Month: February 2017

A brain tumor ended one career but gave birth to an even more extraordinary life of service

By Jim Moriarty   •   Photographs by John Gessner

Sometimes great events are measured in centimeters. A couple of them turned up 13 years ago.

Dr. Robin Cummings, who is now the chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, was on his rounds, looking in on patients at FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital. It was an early winter evening, full darkness by 7 o’clock. He had performed two heart bypass surgeries that day. Walking alongside his colleague and friend Dr. Carl Berk, an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon, he mentioned he was having trouble hearing in one of his ears. Dr. Berk asked him a couple of questions. They diverted to radiology, where Cummings had an MRI. It revealed a two-centimeter acoustic neuroma located roughly where the brain stem meets the brain.

“It was a benign tumor, which is good,” says Cummings. “Most brain tumors are not.” Surgery was performed successfully a few weeks later. His hearing was preserved to a large degree, though even that has waned in the intervening years. But the surgery also affected his fine motor skills. Cummings knew that would happen before the doctors in Raleigh made the first incision. “Where it was located, you could not have put it  in a more key place in my body to affect my livelihood,” says Cummings. After the surgery he tried to hold an instrument and focus. “My hand would shake. So, I said, ‘I’m not going back.’ I quit. I retired early.”

Sort of.

It wasn’t just a livelihood Cummings lost that day. That’s the dispassionate, the clinical word for it. What he’d lost was a life. An all-consuming occupation, his mission, something he’d trained for from the moment he saw a beating heart in a chest, something he practiced with consummate skill. Something that defined who he was had been taken from him by the very capriciousness of life he dealt with every day he put on surgeon’s scrubs.

“It was like going through a divorce, going through a death,” says Cummings. After he retired, he and his wife, Rebecca, would join friends for an evening and he discovered he had nothing to talk about. “I really couldn’t carry on a conversation,” says Cummings. “No exaggeration.” Normal things, the gritty stuff of day-to-day, had eluded him. Turned out, the skill set of the highly skilled was also highly limited.

“It really was about six months of going through some depression,” he says. “I remember sitting in our kitchen one day and Rebecca wasn’t there and I was just, I was screaming and shaking my hands. I don’t understand this. Why can’t I operate? Why did this happen? God-why-did-you-do-this kind of thing.”

His self-prescribed therapy was to move. Just move. Do something. And he hasn’t stopped since. It led him to the hospital’s board of trustees; to being the director of Community Care of the Sandhills; to manage North Carolina’s Office of Rural Health and Community Care; to oversee the state’s Medicaid program, delivering health care to 1.8 million people with a budget of $14 billion; and, ultimately, back home, back to Pembroke, back to Robeson County, back to the place where it all began.

Dr. John Dempsey, the president of Sandhills Community College, is a longtime acquaintance of both the Cummings. “I wrote my master’s thesis on the subject of power in the works of Ernest Hemingway,” says Dempsey. “Most of Hemingway’s characters are people who have lost one power, had it replaced by another and were far the better for the experience. And, I think in truth, that’s Robin’s situation as well. As he lost one ability, he gained others.”

Cummings grew up on a 25-acre farm in Robeson County’s Union Chapel Community, roughly three miles from the chancellor’s house on the campus of UNC Pembroke, where he now lives. His father, Simeon, was a Methodist minister. His mother, Maude, and the couple’s nine children — Robin is the second youngest — worked the farm to keep the electricity on.

“Tobacco. Corn. Cotton. Soybeans. And cucumbers. Later on, we got into cucumbers,” says Cummings. “I’ve picked cucumbers, man, I’ll tell you. If you want to work hard, pick cucumbers.”

Or tobacco.

