Patriot Games

Building on a tradition of success

By Lee Pace

Pinehurst is where the golf architectural genius of Donald Ross sprouted. It’s where thousands of visitors in the 1910s and ’20s were first exposed to golf, were smitten and spread the idea for new courses in their hometowns across the Northeast and Midwest. The No. 2 course at the resort has been host to the U.S. Open (men and women), the U.S. Amateur (men and women), the Ryder Cup and PGA Championship.

There are 40 golf courses within Moore County and a sand wedge of its border.

So why shouldn’t the area be home to one of North Carolina’s juggernaut high school golf teams?

Pinecrest High School has won the boys 4-A state title four of the last six years and collected three in a row from 2015-17. The Patriots finished fifth in the most recent state competition, with Raleigh Broughton taking the championship while Pinecrest’s A.J. Beechler won his second consecutive individual title.

“We broke open the floodgates my senior year, and it seemed to really set the tone for what was to come with future teams,” says Zach Martin, a member of the 2013 state championship team who went on to play at the University of North Carolina. “The success builds on itself. This run of state championships is pretty strong.”

The Patriots’ remarkable stretch of success in both the boys’ and girls’ programs began two decades ago when one of the staff golf professionals at Pinehurst Resort and Country Club was frustrated that there was no golf team at West Pine Middle School. Rich Wainwright wanted a team that his son John, a sixth-grader, could play on and begin to develop his game. So Wainwright volunteered to start a team, hoping John and his friends would be motivated to continue the game into high school at Pinecrest.

“I remember having a lot of fun with it,” says John, who is now 32, and is a golf instructor and tournament director for U.S. Kids Golf in Southern Pines. “A lot of guys got the bug then. Once our team started, we bonded and became lifelong friends. We had golf to talk about during the school day, and it was fun getting out of school for golf matches. That bond and that structure helped when we went to high school.”

When John moved to high school, Wainwright began volunteering as a coach for the Pinecrest team in 2000 and has been the Patriots’ “co-coach” ever since, working with high school staffers Sandy Sackmann, Jennifer Kearney and Lynne Beechler through the years. Wainwright enjoyed his experiences teaching juniors at the club dating back to the 1980s and was further motivated by his boss at Pinehurst, the late Don Padgett Sr., who was a longtime proponent of junior golf and was the resort’s director of golf from 1987-2002.

“Rich always loved to work with youth; he had a drive and enthusiasm to work with young people,” says Ken Crow, who was also on the Pinehurst staff at the time and now has a son, Benjamin, on the Pinecrest team. “Back in the ’80s, Rich was the guy having the most fun in junior clinics, encouraging them to get better.”

Wainwright remembers commiserating with Padgett in the early 2000s over a patch of high scores posted in recent competitions. Padgett, as he was wont to do, leaned back in his office chair overlooking the putting green to the south side of the Pinehurst clubhouse and addressed Wainwright by his nickname, Red.

“Red, just have ’em putt,” Padgett advised. “Teach those kids the short game. Have ’em pitch the ball over that row of bushes and see who can get it closest.”

The light popped on in Wainwright’s head. For going on two decades now, it’s been all about the short game — sage advice not only for high school golf teams but rank-and-file golfers of every shape, size and era.

“If these kids have good short games, we can win most tournaments,” Wainwright says. “I do very little to nothing in the full swing. We do a lot of situational short game practice.”

Golfers coming through the program remember all the 5-foot putts at sundown, their stomachs growling for dinner and the pressure of having to make x-number in succession so everyone could go home.

“We learned a lot about playing under pressure,” Martin says. “Everyone on the team would have to make, like, 10 putts in a row before anyone could go home. You don’t want to be the guy who misses and keeps everyone there to putt another round.”

Sometimes Wainwright will have his golfers hole out a chip before they can leave or even jar two from a bunker before calling it a day. He’ll set up recovery shots from the woods and encourage his golfers to envision a shot with a 7-iron and another with a pitching wedge.

“He’s a numbers guy,” Martin says. “Golf comes down to the short game when you want to score well. He definitely puts a lot of importance on it. It’s paid off the last few years.”

“Dad’s gotten pretty good teaching guys how to play the game of golf better,” John says. “He doesn’t spend too much range time. It’s all about how to get the ball in the hole. How do you still score when you’re not having your best day at ball-striking? It’s been neat to watch him evolve.”

It’s obviously worked well. Pinecrest won the girls’ state title in 2001 and 2016 and the boys’ in 2006, 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017, and more than a dozen golfers have advanced to play collegiately.

Joshua Martin followed older brother Zach to Chapel Hill. Jack Fields and Robert Riesen also played at Carolina, Eric Bae at Wake Forest and Josh Stockwell at UNC Greensboro. This year’s boys’ team has four players going to Division I schools in Benjamin Crow and Symon Balbin to UNC Greensboro and A.J. Beechler and Attie Giles to East Carolina.

Among the top girls’ players have been Josie Shinn at UNC, Gabrielle Weiss at James Madison, Elizabeth Nguyen at Georgetown and Mackenzie Battle at The Citadel. Wainwright is particularly high on sophomore Jaclyn Kenzel and senior Lorin Wagler on this year’s team.

The environment has helped attract golfers who otherwise might not have been in Pinehurst. Bae, who was born in South Korea, was living in Raleigh when he made the decision to fully commit to becoming an elite golfer, and moved to Pinehurst to live with his adopted uncle.

“If you want to get good at golf, where better place to be than Pinehurst?” asks Bae, who earned a starting position as a freshman last spring at Wake Forest and is a sophomore now. “Playing for Pinecrest was an awesome experience. I enjoyed every minute of it. Guys like Joshua Martin and A.J. were really competitive; it helped me improve as a player. Coach Wainwright created a really good environment for me to improve.”

In mid-April, the Patriots were playing a match at Pinehurst No. 8, the scene of their 2015 state title, when Bae eagled the par-5 17th and then birdied 18 to secure the championship. Giles had a 50-yard wedge shot and knocked it in the hole for an eagle.

“Coach, I channeled my ‘inner Eric Bae,’” Giles told Wainwright.

Wainwright texted Bae and told him, “You’re still helping us win golf tournaments.”

That’s the way it goes in championship athletic programs — success begets success. A culture is created and grows on itself.

“I’ve had a lot of fun,” Wainwright says. “I like to win. My goal is 10 state championships. We’re closing in on it.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has been chronicling the Sandhills golf scene in PineStraw since 2008.

Feathered Phantom

The secretive, beautiful green heron finds a summer home in these parts

By Susan Campbell

Think of a heron and a tall, lanky wader comes to mind. However, the green heron is quite a different animal! This stocky bird is about the size of a crow with relatively short yellow legs. But it does have a dark, dagger-like bill and a handsome, velvety-green back, dark cap and chestnut-colored body. And in true heron form, it moves slowly and deliberately, hunting in and around the water’s edge. Because of this slow-motion lifestyle, this bird is often overlooked. When it flushes from thick vegetation or croaks to advertise its territory might be the rare occasions that this bird gets noticed.

Green herons can be found through most of our state. Here in the Sandhills and Piedmont they spend the spring and summer months in all types of wet habitat. Not surprisingly, they feed on fish, amphibians and large invertebrates. They have even been known to grab hummingbirds from time to time! Very versatile hunters, green herons can dive and swim after prey if motivated. Moving through deep water is likely made possible by their natural buoyancy and partial webbing between their toes. Most remarkably, this is one of a very few bird species that actually uses tools. Individuals have been known to use worms, twigs, feathers, bread crusts and other enticements to lure small fish within easy reach.

Green herons are adaptable when it comes to breeding as well. A pair bond is formed between males and females from spring through late summer. The male will choose a spot and begin nest building early on. The female will take over and construct a platform of sticks that may be solid or quite flimsy. But the nest will always be protected, whether it is in a tree or large shrub. The clutch of three to five eggs is assiduously tended by both parents. Likewise, the young will be fed and brooded not only by the female but by the male as well. And for several weeks the heron family will stick together while the juveniles learn what it takes to survive.

You can expect to see green herons from late March into September. Most members of the population in the Eastern United States then head to the Caribbean and Central America in the fall. Even before this southward movement, individuals may wander in almost any direction, especially if food levels drop or water sources dry up. Individuals have covered very long distances. Surprisingly, a few have been observed as far away as Great Britain and France.

