The Rhinoceros Times Greensboro
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Yanceyville Banking Enters 20th Century by Scott D. Yost county editor
I keep a lot of souvenirs. Well, actually, I keep a lot of things that I call “souvenirs,” but to be fair the category is really a lot broader than that. These things are really just anything I have trouble getting rid of. Whenever I can’t figure out what to do with a scrap of paper or some other item, they usually end up in a manila envelope marked “Souvenirs.” For instance, one envelope I came across recently while cleaning out was labeled, “Souvenirs 1990s.” I started going through it, hoping I could get rid of some of it in my ongoing effort to clean out my life – however, the truth is that, once I started going through it, it brought me so much utter joy that I couldn’t imagine throwing any of it away. Really, anything from my past that has made it this far into my life over the last two decades without getting thrown out – well, it’s made it around this long for a reason. Maybe sometime in the next decade I’ll throw some of it away. Like, take this picture from the ’90s of me playing basketball over at a former court at Lindley Park, just off of Spring Garden Street. It was like noon on a Tuesday or whatever, and I was out shooting, and a News & Record photographer came out and introduced himself and asked if he could take my picture. I said sure, and the next day this picture was on the front page of a section in the News & Record; it may even have been on the very front page of the paper.
These days, getting my picture or seeing my name in the paper isn’t a big deal, but this was one of the first times it happened, so I liked it: This was one of my first brushes with fame, and I enjoyed the notoriety, but some friends who were with me the first time I saw it read the caption out loud to me. It said that, when you want to play basketball and no one else is there, then “a little one-on-none basketball might be just the thing for a bright cool day.” Then it said that it’s Lindley Park and the guy in the picture is Scott Yost. But here’s the part my friends pointed out to me. It said: “Yost, who said he is a writer, played while listening to the radio …” My friends read that and they all started laughing, and I was like, “What’s wrong with that?” One of them said, “Don’t you see? They’re calling you a liar. It doesn’t say, ‘Yost, who is a writer’; it says, ‘Yost, who said he is a writer’ – which is the same as saying, ‘Yost, who’s clearly a liar who goes around claiming to be a writer …” And they all had a good laugh at my expense – as, presumably, did everyone in town who read that. Despite the way the News & Record made it sound, I really was a writer back then – though most of the things I’d published at that time were horror short stories and not many people had read them. The other thing I like about this photo is that it brings back memories of that (Continued on page 15)
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