“Sunday Dad would preach — Sunday morning, Sunday night. Then Monday was our day to put in tobacco,” says Cummings. Snapping leaves off the stalks by hand, working from the sand lugs, the dirty, heavy bottom leaves, up on each successive Monday. Beginning as soon as it was light enough to see, getting wet from the feet up with the morning dew, then from the head down with the sweat of the afternoon sun. Their allotment was 1.5 acres. “Usually you had about six croppings,” he says. “We would get up at 4:30 on Monday morning, go to the barn, unload the barn — it’s been curing for the past week — put it in the pack house and then by 6:00, 6:30 we go to the field crop and do our acre and a half.”

Cummings’ mother graded the tobacco in the pack house, A for the golden leaves, then B and C. “She would put those in different piles and we would wrap each pile in a big sheet,” says Cummings. “One of the worst whippings I ever got was when I was jumping on the Grade A tobacco.”

When Cummings was in the 8th grade at Pembroke Middle School, he met a little 7th grader, Rebecca, who lived in the Harpers Ferry community. Both are members of the Lumbee Tribe. Rebecca’s mother worked in Converse’s Chuck Taylor plant; her father drove long haul trucks from one end of the country to the other. “She grabbed on and wouldn’t let go,” Cummings says, laughing. Now they have have four grown children of their own.

Simeon Cummings, the minister at what would become the largest American Indian church east of the Mississippi, Prospect United Methodist, was also a member of the first four-year graduating class at Pembroke, getting his degree after returning from World War II where he served — of all things — as a medic. Education was a family value. Robin Cummings went to UNC-Chapel Hill and graduated with a degree in zoology but knew he wanted to go to medical school. He took a year off when he and Rebecca were married. They also bought a car. He still has the bill of sale.

“It was a Chrysler LeBaron,” Cummings says. “My dad gave me a Toyota Celica to get through school, which broke down all the time. I took that Toyota Celica, and went down to the Lumberton Chrysler place. I didn’t know what I was doing. The salesman played me like a yo-yo. He pointed out this brown LeBaron. ‘I bet you want that car right there. Here’s the sticker price, son. That’s what it costs.’ I remember laying in bed that night and Rebecca says, ‘What are you thinking about?’ I said, ‘I can’t believe we just borrowed $4,000.’ To me, that was the beginning of our life.”

Cummings spent that year working in a dye factory, second shift, at something nudging minimum wage. “It was my first exposure to factory kind of work. What I saw that really upset me was the way the upper level people treated the folks down on the floor. I’m not talking about a racial thing. We’re up here, you’re down there. It really was caste kind of thinking. That second shift, it helped me fill out those applications and get into medical school, boy. Don’t waste time.”

The Cummings farm, most of those 25 acres, is still in the family, but the only part Robin owns is a memory. Financing for medical school came from multiple sources — loans, scholarships, what have you — but one of the pieces came from his father, the minister with the four-year degree. In the original movie The Magnificent Seven, the Mexican villagers tell Yul Brynner they’ve collected everything of value in their town in order to hire him and he replies, “I’ve been offered a lot for my work, but never everything.” One weekend back from school, in the home place on Union Chapel Road, his father handed him a check, small in the grand scheme of things but everything in other ways. “My dad took my part (of the farm) that he was going to give me and sold it to one of my other brothers to give me money to go to medical school,” says Cummings. “He was so proud.”

From Robeson County to Chapel Hill to Duke to operating rooms in Moore County to another one in Raleigh, where instead of giving the care he was receiving it, Cummings found himself back in Raleigh again, only this time finding a way to help 1.8 million people.

“My two years in Raleigh prepared me so well for this job,” Cummings says of his position leading UNC Pembroke. “When I went into work as Medicaid director it wasn’t what fire do I need to take care of today, it was what fire is burning hottest that will burn me up if I don’t take care of it today. Anyway, it prepared me. I dealt with bureaucracy. I dealt with politicians. I dealt with a big organization. I tell people it was a Harvard grad school education for two years, hands-on, trial-by-fire kind of stuff.”

Lacking a background as an academic administrator, Cummings was an unconventional pick to be Pembroke’s chancellor. Turns out convention isn’t as vital as leadership. It isn’t a matter of where UNC Pembroke was as much as where he wanted to take it.

