also on the Greensboro Builders Association website.

211-A State Street, Greensboro, NC www.markholderjeweller.com

336.273.5872

40 O.Henry

August 2013

www.GreensboroBuilders.org The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Evolving Species

Donald and Me

Photograph of Mr. Overman by Bonnie Stanley / Photograph of Mr. Ross from the Tufts Archives

Mr. Ross, meets, um, Mr. Ross

By Ogi Overman

Several years ago I interviewed an

Elvis impersonator who was doing a Legends show at the Barn Dinner Theatre. He told me of a number of his peers, especially those in Vegas, who had crossed that fine line between portraying a character and becoming that character, of taking on the Elvis persona in their everyday lives.

I fear that I may be getting perilously close to blurring those lines of reality, not in regard to impersonating The King — which actually takes a modicum of talent — but of a character I portray based solely on an uncanny physical resemblance.

About five years ago a colleague walked into my office, plopped a magazine onto my desk and, pointing to an ad, asked, “Remind you of anybody?”

The ad was for Pinehurst No. 2, the fabled course designed by Donald Ross, without doubt the most celebrated golf course architect of all time. It contained a black-and-white photo of Ross himself, circa early-1930s.

It took all of a nanosecond for the photo to jump off the page and slap me with the realization that I looked exactly like Donald Ross. I don’t mean

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

like his brother, I mean him. It was actually a bit spooky to confirm the old wives’ tale that everyone has a doppelgänger, and that mine was Donald Ross.

The magazine soon became part of the pile, but every now and then I would dig it out, just to see if the resemblance was still as unmistakable. It was.

Then, a few months later, I happened to be doing a story on my friend Dave Wright, who had mounted a one-man show portraying the late comedian Brother Dave Gardner, when that same colleague offered, “You could do that with Donald Ross.”

Not ready to launch an acting career at this stage of life, I did, however, do the next best thing. As any golfing Gate Cityan would know, Ross designed the layout at Sedgefield Country Club, home of the Wyndham Championship. I approached tournament director Mark Brazil, who, fortunately, was already a friend, about portraying Ross at the tourney, hoping to add a little more atmosphere to an already-collegial event. Brazil gave the idea his blessing, which was my cue to start putting together a wardrobe of vintage clothing. And that turned out to be the moment when the character started taking on a life of its own.

Already having a bit of a sartorial streak, especially with regard to neckwear, now I had a purpose to my impulsive clothes shopping. What started out as two rented, three-piece, wool, tweed suits from a costume shop has August 2013

O.Henry 41

The Evolving Species

now mushroomed into an entire closet — The Donald Ross Closet, if you will — of knickers, double-breasted sport coats, retro neckties, round-collar dress shirts, lapelled vests, snapbrim balloon hats, two-toned wingtips, argyle socks, round-rimmed glasses and a watch fob. I have become personal friends with every vintage clothing storeowner in Greensboro and a couple in Winston-Salem, even to the point of getting tipped off when a new item comes in that I might need. Mitchell’s Clothing ordered me a pair of shoes without my asking, because he knew I’d want them. Miller’s Clothing sent me an email when a new line of snap-brim hats came in. Kit Rodenbough at Design Archives is now custommaking knickers for me and selling argyle socks with me in mind.

Yes, I now wear knickers and garish, 4-inch wide ties and snap-brim hats for no apparent reason. Friends, who heretofore had indulged my necktie fetish, are starting to worry.

But there’s more. Last year I added a Mrs. Donald Ross character, who, attired in full Gatsby flapper attire and drop-dead gorgeous, attracted far more attention than her hubby. I’ve also become the official starter for an annual charity tournament at Bryan Park. I’ve been written up by three newspapers, by far the best of which was a piece in The Pilot in Southern Pines by our own Jim Schlosser. And I almost got some national face time on the Golf Channel, thanks to my old pal, anchor Rich Lerner, but just when he had a few moments to kill, who walks into the booth overlooking No. 18 but Wyndham Worldwide CEO Stephen Holmes, who naturally got the slot.

Now, here’s where I fear I may be going off the deep end. This year I’ve rented a 1929 Chevy and, pending Brazil’s approval, on pro-am day Mrs. Ross and I will be chauffeured to the Sedgefield clubhouse, where I’ll unroll my blueprints and survey my creation, then maybe pull out a hickory-shafted niblick and loft one. A videographer and still photographer will be there, and no doubt the local TV stations will be alerted. It will be great hype for the tourney.

Next year, however, is when I could cross over into Kardashian Land, that place where folks are celebrities for no reason whatsoever. It so happens that both the men’s and women’s U.S. Open will be played where else but Pinehurst No. 2. Surely Ross’ most famous creation needs his doppelgänger to be there roaming the layout, glad-handing fans, posing for pictures, and creating good will, right?

Maybe I could even bring Elvis with me. OH Ogi Overman has been a reporter, columnist and editor for a number of Triad publications since 1984.

He is currently compiling a book of his columns, to be titled A Doughnut and a Dream.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 43

Nowhere, Man

Life of Jane

Once upon a time we teenagers had no place to go. And a good time doing it

By Jane Borden

Perhaps because I grew up in a

illuStration by meriDith martenS

city and not in the middle of nowhere, people find it odd that Greensboro’s high-school hangout spot was a McDonald’s. Specifically, the one formerly at the corner of Huntington and Northwood, across from the old Janus Theatre, which previously had been the unofficial gathering place before the Janus successfully shooed us to Ronald’s house, a feat not unlike convincing mice to inhabit your neighbor’s apartment instead. This great shunning must have occurred just before I entered Page High, as everyone still called our spot the Janus (“Y’all going to the Janus?”) even though that’s not technically where we went.

A typical night began in the parking lot under the golden arches. There were times, before any of my friends could drive, when I begged my parents to just drop me off and leave me there. Explaining, while exiting the car, that I could probably find a ride home, was likely no comfort.

We’d wander the lot until accused of loitering. Then we’d hang inside until forced to buy something, when one person would purchase a small fries.

Eventually, management kicked us out anyway, at which point everyone angled for a seat in a car and so began the long night of getting kicked out.

First stop: St. Pius school. Once, while my girlfriend and I sat on the swing sets, a nice guy named Mike took a knee, in the style of Top Gun, and sang the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” to us. A few years later he drowned on a camping trip.

Eventually the cops came and we rambled on, usually to Johnson Park, a spot on heavy rotation in my childhood too, though certainly never at night.

The group that loitered in Johnson Park usually had beers. I never got my hands on one, but I remember a night when they’d forgotten a church key, allowing one of the older guys to show off a party trick wherein he popped bottle tops with his teeth, equal parts cool and terrifying.

This went on until, of course, the cops arrived and we set out once again, typically to Your House where we drank decaf coffee and felt grown up since we imagined adulthood to be as boring as those nights, though if I could remember what we discussed at that counter, it’d surely bore me now.

Eventually the waitress gave us a stare far scarier than a cop car, at which point all of our journeying led us to where we began, back beneath the McDonald’s arches, from whence we’d begin the circle anew.

I met Rob and Paul at Young Life, a Christian youth organization that aimed to fix the problem of teenagers having nowhere to go via a permanent home in the afterlife and a more expedient one in the material. For one night a week, at the Paisley House of the First Presbyterian Church, it

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

worked. Before each meeting, we spent a full twenty minutes socializing on the lawn; Young Life let us smoke cigarettes, so, you know, they got what we were all about.

Rob and Paul became fast friends with my girlfriends and me. They were two years older, had been to a different middle school and were nicer than the guys in our class. They made me laugh and they laughed at me. We didn’t know who each other had always been, a clincher at that time when you’ve suddenly decided you’re someone else.

Also, they had cars. Rob’s was a two-seater; I scored a ride home from the Paisley House once lying on my belly in the hatchback with my head poking out on the console while U2’s new album, “Achtung Baby,” blared “Mysterious Ways” in my face.

We ran the Janus circuit occasionally with Rob and Paul, but the night I remember most was the one on which we broke the cycle. Someone said something to the effect of, “What’s the point in driving from one destination to another to another? Why not just drive?” And without anyone recognizing the poetics of the statement, we did: turning the drive into the destination.

Suddenly all of Greensboro was part of the tour, the point, and exciting thereby.

We found some creepy graffiti of aliens behind a row of buildings downtown. We pulled a bunch of wheelies in an empty parking lot. We never parked. We never got out. While we were moving, we had nowhere to go.

Rob announced he had an idea. At some intersection downtown, he pulled us into a multistory parking deck. The entrance spiraled up the corner like a staircase. We wound all the way to the top. Then we circled our way back down in reverse. And then we did it again. OH Jane Borden is a native of Greensboro and the author of the highlyacclaimed memoir I Totally Meant To Do That.

August 2013

O.Henry 45

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46 O.Henry

August 2013

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013 Linville Longing Conjure me to Moses Cone; Marry me to blue hills alone.

Pray, wed me now, pure Purple Peaks . . .

Azaleas — salmon, blaze, gold-wheat.

May spoke to me in slandered slurs, “Forget the mountain lavender.”

“I can’t — I can’t forget.”

Linville, how I long to breathe, Confed’rate jasmine hedge, and lea, Dew-wet, endowed by July rains, That piddled down my parlor panes.

From gentle sweep, ’cross hazy ridge, The Mount extends his swinging bridge.

“I’ll come — I’ll always come.”

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

— Barbara Richie Pond

August 2013

O.Henry 47

Night of the Living (TV) Dead

Brilliant and addictive, TVParty! — hailed as the finest web site for classic American television — is in a fight for eyeballs but still the undisputed granddaddy of nostalgic TV trivia

By Bill Hancock

I know, for a fact, that the first truly angry con-

servative on television was a middle-aged, chain-smoking, acid-tongued guy named Joe Pyne.

And I know that Howard McNear, who played Floyd, the befuddled barber on The Andy Griffith Show, had a stroke midway into the third season, making it hard for him to even stand up on the set. Hence, mostly we saw him in scenes sitting down or leaning against a wall.

I can make a convincing case that Superman — or at least the actor George Reeves — did indeed put a gun to his own head in 1959. He wasn’t murdered by anyone at that all-night, drunken party in his Beverly Hills home, despite what conspiracy theorists believe.

And I’m up on the backstory about the long-missing pilot of The Twilight Zone.

These things I know because of Billy Ingram. For nearly a decade, he’s been feeding us with such indispensable information on his web site, TVparty! It may be arcane to you. Not to me.

For me, it’s a late night ritual, calling up TVparty.com, letting Billy lead me on a journey down the channels into long-ago television. I must have spent an hour recently, reading Billy’s interview with Francine York. Like me, you’ve probably never heard of her, but the statuesque showgirl-turned-actress was seemingly on every TV show in the 1960s and ’70s.

And to think, Billy has been doing this for sixteen years from a single desktop computer in his second-floor apartment on the edge of downtown Greensboro.

Up at 6 a.m. — sometimes two hours earlier — he settles into a twelve-hour day or more trolling online for photos, videos and background information on everything from The Soupy Sales Show and Sea Hunt to Lost in Space, Pinky Lee and Route 66.

“Television is the one thing we all have in common, all of us born after 1945,” he says. “It just seemed natural to create a web site about the shows we all grew up on. In school all your classmates watched the same shows that you did.”

Remember when Groucho did You Bet Your Life back in the 1950s? In his blog on the site, Billy lets us watch outtakes, the ones censored by the network because of Groucho’s too-suggestive quips on the air. Or we can watch a clip from the game show Love Connection and the fallout as a young man and woman trade insults after a catastrophic first-and-only date.

To the side of the site, there are ads to order DVDs of The Little Rascals, Combat or everybody’s favorite, The Best of Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Volume 1. For those of you younger than 40, trust me. It was a very cool cartoon.

And where else but on Billy’s site can you learn about the death of Frank Bank, who played Clarence “Lumpy” Rutherford in Leave It To Beaver?