So over the next few months, if you scan the edges of wet habitat, you may be lucky enough to spot a green heron, hunched over with a long, sharp bill, staring intently into the water. Better yet, listen for a loud, catlike “skeow” or odd screaming that may give these somewhat secretive birds away. Should a bird fly, it may seem somewhat crow-like with slow wing beats, but its partially unfolded neck will certainly give it away.  PS

Susan would love to hear from you. Feel free to send wildlife observations to susan@ncaves.com

AI, Phone Home

Is anyone really there?

By Deborah Salomon

I like knowing how things work. Knowledge is power . . . right? This comes from watching my father — a hobbyist handyman/fixer — repair stuff: a toaster, a lamp cord, a toy. Assembling that dreaded “knocked down” furniture filled him with glee. So I experienced no trepidation when, during college summer vacations, my job as an NBC Studios tour guide at the network’s Rockefeller Center headquarters required operating  a wall-sized display that explained how TV works: images are broken down into dots, transmitted from tower to tower and reassembled on home screens. In a flash. That was the late 1950s. Heaven knows how transmission — satellite, cable, digital and otherwise — works these days.

Then, the time I listened attentively, dreamy-eyed, while a boyfriend explained car motors. I even sort-of understand what keeps a 650,000-pound Airbus aloft.

Much knowledge has been gained on the job. I’ve written stories about how a toilet functions (simple and logical, really) and, mid-1980s, the first CAD/CAM computer designing heating/AC systems. That one was dicey: I told the engineer to pretend I’m a fourth-grader. He did. I understood enough — and wrote the story in a fourth-grade vocabulary, for a business magazine, no less. Readers loved it.

That’s the thing: Learning how a motor propels a car isn’t rocket science; computer technology is, and I’m frightened, partly by dependence on machines so few ordinary folks understand. Our human footprint is distilled onto an envelope-sized appliance thinner than an Oreo called a cellphone — a misnomer, since calls are its least-used function. With it, you can close a garage door or order a pizza; navigate Boston or check movie times; watch the ball game or watch your grandchildren — who live in Bangkok. Horrifying news from Dell: “We’re teaching your car how to read your mind.”

How? Can anyone explain that in fourth-grade lingo?

Speaking of fourth-graders, when they ask, “Where’s the cloud?” what’s your answer?

I’m with Michelangelo: “Look up.”

Enter the most fearsome creatures of all named, enigmatically, virtual personal assistants: Siri, Alexa, M, Cortana, Watson et al. The names sound vaguely familiar. Siri? Isn’t she the daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? I’m sure Judi Dench played “M” in James Bond flicks. Cortana must be that ski resort in the Italian Alps. As for how they work, don’t ask anyone over 18 unless they have kids over 12. The answer I got: “Siri just asks the computer,” which is 10 feet away, saving me the trip.

Siri, her siblings and similar devices are dubbed artificial intelligence, AI, first explored in the eponymous 2001 film directed by Steven Spielberg, E.T.’s daddy. Because Siri is “artificial,” no need for a please or thank you when shouting orders. But now, the apes have breeched their cages and are rounding up the zookeepers. Watson beat all comers on Jeopardy!  Deep Blue, an IBM prodigy, won at chess against a world champion. Soon, scientists fear, these creatures with a single name (preferably not Meatloaf, Madonna or Omarosa) will start bypassing human input and interacting with each other — maybe take over the world, which might not be so bad considering the job humans are doing.

As a remedy I think schools should adopt a syllabus on How Things Work. Start with filling toothpaste tubes, move on to wrapping Hershey Kisses, inserting cheese slices into cellophane envelopes, then helicopter physics before touching on how the Mars Rover responds to signals sent from Earth, a mere 101.51 million miles away. End, in grade 12, with computer mechanics.

My rabbit-ears antennae pick up grumbling: There goes another sassy old technophobe. Not true. I’m simply scolding the tail that wags the dog. If I need a new kidney, by all means press a button on the 3-D printer and suit me up. But I’m not flagging any self-driven taxi, and if I want a weather report my old-fashioned PC (talk about an oxymoron) does just fine.

But Siri, do text me when you locate my car keys.  PS

Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

June Books

POETRY

Proof, by Murray Dunlap

With the release of Proof, local author Murray Dunlap celebrates the 10-year anniversary of the car accident that left him immobile and with a severe brain injury. The poems chronicle his marriage, relationship with God, and the struggles and confusion he has encountered during his journey. Dunlap worked on the collection during his stay as a writer-in-residence at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. 

FICTION

How Hard Can It Be?, by Allison Pearson

Kate Reddy is approaching 50 and facing the ultimate female body betrayal: perimenopause, which she has nicknamed “Perry.” After leaving a highly successful career to raise her family, she finds herself entering the job market once again — no small feat at her age. All the while her husband is in the throes of a midlife crisis and her two children pose typical and not-so-typical challenges. The author of the best-selling I Don’t Know How She Does It leaves the reader gasping with laughter.

Florida, by Lauren Groff 

In 11 short stories, each masterfully crafted by a writer with a keen eye for humanity, Groff lifts the curtain on the side of Florida the sunburned droves of tourists trekking to man-made meccas miss. Dark, lush and dreamy, the stories depict the dangerous natural elements lurking in the Sunshine State along with its dissatisfied, insecure and flawed characters.

Bring Me Back, by B.A. Paris

The author of Behind Closed Doors returns with a psychological thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end. For the past decade Finn has wondered what happened to his girlfriend, Layla, after she disappeared from a rest stop. When he announces his engagement to Layla’s sister, Ellen, he starts getting signs that can only come from someone who knows her whereabouts
. . . or are they coming from Layla, herself?

Remind Me Again What Happened, by Joanna Luloff

A traveling journalist, Claire goes on an assignment to India, contracts Japanese encephalitis and wakes up alone in a hospital in the Florida Keys. Her husband and best friend come to be with her, and eventually take her home, but her memory loss wears on them all. Remind Me Again What Happened is a fascinating look at friendship and how events in our lives change those relationships.

Left: A Love Story, by Mary Hogan

Fay and Paul are vacationing in Spain when the first signs that something is wrong with Paul begin. Everything comes to a standstill when he falls and requires surgery. His mind is never the same, and Fay must learn to live with her new life. A touching account of loving someone in sickness and in health.

NONFICTION

Lincoln’s Last Trial, by Dan Abrams and David Fisher

At the end of the summer of 1859, 22-year-old “Peachy” Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in more than 3,000 cases — including more than 25 murder trials — during his two-decade legal career, was hired to defend him.  Lincoln’s Last Trial captures a moment that shines a light on our legal system in a battle that remains incredibly relevant today.

The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy, by Jay Cost

Hamilton emphasized economic growth and Madison the importance of republican principles. Cost argues that both men were right and that their quarrel reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of the American experiment. He shows that each man, in his own way, came to accept corruption as a cost of growth. The Price of Greatness reveals the trade-off that made the United States the richest nation in human history, and that continues to fracture our politics to this day.

Race to Save the Romanovs: The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue the Russian Imperial Family, by Helen Rappaport

Investigating the murder of the Russian imperial family, Helen Rappaport embarks on a quest to uncover the various international plots and plans to save them, why they failed, and who was responsible. She draws on never-before-seen sources from archives in the United States, Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom, creating a powerful account of near misses and close calls with a heartbreaking conclusion.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Brave Enough for Two, by Jonathan D. Voss

Hoot and Olive are best friends and adventure lovers. As often happens, opposites attract. Olive likes her adventure in books while Hoot prefers the great outdoors. But, when good friends get together, things always seem to work out. With classic-feeling illustrations and a gentle back-and-forth story, Hoot and Olive are reminiscent of the friendships found in the A.A. Milne Winnie the Pooh stories. (Ages 3-6.)

Crunch the Shy Dinosaur, by Cirocco Dunlap, with illustrations by Greg Pizzoli

Shhhhh. Crunch the Dinosaur wants to come out and play, but is just too shy. Whisper his name and maybe he will venture out to join you. Engaging and interactive, this cute new dinosaur tale will delight young readers over and over again. (Ages 3-6.)

The Inventors at No. 8, by A.M. Morgen

On the eve of his 10th birthday, George, the third Lord of Devonshire, has suffered the death of almost all of the adults closest to him. His only guardian is his manservant, Frobisher. The pair survive by selling the furnishings from George’s house. When a thief tries to steal George’s legacy, his grandfather’s map to the Star of Victory, an ingenious mechanical bird intervenes. Jam-packed with thieves, clues and intrigue, The Inventors at No. 8 is a great summer read. (Ages 8-13.)