“UNC Pembroke was a teachers’ college when it started. We added a school of business. We have a fairly strong arts and sciences school now. Nursing has come on. How do we retool ourselves for the future? What are the degrees that UNC Pembroke should be focusing on? How does this university serve this region? Here’s this great, wonderful university, yet we’re located in the poorest county in the poorest part of the state and we’ve been here 129 years. That doesn’t make sense, folks. This is this region’s university. Look at Buies Creek. Take Campbell University out of there and what would it be? Imagine if we could put that kind of machine here in southeast North Carolina. We would change the dynamics of this region in an incredibly good way.”

The university has developed a dual degree program with the North Carolina State University College of Engineering. The recently passed educational bond has earmarked $23 million for a state-of-the-art school of business. The building will actually cost $36 million, but Cummings views the fundraising challenge as another opportunity. They hope to break ground next year. They’ve created a program in collaboration with the NC State School of Veterinary Medicine, one of the hardest post-graduate programs to access in the nation.

“The honest truth is, of all the things we are for our institutions,” says Dempsey, “probably foremost among them is cheerleader. I think Robin is a great cheerleader for UNCP. He understands the political process because he worked in Raleigh. He does understand, I think, what it means to deal with very strong personalities. He is nominally in charge but just as the real work at the hospital is done by the doctors and nurses, the real work at the university is done by the professors and counselors. He is learning that you lead these institutions by cajoling rather than by declaring. Not ever to underestimate the importance of a cardiac surgeon, but the hearts and minds that Robin is touching now at UNC Pembroke are certainly equal to those that he touched in his career as a surgeon. I couldn’t be more impressed. He’s always upbeat. He’s always looking to the future.”

And still on the move.  PS

Jim Moriarty is senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at
jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Deep in the Sandhills, a lingering legacy of dreams

By Bill Fields

On a January morning that would soon warm up so that a sweater was plenty for a hike in the woods, I was off to look for gold — or at least look for a place where men used to look for gold.

My guide, Donnie Reeves, who has studied and explored Montgomery County’s gold heritage for more than three decades, led me in his pickup to a pull-in for the Uwharrie National Forest north of Troy. At the urging of his father he had wanted to seek his fortune in Alaska but never made the long trip. Instead, after becoming fascinated with the story of gold much closer to his native Alamance County, he made a much shorter journey.

“I lived in an old school bus for two years — me, my wife and children,” Reeves says.  “My mother and daddy bought themselves a school bus and they came right behind me. We lived in that bus for two years and prospected when we could. We loved the area and never left.”

As I parked my rental car next to Reeves’ truck a few miles from his current home down the road from an old Methodist Church, I was not only excited about my forthcoming tour of the site of the former Russell Gold Mine, but also thinking about how my roots intersected with North Carolina’s 19th century gold rush, which predated California’s and was the exclusive supplier of domestic gold for the United States Mint from 1804 to 1828.

Many people were drawn to the Carolina slate belt, a series of rocks 25 to 70 miles wide extending from the South Carolina to Virginia borders for the potential riches — or more realistically, a job — in the 1800s. Lockey Arnold Henderson, my great-grandfather, who was born in 1818, left Chatham County on horseback as a young farmer. He headed for the Montgomery County village of Eldorado, the Old North State’s twist on El Dorado, the mythical “Lost City of Gold” in South America. (Locals pronounce a “long a” in the one-word version.) In the Uwharries, great-grandpa found work in the gold mines, settled and had a large family, including my grandfather, B.L. Henderson, who was born March 28, 1861, less than a month before the Civil War began.

“The first gold mining in North Carolina may have been by the Indians in Cherokee County before white settlers arrived,” P. Albert Carpenter III wrote in a 1993 North Carolina Geological Survey. Carpenter also notes reports that explorer Hernando de Soto attempted to mine gold in 1540 near Murphy, N.C. There were accounts of mines operating in Gaston and Mecklenburg counties before the Revolutionary War, and of the U.S. Mint receiving gold from North Carolina as early as 1793, according to Carpenter.

