HOME FOR KEEPS BY JIM DODSON FOUNDING EDITOR, O.HENRY MAGAZINE
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY BLAIR
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orty-two years ago this spring, I left my hometown of Greensboro for the bright lights of Atlanta and a job as a staff writer on the oldest Sunday magazine in America. I’d just turned 24. It was a dream job, covering everything from sports to presidential politics for the magazine. After my time at the largest news magazine of the South, I moved on to work for a legendary magazine in New England, which launched a career working for the leading travel and golf magazines that took me anywhere I ever dreamed of going in the world. By the time marriage and fatherhood found me living with my young family in a post-and-beam house on a beautiful forested hilltop on the coat of Maine, I feared I might never find my way home to the leafy green city where streets were named for ancestors and my family roots reached back to pre-Revolutionary times. This was the late 1980s and early ’90s, and like many cities of the region, Greensboro was struggling to overcome changing economic circumstances and somehow redefine its future. Looking back, it took the unexpected opportunity to serve as Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at a historic University in Virginia and a simultaneous invitation to spend a fortnight covering the U.S. Open of 2005 for the award-winning Pilot newspaper of Southern Pines that brought me briefly home — or very near it — again. I signed on figuring I’d stay two or three weeks in Pinehurst, my old golfing stomping ground, and reconnect with friends from Greensboro before I headed off to a new horizon. Those wonderful evenings with friends reminded me how much I loved the city where I grew up. The hand of sweet Providence did the rest. A short time late, a gifted art director named Andie Rose and I transformed a local newsprint tabloid called PineStraw into a serious arts and culture magazine for the Carolina Sandhills. Buoyed by its enthusiastic reception, in 2011 — the aftermath of the Great Recession
— we decided to launch a sister arts magazine for Greensboro because I knew no other place in the South could match the Gate City for its wealth of history, enlightened civic involvement, diverse social culture and a fulsome grassroots arts community that was quietly helping to fuel a Gate City renaissance. It proved a wise decision. O.Henry magazine — named for Greensboro’s famous native son whose short stories with unexpected endings made him the most beloved author of the early 20th century — launched in August of 2011, and now approaches its 10th anniversary as the voice of a city that is blooming almost everywhere you look these days, symbolized by the new Stephen Tanger Center for the Performing Arts, a transformed downtown and thriving South Elm Street and art district, spectacular LeBauer Park and revitalized urban living on a thoughtful human scale. Indeed, as one decade ends and another begins, Greensboro has been singled out by several national organizations for its warmth, physical beauty and high “livability” factors that include everything from reasonable housing prices to civic roadways that are described as the easiest to navigate in the nation -- not to mention several outstanding colleges and a pair of booming state universities with growing national profiles. Topping off the list: a thriving sports scene, an uncommon number of spectacular gardens and wonderful public spaces. Of course, some of us have always known it was only a matter of time before the rest of America discovered what many of us have known all along — that there’s no better place to live, work and make one’s own happy O.Henry ending than in the Gate City of the South. James (Jim) Dodson is the Founding Editor of O.Henry Magazine, award-winning journalist and and bestselling author of 14 books, including four Books of the Year in the world of golf. His latest project is The Great Wagon Road for Simon & Schuster, expected in 2021. 5