But for those baby boomers among us, I offer this warning should you consider venturing to his site some late evening: It can be addictive. An obsession. A fixation. Nostalgia does that to you.

Don’t just believe me. Read the words of the L.A. Times: “It’s too good to be true. TVparty.com has gossip, scandal, sex, singing, dancing, action, drama and celebrities with their ‘original parts.’”

“Essential trivia,” McCall’s magazine once declared. “A living repository of dead TV,” wrote Newsday.

The Discovery Channel says: “TVparty! is hands down the best site on the Web for classic TV.” For me, at least, it’s nice to know that my obsession has company. There are at

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August 2013

least 150,000 others glued to his site each month.

The name “TVparty!” is itself a bit of trivia, not the television kind but hidden in the minutiae of rock ’n ’roll. More precisely — West Coast punk rock in the early 1980s.

Billy Ingram should know. He was there. After graduating from Page High in 1974 — his family first lived in Latham Park, then Old Irving Park —he headed to college, then acted in dinner theater musicals. By the early ’80s he found himself

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

photograph of billy ingram by sam froelich

in West Hollywood, a commercial artist for an ad agency. On the side, the company published a small magazine that desperately needed articles to fill its pages.

Apart from the fact that he knew nothing of writing or rock music, Billy decided to start a column under the pen name “Billy Eye,” covering the West Coast music scene. He just wanted to get in on the ride.

He journeyed into the punk universe and its seamy, gritty, late-night club life, writing about its fast, hard-edged music and bands, some of which would become famous nationwide. One group, Black Flag, had a minor hit with its song “TV Party,” a stinging satire of people obsessed with television.

The irony is that Billy was indeed obsessed with television, but only the TV of his youth. As a kid, back in Latham Park, he glued himself to the set, sometimes using a tape recorder to capture the audio of one show after another. He bought fan magazines, studying them and those tapes over and over.

His obsession never subsided, even after leaving the punk scene to spend fifteen years in the movie industry, designing posters and working on the trailers and Oscar campaigns of stars like Barbra Streisand, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, even Steven Spielberg.

He made his way back to Greensboro in the late 1990s. “I couldn’t find a full-time job here after moving from L.A. I thought, if I’m so damn good and on a level with the best in the motion picture business, then I should be able to create something that will get people’s attention on a national level.”

Fueled by a need to make money, in 1997 he launched TVparty!, first as part of a larger site, called Homeroom One with other segments to it. He built the site, even teaching himself the coding.

“I was casting around for the subject matters people would be interested in, and the TV stuff they responded to instantly,” he says. Eventually, the other parts of the site faded away. With TVparty! he captured lightning in a bottle.

Technically, though, his web site was ahead of its time.

His became the first to merge text, audio and video. And he was the first to broadcast clips of classic TV shows online.

There was no playbook on how to do it technically. “I had to jury-rig the coding,” he says. “No one else had done that. I wanted to conquer the Internet.”

His first postings? He’s not really sure. Probably something on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour or Winky Dink and You, the first interactive cartoon. Remember it? All of us good children at home placed a specially ordered piece of vinyl plastic over the TV screens (static electricity kept it in place). Then we used the enclosed special crayons when Winky Dink needed our help to draw a bridge so he could cross a river.

But you can’t blame Billy for not remembering exactly which was his first posting. After all, there have been maybe 3,000 stories on his site over the years. No question, however, on which has been the most popular — would you believe Romper Room?

Every day someone writes, “I was on Romper Room and how can I get a copy of it?”

Romper Room, for those not around then, was for preschoolers beginning in the 1950s. Some of it was syndicated, but most was franchised to about 150 cities with local hosts in each one.

That meant local kids were on the shows. Trouble is, almost none of the tape recordings were saved. The same tape was used day after day to record the next day’s broadcast.

Since his was the only TV nostalgia site in the beginning, TVparty! rapidly collected fans, by 1999 attracting 2 million users a month. That’s 24 million a year.

Want to get those kind of numbers today? Good luck. Now, you would hire an agency specializing in how to enhance your The Art & Soul of Greensboro

web site’s visibility on search engines. “I didn’t need any of that for TVparty! because my articles were the only thing around at the time. If you did a search for Sonny and Cher it would be number one, the first listing,” he says.

But the revenue didn’t grow much, not immediately. And TVparty! was making barely enough money to cover the hefty bandwidth fees. Billy moved to London in 2001, partly because housing was cheaper there. He stepped off the plane just hours before the 9/11 attack, and with less than $15 in his pocket.

“It was just one of those times when I said, I’m just going to do this and let the chips fall where they may,” he says. “I’ve found if I work hard and smart, then the road will open up before me. At least it always worked before.”

He says he was $1,400 in debt for Web-hosting, “and I didn’t have the money.

I was broke. It was a pretty hopeless situation.”

You and I might see that as a career in free fall. Not Billy.

“Every night I was visualizing that I’d get a book deal, and then I’d get a television deal. And it all happened.”

A stateside publisher phoned him in England, looking for someone to write a book about nostalgia television. “He asked, ‘How much do you want?’ And I said $30,000, and he said $20,000. And I got to do the book completely my way,” he says.

“You know what? My life’s been like that — serendipitous.”

The following year, with the book done, Billy headed back to the U.S. for a nationwide promotion tour. And he returned to Greensboro.

The book, TVparty!: Television’s Untold Tales, has sold more than 20,000 copies. Among other places, you can find it on sale in the Universal Studios Theme Parks in Hollywood and in Orlando, Florida.

In time, his web site revenue grew, from advertising on the site by Amazon, Google, Time-Life and some third-party providers. He’s made a living from the site since 2002.

But now, a decade later, the competition is fierce with hundreds of sites about nostalgia television pulling some of Billy’s viewers away. “Everybody got on the Internet. I’m fighting for eyeballs against CBS and ABC, TV Land and YouTube.

Still, I’m considered the granddaddy of them all.”

Today he’s still pulling in just under 2 million visitors a year. And it still brings him money.

To keep up his interest — and his revenue — he has turned to creating other web sites. Today his domain includes newsregurgitator.com, vegaslegends.net and obscure 70s.com.

And he’s been branching into the book world with print-on-demand books published by Amazon.com. In 2012 he wrote Punk, about those early years in the L.A. underground music scene. And now he’s working on a novel, a Southern Fried comedy set in North Carolina with September as a target date to finish.

Which brings us to his acting. Just as his fantasy came true about getting a book deal, so did it for a television deal. Billy’s been in several series and specials on the Bravo channel. He also co-starred in Les Butchart’s 2010 independent regional film, Swimming in a Lake of Fire, that was filmed around the Greensboro area. And he has done various short films over the years.

Given all of this, you may be surprised to walk into his living room and see that his only TV is an old tabletop portable. It hasn’t been hooked up to cable in a decade.

You see, Billy Ingram, keeper of the flame for long-ago television, intensely dislikes today’s TV shows.

“It’s killing America,” he says. “It’s too homogenized. It’s not very entertaining.

The good years were in its messy adolescence. After that it was taken over by the bean counters.”

He watches some dramas, like The Wire, online or on DVDs. That’s about it. But he is getting ready to buy a new computer. He’s worn this one out. And there’s much more to write. More blogs and more books to come. OH Bill Hancock is the former editor and publisher of 99 Blocks Magazine in downtown Greensboro.

August 2013

O.Henry 49

Supreme Justice t he l ong and h iStoric J ourney oF h enry and S hirley F rye

Y

By Maria JohnSon

ears ago, Greensboro biographer and historian Howard E. Covington Jr. noticed something while plumbing the depths of state archives and libraries. There were almost no books about African-Americans who ushered North Carolina out of the Jim Crow era.

Covington resolved to write one.

Henry Frye: North Carolina’s First African American Chief Justice, published earlier this year, details the lives of Frye, now 81, and his wife, Shirley, 80, both of whom came from rural North Carolina to attend The Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina — now N.C. A&T State University — in the years following World War II. A lifetime later, the Fryes stand out as one of North Carolina’s most accomplished couples.

In 1968, Henry Frye became the first black person elected to the state legislature since Reconstruction. He later served in the state Senate.

He was the driving force behind the opening of Greensboro’s first minority-owned bank, Greensboro National Bank, in 1971.

In 1983, then-Gov. Jim Hunt appointed Frye to replace an associate justice who left the state Supreme Court, making Frye the first black person to serve on that panel.

On the eve of a new millennium, in 1999, Hunt upped Frye’s place in history by naming him to fill the unexpired term of the retiring chief justice.

While Henry Frye was in Raleigh, Shirley Frye was busy in Greensboro, raising the couple’s two sons and accumulating her own string of firsts.

A longtime teacher and education advocate, she knew she was tapped for boards and jobs because of her husband, her gender, her race — or all of the above. She took the opportunities and made the most of them.

“I didn’t change my behavior,” she told Covington. “I don’t know how to pretend.”

Covington — who was born in Concord, North Carolina, was raised out-of-state and repatriated for a journalism job — knows a good story when he sees one.

In 1980, he wrote a series for The Charlotte Observer about the difficulties brown lung survivors had in collecting benefits. The stories won the paper a Pulitzer Prize. By the time the award was announced, Covington had already moved to Greensboro to be the city editor of The Greensboro Daily News.

A few years later, he left for new ventures, including a stint as publisher of

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August 2013

Carolina Gardener magazine. He also wrote books on North Carolina icons including former governor and senator Terry Sanford, the Biltmore Estate, Belk department stores, and Nationsbank, which later morphed into Bank of America. Covington wanted to write about the Fryes because of the times they lived through, and also because of how they lived before, during and after all of their firsts. Always more comfortable working behind the scenes, the couple devoted themselves to fairness and civility, even when no cameras were around.

Covington writes of a time when Henry Frye was pulled over by a state The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Photographs courtesy of the Frye Family

trooper for speeding while driving Shirley’s car, which unlike his car did not bear a license plate indicating he was a member of the court.

The trooper didn’t know who Henry Frye was. As he wrote the ticket, he asked Frye what he did for a living. Frye replied that he was in the legal profession. The trooper asked where. Frye said he was on the state Supreme Court.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” said the trooper.

“I didn’t think it was necessary,” said Frye.

The trooper issued Frye a ticket and shook his hand.

In Howard Covington’s new book about Henry Frye, readers will find a trove of history from the civil rights era and the years after. The following excerpt describes two important experiences that Frye had one summer day in 1956, just before he started law school at UNC Chapel Hill.

From Henry Frye: North Carolina’s First African American Chief Justice: Henry and Shirley’s wedding day was August 25. That would leave them about a week for a honeymoon before Henry was due to begin classes in Chapel Hill. On the morning of the wedding, Henry was in Ellerbe while Shirley busied herself in Greensboro before the ceremonies set for 5 p.m. at Bethel AME Church. Bethel’s minister, the Reverend Melvin Swann, and Henry’s childhood friend from Ellerbe, who was now the Reverend Frederick Terry, were officiating. While Henry was at A&T and in the Air Force, Terry had finished at Shaw University in Raleigh and begun his studies at seminary. This would be his first wedding.

Before they left for Greensboro, Frye and Terry drove to the Ellerbe town hall, where they planned to register to vote.

A clerk was on duty on Saturdays, and this would be Henry’s last opportunity to take care of matters before heading on to Chapel Hill. The two gave their mission no more thought than if they were going to collect the mail. The clerk brought them up short when he took their names and began asking questions about former presidents of the United States, and if they could name a certain number of signers of the Declaration of Independence. Frye was stunned. He didn’t try to answer and said he didn’t believe he was required to do so. The clerk told him he was only following instructions.

They had to pass a literacy test, and he pointed to a book on the counter before him as his authority.

The state constitution did include such a provision. It was part of a package of amendments adopted in 1900 after Democrats regained control of the state after literally and figuratively running Republicans and African-Americans out of public office. The provision stipulated that any prospective voter “shall be able to read and write any section of the Constitution in the English language.” Registrars had used that provision to reduce African-American political participation to next to nothing, especially in “black belt” counties where the majority black population could make an appreciable difference in elections. Over the years, The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Richmond County had effectively discouraged African-Americans from voting. In 1940, of the 8,746 voters in the county, only sixty-eight of them were black. None of the Fryes were registered to vote, as far as Henry knew.