The frequently cited and “first authenticated discovery of gold” in North Carolina — and the U.S. — according to the state report, occurred in 1799 by a boy fishing in a Cabarrus County stream. But three years went by before the child’s father, John Reed, a German immigrant farmer, took the yellow, 17-pound nugget that had been used as a doorstop to a second jeweler for evaluation. Swindled by the jeweler, who paid him only $3.50, Reed eventually figured out the scam and reportedly received approximately $3,000 for Conrad Reed’s find. Reed’s Little Meadow Creek, where the first nugget came from, turned out to hold more gold and the rush had begun.

Capitalizing on the proximity of the valuable mineral, the Charlotte mint opened in 1837, producing $1, $2.50 and $5 gold coins — issuing more than $5 million worth — until it closed at the outset of the Civil War. During the 19th century, gold was discovered in a third of North Carolina’s 100 counties, with 345 mines open at one point according to state records, although other sources place the number at more than 600 during the peak years when gold mining trailed only farming as North Carolina’s biggest industry.

“Hundreds weren’t listed because they were really Mom and Pop operations,” says Reeves. “Farmers would operate them during the wintertime when they didn’t have crops to work.”

Montgomery County and Moore County each had about 20 mines, the former more of a hotbed of activity. Most of the Moore County mines were located north of Highway 24/27 southwest of Robbins. A “Gold Region” post office existed in that area from 1844 to 1866, then was renamed “Carters Mills,” for one of the mines, and operated until 1932. A “Gold Region No. 2” was open from 1877 to 1879.

A 1903 advertisement in the Pinehurst Outlook for “real estate and hunting grounds” offered by R.L. Burns of Carthage noted “fine farm, trucking peach, grape and berry lands . . . Also GOLD property.”

Moore County’s gold caught the eye of inventor Thomas Edison when he visited North Carolina in 1890. “(He) is in Moore county on a prospecting tour,” The Evening Visitor of Raleigh reported on June 25. “He is said to have taken options on large bodies of lands, rich in gold. Mr. Edison will soon form a syndicate of English capitalists and commence work, and the purchaser contemplates turning the water through it for gold-washing purposes.”

A “Gold Mine Pit” is even denoted 1 mile northeast of the Village Green on an 1897 map of Pinehurst and vicinity — likely a “prospect” where a tiny bit of gold was discovered. “They probably found a little bit of gold when they dug down but there wasn’t enough to keep digging,” Reeves says. “There are thousands of those places. More than likely, that’s what happened there.”

There were no such false starts at the Russell Mine. By the middle of the 19th  century it was the biggest gold mine in Montgomery County and the subject for a detailed 1853 report from the Perseverance Mining Company projecting millions in revenue over the course of a 60-year lease on the 40 acres of mineral land.

“More than likely your great-grandfather worked in this mine,” Reeves says as we walk into the national forest and see the first sign of the Russell operation, an old 100-foot shaft with bars installed at its entrance to keep out the curious. “There were homes and shacks where the workers lived. Hundreds of people lived here. There was a general store and a hotel across the street. Forty-some miners worked on a shift, and they’d run 24 hours.”

Some gold extraction was done through placer mining, a process in which miners washed eroded ores of rocks containing gold with pans, rockers and sluices (a grated rectangular box). The other type of deposit was found underground and in open pits dug by the miners in the form of gold veins often embedded in quartz. The largest excavation on the Russell property was “The Big Cut,” a pit 300 feet long, 150 feet wide and 60 feet deep.

The ore was crushed by 190-pound “stamps” that fell the height of a man or more, pounding the gold into a fine substance. The equipment allowed a mine to process 20 to 50 tons of material daily instead of just a few tons.

“You could feel the ground shake a half mile from here because of the many stamp mills,” Reeves says, a jarring observation on such a peaceful winter day. “You could hear it miles away.”