Neverworld Wake, by Marisha Pessl

Beatrice, Martha, Cannon, Whitley and Kipling find themselves in the Neverworld Wake, the hours the friends relive over and over, a hundred, a thousand, possibly a million times as they search for answers about their friend, Jim’s, death, and the accident that threw them into the wake. “The first thing you must do is stay calm,” says the mysterious Keeper. This psychological thriller of the most fascinating sort, where one’s worst nightmare is relived again and again, is an absolute beach-bag must for fans of Gone Girl, We Were Liars and We Are the Goldens. (Ages 14 to adult.)  PS

Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally.

Old Forty

Even the best of rides can throw a rod once in a while

By Tom Bryant

In 1959, the summer before my first year of college, my dad bought me a 1940 four-door deluxe Chevrolet. It was the finest car ever made, at least to me. There is something about a youngster’s first automobile. The occasion creates an aura of independence, open roads, traveling, seeing the country. Adventures are only limited by the imagination.

Dad bought the almost 20-year-old car at an estate sale in Pinehurst and called me at the ice plant where I was working a summer job before going off to Brevard College. He was the superintendent at the plant and gave me the job to supplement my spending money for school. The chief engineer on duty that day called me to the phone that was hanging on a post in the engine room. Dad said, “Tom, I need you to help me move some stuff at home. I’ll pick you up in a few minutes.”

“What stuff? I’m in the middle of pulling ice right now.”

“Never mind, let Walter take over. You’ll only be gone an hour or two.”

Walter was another summer employee, and we alternated the chore of pulling ice from the huge brine tanks. We used an immense crane that could lift 10 blocks weighing 400 pound each all at once. It was not my favorite job around the plant, so I was glad to let him take over.

When Dad arrived, he went to his office to check messages, and I waited in the car. In a few minutes he was back. “I need to go by Pinehurst, and then we’ll run home to move that swing set for the girls.” My sisters were into gymnastics and had an exercise bar and swing set in the backyard. We needed to move it to a shadier spot.

“I hope I’m still on the clock,” I joked. “I need the money. School is only six weeks away.” In those days I made the minimum wage, which was a dollar an hour. A 40-hour week provided, before taxes, $40, a lot of money in the ’50s.

I assumed we were going by the old chicken plant in Pinehurst where Dad was the consultant for the refrigeration system, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention when we pulled in to the driveway of an old house that had seen better days. He stopped in front of a ramshackle single garage. A dusty car squatted forlornly in the dark opening. “There it is, buddy roe,” he said.

“There what is?”

“Your new ride.” I piled out of the car and, somewhat dazed, walked to the garage and the dust-covered vehicle. It was so dirty, with years of accumulated grime, that I could hardly tell its color.

“What do you think?” Dad asked.

I was flabbergasted. I didn’t know what to say. “Will it run?”

“Sure it’ll run. I checked it out before I bought it. It’s gonna need a lot of cleaning and some small repairs, but she’s solid and, with a little work, will carry you many miles.”

I opened the driver’s side door and crawled in. It was magnificent, dirty but magnificent. I looked out at Dad and asked, “Can I crank it?”

“Sure, the switch for the starter is on the floor. I’ve already put in a new battery, so she should fire without any problem.”

I pushed down on the switch and the old vehicle roared into action.

“OK, son, back her out and I’ll follow you home.”

That was easier said than done. When I was just on the outskirts of Pinebluff, cruising at about 40 miles an hour, the right back tire blew like a firecracker. As I was pulling to a slow stop on the side of the road, the left front tire also blew out with a bang. Dad was right behind me and pulled over, got out of his car and walked up laughing. “I thought we’d make it home anyway,” he said, chuckling. “Those old tires are the originals and are dry rotted. They’ll have to be replaced. You wait here and I’ll get a wrecker to pull your car back to the plant, and we’ll put on a new set of tires.”

The rest of the day was a blur. Dad went to town and bought a set of tires from the automotive store, and the guys working at the plant helped me install them. I remember changing the oil and using some of the plant’s equipment to grease the old vehicle. It had been years since she had been serviced.

That day began a love affair with the ancient ride that we nicknamed plainly “The Old Forty.” I used her for all sorts of things: camping, hunting, fishing. She carried friends and me many, many miles safely and only left us, or me, rather, stranded once. It was my sophomore year and I was on the way to school, clipping through Hendersonville, about 20 miles from Brevard, at a pretty good pace. I topped a rise right outside of town and heard something give way in the engine. I pulled into the gravel parking lot of a two-pump service station, got out of the car, raised the hood and heard rattling. It sounded like something in the motor was using a hammer trying to get out.

An old guy, dressed in bib overalls, walked over, looked under the hood and motioned for me to shut down the engine. “I’m sorry, old sport,” he said as he leaned in the passenger-side window, “but I do believe you have, as they say in the vernacular, thrown a rod.” He spit a dollop of chewing tobacco out the corner of his mouth. “It looks like you’re heading to school,” he said, noticing the load of camping gear, clothes and boxes in the back seat.

“Yes sir, Brevard. The semester starts tomorrow.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, we might be able to solve this little quandary. Brevard is right down the road. I’ve got some business there this afternoon and if you don’t mind being towed by an old pickup, as a matter of fact about as old as this beauty you’re sporting, I can tow you to school and then you can make arrangements to get her fixed at your convenience.”

We hooked a chain from the front of Old Forty to the hitch on the back of his pickup, and that’s how I arrived at college. The old gentleman and his ancient truck deposited me at the rear of my dorm, right across from the cafeteria where a line was forming for evening chow. A cheer went up as we unhooked from his pickup and pushed my car into a parking spot. The old guy grinned and said, “It looks like some of those folks are glad to see you.”

That was an understatement. “The Old Forty” became famous as the conveyance that, even though it wouldn’t run, brought me back to an institution of higher learning, or so said many of my friends.

I had the car repaired the next spring and we went on to many more adventures.

A few years later, I was sitting in the front seat of the old vehicle in the parking lot of Ritchie’s Drive-in Bar and Grill, on the outskirts of Elon College, another bastion of higher learning I was attending at the time. I had Old Forty idling, heater going full blast, attempting to warm Linda and me. It was right frosty outside and the windows were fogged. I had been planning for weeks to propose marriage to the cute little girl sitting there in the passenger’s seat, and I made the decision, for better or worse, to pop the question.

The stars and moon must have been perfectly aligned that night because Linda said “yes,” and I swear I could hear the old car happily applauding, or maybe it was just the valves rattling as I shut her down and kissed my soon-to-be bride.  PS

Tom Bryant, a Southern Pines resident, is a lifelong outdoorsman and PineStraw’s Sporting Life columnist.

PinePitch

Longleaf Symphony

What could be finer than wine and cheese and The Carolina Philharmonic under the pines? “Serenade in the Pines” features four musical destinations and takes place June 16 from 4-6 p.m. at Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities, 555 E. Connecticut Ave.  For information call (910) 692-6261 or visit weymouthcenter.org.

The Beach Goes On

Mary Alice Monroe continues her series about the struggles and triumphs of the Rutledge family of Charleston, South Carolina, in her new book, Beach House Reunion, when Cara Rutledge returns to her home on the Isle of Palms, reconnecting with family, friends and the low country. Monroe will speak and sign books at The Country Bookshop, 140 N.W. Broad St., in Southern Pines, on June 19 and 4 p.m.

Rhapsody in Weymouth

The Weymouth Center for Arts & Humanities features “An Evening of Gershwin Favorites” on June 7 at 7 p.m. John Hatcher and Friends Quintet perform with vocalist Megan Causey along with a special vocal guest, Dr. Marc Bernard. Tickets are $50 for members, $60 for non-members, and include wine and appetizers. Reservations for the event at 555 E. Connecticut Ave., in Southern Pines, are required. For more information call (910) 692-6261 or go to weymouthcenter.org.

Farmers on the Green

GivenTufts and Elliott’s on Linden present “A Taste of North Carolina” on the Pinehurst Village Green at 6:30 p.m. on June 21. Tickets to the North Carolina farm-to-table meal are $80 and available at the Tufts Archives, 150 Cherokee Rd., Pinehurst. Chef Mark Elliott is donating the food and proceeds from the dinner benefit GivenTufts. For more information call (910) 295-3642.