By the mid-’50s, there were still only a handful of blacks on the rolls in Richmond County. In the Mineral Springs precincts that included Ellerbe, about a third of the residents but only 6 percent of the registered voters were black.

Of course, discrimination was nothing new for Frye or Terry. They had seen it — and experienced it — all of their lives. At the same time, they found the clerk’s justification for dismissing the applications of two college graduates as illiterates to be unbelievable. They left the office, and then Frye turned around and went back inside. There must be a mistake, he said. The clerk must have questioned his application, he said, because he had been out of state working in New York of late. No, the clerk replied, there was no mistake.

Recalling the incident years later, Frye said the man told him: “Oh, no, I know your father, Walter Frye, and you are the one admitted to the law school at Chapel Hill.”

“So, you are turning me down,” Frye said.

“Yes,” the man said. “You didn’t pass the literacy test.”

Henry was still deeply disturbed about the insult more than five hours later as he stood with Terry at the front of Bethel AME Church and watched Shirley walk down the aisle on the arm of her father in a glorious dress of Chantilly lace and tulle over satin. In her hand was a white Bible topped with a white orchid. Henry was in white formal wear. There was an orchid in his lapel. Just as his bride reached the chancel, he leaned in to whisper to her, “Do you know they wouldn’t let me register to vote today?” She smiled back and said, “Can we talk about that a little later?”

Editor’s note: When Henry Frye became a state representative thirteen years later, one of the first things he did was introduce legislation to repeal the constitutional amendment requiring literacy tests. The legislation passed the House and Senate, but voters rejected the change at the polls in 1970. The literacy test amendment is still a part of the state constitution, but it is no longer enforced. OH From Henry Frye: North Carolina’s First African American Chief Justice © 2013 Howard E. Covington Jr. by permission of McFarland & Co. Inc., Box 611, Jefferson, N.C. 28540 www.mcfarlandpub.com Howard Covington can be reached at hecovington@bellsouth.net.

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry.

August 2013

O.Henry 51

Toast of theTown Here’s to some of Greensboro’s most iconic names, celebrating big anniversaries this year

By JiM SchloSSer

Longevity for humans requires loads of luck. But for the grace of God that bus barely missed you.

It’s different with buildings, organizations, events and businesses. To reach a venerable age requires leadership, maintenance, management, good service, perseverance and determination.

This year of 2013 abounds in celebrations and observances, among them the second anniversary of the magazine you have in your hands. In an age when print publications are sinking like dinosaurs in a quagmire of red ink, O.Henry magazine is taking a humble birthday bow this month, gratified that you, our loyal readers, have made it a success.

Our success, however, is modest compared with longtime players like the Jefferson Standard skyscraper, christened ninety years ago in 1923; the Junior League of Greensboro, which got its start eighty-five years ago in 1928; or what has become the Wyndham Championship, which began seventyfive years ago in 1938. Other institutions having significant anniversaries this year include the Atlantic Coast Conference, Moses Cone Memorial Hospital, Schiffman’s Jewelers, Belk’s Greensboro store, Kriegsman Furriers, Page High School and Smith High School.

One day this month, we’ll stick two candles in a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie and pop a bottle of Cheerwine to celebrate our second year in operation. If any of the establishments below intend to serve champagne, please put us on the guest list.

full. No mortgage, thank you. Price didn’t believe in debt — or for that matter removing his fedora indoors.

The insurance company actually occupied only five floors in the mammoth building, with its eclectic architectural mix of Romanesque, Gothic and Art Deco styles. The rest in what has been called “a city within a city” was leased to doctors, dentists, lawyers, insurance agents, various clubs (including the Jaycees), the Fuller Brush company, contractors, even a plumber.

From the Jefferson, a draft board sent “greetings” to conscripts during World War II. After reporting to the building, the men boarded buses outside on Jefferson Square for the journey to boot camp.

The architect, Charles Hartmann, visited Greensboro a few years earlier from New York to concept the O.Henry Hotel downtown. Julian Price offered Hartmann the job of designing the Jefferson if he’d move to Greensboro and open a practice. Hartmann accepted and spent the rest of his life here designing notable buildings, including Grimsley High.

According to a 1975 National Register of Historic Places nomination, “This granite and terra cotta tower, with lavish use of marble and brass on the interior, is one of the few examples in North Carolina of the opulent skyscrapers that are the monuments of pre-Depression prosperity.”

Because of its National Register listing, the Jefferson Standard Building retains its old name, even though now owned by Lincoln Financial, which bought Jefferson-Pilot in the mid-1990s.

Soaring seventeen stories when completed ninety years ago at North Elm and West Market streets, the Jefferson Standard Building was the city’s first skyscraper — and for a while, the tallest structure between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.

Speaking in Greensboro, famed humorist Will Rogers compared it to a giant candle in a farm field. On a clear day, people on the upper floors, which included a seventeenth floor restaurant, bragged about being able to see Pilot Mountain in Stokes County.

The Jefferson was the baby of visionary Julian Price, president of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Co. According to Jefferson-Pilot: a Century of Excellence, 1903-2003, Price sought to build high and sturdy because the public liked “to identify their financial institutions with impressive buildings that inspire confidence.” Plus, he wanted employees of his growing company, scattered in a half a dozen buildings all over town, in one spot.

The Jefferson cost $2.5 million, plus $177,000 for the land, both paid in

Eight-five years ago, in March of 1928, nine women who had belonged to the Greensboro Charity League joined twenty-four other women to form the Junior League of Greensboro. Charter members came from well-to-do and well-connected families, as was the practice in other cities.

But in one way, the Greensboro chapter differed markedly from others in the South (and in some Northern cities). Jewish women were welcomed from the start, especially if their names were Cone or Sternberger. The Jewish community possessed too much history and economic clout here to allow for a Gentiles-only policy.

The league’s local founder was Kathleen Price, daughter of Julian Price. She would marry Joseph Bryan, now remembered as the city’s most benevolent philanthropist.

A 1930s photo shows some of those early league members dwarfed by a lanky Eleanor Roosevelt [see cover]. It was taken outside the home of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cone, where Roosevelt was a guest on 1030 Summit Avenue, where it still stands.

The local league has donated millions to worthy causes, plus supplied hours of volunteer women hours. Members like to say that in recent decades the league has swapped white gloves for work gloves. And for years now, the league has been accepting minority members. Also, an Irving Park, Kirkwood or Starmount address is no longer needed. The emphasis is on leadership training nowadays. A beneficiary is former league member U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan.

Jefferson Standard Bilding

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August 2013

Th e Junior League

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Once upon a time, getting in was tough, requiring nomination by two members. Today, any woman from any part of the city can apply for membership, provided she’s willing to work hard for no pay and start out, say, at the cash register at the Bargain Box, the league’s thrift shop dating to 1933, celebrating its eightieth anniversary.

The league’s sustaining members — those no longer active in day-to-day activities — staged an eighty-fifth anniversary banquet in May. The location, the new O.Henry Hotel, was appropriate. The league’s charter meeting was held in 1928 in the blue room of the old O.Henry Hotel.

At the May banquet, the honoree was Lib Farmer, the oldest sustaining member at 101. One banquet speaker said, “The league has certainly changed our community, but it has certainly changed its members, too.”

Polio Epidemic

Sixty-five years ago, in 1948, a horrific polio epidemic swept the nation, hitting Greensboro harder than anywhere else in America if a 1948 edition of Life magazine is to be believed.

Polio brought fear. The threat of the disease closed theaters and swimming pools. Mothers confined children to yards. One tied her 5-year-old to the porch so he wouldn’t wander off and be exposed to polio, which had stricken other children in the neighborhood.

One story involved a young soldier who endured four years of fighting in World War II only to be killed by polio upon his return in 1948. As his respiratory system shut down, his wife and family watched helplessly from behind a glass window as an iron lung sought in vain to keep him alive in a former recreation center pressed into service as a temporary hospital.

But the anniversary also recalls a time when the city rallied as it never had before. Citizens, white and black, built a polio hospital with volunteer labor and donated materials in only ninety-four days. The hospital was integrated from the start, unique in the South in the 1940s.

By the mid-1950s, the Salk and Sabin vaccines virtually wiped out polio.

Moses Cone Hospital

Unlike Greensboro’s polio hospital, Moses Cone Memorial Hospital was forty years in the making. In 1908, after the death of Moses Cone, the founder of the Cone Mills empire, Bertha Cone, created a trust fund for a hospital to memorialize her husband.

But she stipulated that the funds couldn’t be released until her death, which didn’t come until 1947. Bernard Cone placed the cornerstone in 1951 and construction was completed in 1953 — sixty years ago. The hospital began with 200,000 square feet and more than 300 beds.

Two hospitals on Summit Avenue, St. Leo’s Catholic and Sternberger for Women and Children, closed, made obsolete by Cone.

Nearly every year since the hospital opened, new construction has enlarged Cone — to 537 beds and 1.2 million square feet. Meanwhile, Cone has gone from being a single hospital to a giant health network. In addition to Cone Hospital, Cone Health System owns Wesley Long Hospital, Women’s Hospital and a mental health hospital, all in Greensboro; Annie Penn Hospital in Reidsville; Alamance

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Memorial Hospital in Burlington; and med centers in Kernersville and High Point. It also owns a large physicians’ medical practice. This June brought the opening of Cone’s six-story, $200 million, 220,000-square feet North Wing.

Just as the textile mills Moses Cone founded in the 19th century with his brother, Ceasar, became the area’s largest employer, in the 21st century Cone Health System now holds that distinction, with more than 8,000 employees.

The Acc

In 1953, representatives from seven schools — UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, Wake Forest, N.C. State, Clemson, South Carolina and Maryland — met at an inn that was part of Sedgefield Country Club. Sixty years later, the organization they formed, the Atlantic Coast Conference or ACC, is a household word.

Virginia joined the original seven teams in short order. Then in the early 1970s, South Carolina withdrew. The Gamecocks were later replaced by Georgia Tech. Florida State came next, followed later by Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College. This fall, Notre Dame, Pitt and Syracuse enter. Next year, Louisville replaces Maryland, which is moving to the Big Ten Conference.

While the first conference headquarters was the mezzanine of the King Cotton Hotel downtown, now the conference headquarters occupies a sprawling, mansion-like office on the grounds of Grandover Resort and Conference Center. With annual revenues of more than $200 million, the ACC’s presence in Greensboro is equal to that of a large corporation — and its name recognition and prestige for the area are immeasurable.

Wyndham Championship

Seventy-five years ago, Sam Snead won Greensboro’s only major league pro sports event, the Greater Greensboro Open, now called the Wyndham Championship golf tournament. That first year, 1938, the tournament was held at both Sedgefield and Starmount country clubs.

In 1965, the tournament’s founders, the Greensboro Jaycees, dedicated the GGO to Snead. He was 52 and thought to be past his prime. Darn if he didn’t win, his eighth time. Snead remains the oldest player to win a PGA Tour event, and his victory count here is a Tour record.

Starting in 1942, the tournament alternated between Starmount and Sedgefield.

Starmount had the event to itself from 1956 until 1960, when Snead, after winning his seventh GGO, criticized Starmount’s condition. Enraged Starmount owner Ed Benjamin banished Snead for life from Starmount.

The Jaycees couldn’t afford losing their star player. The tournament switched to Sedgefield, where it was played until 1976. It moved the next year to Forest Oaks Country Club, where it remained for thirty-one years. In 2008, after galleries had dwindled at Forest Oaks, the tournament returned to Sedgefield. Weekends are now typically sold out. Sizable galleries also come for Thursday and Friday rounds.

Snead won $1,200 that first year from a total purse of $5,000. Last year, Spaniard Sergio Garcia banked $936,000 for first place from a purse of $5.3 million.