We walk farther into the forest and encounter “The Big Cut,” now cluttered with trees and other vegetation that make it seem smaller than its working dimensions. Miners would earn less than a dollar a day for their dirty, exhausting labor. Some miners went west when gold was found in California in 1849. Many of the mines closed as they became less profitable. Most closed down for the duration of the Civil War with the exception of the Silver Hill Mine in Davidson County, which produced ammunition for the Confederate Army. Some of the bullets were not only lead but included gold and silver because wartime wouldn’t allow for a costly and lengthy separation process.

“Lot of the Yankees who came down here had gold pans strapped to their saddles. They thought they were going to come in here and get rich,” Reeves says.

Following the Civil War there was a revival in North Carolina gold mining that continued, with intermittent lulls, into the first quarter of the 20th century.

“This portion of Montgomery County is a vast gold bed,” a correspondent for The Weekly Observer in Raleigh reported in 1878 while visiting the Swift Island mine. “Many pieces of gold weighing from one to two and three pounds have been found. We saw the hole in the ground from which two pieces were taken that weighed exactly a pound and a quarter each, each piece looking just like a frog.”

Thirty years later, the Asheboro Courier noted: “Bud Morgan found a valuable nugget of gold weighing 20 ounces near Eldorado.”

The Coggins Mine, a mile northeast of Eldorado on the road to New Hope, operated off and on from 1882 to 1934 as one of the busiest in the area. It was the scene of tragedy on Jan. 15, 1914 when three miners, eager to leave work on payday, hopped into the ore bucket for the 350-foot ride to the surface instead of climbing a ladder.

“They wanted to beat everybody else out of the mine,” Reeves says. “When it got to the top, the bucket hung on a ledge and flipped over and they fell to their deaths.”

Lizzie Sanders, wife of one of the three men, Walter Sanders, was in her home at the time. “The whistle at the mine started blowing,” Lizzie recalled decades later in an interview with the Montgomery County Historical Society. “Sometimes, they’d just give it a puff or two. But this time it just kept on and on.” Presently Lizzie found out how serious the accident was, fainting upon hearing the news.

According to the N.C. Geological Survey, total gold production in the state is approximately 1.1 million ounces, worth an estimated $25 million at historical prices. At current prices of $1,230 an ounce, it would be worth $1.24 billion.

“In the 1980s and ’90s I worked for a number of gold mining companies that came in here and investigated, trying to see if any of the old mines were worth mining,” Reeves says. “We did rock samples, but it would be too expensive to mine. We know there is over 20,000 ounces in the ground, but those companies were looking for a million-dollar deposit.”

Scores of people come to Montgomery County annually to pan and sluice for gold. Reeves has spent a lot of his time educating the recreational panners how to do it. While we were talking in his kitchen, Reeves gave me a small water-filled vial containing about a dozen small flakes and a nugget the news of which wouldn’t make the newspaper. This gold came from a nearby creek.

“When it gets to the size of the biggest one in there and you drop it in your gold pan and it you hear it go ‘clunk,’” he says, “it’s a nugget.” My gold is only worth a few dollars but he warns me not the shake the vial. “That gold is heavy enough to knock the bottom out,” he says, providing another example why so many went through so much for so long in pursuit of the element.

After our trek to the former Russell property, I had one other request of Reeves. There was another mine site in the Eldorado area I wanted to see.

We arrive at a 21st century general store and ask the owner if she can contact the owner of an adjacent parcel of land. A call is made and permission is granted. In a few minutes we’re maneuvering through trees and dead leaves about 100 yards east of Highway 109.

“There it is,” Reeves says, when we come to a clearing and a water-filled hole of about 10-by-10 feet. “That’s the Henderson Mine.”

My middle name, possibly some of my relatives.

Nearly a century ago, it had been a working shaft of 40 or 50 feet deep. Now, there was the reflection of the blue sky on the accumulated water. The way the light was hitting the old mine, there was a bit of a golden hue on the surface. I took a few photographs and began walking toward the car.

“Just a hole now,” Reeves said.

This mine was history, maybe even some of my own.  PS