Lumbee Film Festival

Cucalorus, the North Carolina Arts Council and the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina are partnering to produce the first Lumbee Film Festival on Saturday, June 23, at the UNC Pembroke Entrepreneurship Incubator, at 202 Main St., in Pembroke. The festival will showcase bold, original films by Native American Indians, especially Lumbee filmmakers, and will include a panel discussion with community organizers, filmmakers and tribe members. For more information visit www.cucalorus.org/lumbee-film-festival/.

Best in Show

The highly entertaining Fun Dog Show will be June 9 from 9 a.m. to noon at the Walthour-Moss Foundation, Lyell’s Meadow, 225 Mile Away Lane, in Southern Pines. Registration begins at 8 a.m. The classes include: Cutest, Best Trick, Best Coiffed, Senior Dog, Junior Handler, Look Alike, Best Rescue, Best 6 Legs and Best in Show. Prizes and ribbons galore. Caring Hearts for Canines will be on-site with dogs seeking homes. Cost for entrants is $5 per class the morning of or you can register at www.walthour-moss.org.

First on the First at the First

With roots deep in the tradition of Blue Ridge music, the Jeff Little Trio headlines First Friday on the First Bank Stage beside the Sunrise Theater, 250 N.W. Broad St., in Southern Pines, on June 1. Food trucks and beverages abound but, please, leave the dogs at home. For further information call (910) 692-8501 or visit firstfridaysouthernpines.com.

Forsooth and Zounds

The Uprising Theatre Company brings Shakespeare back to the park with performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on consecutive weekends, June 1-3 and 8-10, at 7:30 p.m. at Tufts Memorial Park, 1 Village Green Road, Pinehurst. Admission is free to all though there are some VIP tables close to the stage available for $450. For more information call (541) 631-8241 or go to www.uprisingtheatrecompany.com.

The Rooster’s Wife

Friday, June 1: Seth Kibel and Bay Jazz Project. Premier woodwind player Seth Kibel fronts this crazy good band that leaves no genre uncovered. Cost: $10.

Sunday, June 3: Sultans of Swing, a Canadian duo, combines flamenco, Arabic folk, Cuban rhythms and French gypsy jazz. Cost: $15.

Saturday, June 9: The sextet Night Tree plays original works spanning the Celtic world. Cost: $10.

Wednesday, June 13: Bette Smith from Bed-Sty brings her big dreams and big band. Cost: $15.

Thursday, June 14: Open Mic. Members are admitted free.

Sunday, June 17: Jeanne Jolly’s wondrous voice is backed by a rocking band. Cost: $20.

Friday, June 22: City Dirt Trio, a side project of Urban Soil, features Gregory Meckley, Eric Chesson and Jonathan Wilson. Cost: $10.

Sunday, June 24: Singer, songwriter and guitarist Chris Jones and the Night Drivers bring their bluegrass sound. Cost: $15.

Doors open at 6 p.m. and music begins at 6:46 at the Poplar Knight Sport, 114 Knight St., Aberdeen. Prices above are for members. Annual memberships are $5 and available online or at the door. For more information call (910) 944-7502 or visit www.theroosterswife.org.

The Mighty Widget

And the learning curve of sweat

By Jim Moriarty

My two older brothers and myself all matriculated at the same institution, the Widget Factory. It’s the place we worked during the summers of our youth. I’m not sure which one of my brothers gave it the name but it’s the only thing we ever called it in our house, and it helped put all of us through places where the learning was advertised as being higher. In the final analysis — which is creeping up on all three of us — I’m not sure if I learned any more from Chaucer than I did from Jocko.

We called it the Widget Factory because functional, mostly unidentifiable, metal objects were manufactured there. You know those doors that open with a push bar? And, the doohickeys that hold the bar on the left and the right? Widgets. Gears don’t shift and forklifts don’t fork without widgets. They are the invisible hand that turns the indispensible cog. In the absence of the mighty widget, life is just a bucket of bolts. It’s true we had no idea what we were making but we were, nonetheless, secure in the knowledge that it served a purpose somewhere, somehow, to someone. And we got paid 10 cents more an hour for doing it on the graveyard shift, 25 cents more if we worked in the foundry.

Jocko ran the acid bath. He had the face of a battered palooka and the body of Haystacks Calhoun, dressed in T-shirts that appeared to be pre-sweat stained and unlaced work boots. You could strop a razor on the toe of either foot. As one might intuit from the name, the acid bath was not without its perils, the evidence of which appeared on most of the exposed portions of Jocko’s flesh. Serious about his craft, he was as territorial as a honey badger. Even the owner of the factory approached Jocko as if he was inviting Luca Brasi over for tea. 

Gil worked in the foundry, where they poured the steel at 3,100 degrees. One of the jobs I mastered during my summers was being Gil’s set-up guy, using a two-pronged pitchfork to move ceramic molds from the 1,200-degree oven to the spot where Gil would fill them with molten steel. He once told me he’d grown up in the same neighborhood as Jack Nicklaus and, after Jack hit the big time and Gil hit the foundry, he walked up to the door of Jack’s old house in Columbus, Ohio, and knocked on it just to see how he would be received. He said Jack was still the same old Jack and treated him like the same old Gil. He thought it was the kind of information people with a future beyond the Widget Factory ought to have.

Bob worked in the wax room, but I only addressed him by his last name, preceded by Mr. He owned one of the finest houses on top of a sand dune in one of the swankiest neighborhoods on the lake. On a clear night he could see the Chicago skyline through his picture window. He had successful kids. One was a professional athlete. Sometimes on break, I’d see him out back drinking wine out of a pint bottle. Inside, he sat in front of a cafeteria tray full of tiny wax widgets using a sharp knife and shaky hands to whittle away the residue where the two halves of a mold left an unwanted line. He wasn’t scraping away his dignity; he was holding on to as much of it as he could.

Dennis was the head inspector. Tall and lanky with James Dean hair, he drove a pickup truck as orange as a hunting vest and called me Hippie, combining derision and kindness in the same smoky breath. He had no education to speak of, but he worked meticulously and honestly and showed up on time every day, trusted more by the man who owned the joint to do the right thing than the owner trusted his accountant. That turned out to be prescient, since long after I’d stopped spending my summers there, two people (one was the accountant) who inherited the executive offices from the original owner got led away in handcuffs after they embezzled every nickel that wasn’t welded down. That was the graveyard shift for the Widget Factory, where the evening classes began with a punch clock instead of a bell, and the degree you received was a doctorate in the nobility of work.  PS

Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho

It’s off to work we go

Illustrations by Laurel Holden

We’ve all had ’em, those odd jobs we’ve done along the way. Maybe it was behind a cash register or in front of a deep fat fryer. It could have been sweeping floors, pouring concrete or delivering pizza. The uniform might have featured a hairnet or a pair of work boots. It could have been weekends or evenings in high school or a long, hot summer waiting for college to begin. Maybe you already had a degree in your hand. The payoff could have been cash money (though not much of it) or nothing more than the experience. The memory of these jobs can bring a smile, a groan or a grimace. The money, if there was any, didn’t last long. The lesson that all work is noble lasts a lifetime.

Helen Buchholz is the mother of eight and grandmother of 25 who just celebrated her 95th birthday and once owned The Salem Shop, a women’s apparel store located on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and S.W. Broad Street. At home she has a photograph taken during War War II of her husband, John, who lost a leg in the Battle of Peleliu, meeting Bing Crosby at a golf club outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was Crosby’s driver and, at the time, didn’t know the man who would become her husband.

“I was a driver for the Emergency Aid in Philadelphia. An organization of volunteers. I did it from 1941 to 1945. I was 18 in ’41. My husband got to do it because he was part of the incentive program. They went around to different plants that won the letter E — the flag that they hung on their building — for their work effort. I was the one that drove Bing Crosby. I used to meet them at the airport or the railroad station and take them to Convention Hall when it was a drive for bonds, selling bonds during the war. I drove a lot of them. They had bond drives all the time. Those people came in as guest speakers. They stayed at the Ritz Carlton when it was on Broad Street, if they stayed overnight. I was assigned as their driver the whole time they were there. Most of them were very nice. Some were bossy like they thought we were employees instead of volunteers. They would have somebody in the backseat with them and they’d be talking. Bing Crosby was very nice to us. We had Bob Hope. He was fun. He really was. He had a lot of cuss words in his vocabulary but not like two of the women. Lucille Ball had a very dirty mouth. Linda Darnell. She had a terrible dirty mouth, terrible. That’s what I remember most, I guess. It was all very interesting to me. We were all a bunch of volunteers. We had the USO in the basement of the Academy of Music off Broad Street. The USO was there all day and all night and it was all volunteers that did it. Sometimes there were five or six people down there; sometimes there were 100.”