Snead’s name still looms large. The Sam Snead Cup goes to the winners.

Well into his 80s, not long before his death, Snead came down from West Virginia to present the trophy.

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O.Henry 53

In 1963, fifty years ago, thousands of students, mostly from A&T State University and Bennett College, marched downtown to protest segregation in theaters, restaurants and department stores. The highly publicized sit-ins of 1960 had successfully ended segregation at the Woolworth and the Kress dime stores. But most of the rest of downtown remained whites only.

Led by A&T student leader Jesse Jackson, the marches resulted in mass arrests, so much so that the city pressed the old polio hospital into service as a temporary jail.

One night the students staged a sit-down in Greensboro’s most central and visible intersection — Elm and Market. Police hauled them away by the dozens. Still, the protests stayed peaceful. Jackson, now a national civil rights leader, would say years later that Capt. Bill Jackson of the Greensboro Police Department (who was not related to Jesse Jackson) was professional in every way. There were no beatings or fire hoses. Unlike the sit-ins three years earlier, the marches effectively ended segregation downtown.

Uncg

It was fifty years ago that the venerable Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, or UNCG. The change came at the same time the university decided to admit men as undergraduates, starting in 1964. Many “W.C.” alums expressed anger at losing the school’s name, and some were outraged at men becoming undergraduates.

Only sixty-six men enrolled, all living off campus because the campus lacked a male dormitory. Male enrollment has grown among the 18,000 students, but it still lags far behind that of women, two to one.

Schiffman’s

It was in 1893, 110 years ago, that Simon Schiffman walked down South Elm Street to kill time while waiting for a train to Asheville on his way to buy a jewelry store. His stroll was interrupted when he encountered a sign announcing the closing of a jewelry store. Schiffman canceled the rest of his trip and bought the store.

Since then, Schiffman’s has been the city’s premier jewelry store and has remained in the Schiffman family. It also owns other stores, some with names other than Schiffman’s, in South Carolina, Virginia and as far away as San Francisco.

One thing hasn’t changed. Its flagship store has stayed downtown, even during the time when retailers were fleeing a dying downtown. The original four-story structure went up in flames in 1936. The existing structure looks pretty much as it did when it was rebuilt in 1937.

Tony Schiffman, Simon’s grandson, and Tony’s three sons manage the chain of stores.

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August 2013

Shores Fine Dry Cleaning

Soon after Shores Cleaners opened in 1948, people from all over the Triad started making the drive to High Point for a cut-above care of their specialty garments, wedding gowns and everyday clothing. Eventually, Shores opened locations in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, and in 1982, changed to a name befitting its reputation. Today, Shores Fine Dry Cleaning is going strong at 65, providing its legendary service to second and third generations of customers.

Belk

Belk Department Store is celebrating its 125th anniversary as a chain, with the first store founded in Monroe in 1888. It’s also an anniversary year for Greensboro’s Belk store, its 115th. The store, the city’s first major chain department store, opened in 1898 as Harry-Belk Bros. in the 200 block of South Elm Street.

It eventually dropped the name Harry and became Belk. In the 1930s the chain erected an impressive Art Deco building at Elm and Market. The store was a landmark shopping destination until 1975 when it joined other downtown department stores moving to shopping centers and malls. Belk relocated to Friendly Shopping Center, where its store has been enlarged many times, with another expansion planned.

Kriegsman

Kriegsman Furriers is a small business, but a lasting one. The store on East Cornwallis Drive is, without fanfare, observing its eighty-fifth year. It also has stores in Winston-Salem and Asheville. David Kriegsman says the business is Greensboro’s oldest furrier, and, he adds, North Carolina’s oldest. His father, European immigrant Abraham Kriesgman, was the founder, joined later in the business by his brother, Max Kriegsman.

The store’s heritage actually dates before 1928. David Kriegsman says his grandfather and great-grandfather prospered as furriers in the old AustroHungarian empire.

The store has made an arc around Greensboro, starting in downtown, moving to Friendly Shopping Center and, in 1986, to its current home on East Cornwallis Drive.

There, the company makes furs, leather and cashmere garments, and retails the products to the public.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Photographs courtesy of WWW.GREENSBORODAILYPHOTO.COM

Desegregation Marches

Greenboro Symphony Guild Presentation Ball

The Symphony Presentation Ball is thirty-five years old this year, celebrating more than three decades of turning young ladies into debutantes. In late December, the Presentation Ball is the culmination of a debutante season that begins in April, which not only recognizes young women for making significant contributions to the Greensboro community but has evolved to be a flourishing volunteer program in its own right. The Symphony Guild, which sponsors the ball, will celebrate its own golden anniversary next year after 50 years. The symphony itself will be seventy-five in 2014, celebrating its diamond anniversary.

Godwin Insurance Agency

Sixty years after its founding by brothers Grover and Louis Godwin, Godwin Insurance Agency is proving that, in a business increasingly dominated by major corporations, the Triad still has room for an independent agency that goes the extra mile. Now in the hands of Shirley Ray, whom the brothers originally hired as a typist in 1970, Godwin has preserved a legacy of integrity and customer service since 1953.

Overseas Replacement Depot (Ord).

With World War II well under way in 1943, seventy years ago, the U.S. Army Air Corps built a base in a matter of months on more than 600 acres in east Greensboro. The base had more than 900 buildings with tar-paper facades — barracks, mess halls, a hospital, theaters and various other facilities. Starting as Basic Training Camp No. 10, the base later became the Overseas Replacement Depot (ORD).

More than 330,000 soldiers passed through BTC 10 and ORD. Among them were future movie star Charlton Heston (who got married here) and song and dance man Donald O’Connor. Once the war ended, the base lingered on until 1946 as a discharge center, then closed.

The old base is now an industrial, commercial and retail area. A few old tar-paper buildings remain.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Greensboro Coll ege

Greensboro College is a jewel of its home city for many reasons — for being founded as just the second college for women in the South, for its spate of notable alumni and alumnae, for the individual attention its academic program provides to students, for a powerhouse “Pride” Division III golf team and, this year, for reaching a 175th anniversary that nearly wasn’t. In 2009, Greensboro College lost 40 percent of its endowment principal in financial markets, leaving the school struggling to pay its bills after more than a decade of ambitious expansion.

Its trustees were forced to make deep cuts. It was hardly the first setback for the now coeducational liberal arts school, which has survived three devastating fires and myriad financial crises since its founding in 1838 by circuit-riding Methodist minister Rev. Peter Doub. Amid the recent turmoil and on the brink of bankruptcy, Greensboro College’s faculty, students and former students rallied around new president Dr. Lawrence Czarda and Board of Trustees Chairman R. Carter Pate, who have both led the effort to pay the school’s debts and renew its commitment to boosting enrollment and fundraising. Now, with special events for alumni and students, as well as free performances for the public, Greensboro College is relishing its landmark birthday, and Greensboro can once again be proud of the Pride.

Ben L. Smith High School

Smith seemed out in the sticks when the school opened in 1963 as the old Greensboro City School System’s fourth high school. Located on Holden Road, it now stands near Four Seasons Mall, which wasn’t even there when Smith came along. It is named for Ben L. Smith, a long time superintendent of city schools who was instrumental in getting the city schools in 1957 to allow five black students to enter previously all-white Gillespie Park School while a sixth black enrolled in Greensboro Senior High (now Grimsley).

Walter H. Page High School

Until Page opened in 1958, segregated Greensboro had only one white high school, what’s now Grimsley. Page, located almost on the border separating Northwest and Northeast Greensboro, was the little guy for a while, but its enrollment eventually caught up with Grimsley. In 1964, the Page Pirates whipped the Whirlies in football for the first time. Since then, it has been Page dominating the gridiron series. The two schools also have been longtime academic rivals, with both consistently getting high ratings from those who judge academic performance.

Next year will be anniversaries for two of the cities pre-eminent high schools: George A. Grimsley High and James B. Dudley High. Dudley High School, which served the the city’s black high school students during segregation, will turn eighty-five, having been at its original campus on Lincoln Street since 1929. Grimsley High will be 115 years old — eighty-five of them at its present site on Westover Terrace. OH

August 2013

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Story of A House

Gloriously Imperfect From a shattered life arose a home filled with colors and precious personal objects, the beautiful fragments of a life reborn

By Mary Seymour • Photographs by John Gessner

I used to live

in a New England house with creamy white walls and polished wood floors.

Everything in it was carefully selected, edited for style and consistency. I wanted the look inside the house to match its simple farmhouse exterior. I wanted it to be perfect.

My husband and I spent years fixing up the house; in it we celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary, the arrival of our son, the rites of passing seasons. In the house I learned to change diapers, to make apple pie, to strip paint with a heat gun. I worked there in a study with a forest green braided rug and butternut slant-top desk, writing words for money. And in that house I went mad, my mind sailing far beyond the walls of my well-furnished box.

My husband and I bought the house twenty-five years ago, spending all our savings to make the small down payment. We liked the place, despite its disrepair, and began the slow job of transforming it, sinking all our spare time and disposable income into it. Our conversation began to center around Sheetrock, fuse boxes and overhead lighting.

Our marriage, which had become thin material, suddenly had a focus. Renovating the house sustained the illusion that we were a team.

I became obsessed with decorating the house perfectly. I spent my spare time combing antique stores and secondhand shops for just the right milk-paint cupboard and distressed-pine chest. Each purchase was a puzzle piece slipped into place. I felt my life would be complete when the puzzle was finished.

After ten years, the kitchen was the only room left untouched. It was the very definition of depressing: infirmary green walls coated with kielbasa grease, a worn-out linoleum floor, peeling lead paint and a rusted sink. Finally we decided to take it on. Because my husband was an artist, he was able to trade a painting for the carpenter’s labor, making the project affordable.

For years, I’d felt heaviness inside, an aching unhappiness that I chalked up to being strapped for money and living in a house perpetually under construction. I’d always said that once we had a nice kitchen, I’d be happy.

But when the new kitchen was finished, I still felt numb and heavy inside. I understood, with terrible clarity, that my unhappiness was not about a kitchen.

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It was about my life.

That realization precipitated a dizzying chain of events. I began openly questioning my marriage. I stopped eating and sleeping. My mind began to throb with anxiety, spinning a little faster each day until, with a swerve, it spun off from reality completely.

Believing I was Eve in the Garden of Eden, I lay on the striped linen Crate & Barrel sofa while God spoke to me. I ended up in a psychiatric ward, where doctors told me stress had triggered a manic-depressive episode, and I would now have that condition for life.

By supreme irony, two months after I left the hospital, Country Home magazine decided to feature our house in an article. It looked as I’d always imagined: washed in sunlight, artfully simple, country sweet.

By the time the article was on the newsstand, my husband and I had been separated for six months. I was barely coping with my manic-depressive diagnosis, coming to terms with my new self in tiny, painful increments. I wondered if anyone, looking at the magazine’s idyllic rendering of our lives, could guess the strain that lay behind it. It struck me that the magazine article was a fitting epitaph to my old life. Lovely to the eye, riddled with falseness, it was the picture of a self that never truly was.

Every time I walk into the house I live in now, my heart does a little shimmy. I bought it five years ago, when I moved to Greensboro from Massachusetts.

Built in 1958 — the year I was born — it’s a simple, no-pretense house with a small oval lawn that my older sister compares to a racetrack for tiny horses. The backyard is a surprising bower, a dollop of country in the middle of the city.

But inside is where my happiness lies. As soon as I moved in, I began saturating the airy rooms with color: yellow gold above the fireplace, soft turquoise in the bedroom. I let loose with a medium I took up fifteen years ago: creating mosaics out of broken plates.

For me, this art form is a profound metaphor: Something whole and supposedly The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 59

perfect can be shattered and re-formed, and the result is beautifully complex, perfect in its imperfection.

I broke plates and arranged them into waves of color around my fireplace, dotting the surface with marbles. I pulverized a pile of white plates to make a kitchen backsplash and turned my bathroom sink into a Gaudi-esque tribute.

Using my other favorite medium, decoupage, I tackled tag-sale mirrors and vintage wall clocks. I dismembered stacks of used art books, happily cutting out pictures of Chinese scrolls and thangkas, Tibetan paintings on embroidered silk. Invading those perfectly intact books with scissors was as therapeutic as creating an original design out of bits and pieces of paper.

I’ve filled my house with objects that are precious to me: Tribal artifacts and spiritual images, such as Buddhist prayer flags and Nigerian shaman belts, are everywhere — testaments to the faith I found in the difficult years following my diagnosis. Every piece has deep meaning to me, from the bird’s nest found in a Christmas tree to the flea-market plaster Madonna.

I love this house not only for its beauty, but for the change it represents. Since moving to Greensboro, I’ve shifted from writer and editor to mental health professional. I summoned up all my courage in 2010 and applied to graduate school in counseling at UNCG. I’d never taken courses in psychology, except for my own very personal curriculum. I didn’t expect to be accepted, but I was. My house became a haven as I worked my way through a grueling but exhilarating curriculum.

My powerful inner yearning to help others walking a similar path has finally found its outlet. Now I work in the recovery field, emphasizing that a mental health diagnosis does not mean a diminished life. It does not mean that you are broken, sidelined, or less than.

It means you have license to put the elements of yourself together in your own way, creating a gloriously imperfect life. OH Mary Seymour is director of recovery initiatives at the Mental Health Association in Greensboro. She also works part-time as an LPCA at Tree of Life Counseling. Mary earned her master’s degree in counseling from UNCG in 2012.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 61

The Perfect Place to Grow

I

By John Cruickshank • Photographs By Cassie Butler Timpy

visited Gateway Gardens for the first time on a blue midday in July — dry and breezy, 90 degrees — the kind of day that’s glorious when you have time to move slowly. I wandered through the Children’s Garden: a labyrinthine, 1.25-acre expanse of streams, trellised arches, flowers, birdhouses, bridges, plants and whimsical sculptures, all on a miniaturized scale. I followed a path along the edge of the property to the Heritage Garden, where a stand of hydrophyllum, wrought in antiqued bronze and steel, curves thirty-five feet into the sky as part of a monumental sculpture, the Gateway Gardens Icon fountain. I lay down under a stand of pine trees on the grassy lawn, where I noticed that the grass was alive with spiders, tiny red ants and big black picnic ants. As I watched a tiny inchworm summit a blade of grass, I felt the unwavering stare of a wide-eyed brown toad the size of my thumbnail. Besides me, these creatures seemed to be the garden’s most frequent visitors. In the entirety of my stay, precisely one family visited Gateway Gardens. Two years after being born, it is Greensboro’s unknown garden oasis.

Gateway Gardens opened in April 2011, and now, at the height of its third summer, Gateway’s countless flora are rioting, seeming to counter the gardens’ unmistakable newness — fragrant mulch, glistening cement paths and razor-sharp landscaping lines. Supervisor Paul Greiwe speaks of the garden he oversees almost as if it were his own offspring: “It is in its infancy. And will continue to fill out and grow and mature as time goes on.” Which is apt for the site of Greensboro’s only garden for children. Strolling down one of its paths, Greiwe explains that the garden’s plants were carefully chosen with kids in mind: “We chose the plants to facilitate the children running around in here. And, yes, stomping them,” he says. “It’s gonna happen, it’s a public garden.” He views minor damage in the garden as evidence it was enjoyed.

As he speaks, Greiwe pauses to point out plant species along the winding

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paths. Green webs of euonymus creeping up the legs of an 18-foot-tall giraffe topiary. Liriope, spiderwort and wormwood surround benches, statues and archways, most of them commissioned from artists based in Guilford County. Erik Beerbower did the butterflies and carrots. Jim Gallucci did the alphabet arch. Ernest and Lois Rich did the ladybug and vegetable chairs. The list goes on and on. “Look for little hidden surprises throughout the garden,” Greiwe says. “You come around the corner, and ‘Oh look, there’s the frog that’s reading the book.’”

Perhaps the biggest little surprise in the Children’s Garden is in its very center, where picking in a demonstration garden is encouraged. Greiwe says that children regularly pick berries to eat, and he mentions a woman who often stops by the garden to share muffins containing blueberries from the garden. From bursting ripe tomatoes to fragrant thyme, from corn to cucumbers, “If you were to live in the neighborhood or come visit us,” he says, “and if you wanted to go home with a couple of fresh zucchini for your dinner table tonight: by all means.”

One of Gateway Gardens’ many wonders is that it sprang into existence at a time when public funds were so scarce. Gateway’s seed money, so to speak, was supplied by a nonprofit organization called Greensboro Beautiful. Through its network of sponsors, Greensboro Beautiful has so far raised $5.4 million for Gateway, its largest project to date, and the organization plans to raise $2.6 million more.

The construction of everything at Gateway that is open today was entirely funded by private donations to Greensboro Beautiful, although the city owns and operates the gardens and has since paid for upkeep.

“Greensboro maintains the bus,” Greiwe elegantly summarizes. “Greensboro Beautiful drives it.”

Gateway sits caddy-corner to UNCG’s and NC A&T’s Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, a collaborative research center chartered to make scientific breakthroughs and spawn high-tech local industries. Across Florida Street is Barber Park, home of expansive green spaces and recreation facilities, including an indoor tennis center. The Hayes-Taylor YMCA is expected to soon move in next door. Unnoticed by many, but carefully cultivated by a few, southeast Greensboro is poised to grow. And at the heart of it, there is a garden, built for tomorrow’s generation in a place that may blossom in their time.

This August, the coneflowers and day lilies will light up the Children’s Garden in all their glory.

Paul Greiwe will tend to them lovingly, his energy in the present, but his thoughts on the future. He sees Gateway for what it will be once its gardens are complete — and once the people of its city discover it.

He describes the gardens as “a two-year-old, getting ready, learning how to walk.”

John Cruickshank is a native of Greensboro and a student at UNC Chapel Hill. He can be reached at john.cruicks@gmail.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 63

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Pleasures of Deep Summer

By noah Salt

A tart and refreshing toast, if you please, to the slow rituals and reveries of August, summer’s traditional end, the month of going away and laying low. Deep summer, says poet Sam Keen, is when laziness finds true respectability, and our gardens begin to orient toward the autumn harvest. As summer’s lease expires, the first apples and pears begin to ripen and drop off the limb, grapes ripen on the vine, suntans deepen, summer novels are finished, lilies and lavender reach peak bloom, and gimlets and mojitos taste even more divine on the porch.

In ancient Rome, this month was revered as a time of family rest and renewal, watched over by the goddess Pomona, one of the Numina guardian deities of home and garden whose job it was to look after a household’s fruit trees and gardens as the days grew noticeably shorter.

In a normal year, the heat and stillness of afternoon lies like a fevered hand on a withered brow, although this year’s coolness and abundant rain has made an English summer of our Carolina gardens. Jove be thanked for the timeless song of the Brood II magicicada, the locust that filled lazy afternoons with its roasted-sounded mating call much of this summer. The brief courtship of the mysterious large-eyed bugs, which actually lasts only days, comes on a 17-year cycle, and this year’s cicadas were the descendants of the same bunch Thomas Jefferson noted in his garden journal near the end of his days at Monticello. “I am an old man,” he also famously took pains to observe, “but a new gardener.”

The Almanac Gardener knows exactly what he means.

“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.”

— Jane Austen

The Garden To-Do List

* * * ** ** The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Water in the cool of morning. Pay special attention to potted plants on hot days.

Apply extra mulch to control weeds and cool soil.

Raise lawn mowers by a full inch to provide extra protection to grass Train vines on support structures Share cut flowers from your garden with a neighbor Paint and stack wood for drying Thin fruit trees and enjoy the first fruits of the autumn harvest

A Writer In The Garden “I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.

— Violette Leduc, daughter of a French peasant and best-selling novelist August 2013

O.Henry 65

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O.Henry 67

August 2013

Arts Calendar

Book Discussion

1

Mayan Photographs

Black Theatre Festival

1-3 1-30

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August 1 — 3

pounds of produce from gardeners who grew more than they could eat. Go to sharetheharvestguilfordcounty. org to find where and when they accept produce.

and around the world gather in Winston-Salem for a biennial festival celebrating a culture and an art form, with more than 140 drama, comedy, musical and multimedia theatrical performances, as well as celebrity receptions and special events for the community.

Tickets: (336) 723-7907 or nbtf.org.

August 1 — August 30

NATIONAL BLACK THEATRE FESTIVAL. • Professional theater companies from across the country

August 1 — August 4

BARN BLONDE. Legally Blonde The Musical, an • all-singing, all-dancing, feel-good musical comedy starring

Broadway sensation Erin Sullivan, in its final days at the Barn Dinner Theatre, 120 Stage Coach Trail, Greensboro.

Tickets: (336) 292-2211 or box-office@barndinner.com.

August 1 — August 18

WOOD YOU . . . Like to see Speaking in Species, • works of art made from wood by more than two dozen N.C. artists at the newly rebranded GreenHill, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-7460 or greenhillcenter.org.

August 1 — 31

VEGGIE DROP. Donate your surplus zucchini, to• matoes, cucumbers and other vegetables to feed hungry

YOUR MAYA. Witness the stunning photographs • of Morton W. Huber, along with textiles and other

items he collected while documenting the Maya people of Guatemala during the 1960s; Wake Forest Museum of Anthropology, Wingate Road, Winston-Salem. Info: (336) 758-5282 or moa.wfu.edu.

August 1 — September 8

• • Art

Music/Concerts

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August 2013

Performing arts

and join horticultural expert Toby Bost for a discourse on fall vegetable gardening in the ballroom at Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 South Main Street, Kernersville. Reservations: (366) 996-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.

August 2

ART OUT. 6 — 8 p.m. Drop the kids off at • ArtQuest and head next door for live music from

Bound to Have a Little Fun and an afterhours look at Speaking in Species, the current exhibit at GreenHill, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 3337460 or greenhillcenter.org.

August 3

August 1

Carolina’s many state symbols and make your own symbolic crafts at Greensboro Historical Museum’s David and Rachel Caldwell Historical Center, 130 Summit Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2043 or greensborohistory.org.

Record photographer Jerry Wolford at the Greensboro Historical Museum, 130 Summit Avenue, Greensboro.

Info: (336) 373-2043 org or greensborohistory.org.

BOOKBREAK. 12:15 — 1:15 p.m. Bring a friend • and your lunch to discuss Shoeless Joe, the novel that

inspired Field of Dreams, at the Greensboro Historical Museum, 130 Summit Avenue Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2043 or greensborohistory.org/historical-park.

August 1

•LUNCH & LEARN. noon — 1 p.m. Bag a lunch • • • • • Film

3

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STORYTELLER’S EYE. View three decades of • photographs by award-winning Greensboro News &

families. Last year, Share The Harvest collected 14,240

Key:

Seth Walker Band

Literature/Speakers

Fun

History

SUMMER SATURDAYS AT CALDWELL. • noon — 3 p.m. Learn the what and why about North

August 3

DISNEY DELIGHTS. 3 p.m. & 6 p.m. Join old • favorites Mickey, Minnie and Cinderella, along with

new characters Jake, Doc McStuffins and Disney’s first little-girl princess, Sofia, for Disney Junior Live on Tour! Pirate and Princess Adventure at War Memorial

Sports

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Still Life

17

10-31 15

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August 3

from the Greensboro Concert Band at Lindley Park, Starmount Drive at West Market Street and Wendover Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 3732549 or city-arts.org.

August 3

DRAMA ON A DEADLINE. 8:05 p.m.

• Experience the work of actors, directors and play-

wrights who have spent the past ten hours devising their performances from scratch in the Dramatists’ Playground workshop; City Arts Studio Theatre, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 335-6426.