J.J. Jackson, part owner of the Carolina Hurricanes, has served as a board member and/or chairman of several worldwide rare earths and rare metal mining and natural resources companies; invested in and was a board member of the largest mobile telephone provider in Lithuania; was the chief financial operator of a similar company in Romania; worked for a wireless telecommunications company in the Czech Republic and at a holding company specializing in high-growth, high-risk telecom ventures throughout Central Europe; and on and on. A native of Peterborough, Ontario, and a former hockey goalie who married the Zamboni driver, his wife, Nancy, Jackson and his boyhood friends from Adam Scott High School spent June, July and August with flashlights attached to their baseball caps and old soup or bean cans strapped to their legs with elastic bands wandering local golf courses in the middle of the night learning the ins and outs of business from the ground up.

“I would bicycle about a mile to this guy’s ramshackle house, then we’d pile into some beat-up old van about 10 o’clock at night and drive to a golf course. You’d have a big empty can strapped to each leg like in the old days when you played hockey and used Sears and Roebuck catalogs for shin pads. And then you’d walk the fairway. Your quota was 1,000 worms a night, 500 in each can. Nightcrawlers. You sold them to the bait stores in flats of 500. We’d finish up at 4 or 5 in the morning, get back in the beat-up old van, go back into town, get on my bicycle and pedal back home. One night we were swinging from the limb of a tree and broke it. The golf course was pretty mad about that. Otherwise it was pretty uneventful.”

Paul Murphy is the pastor at Trinity A.M.E. Zion Church and spent a couple of decades performing at the Pinehurst Resort and Country Club.

“Technically, my first real job, I worked for my father, Murphy’s Music Center down in Town and Country shopping center. I moved pianos. Right before going to Chapel Hill to college he sent me off to a piano technicians school in Elyria, Ohio, to learn to tune, rebuild and refinish, everything having to do with a piano. It was called Perkins School of Piano Tuning and Technology. I was there for six months. The guy who owned the place was a West Virginian. He had this little racket going where he would advertise: Junker piano in your basement? They would pay him to rid their basement of these monstrosities. We would get these pianos all the way up the stairs, up on to the truck, bring them to the school, where we would pay him to teach us to tune the pianos and rebuild the pianos. Once the pianos were done then we would deliver them to downtown Cleveland to his store, where he would sell them. For him it was a win-win-win. Once I got to Chapel Hill, I ate up my dinner ticket my first week. When I came to myself, I said, ‘Wait, I can go to the music department and let them know I can tune pianos.’ The first day they sent me down to the basement and I tuned, like, four pianos. I worked my way up to the concert stage. My very first job was down in Madison, Georgia, picking cotton. The next-door neighbors were migrant workers. I was 5. We’d get paid a nickel a week. End of the week, my mother said I could spend three pennies. Go down and get these big round cookies, two for a penny. When we moved to North Carolina in ’71, I was in fifth grade. I got in with the tobacco guys. They were waking up at 4 o’clock in the morning. I think it might have been the summer of my sixth grade year. I would jump on the 4 o’clock truck that would come slowly down the road. That truck was like treasure. You’d hop on the back of it. The guy would throw an old sheet over us because it was still cold, there was still dew in the air and he’d take us way up into the Carthage area and we’d start priming tobacco. I started making 12 bucks a day. Three summers. Oh, my Lord, for us it was fun. They’d give us free grape soda and a pack of Nabs.”

Walter S. Morris III is a doctor. But he wasn’t always.

“Between my junior and senior year at Carolina, I was taking summer classes, but I needed a job. So I went down to Fowler’s Food Store in Chapel Hill, down at the bottom of the hill on Franklin Street. ‘Can I get a job?’ They said, ‘Yeah, we’re looking for a butcher’s assistant.’ I said, ‘Sure, I know a lot about beef and meat.’ I was young and dumb. Fowler’s was great because that was where they had the walk-in beer fridge. That’s why I went down there to apply in the first place. I didn’t get any beer privileges though. It was just to make some money, put gas in the car. Stuff like that. I was driving a silver gray Toyota, one of these little hatchback cars. I had to put my golf clubs through the middle seat just to get them in. Anyway, my job was to slice the deli meats and to clean everything after the day was done. That was the assistant’s job, to clean all the blades and the blood and guts. I did cut my finger once. It was my first trip to the hospital. Actually my second trip to the UNC Hospital because I was born there. I sliced my finger cutting bologna and had this big ol’ drip running down my arm. You remember the bologna that came with the little olives in it? I’m pretty sure that was it. You can’t make that up. I thought, this doesn’t look that much different than the blood I’m cleaning up. I got about four or five stitches for that. I’d never had stitches before. I didn’t know then that I was going to go to medical school — I was sort of pre-med — but after I went to the emergency room I thought, you know, this is pretty cool.”

Pat Corso is the executive director of Moore County Partners in Progress and served as the president and CEO of Pinehurst Resort and County Club for 17 years.

“My wife’s sister and I were friends at Ball State University. We were in a group called the University Singers. She had gone to Northern Michigan the summer before and performed at Brownwood Acres, a family business on Torch Lake. The guy that ran it was moving over to a ski and golf resort called Schuss Mountain. She came to me and said, ‘My sisters and I are going to go up and we need a guy. Would you be interested?’ Hell, yes. I was painting fire hydrants in Logansport, Indiana, the summer before. This may be a step up. It was. That’s where I met my wife, Judy. Anyway, we stole music from what we did at Ball State. We’d wait tables. The mainstay entertainment was this guy who played electric accordion and a drummer in the upstairs loft of this ski building. They would play for 40 minutes and invite us up to perform for 20. We’d put our trays down and go up and sing for 20 minutes. The place held 300 and we’d have a line out the door because it was kids, working hard and performing. We did it for three summers. The second year we brought our band up from Ball State and got rid of the accordion player. We played from 9 o’clock at night until 1 o’clock in the morning. They moved me to the door so I was the guy who seated everybody. The girls were called the Schussy Cats. A black leotard, a little barrette with ears on it, hot pink shorts and high boots. I was the lounge lizard — remember shirts with collars that a good wind would pick you up and carry you away? The bottom line is, later on, we opened our own business doing the same thing in Traverse City. We didn’t have anything, didn’t have a nickel to rub together, running around in old beater automobiles, but when you look back at those years, don’t you think, boy, didn’t we have a good time?”

John Dempsey is president of Sandhills Community College. Heck, he’s got a building named for him.

“I got out of the Navy in March of 1971 and I went to graduate school to get a master’s degree at William and Mary. I was on the GI Bill and a little bit of assistantship and we had a little baby. The end of the year came and my GI Bill ran out. My fellowship ran out. So I had no money. I mean, no money. I saw this ad in the paper. Taxicab drivers wanted. What the hell? I went down there. This is early 1972 and I’d gotten out of the Navy in March of 1971 and I hadn’t had a haircut since. Hair was big in ’71. I went in for an interview with the guy and he had a crew cut. He was making a statement just like I was making a statement. ‘I’m here about the taxicab driver’s job,’ I said. He said, ‘We don’t hire girls.’ I was 22 years old, just back from Vietnam. I’ve got two choices. I can jump over the desk and strangle this guy or I can go get my hair cut. I swallowed all my stupid Irish pride and went and got a haircut, came back and got the job. I left the house in the morning looking like a graduate student and I came back that night with a little taxicab driver’s hat on and no hair. The next day was my first day on the job. The deal was, you kept half the proceeds and tips. I discovered very quickly that my customers were not rich. Poor people take taxis because they can’t afford cars. It was unusual to get even a dime tip. I kept all my money in a little sack. The very first night I made $60, so I’d get $30 of it. I had to go to the bathroom at the end of my shift and I went into the Holiday Inn in Williamsburg and I thought I better take this money with me. I left it in the bathroom. Oh, it was so humiliating. That supercilious so-and-so. ‘College student, huh? Can’t even remember . . .’ When you have no money and a little baby you do what you have to do. After that ignominious start, I actually grew to like it. I guess it’s what being a hairdresser must be like. People talk to you about the strangest things. Every once in a while I’d get a call, go to the Williamsburg Inn. You know there’s a tip involved there. I would just schmooze them unmercifully. It got me through the summer. I got my master’s thesis written. You know what it’s done to me? It’s made me a big tipper. I over-tip everywhere I go. I know what it was like.”