August 4

KIDLESS WEDNESDAY. 9:30 a.m. Join the • last session of fun and games at Carolina Kids Club

at the Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 333-2605 or carolinatheatre. com.

August 4

Greensboro. Tickets: Coliseum Box Office, 1921 West Lee Street or ticketmaster.com.

August 4

•

NACHTMUSIK. 6:30 p.m. Music for a Sunday Evening in the Park features classical and pops

•

JO DISHES. 6:30 p.m. Author and essayist Jo Maeder discusses the true events that inspired her latest novel, Opposites Attack, and shares recipes from the south of France, where the story is set. Greensboro Public Library sponsors the free event at Zeto wine and cheese shop, 335 Battleground Avenue, Greensboro.

Info: (336) 574-2850 or jomaeder.com.

August 5

GENERAL ADMISSION. 7 p.m. Enjoy locally • made short and experimental films with the General Greene Film Festival at Carousel Luxury Cinemas, 1305 Battleground Avenue, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 373-2026.

August 8 — 11

HOPPIN’ HOMESTAND. The Greensboro • Grasshoppers take on the Augusta Green Jackets at New Bridge Bank Park, 408 Bellemeade Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 268-2255.

and the police-community partnership with a free evening event, featuring refreshments, historic games, an antique fire truck and a special performance by Justice Johnson; 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org/ historical-park.

Key:

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 7

Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point.

Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org/ historical-park.

GO GOSPEL. 4 p.m. Powerhouse soprano Tamela August 6 • Mann, along with guests James Fortune and FIYA, NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM. 5— 7 p.m. High • at the Greensboro Coliseum, 1921 West Lee Street, Point Museum celebrates its neighborhood’s spirit

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Performing arts

8/

August 7

EMFfringe. 8 p.m. Seth Walker Band brings its • rockin’ and swingin’ sound to Triad Stage, 232 South MR. SMITH. 10 a.m. — 4 p.m. Blacksmithing • Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-7450 or demonstration in the Historical Park at High Point easternmusicfestval.org.

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Auditorium, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro.

Tickets: Coliseum Box Office, 1921 West Lee Street orticketmaster.com.

Blacksmithing

Sounds of Water

City Market

August 8 — 11

DOWNTOWN DR AMA. Witness the • world premiere of All About Faith, playwright Bill Cissna’s work about a prison psychologist who encounters a mysterious patient named Faith; Community Theatre of Greensboro, 520 South

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

August 2013

•

Sports

O.Henry 69

URBAN MOBILITY OR LONG DISTANCE FUN?

8/1- 9/8 Jerry Wolford Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-7469 or ctgso.org.

August 10 — August 31

STILL BEAUTIFUL. See some of the finest • still-life pieces in North Carolina, including works

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by Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and John James Audobon, with Things Wondrous & Humble: American Still Life at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, 2250 Reynolda Road, Winston-Salem. Tickets: (336) 758-5150 or reynoldahouse.org.

August 10

SUMMER SATURDAYS AT CALDWELL. • noon — 3 p.m. Discover more about Greensboro’s

unique cultural heritage and make crafts celebrating the diversity of people who make up the city at Greensboro Historical Museum’s David and Rachel Caldwell Historical Center, 130 Summit Avenue, Greensboro.

Info: (336) 373-2043 or greensborohistory.org.

August 10

THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE. 10 a.m. — 4 p.m. The • junior interpreters explain how American settlers watered their

plants without a hose, demonstrate an old-fashioned thumb-waterer and host a water bucket relay race in the Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point.

Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org/historical-park.

8/11 Mad Hatter Tea

••• • •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Film Literature/Speakers Sports

70 O.Henry

August 2013

• • •

Performing arts Fun History

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 71

Celebrating the life of a loved one. www.haneslineberryfuneralhomes.com 1604 South Main St. | Lexington, NC l 336-248-2646 l Mon-Thurs 9:00am-5:30pm, Friday 9:00am- 7:00pm, Saturday 9am- 5:30pm

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72 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 10

ballroom at Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden, 215 South Main Street, Kernersville. Reservations: (366) 9967888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.

Club’s annual fundraiser show; City Arts Studio Theatre, 200 North Davie Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 335-6426.

August 15

CABERNET CABARET. 7 p.m. The wine and • innuendo flow freely at the Drama Center Booster

August 17 MARKET ON YOUR CALENDAR. 5 — 9 • p.m. While listening to soul and funk from the band • EMFfringe. 8 p.m. Greensboro’s own Sounds of Doby, browse an eclectic selection of artisan goods, Water plays a homecoming show at Mack and Mack,

August 10

HBTY, NAT 1 — 4 p.m. Gather around the • statue of General Nathanael Greene and eat some

enjoy fresh local vittles, sip your favorite beverage and find your cool at this month’s “Cold” edition of The City Market, held at The Railyard, on the 500 block of South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: gsocitymarket.com.

birthday cake in his honor, “seranaded” by the Fife and Drum Corps at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, 2332 New Garden Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 288-1776 or www.

GuilfordBattlegroundCompany.org

August 16

•

August 11

GONZO GOURMET. 2 p.m. See the world of • Alice in Wonderland come to life while dining on

whimsical delicacies and sipping Mad Hatter Tea at Green Valley Grill, 622 Green Valley Road, Greensboro.

Tickets: (336) 854-2015 or greenvalleygrill.com.

August 11

NACHTMUSIK. 6 p.m. Music for a Sunday Evening • in the Park offers contemporary country from The Radials with Lisa Dames, followed by folk from Warren, Bodle & Allen at Hester Park, 3615 Deutzia Street, Greensboro.

Info: (336) 373-2549 or city-arts.org.

August 15

HERBY HOUR. 7 — 8 p.m. Cindy Watson picks • fresh facts on the history of herbs and discusses their

current culinary, medicinal and decorative uses in the

Key:

• • Art

Music/Concerts

•

Performing arts

begins at Changing Tides Cultural Center, 613 Washington Street, High Point. Registration: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org/ walking-tour-of-historic-washington-street.

CAROLINA CROONER. 8 p.m. Grammy nominated R&B singer and songwriter Eric Benét returns for a live performance at the Carolina Theatre, 310 South Greene Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 3332605 or carolinatheatre.com.

( August 17

MR. SMITH. 10 a.m. — 4 p.m. Blacksmithing • demonstration in the Historical Park at High Point

Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point.

Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org/ historical-park.

August 18

August 16 — 22

NACHTMUSIK. 6 p.m. Music for a Sunday • Evening in the Park grooves with funk from the band

HOPPERS HERE. The Greensboro Grasshoppers go for back-to-back home series against the Kannapolis Intimidators and the Delmarva Shorebirds at NewBridge Bank Park, 408 Bellemeade Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 268-2255.

August 20

•

August 17

WALKING ON WASHINGTON. 9 a.m.

• Historian Glenn Chavis conducts a walking tour

of Washington Street, once a thriving business and entertainment district for High Point’s black community during the period of segregation. Tour

• • Film

220 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 3337450 or easternmusicfestval.org.

Literature/Speakers

• • Fun

History

doby, then rock ’n’ roll by Rob Massengale Band at Lindley Park, Starmount Drive at West Market Street and Wendover Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 3732549 or city-arts.org.

WINE ’N’ DINE. 6:30 p.m. Join winemaker • Susie Selby of Selby Winery in Sonoma County and

Print Works Executive Chef Leigh Hesling for a wine tasting and five-course menu at Print Works Bistro, 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Reservations: (336) 478-9126 or printworksbistro.com.

•

Sports

ALIGHT AT TYLER WHITE ANNUAL FUNDRAISING EVENT Thursday, September 26th • 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.

Tyler White O’Brien Gallery • 307 State Street

Enjoy fine art, conversation, wine and hors d’oeuvres while raising funds for local breast cancer patients

Sponsorships & tickets available online AlightFoundation.org or call 336.832.0027 facebook/thealightfoundation

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 73

August Arts Calendar August 24

FUNK FEST. 7:30 p.m. Get down with Ronnie • Laws, Tom Browne, Dazzband, Sunshine Anderson

and more at the Jazzy-Funk Festival, White Oak Amphitheatre, 1921 West Lee Street, Greensboro.

Tickets: Coliseum Box Office, 1921 West Lee Street or ticketmaster.com.

August 24

BATTLEDORE PARK. 10 a.m. — 4 p.m.

• Historical interpreters show you how to make a bat-

tledore — the form of printed material used to teach children their letters in early America — and let you bring one home from the Historical Park at High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 885-1859 or highpointmuseum.org/ historical-park.

August 24

CLOTHES FOR A CAUSE. 9 a.m. — noon. See children • and young adults from Baptist Children’s Homes of North Carolina modeling the new school clothing they receive at the HopeinStyle benefit.The fashion show and brunch, featuring a performance by Victoria Livengood, will be preceded by asilentauctionat GreensboroCountry Club, 410 SunsetDrive, Greensboro.

Tickets: (800)-476-3669ext. 1211, or kslate@bchfamily.org.

We’re not a mexican restaurant, we’re a taco Tuesday-Thursday 11am-9:30pm Friday & Saturday 11am-10pm 219-A South Elm Street Greensboro NC 27401 | (336) 273-0030 www.craftedtheartofthetaco.com

8/31 Enter the Haggis

we’RE NOT A MEXICAN RESTAURANT, WE’RE A TACO JOINT Tuesday-Saturday

8/31

(336) 273-0030

Steel Wheels

••• • •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Film Literature/Speakers Sports The Art & Soul of Greensboro

11am-10pm 219-A South Elm Street Greensboro NC 27401

• • •

Performing arts Fun History

www.craftedtheartofthetaco.com August 2013

O.Henry 75

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76 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August Arts Calendar August 25

NACHTMUSIK. 6 p.m. Music for a Sunday Evening in the Park has the sizzling • sounds of West End Mambo, followed by Motown and beach music from Soul Biscuit at Bur-Mil Park, Owl’s Roost Road off of Highway 220 North, Greensboro. Info: (336) 373-2549 or city-arts.org.

August 26

RESOURCEFUL. 10 a.m. — 2 p.m. The Women’s Resource Center of • Greensboro observes its eighteenth birthday with an open house and A Celebration!

One Community. Every Woman. at 628 Summit Avenue, Greensboro. Info: (336) 2756090 or womencentergso.org.

August 27 — 29

HOP ON. The Greensboro Grasshoppers face the Hickory Crawdads at • NewBridge Bank Park, 408 Bellemeade Street, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 268-2255.

August 31

EMFfringe. 6 p.m. Enter the Haggis and Steel Wheels give a free concert on the • Guilford College Quad, 5800 West Friendly Avenue, Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 333-7450 or easternmusicfestval.org. (

WEEKLY HAPPENINGS

m ‧ ‧

Treasures Antiques Consignments

Tuesdays

CHICKEN’N’PICKIN’ 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. Skillet Fried Chicken & Songs from • a Southern Kitchen. Sit down to Chef Jay’s signature fried chicken, select beverage

specials and live music by Laurelyn Dossett and friends — at Lucky 32 Southern Kitchen, 1421 Westover Terrace, Greensboro. Info: (336) 370-0707 or lucky32southernkitchen.com.

Wednesdays

MUSSELS, WINE & MUSIC. 7 – 10 p.m. Mussels for $15, wines from • $10–15 a bottle and live acoustic music by AM rOdeO — at Print Works Bistro, 702 Green Valley Road, Greensboro. Info: (336) 379-0699 or printworksbistro.com.

Wednesdays through Saturdays

MUSE ON THESE. 10 a.m. — 4 p.m. High Point native Meredith Slane • Michener’s miniature rooms, crafted on a 1:12 scale on display, along with historic

photos and artifacts of the Belk Department Store chain on its 125th anniversary at the High Point Museum, 1859 East Lexington Avenue, High Point. Info: (336) 8851859 or highpointmuseum.org/merediths-miniatures.

Thursdays

JAZZ NIGHT. 7 p.m. Fresh-ground, fresh-brewed coffee is served with a side of • jazz at Tate Street Coffee House, 334 Tate Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 275-2754.