Joyce Reehling is an actor and writer, a contributor to both The Pilot and PineStraw and will be appearing in the fall in the Judson Theatre Company production of Love, Loss, and What I Wore.

“The first job I had right out of college was I was Santa’s helper at Sears. I took my Bachelor of Fine Arts and immediately got a job at Sears. The guy in major appliances was Santa, a very nice guy. We took children’s pictures with Polaroids. You took the picture, then you pulled out the thing, then you waved it to make it dry before you put the sealer on it. Then blow on it. This is Sears. There was nothing fancy. I had an elf hat and that’s all. He had kind of this thronie thing for Santa. And then every 30 minutes or so we’d turn the ‘Santa’s Gone to Feed the Reindeer’ sign. And every parent just looked at you like ‘I’m going to kill you now with my bare hands.’ Some kids love to be with Santa. Some kids don’t want to be with Santa at all, ever. I forget how many children peed on Santa. I did this for like 10 days or two weeks. If you can be Santa’s helper for two weeks and not kill either a child or a parent you’ve passed some sort of huge spiritual test. The first job I had in New York was working at a 50-plug switchboard. You take the wires out and push them in. They give you no training for this. Just a headset. The woman who sat next to me was absolutely wonderful. She was very fast, very efficient, you could read every note she ever wrote. She had this darling sweet voice, a Southern voice. She’d answer your phone and you’d think you were the only person in the world, meanwhile she’s doing this for 15 people at the same time. If I got in the weeds, she’d just whip over and pick up a call for me. ‘Oh, baby, I’ll help you.’ It was the Judson Exchange, I think it was called. Behind us was this strange carousel of people who handled almost all the jingle bookings in New York. In the middle of their circle they had like Cheetos and Camel cigarettes. It was a very healthy environment. This was 1970-something. They were always smoking and talking on the phone in these raspy voices. ‘Joe, I got a session. Is this Joe’s wife? Yeah, I got a bookin’ for him. It’s a session plus 20 at 2:30. What? Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. When’s the funeral over? Can he make the 2:30?’ That’s the kind of thing you’d hear behind you.”


The Wisdom of Work

Friends and neighbors recall the peculiar jobs and summer employment that made us who we are today

Baxter Clement, Musician — “I’d just finished college and I went to New York to make music and I had day jobs. For one of my day jobs I dressed up as The Cat in the Hat and read children’s stories in grocery stores in Staten Island. I worked for the Swiffer Corporation, those little mops. Kids would come and sit on my lap, and I was dressed funny and I had a Vanderbilt degree and I was a classical guitar player and I read them stories. I don’t know why they pegged me as The Cat In the Hat but it happened.”

David Carpenter, Accountant — “I was a lint head. I worked in the cotton mill and held the following jobs on any given day: sweeper, card hand, hopper feeder (cotton and polyester), opening cotton bales, comber hand, dye house floor hand, and noil sucker. Before you attached your tube to the vacuum system and flipped the ‘on’ switch, you had to call the waste house and announce what was coming — ‘Mill No. 6, white noils!’”

Sam Walker, Minister — “My first summer job was between high school and college at Phillips Esso just over a bridge off the main drag in Avalon, New Jersey. I can still see the place. Regular gas in those days was 28 cents a gallon. My job was to greet customers, pump gas, wash front and rear windshields, check the oil, the battery, fan belts, radiator fluid and the pressure in all the tires. That summer I learned how to clean restroom toilets, polish brass handles, change oil, lubricate a car, change a flat tire, drive a stick shift, manage a tow truck and that a VW engine was not in the front. I fell in love at least every other week and opened my first bank account. I learned the value of good service, the importance of showing up and doing your job and being part of a team.”

Kevin Drum, Restaurateur — “As a teenager, I was the relish girl at the Pine Crest Inn when the girls didn’t show up. My peers gave me a really hard time but I persevered and tried to be the best relish girl I could be.”

Rose Highland-Sharpe, Minister — “My first semester at UNC-Chapel Hill, I worked at the Carolina Inn. I served the vegetables. I was very nervous about it. I wasn’t much over 100 pounds. A tiny thing back in the day. The fellas referred to me as the ‘Vegetable Girl with the Million Dollar Smile.’ I was so thankful for that job.”

David McNeill, Mayor — “In the ’60s and ’70s the city of Rocky Mount’s largest park, Sunset Park, had a children’s museum, a miniature train, a merry-go-round — or hobby horses as some called them — swimming pool, ball fields, tennis, picnic areas and a concession stand all adjacent to the Tar River. My job at age 16 or 17 was to drive the train and occasionally operate the merry-go-round — with music on LP records. We opened at 2:00 each day and closed at 9:00 p.m., just about dark. I drove the train three times around the half-mile train track for each ticket purchaser — mostly kids. In 1999 the flood after Hurricane Floyd took out the park.”

Rick Dedmond, Lawyer — “I had just graduated from UNC and I needed a summer job. I went to work for my uncle, who was a commercial building contractor, churches, schools, things like that. The first day I was down digging footers to pour concrete. I came back to work the next day and he assigned me to Wallace. For the rest of the summer, I was Wallace’s assistant. Wallace was early 40s, about 6-2, 230 pounds. I’m about 5-6 and I probably weighed about 125 pounds. Wallace wore overalls and a straw hat. Chewed cigar butts after he smoked the cigars. He drove a truck with a dump bed so we mostly cleaned up construction sites. We filled up the truck with sand and bricks and hauled off sheet rock, that sort of thing. We would remove mounds of cardboard where new pews had just been installed in a the church and take it to the cardboard recycling and sell it for enough money to buy our lunch.”

Patrick O’Donnell, Pub Owner — “I took a gap year between Montclair State and Appalachian and I’m backpacking through Cairns, Australia. I was doing willing workers on organic farms. It’s called WWOOF. You call up and say, ‘Hey, do you need anybody?’ You’re working for room and board basically. I had to go clean out the chicken coops. The things were maybe 6-feet high. When you stepped in there it was like 4 1/2 feet. You had to shovel all the chicken shit out and move it to a compost. Oh, my God, this was the worst job ever. I did that for two days.”

Mark Hawkins, Jeweler — “I worked in a convenience store in Miami, Coconut Grove, for maybe six months. That was kind of weird down there at the time. It was probably more dangerous than I realized. I learned how to make jewelry in Coconut Grove. Dropped out of the University of Miami and never looked back.”

Caroline Eddy, Non-profit Director — “Remember the stores The Record Bar? They started in Durham and sold LP albums. I was the clerk that rang up the items we sold. I loved that job.”

Marsh Smith, Lawyer — “My neighbor, Donald Ray Schulte, who was a psychiatrist, lived right across from my dad’s house on Warrior Woods Lake. He had a Jaguar. The road on the north side of the lake was so rough it would knock the muffler off his Jaguar so he ran straight pipes. Every morning he would fire that XKE Jaguar at about 6:15 and have the choke set at fast idle for the motor to warm up. That rumble was my alarm clock. It sold me on the coolness of a Jaguar. A couple, three years later when I was in college I noticed a midnight blue XKE roadster sitting outside Five Points Garage. Carl Bradshaw had a farmhouse off of Highway 211. He had an airplane hangar that had formerly been at Skyline airstrip behind Dunrovin. Carl had a condition that made him allergic to petroleum products. He would sit in his lawn chair and tell us what wrench to choose and what bolt to turn. He agreed to let the Jaguar sit in his garage and I would come home from Duke University and work on it. Then I heard about a guy in Beckley, West Virginia, who rebuilt his Jaguar, so I dropped out of school to go up there and learn about how to restore Jaguars. That lasted a couple of months. I came back and went to work for Carl. I opened up a Jaguar restoration business behind what’s now Doug’s Auto. That building was rented by Lawrence Bachman. He worked on VWs in four of the stalls and rented me one and a half stalls. I lived at the Jefferson Inn, $35 a week for a room, with linens.”

Linda Pearson, Non-profit Director — “I was a cashier at Holly Farms Fried Chicken. It was where Taco Bell is now. I remember my boss’ name was Steve.”

Doug Gill, Lawyer — “The A&W root beer stand on Lincolnway in South Bend, Indiana, was in the form of a giant root beer barrel. I worked behind the counter. My primary job, in addition to climbing up into the attic of the barrel and mixing the root beer in big vats and cleaning the fryer at the end of the evening, was to draw mugs of root beer for the carhops to deliver. On busy nights I was able to draw 12 mugs at a time by holding six mugs in each hand and then rotating them under a running root beer tap. Had I tried to sing, it would have destroyed the business.”

Earl Phipps, Police Chief — “I used to dig ditches for a water and sewer line contractor as a young man working all through Lee, Harnett, Chatham and Moore counties. In college I worked as a vacuum attendant and car detailer at a car wash in Greenville. I used to hate those minivans with the red velvet interior. They always came with a white poodle and its white curly hair stuck in the fabric came along with it. One time I was vacuuming a car and my manager said, ‘Let me know when you are ready for me to pull the car up.’ I answered, ‘OK.’ And he pulled the car up right over my foot. While I was obtaining my Basic Law Enforcement Training I worked as a shoe salesman in the mall. I lived the life of Al Bundy trying to fit size 10 feet into size 7 shoes.”

Rich Angstreich, Proprietor — “In my mid-20s I was a chimney sweep on Long Island. I saw an ad in Mother Earth News. It was this system of cleaning chimneys. You could buy the whole set-up. Home and Hearth. Once you can’t work for other people you’re doomed for the rest of your career to work for yourself.”

Lindsay Rhodes, Shop Owner — “I would handle escalator distress calls and dispatch technicians for Montgomery Kone in Greensboro. Actually it was elevators and escalators. If somebody got their shoelaces stuck in the escalator or got a stroller stuck or if people were stuck in an elevator.”

Tom Stewart, Shop Owner — “Mrs. Mac’s Jelly Kitchen was right downtown in Petoskey, Michigan. Mrs. Mac was probably 75. She would give me a list and I would go to Crago’s Grocery Store and pick up a little thing of half-and-half, Archway molasses cookies and several other things. Before the golf season started she wanted me to weed the flowers. I did such a good job I eliminated every living thing in her plot. She actually used some of that stuff in her jam and her jelly. I don’t think she was real happy. Thank God caddying came along at the right time.”

Jarrett Deerwester, Proprietor — “In Cincinnati I worked for a guy who was a West German immigrant named Willy Brandt. It was a good life lesson. I was a mechanic. The repair shop had white linoleum tile floor. You had to mop it every night. You couldn’t have so much as a screwdriver on your workbench out of place. Complete OCD German. A good first boss. Taught you appearances and details matter. I did that for two years finishing up high school.”

Fenton Wilkinson, Lawyer — “I worked for the Norfolk Redevelopment Management Authority on a brush clearing crew for projects where stuff had overgrown or houses they were going to take down and redevelop.”

Adam Faw, Teacher — “While I was in college I spent two summers working in concrete construction. The first summer I worked at a pre-cast plant in Wall Township, New Jersey. Didn’t need to work out that summer. I got all the exercise I needed lugging things around the plant. The next summer I worked for a concrete company in Boone, North Carolina, mostly in the field on curbing and sidewalk pours. I actually did some steps and railing that are still around campus at Appalachian State.”

Skipper Creed, Judge — “In high school I worked at Goldston’s Beach at the Dairy Queen for one summer. I just wanted to pretty much take the job so my dad would not send me down to his hunting property to work driving a bulldozer or backhoe and getting paid five dollars a day. The great thing about Dairy Queen is you got to see every flavor of life that came by the window. I made thousands of Blizzards. Families would go to White Lake and someone would order for the entire family, including the extended family, because they’re all staying in the different little motels and hotels there. You think they just want one order and they look at you and want 30 banana splits.”

Mark Elliott, Chef — “My dad used to hang me off the side of buildings to fix things. I think I was 11 or 12 years old. We owned a hotel in Torquay. These buildings were huge Victorian summer homes a long time ago. We were repairing the roof, three stories up. It’s like a slate roof with a flat area. He actually had me on a rope wrapped around my feet lowering me down. That is a true story, right there. There was no health and safety back then. We dug out the patio and dug in a pool so it was probably 60 feet to the ground. I remember looking down. My dad would scream, “You’ll be all right, son. I’ve got ya.” I actually got paid 25 pence an hour. That’s about 35 cents. No danger money on that one.”

Kerry Andrews, Marketing — “My only odd job was working in the arcade at a water park in Fayetteville. My friend was a lifeguard but I didn’t quite make the lifeguard status so I got to work in the arcade. They would give me quarters and I would give them tokens. Smelly bunch of 10-year-olds and wet carpet. Back then it was Galaga and Ms. Pac-Man. It was a straight on 1980s arcade with all the ding-ding-ding-ding-ding. Four hour shifts of that.”

Ken Howell, Mason — “My first ever entrepreneurial job was when I was 8, 9, 10 years old and I would buy flower seeds for a nickel in a mail order catalog and sell them for a dime. I’d walk around the neighborhood and sell flower seeds and double my money. After I got in the masonry business I worked at Roses at Christmas putting bicycles together. I would get paid $5 for a regular bike and for a 10-speed I got $10. I would go in there after hours at night, work until midnight throwing those bicycles together. I had to make extra money at Christmas and that was a good way to do it. “

Tom Pashley, Resort Director — My high school job was scooping ice cream at Häagen Dazs. After my sophomore year at college I felt like I needed to branch out. I ended up working for a temporary services company called Kelly and I remember my family saying I was a “Kelly Girl.” Whether or not they were stilling calling themselves Kelly Girls in 1989 or ’90, I don’t know. The job the agency sourced for me was in the Lamar Building in downtown Augusta, Georgia. It’s probably a 25-story building. My job was to paint the stairwells and refinish the wooden banister. There’s nothing like using a paint gun in an enclosed space to teach you the value of education.

Warren Lewis, Chef — “My dad was in real estate and every summer I had to work for one of his contractors. One of the jobs was re-bricking furnaces for big apartment buildings in Manhattan. You got so dirty, your toenails got dirty. The room was the size of a good bathroom with a door that’s like a foot by two feet. You’d climb in. Once you got in the chamber, you didn’t leave it all day. It was relatively cold. You’d have to pull all the bricks out and start re-bricking them. Five bucks an hour. You remember the Moonies, the religious cult? We did their building. They were the coolest people. They would bring us down food and stuff and feed us. We did one in Brooklyn or the Bronx that was really sad. It was a very, very poor neighborhood. They hadn’t had hot water in a year or whatever it was. The landlord finally broke down and had to get it done. These people were angry and sad and happy all at the same time.”  PS

Radio Days

The perils of a talking head

By Bill Fields

Once in a while when checking the time, I go back in time.

It’s 4:15 . . . The current time brought to you by Bulova . . . Bulova available at The Glitter Box on Main Street in Aberdeen.

I hear myself — or my fellow WEEB-990 part-timer Keith Smith — reading that 10-second spot on the radio. The Glitter Box jewelry store is long gone, but the commercial has stuck in my memory like lint on a blue blazer.

Working for Southern Pines’ 5,000-watt AM station in the summer of ’77 was the first position related even a little to what I would do in the years ahead. Compared to bussing tables or parking golf carts, two of my other early jobs, turning onto WEEB’s driveway off Midland Road seemed a tiny journey toward a career.

I wasn’t entirely green to WEEB when Mitt Younts, then the manager and son of the station’s founder, Jack Younts, hired me.

Occasionally I had been part of a Key Club radio hour on Saturday mornings, when the booth was turned over to a couple of high school boys who would play records and yap mindlessly between songs. The Key Club show aired without incident, notwithstanding one weekend when, being Elton John fans and forgetting we were not on WQDR, the cool rock FM station in Raleigh, we put “The Bitch Is Back” on the turntable. We were allowed back but only after apologizing to the owner, who seemed to be on the phone before the chorus expressing his displeasure about our choosing such an inappropriate number.

Despite being part of that blunder, I got my own weekly show, “Pinecrest Sports Spotlight,” during which I would report on Patriot athletics and usually have a guest or two to interview in the studio. (When the Pinecrest girls won the state basketball championship, most of the team plus coach James Moore came, the microphone passed around like a bowl of mashed potatoes at Sunday supper.)