OPEN MIC COMEDY. 8 — 9:35 p.m. Local pros and amateurs take the mic at the Idiot Box, 348 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: (336) 274-2699 oribcomedy.com.

Fridays & Saturdays

IMPROV COMEDY. 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, plus an 8 p.m. show on • Saturday appropriate for the whole family. The Idiot Boxers create scenes on the

spot and build upon the ideas of others creating shows that are one-of-a-kind — at the Idiot Box, 348 South Elm Street, Greensboro. Info: 336-274-2699 oribcomedy.com.

NIGHTMARES AROUND ELM STREET. 8 p.m. A 90-minute, historical, candlelit ghost walking tour of Downtown Greensboro. Tickets: (336) 905-4060 orcarolinahistoryandhaunts.com/information. OH

•

To add an event, email us at ohenrymagcalendar@gmail.com by the first of the month prior to the event.

• ••• •

Key: Art Music/Concerts Fun History Sports The Art & Soul of Greensboro

•

Performing arts

• • Film

Literature/Speakers

Monday-Saturday 10am-6pm 4537 U.S. Hwy. 220 Summerfield, NC 27358

Sunday 12-6pm goldenantiques@att.net (336) 643-6994 August 2013

O.Henry 77

Looking for a New Style for Fall?

We just returned from Toni & Guy’s Advanced Education Academy in Costa Mesa, California with the latest trends!

eyewear

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we love

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Email us at KathyFlack1@hotmail.com

78 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

State Street

515 State Street, 545-3003 • M-F 11-6, Sat 11-5 www.linneasplussize.com www.linneasboutique.com (Small to XLarge)

507 State Street • Greensboro, NC 27405

Size Small to 3x

www.LilloBella.com

Enhance Your Natural Beauty

336-275-7645 • Mon - Sat 11am - 6pm

Skin Care Services /

Skin Care Specials / Dysport • 15% off Skin Care Products • $25 off • 25% off a Chemical Peel • $50 off Fillers

Dr. Contogiannis has been Selected as One of Americas Top Plastic Surgeons in 2012

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

In Office Surgical Suites 333-9022 • 211 State Street • Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 79

Flowers

giFts

Plants

like us on Facebook!

336.883.6249 | 1313 n. Main street High Point | sami@justpriceless.net | www.justpriceless.net

Photo by Rodney Slate at Autumn Song Photography

Don’t miss an issue of

M A G A Z I N E

Find it at these High Point Locations: Harris Teeter, 265 Eastchester Dr.

•

Harris Teeter, 1589 Skeet Club Rd.

•

J.H. Adams Inn, 1108 N. Main St.

•

Shore’s Fine Dry Cleaning, 804 Westchester Dr.

•

Tex & Shirley’s, 4005 Precision Way

•

The Rush Fitness Center, 2620 N. Main St.

•

Theodore Alexander Outlet, 416 S. Elm St.

body

soul

We offer a wonderful array of massages and body therapy services that are sure to melt away the tension from your body and mind, bringing you away from the st stress and feeling your best.

Where Nurturing Really Makes A Difference

336-862-1661 1107 North Main St High Point, NC

80 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Worth the Drive to High Point

Come Down and Kick Some Tires

I

t’s billed as the “Let’s Talk Cars & Trucks Show,” and if that’s something that appeals to you, head south to High Point on a Thursday night because there will be plenty of it there.

For instance, ask Conrad Gailey about his 1928 Ford sedan, which he drives from Lexington to High Point nearly every week. He’ll tell you about how his two-seater measures only 45.5 inches high, from where the tires touch the ground to the top of his windshield. And though he calls it a “Rat Rod,” he’s totally customized it, adding his own touches, such as candyapple-red bucket seats, matching steering wheel and a leather top. And look for the words “Older than DIRT” painted jauntily beneath its narrow slit of a back window. How does it ride? “Like an Austin-Healey,” he says with a grin, which to those of you who are not car enthusiasts, means a little rough.

Or, if you have a little time on your hands, ask car lover Jackie Baker why he started the weekly car show nineteen years ago. The first show had just fourteen cars and maybe twice that many people talking about cars and trucks.

Now on any given Thursday, there may be up to three hundred cars on the lot. They come from near and far. Greensboro. Danville. Myrtle Beach.

Baker proudly describes it as a family event. Alcohol isn’t allowed.

Neither is spinning your wheels. “You come to show your car, not race it,” he says. “Kids are all over the parking lots, including my grandchildren.” You should come to look and talk, he says — about cars and trucks and anything else except religion and politics, though there’s always some of that too.

Cars start arriving at Kagan’s Furniture Galleries — about half a mile north of Business 85 on U.S. Highway 311, 1628 South Main Street, High Point — around 5 p.m. and start leaving about 8 p.m., depending on the weather. Look for street rods, hot rods, classic muscle cars, motorcycles and everything in between. Speakers blast classic tunes from the 1950s. And the only cost may be a $3 hot dog from Big John’s. Since this is a classic Carolina event, we recommend you add chili, slaw and onions. Information: (336) 882-8809 nights. OH — Tina Firesheets

The J.H. Adams Inn and Hampton’s Restaurant

Great prices and items arriving daily!

Inn 336.882.3267 / Restaurant 336.882.2002

Located in the Historic Sherrod Home at 1100 N. Main St., High Point 336.886.1090

Historic Boutique Hotel, Four-Star Fine Dining Restaurant and Premiere Event Venue

www.jhadamsinn.com

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 81

Aces High

Worth the Drive to Winston-Salem

T

he burning question at this year’s Winston-Salem Open is: Will local favorite John Isner again be the victor? The Greensboro native — who made history when he played the longest match in tennis history (eleven hours and five minutes) at Wimbledon in 2010 — received a hero’s welcome when he won the inaugural WSO the following year. He claimed the winner’s trophy again last year.

This year’s tournament, August 18–24, is the final stop on the men’s tour before the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows, New York, so you’ll see a lot of big-name players who’ll move on to New York, but they’ll be much more accessible at the Wake Forest Tennis Center. So drive on over for some top-flight tennis, hang out at the Corona Beach House and mug for the camera at the photo kiosk.

Kids can eat mor chikin’ on Chick-fil-A Night, and everyone can salute the troops on USO Military Appreciation Night.

As for Isner, ranked No. 21, he’ll have competition in Sam Querrey, who holds the No. 20 spot — the highest for any American. But with a hometown crowd behind him, no doubt Isner will feel — and not score — the love. Info: www.winstonsalemopen.com — Nancy Oakley

WOVEN SOUL Threads of Connection

631 Trade Street Winston-Salem

in the Heart of the Arts District

Open Tues - Sat 11-5

vegetable dyed, dried in the sun featuring small batch clothing from women’s cooperatives

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 83

Paintings B y

Arts & Culture

C.P. Logan

“The Yellow Door” 30x40” oil

Original Oils, COmmissiOns, WOrkshOps, studiO Classes, Online Classes, painting parties

www.cplogan.com

84 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 85

Arts & Culture 86 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

GreenScene

Noah Horne, Pat Jeffries, Jamie Dowda, Peggy & Richard Cunningham

Let’s Talk Cars & Truck Show, High Point Thursday, July 18, 2013 Photographs by Lynn Donovan

Allen Griffith, Kevin & Sue Myers

Gale & Bob Byers

Chris Collins, Cliff Hearne

Justin Pattico, Richard Powell

Rich Drwiega, Jim Lynch

Amanda Kinney, Karen Luisana, Chandra Young

Jackie Baker

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 87

Factory Trained Technicians Free Shuttle ASE Certiied All Current Computer Diagnostics Keeping Your New Warranty Valid

AllA D’SAlon

alla campanella master stylist

Classic European Style Elegant private setting Online BOOking www.alladsalOn.cOm

By phone: 336-306-8417 88 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Now offering Amy Howard Paint Products!

Rescue Restore Redecorate ™

Restore rescued furniture into one-of-a-kind classics

One Step Paint Class August 3rd and 24th 9am to 12pm Intro rate $125.00 (Regularly $150.00) Call now to sign up

Everything for the Home!

Over 6,000 square feet filled with antiques, upholstery, accessories and gifts from over 25 designers, dealers and artists

Hours: Tues - Sat 10-5 • 3500 Old Battleground Rd, Suite A (336) 617-4275 • www.aubreyhomedesign.com The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 89

GreenScene

Jason & Marie Cannon, “Dolley” Daisy Mae

Fun Fourth Festival 2013 Saturday, June 29, Wednesday, July 3 & Thursday, July 4, 2013 Photographs by Lynn Donovan Sam Hummel, Nikki & Lee Paige, Lauren Logan, Locke Clifford

Lauren Gallinger, Bill Menius, Dacia McLeod

Debbie Foster Fuchs, Faun Finley

Denise Turner Roth & C.J. Roth Larry Day, Ben Cone, Brian Gray

Jennifer Blevins, Debbie Hynes Emily & Kaitlyn Lewis

90 O.Henry

August 2013

Winte Lynn, Nashanee Jones, Syphira Price, Kencya Waving

John, Parker & Asher Stroud, Skip & Peg Moore, Julie Wiegand

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

GreenScene

Lisa Fewell, Monique Chavis, Uncle Sam (aka Locke Clifford), Sandra Johnson, Frita Pineda, Carletta Scott, Jennifer Wood, Carla Bowman, Tammy Jordan, Leslie Rice

Fun Fourth Festival 2013 Saturday, June 29, Wednesday, July 3 & Thursday, July 4, 2013 Photographs by Lynn Donovan

Aashka Mehta, Mara Mehta, Carly Koop

Claire Deskevich & Reid Deskevich

Kelly Arsneault, Todd & Linda Mason, Kathy Kasek

Chip Roth, Eloise Hassell, Denise Turner Roth, Robbie Hassell

Betty Cone, Bill Black

Algin Long, Jennifer Stokes, Nicole Smith Amelia Collier, Zia Zirps

Anjie Clark

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

August 2013

O.Henry 91

GreenScene

Gary Brown, Glenn Dobrogosz, Mayor Robbie Perkins, Kevin Baker, Councilman Zach Matheny

Greensboro’s Carolina SciQuarium Opening Friday, June 28, 2013 Photographs by Lynn Donovan

Peyton McGee

Chris & Braylon Barbee, Emma & Alex Mize, William Pearson

Mary Layton Moffitt & Hastings Moffitt

Jade & Zoey Chiu

Andrew & Zachery Wilson Jana & Braedon Barrett, Felicia & Lauryn Cooper

Xxxx

Landon Kehoe

Roman & Asher Templeton, Jennifer Hutchens, Tessa Anne Odom

Xxxxx Abigail Roley, Mallie Roley, Ella Cate McGarrigan, Jackson & Danny McGarrigan

Austin Whiting

92 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Irving Park

Irving Park

North Beech digbyeye.com

Irving Park

Two locations: 2401-D Hickswood Rd, High Point (336) 454-2020

SO

LD

336-461-6900 www.allicadabra.com Bonded - Insured

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

201 Parkmont Dr.

Great family home updated and maintained throughout! Master Bedroom on main level. Office + LR, DR, Den & Sunroom on main level. Upper level had 3 bedrooms and 2 bonus rooms.

3.5 Baths. Hardwood floors on both levels except bonus. Fenced-in back yard. Recently added slate patio with stacked stone walls. Attached 2-car carport with storage area. True warmth and family comfort in great location! $539,000

2412 North Beech

301 Sunset

Majestic Georgian Irving Park Home.

Family room w/custom FP & entertainment cabinet, hardwoods & marble floors ,custom moldings professionally decorated 4 BR,5baths 2 half baths (His & Her custom areas ) Custom French doors to gray stone patio & Loggia ( copper roof, FP, TV, dining &entertaining area) Lap Pool, fenced bk yd, new landscaping and gardens, Golf Course lot!

“CLICK OR CALL… WE DO IT ALL”

Organizing and Personal Assistant Services Alli McVann

Prime Irving Park Location - Brick home with master on main. 5BR, 4 full BA’s.

Renovated in 2007, 2nd floor finished. New kitchen w/double ovens, pantry, wet bar, hardwoods, 9 ft ceilings on main.

Gorgeous sunroom that can be used as dining area. Back yard fireplace and wood burning oven. Huge bonus on 2nd floor.

Detached 2-car garage w/extra storage plus additional outbuilding. This is a great, spacious family home for family fun and entertaining both inside & out. $559,000

4BR/4.5 BA -- Full finished Basement.

Move-in condition with many extras: Generator; Central Vacuum; 3 Car Garage; Ceiling Fans; Raised Deck; Garden area; Neighborhood Pool; Porch; Security features; Bonus Room, Den and lots of Storage. $499,999

Digby Eye Associates

719 Green Valley Rd, Suite 105, Greensboro (336) 230-1010

111 Elmwood

Xan Tisdale Kay Chesnutt 336-601-2337 336-202-9687

Yost and Little Realty

Xan.Tisdale@pruyostandlittle.com Kay.Chesnutt@pruyostandlittle.com

August 2013

O.Henry 93

hands-on Greensboro’s premier Montessori School...

Area Schools

Serving children ages eighteen months through eighth grade, where students develop a love of learning through individually guided, hands-on discovery and exploration.

Come discover the GMS difference for yourself!

• Authentic Montessori curriculum, exceptional and caring faculty • New, lower pre-school tuition rates for 13-14 • Low student-teacher ratios • Before and after school care, enrichments, and middle school sports

Classic Education A Caring Community WWW.HPFS.ORG (336) 886-5516

High Point Friends School fosters academic excellence for students in Preschool through Eighth Grade. Using hands-on, experiential learning, students are engaged through innovative techniques that prepare them for challenges in higher education and equip them with enhanced problem solving skills. High Point Friends School offers advanced courses of study in the middle school curricula utilizing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) investigations, and state of the art technology. CALL TODAY TO SCHEDULE A VISIT!

High Point Friends School 800-A Quaker Lane, High Point, NC 27262

(336) 886-5516 www.hpfs.org

Prepare to be your best.

Limited openings for fall 2013.

Please call to inquire.

Canterbury School is Greensboro’s only PreK-8 Episcopal day school and combines a rigorous program with a full host of athletic and extracurricular activities. Financial assistance and an extended day program are available.

5400 Old Lake Jeannette Rd. www.canterburygso.org 336.288.2007

Challenging the mind. Nourishing the spirit.

94 O.Henry

August 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Accidental Astrologer

By Astrid Stellanova

Doggone Days

Leo (July 23–August 23) I am Leo, hear me roar . . . right? Wrong. Goodbye kitty. Put a sock in it. The biggest cats let the rest of the pride do the hunting — then just slide on in and enjoy the buffet. (Try playing “nice kitty,” and say “Much obliged!” before enjoying the kill, whydontcha?)

Despite a mighty impressive roar, raging self-doubts start to leave after the trine early this month. Before August ends, big change comes with it. Your hunting grounds are about to expand, Killer.

Virgo (August 24–September 23) Jumpy, ain’t you? There’s an itch you want to scratch soooo bad — and it has you all upside down. My charts say you can get away with a lot right now, Poison Ivy, with one little bitty exception. You look like you’re lying even when you’re not, so get a good mirror and practice. A smirk is not a smile, sugar. Even when things are going so good this month you can hardly believe it your own bad self, just smile and say something charmin’ — before anybody figures out what you’re really up to.

Libra (September 24–October 23) Everybody’s going to start calling you Left Brain this month, cause that’s how smart you’re looking. Uh, huh. Then things get U.P.S.-deliveryman kinda sexy. With your astrological situation, let’s just say you going to wind up hotter than the love child of Bill Gates and J.Lo. Put the lid back on the mayonnaise jar and practice loosening up your dance moves. It wouldn’t kill you to write a thank-you note, either, saying, “Thank You, Miss Astrid.”

Scorpio (October 23–November 21) Before my forced break up with Jose Cuervo, I was seeing more ghosts than the Long Island Medium. When Jupiter starts marching through your house, you start having your own kinda intuitions. Lightning flashes in the dark ain’t always detached retinas.

Sooo . . . work it, Baby. Fast thinking and intuition can come in awful handy.

There’s one little secret you been hanging onto like it’s the last pack of Ho Hos. You sure you wanna keep carrying that load around, Sugar?

Sagittarius (November 23–December 21) Your supernova days are the 14–17; that’s right. You gonna feel super-charged, too, and more than a little foxy, according to me and anybody else with a crystal ball. Waaay fine. But lay low and hang with your pals. You can eat grits, cheat at cards, lie about how many fish you caught — no problem. But whatever you do, do not mouth off at the boss. And if you don’t want a mullet, don’t mouth off to the hairdresser, either.

You heard it straight from a (newly, usually sober) beautician/astrologer.

Capricorn (December 22–January 20) You got a new Target charge card burning a hole in your pocket, with the stars exerting a mighty force in the House of Knock-Off Luxury Products. But you got some financial fixes to untangle before you go all Nate Berkus. Here’s what Astrid says: sweep the floors in your astrological house and wash some windows before you put one more geegaw on the shelf. You seen what happens to them hoarders, Honey? They got milk jugs piled sky-high and they start sleeping on them old Cabbage Patch dolls they got stacked everywhere.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Aquarius (January 21–February 19) Lordamercy, if you want things to work in the love department, it’s time to change gears. You got a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much-obliged, and nobody’s impressed. Your sweetheart ain’t buying it, either, cause you been talking faster than a Yankee with a speeding ticket. Switch to decaf, and hold onto your pantyhose, because things are going to move faster than greased lightning. One thing you got up your sleeve is going to work for you — just not this month.

Pisces (February 20–March 20) Some people had rather climb on the roof to tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. You, my fishy, absolutely should not drink and dial — take it from ole Astrid — even if your sense of righteousness is screaming. Around the 10th, you might get it into your head to confront something else head on — fuggedaboutit. Two weeks later, you find yourself with a Moon Pie in each hand at the drive-thru ordering milkshakes.

That’s as crazy as you ought to let yourself get, you hear?

Aries (March 21–April 20) Sayin’ an Aries oughta go with the unknown is like telling a billy goat to make a ruckus. He’s gonna do it anyway. It gets him noticed. But what does it accomplish when he eats the sheets on the clothesline?

You’re like that billy goat — royalty in the Redneck Empire. You got a powerful effect, some strange kinda magic. If you can restrain your wild self for about ten minutes, though, you’re liable to find out true love is right there in front of you, along with a lotta other things more appetizing than bed sheets.

Taurus (April 21–May 21) You’re the bologna in somebody’s cheese sandwich, Darlin’; you just don’t know it yet. Sometime after the 4th, Venus slips into your house of love. Pay attention. You gotta sweet surprise coming on the 22nd, too, and opportunities are just about everywhere you look. Don’t you get your panties in a wad cause you think it is too good to be true. Look with love, not fear. You’re just skeered. F-E-A-R is just “false evidence appearing real,” Toots.

Gemini (May 22–June 21) Some temptations, a shocker-roo, and a complication are all on slate, you wild child. A full moon is going to rattle your world around the 20th. Sometimes you gotta let the card lie there, even when the fingers are itching and your mouth is saying “Hit me.” It is not exactly your style to play things straight or careful. You’re a cagey one, with more moves than a Gypsy debutante. Spell R-E-S-T-R-A-I-N-T before you get bedazzled and shake your booty.

Cancer (June 22–July 23) Making sense of this month is like trying to meditate at Chuck E. Cheese’s. It’s tough. Don’t just do something. Sit there. Seriously, crab legs. The 14th is the one day you might trust your instincts — apart from that, find your place on the beach and sit tight in that beach chair, honey. The tide comes and goes. It’s called ebbing. It ain’t no tsunami. OH For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.

August 2013

O.Henry 95

O.Henry Ending

Confessions of a Real Greensboro Housewife (Note to self: Check thong before doing cartwheels at Circle Meeting)

By CyntHiA AdAMs

My unironed khakis and shirts

outnumbered clean and pressed ones. I set off to fix this in a workman like — no, a housewifely — way. I found the iron on the closet shelf above my long-lost Canon camera, and fired both up. At least the iron powered on. The ironing board was easier found, although its legs seemed annoyingly frozen. Apparently, this can happen if an ironing board is left folded away for, say, five years.

Attempting this mountain of ironing, I decided to watch a little art-imitating-life segment of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, or RHBH. As I pressed and steamed, hoping for we’re-inthis-together housekeeping tips from women who earn their Windex money as paid professionals, I learned so much more than hoped for.

These are real housewives!

They offered housewife coping strategies. The grieving widow of the group keeps lips attached to a glass of chardonnay. Exhibiting wild mood swings and an impulse to don brief-or-no underpants and do cartwheels on camera, she is the wild card of the RHBH. I assume this is all because she is caught up on her ironing and looking for a way to discharge pent-up angst. When not cartwheeling, the widow volunteers and dates her divorce lawyer. (Note to self: Time to wine-up at Trader Joe’s.)

Camille, former video dancer and former celebrity spouse, has a house so enormous it would account for the fact that she is visibly wasting away just chasing dust bunnies and her (never visible nor audible) young children. Where are those kids stashed, pray tell? The root cellar? A young boyfriend and psychic friend keep her purring. (Note to self: Buy new house with root cellar.)

Eternally fertile Kyle, on the other hand, not only has children in abundance, but they run the gamut from toddler to teenager. With a swish of her Genie-in-abottle ponytail, yoga instructors and makeup artists appear. Voila! She oversees impressive poolside parties — with a conspicuous absence of Tupperware to burp or Silpada to hawk. Serving tiny food. (Note to self: No cheese balls at future parties. No Jello-O, either, unless it’s in the bottom of a shot glass.)

Multitasking Lisa not only runs a hotel-sized house but also some restaurants. Wisely, she has engaged a maid named Maria to dust off the Picassos and make tea for her adoring husband. Thereby allowing her time to adore her kitted-out dog, Jiggy, who suffers alopecia. (Note to self: Look up “alopecia” and plan philanthropic fundraiser.)

96 O.Henry

August 2013

Housewife Brandi forgoes housework but fixates upon her dirty, rotten scoundrel of an ex and his wife, and writes a confessional. We all know a Brandi. Ten years past divorce, they still drink and dial, telling badly bored BFFs what a messed-up jerk said ex and replacement wife are. Hiccup. (Note to self: Disconnect landline.)

In a disturbing, vacant-eyed way, one housewife dusted away. Child star Kim is also the Genie’s sister. She occupies a tidy ranch bungalow, and apparently spends dazed hours polishing picture frames while muttering inscrutable things.

(Note to self: Remember all those gift shop signs about an orderly house as indicative of a disordered mind?)

Newish housewife Yolanda really is a housewife. She recently married a music mogul, and knows how to keep his decibels revved and rickets at bay.

Here’s her secret: the vitamin C in lemons. She planted a lemon grove on their sprawling estate, and serves up lemon chicken, lemons mounded in a bowl, lemons sliced in water, lemonade, and any lemony dish she can conceive. She jumps onto the countertop to better admire said mogul when he comes off an exhausting trip with Sting or Streisand, and serves him this family fave: a fragrant platter of lemons. (Note to self: Pucker power!)

The ironing done, show over, feeling well versed in housewifery, a peace descends. No mansion to dust; no lemon groves to tend; no party to plan; or cartwheels to bend. Just vacuum, mop, and order in. OH Illustartion by Harry Blair The Art & Soul of Greensboro

John Reganess, CFP 速 First Vice President - Investments Fundamental Choice Portfolio Manager 324 W. Wendover Ave #301 Greensboro, NC 27408 (336) 544-1015 john.reganess@wfadvisors.com https://home.wellsfargoadvisors.com/john.reganess

0912-00121 09/2012