I had to pass up a post-graduation trip to the beach to start my job, but getting paid to come to work at the building I’d seen so often from the ninth tee while playing golf at Knollwood Fairways made that not seem like so much of an opportunity lost. I even got to cover some golf later that summer, the Women’s Trans National Amateur Championship held at Mid Pines.

Figuring out how to use Mitt’s tape recorder to get sound bites was infinitely easier than correctly pronouncing the surname of participant Lori Garbacz, which I butchered as “Gar-box.” Fortunately, Cathy Reynolds beat Beth Daniel in the final, two names that even I could handle.

A couple of shifts per week I got to be an actual disc jockey and got competent at cueing up vinyl, reading the required live advertisements and switching to ABC News at the top of the hour. Other days, much of the time was spent monitoring the auto-play operation that WEEB had adopted for the bulk of its programming. On Sundays, a preacher from one of the local churches would deliver a recording of that day’s service. I would collect his $30 payment and play the tape at the scheduled time.

One particular Sunday afternoon while on duty alone, there were prayers before the prayers.

I had my key to get into the station on a separate key ring from my car and house keys. Taking out the trash, I didn’t prop open the door. And, after emptying the garbage can and trying to re-enter the studios, I realized the WEEB key wasn’t in my pocket with my other keys.

It wasn’t Bulova time but panic time. 

If I used one of the golf clubs in my trunk to break in, everybody would know. If I left to go borrow a key and something happened to the station’s audio cruise control before I returned, everybody would know.

I decided to chance the latter choice, guessing correctly that Keith, one of the best athletes in my class as well as my co-worker, was lifting weights at a gym in downtown Southern Pines. Through his laughter he loaned me his key. Avoiding pine trees and police cars, I drove back to WEEB, the dust flying behind my Fairlane as I tore down the dirt lane toward the building.

Feeling as if I had been running wind sprints, I got inside and heard something. The programming had held. WEEB didn’t go off the air that day until sunset, as usual, nor had my career gone dark prematurely either.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Diamonds Are Forever

Living on the lake fulfills a fantasy

By Deborah Salomon   •   Photographs by John Gessner

Houses often represent milestones: a new baby, job promotion, retirement.

Once in a while, there’s a Cinderella factor, which better describes the desire and means to transform a ho-hum ranch into a lakefront cottage showplace filled with art and sunshine. Wielding the wand was Jayne Rhodes, who already had Prince Charming in husband Ed.

The story unfolds like this:

Jayne grew up gracefully Southern, in Lexington, North Carolina, home also to Artis Hardee, who developed Whispering Pines in the 1960s. Her friends, the Mashburns, had a summer cottage on Thagard Lake, where she spent idyllic vacations: “I loved the water, the sailboats . . . ” Sun sparkling off the wind-rippled surface reminded her of diamonds. “I carried that memory throughout my life,” she says. It’s a life that eventually brought Ed and Jayne to Moore County, where they raised a family in a Weymouth residence built in 1895, then at National Golf Club.

Jayne suspects Ed was suffering from golfing guilt when he surprised her with “I’ll do anything you want,” to which she replied, “Let’s drive out to Whispering Pines, see if a house is for sale.”

They spied one, with a lock box. Ed, being a Realtor, had a key.

“We walked in and that was it,” says Jayne, recalling a day 20 years ago. “I looked beyond the house and saw the view.”

The house, built in 1968 by a Navy admiral from California, had high ceilings and hardwood floors but not much zip after standing empty for years. “When we came back the amount of work made Ed sick. It was just old, but we’re good at remodeling,” Jayne rationalized. “Don’t worry, baby. It’ll be fine.”

Jayne’s vision of “fine” would challenge the most determined fairy godmother.

With the view as her lodestar and an eye for design, Jayne marshaled forces.

First, a layout adjustment. The small kitchen looked out onto a carport, which made it dark. That space became the formal dining room, while the elongated living room-dining area became all living room divided into two sections by furnishings and area rugs. At the end, a sun porch the depth of the house became the bright, sunny kitchen with many windows, vanilla cabinetry, cocoa granite countertops and — just imagine — a framed mirror over the range cooktop. “I can stand at the stove cooking, and see that painting (Jayne points to the end of the living room) reflected in the mirror.” Another novelty: The center island is L-shaped, with the sink positioned so Jayne can see beyond the breakfast room to her precious lake, while washing dishes.

That breakfast room represents a separate chapter. Ten years ago a squirrel found its way into the kitchen. While repairing the damage, Jayne and Ed decided to add this space, entirely surrounded by windows, as well as a deck, all facing that mesmerizing view.

Jayne isn’t sure why the main floor has only one bedroom, the master suite, with a ceiling vault that brings in even more light. Perhaps the admiral and his wife preferred privacy.

The staircase to the above-ground basement is open, making it as much a part of the foyer as one leading up would be. On this level, the family living room with raised fireplace and antique mantel, looks out onto gardens, a hammock, fire pit and dock through paned French doors which replaced Holiday Inn sliding glass. Two bedrooms and a bath accommodate the Rhodes’ three daughters and their families during frequent visits.

Miles of moldings, painted paneling, beadboard, columns and louvered windows lift this ordinary ranch to a higher architectural level. Its contents fuel another narrative.

Sandhills Community College changed my life,” Jayne says. She always wanted to paint, realized an aptitude and finally enrolled at SCC, studying with Denise Baker. “In class I got the idea of a framing business.” As a result, Framer’s Cottage opened in 2001. The downtown Southern Pines gallery sold furnishings and décor accessories, as well as offering designer framing. Here, Jayne became acquainted with local artists while fine-tuning her passion for art. Her collection, including some of her own charcoals, dominates the house, from a picture rail near the living room ceiling, to a photo-quality painting of spring blossoms hanging over an antique ice box. “Ed gave me that on a date,” she smiles. “He said if you marry me, I’ll buy it for you.”

The ice box, a church altar piece/foyer table, her mother’s corner cupboard, a dry sink and a few more family antiques complement Jayne’s penchant for dark woods, leather upholstery (impervious to grandchildren) and outdoor hues — pale, mossy green, beiges and browns brightened with ivory and white present in every room.  Primary colors are limited to the paintings, several reminiscent (along with terra cotta tile flooring) of Spain, where Jayne attended university, perfecting the language and absorbing the flair.

She adores the look of distressed painted pieces, which repeat throughout the house, even on ceramic and pottery lamps which, Jayne proudly confirms, are made in America.

Most unusual are wall treatments accomplished by “printing” a pattern directly onto the paint. In the dining room Jayne used a comb to achieve the modular block effect. Downstairs, she replicated a feathery design with . . . a feather duster.

Overall, Jayne describes her décor as transitional, a mix of traditional and contemporary falling just south of eclectic.

Like every fairy tale, this one has a scary part.

The Rhodes bought their lake house in October 1997. With renovations almost complete, moving was set for Dec. 9. The day before, Jayne went to buy more paint. Her car was hit at a stop light, causing serious injuries requiring surgery. Friends and her Sunday School classmates pitched in. By the time she came home from the hospital, almost everything was in place. “Our world had changed in a moment but the diamonds on the water helped me convalesce,” Jayne recalls. Then, when she could walk, she enrolled at Sandhills.

Ed experienced a scare, too. While carrying a refrigerator down the stairs on his back, he heard an ominous crack. Miraculously, he wasn’t injured. Later, a penny was found at the scene of the near mishap. Jayne called it Ed’s “lucky penny,” framed and hung it near the scene of the misadventure beside a lucky paper penny she brought from Spain.

Window boxes, creeping ivy, flower beds and bright green grass sloping toward the lake complete the transformation from ranch to cottage. The final details address the exterior: an antique front door and painted shingles covering plank siding. Jayne added rose trellises to that carport, which remains an homage to the decade when Whispering Pines was born.

So, in the end, Jayne’s fairy tale came true: a house on the lake of sparkling diamonds conjuring long-ago summers spent with a BFF. A house where grandkids can eat drippy popsicles on the sofa. A house with fine paintings and traditional furnishings from Drexel but no Sub-Zero, in a neighborhood newly invigorated by young families.

Most important, a husband whose doubts were put to rest by the finished product. “As long as Jayne’s happy . . . ”  PS