Mom, Inc.

Aunt Jean

Letters, laps and Chinese food

By Renee Phile

I am . I live in a small, A-frame, wood-paneled house in the mountains of West Virginia. I skip outside the sliding glass door and run down the long, winding driveway to our mailbox. The faded white paint on the side of the box reads “19 Poplar Grove Estates.” The red flag is down, a good sign. I open up the mailbox and peer in. A car advertisement. Several envelopes addressed to my parents, probably bills. And then my hand touches it. It’s nestled under the rest of the mail: a pale green envelope addressed to me. The neat penmanship fills the envelope, and the return name reads “Aunt Jean.” I smile, rip open the envelope, not able to wait another second to read my letter from my pen pal.

She writes about her day and the books she is reading (two by Mary Higgins Clark). She writes about the weather (rainy). She writes how she enjoyed our visit last month, and would we be visiting anytime soon? She signs her letter like she always signs it:

Your Kindred Spirit,

Aunt Jean

**

I am 14. Dad and I drive up north to see Aunt Jean at her home in Martinsburg, West Virginia. We call ourselves the “Aunt Jean Club,” but yesterday we caught wind that there were some other family members, who will remain unnamed, who feel excluded from the club (even though the club is “open”), so we are keeping our club on the DL.

The three of us are sitting on her old beige couch, reading books. I look over at Aunt Jean, and watch her read. She smiles at one page, frowns at the next. Her eyes start to water as she reads, and I look away and focus on my own book.

“Aunt Jean?” I ask after several minutes. “Have you read that latest book by Mary Higgins Clark? The one about nighttime?”

“Hmmmm . . . ” she says, “I do believe I have.” Her eyes close as she thinks, “But let me check in my notebook . . . yes . . . (as she ruffles through the pages). Yes, I read it two weeks ago. I have it written down right here, and I wrote ‘good’ beside it, so I suppose it was good,” she chuckles.

“I want to read it,” I say.

“You love reading just like I do. You and I are certainly kindred spirits,” she says.

After several hours of reading and lounging on the couch, we heat up a frozen lasagna and play Scrabble. Aunt Jean tells us story after story — about growing up during the Depression, about her two brothers and one sister, about how she worked as a librarian, about her husband who passed away around the time I was born. Dad and I listen, then, out of nowhere — bam! — a 60-point play. Dad and I look at each other, amazed. She was undefeated at Scrabble. She still is.

**

I am 22. Yesterday, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English, and I have no clue what to do with my life. Most of my college friends are heading to the beach to celebrate, but I can’t think of anywhere I would rather be than at Aunt Jean’s house. I drove up here yesterday, right after graduation.

It’s just her and me, and earlier today we went to the Martinsburg Mall to walk laps and eat Chinese food. Aunt Jean said two laps around the mall are 3/4 of a mile, and she would know because that’s where she walks four mornings a week. We have spent the day reading, talking, sipping weak coffee, and of course, playing Scrabble. Lots and lots of Scrabble.

I tell her how I don’t know what to do with my life. All I know is that I love English and writing. “Go with what you love, and the rest will take care of itself,” she says. I do just that.

**

I am already 36 years old. (How did that happen?) It’s April, and I’m thinking about Aunt Jean, because her birthday is in April. She passed away in January 2013, and I miss her, but I don’t feel she’s far away.

I still read all the time. I still write all the time. I practice my Scrabble strategies daily. Now it’s through an app called Words with Friends, but it’s still basically Scrabble. I went with my love for English and writing, and the rest has taken care of itself, just as she said.

I’m organizing my closet, and I find an old shoebox. I open it, and see her neat penmanship stretch across the envelopes. The box is full. I take an envelope out, open it. I read the first few lines, then skip to the last part, my favorite part. There it is: Her cursive letters swirl and swoop to form the words:

Your Kindred Spirit,

Aunt Jean  PS

Renee Phile loves being a teacher, even if it doesn’t show at certain moments.

Upstairs, Downstairs

The annual migration of the back of the house

By Bill Case   •   Photographs from the Tufts Archives

After learning in 1895 that James Walker Tufts had concocted a grandiose scheme to build a model New England-style village and health resort in the denuded Sandhills of southern Moore County, most of the area’s denizens derided the wealthy Massachusetts native as an idealistic and foolhardy dreamer. Tufts was far from crazy.

If Pinehurst was to host guests from the North, suitable accommodations — and staffing for them — had to be made available, and fast. The Holly Inn opened on December 31, 1895, just five months after the start of its construction. Twenty guests bunked in that New Year’s Eve night. The Holly represented the initial jewel in Pinehurst’s array of lodgings, accommodating up to 200 guests with all the modern conveniences, including orchestra and billiard rooms. Not long after, Tufts opened an array of smaller hotels, all of which thrived: the Magnolia Inn; The Berkshire (long demolished but once located on Magnolia Road just south of the Magnolia Inn), housing 100 guests; and The Harvard (in the structure that currently houses the Old Sport Gallery), holding 75 guests.

Many New England hotel managers were eager to avail themselves of gainful employment during the months from November until May, when their inns were shuttered. Tufts sifted through this talent pool to hire his innkeepers. J. H. Atwood, proprietor of a hotel in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, became the Holly Inn’s first manager. He was succeeded two years later by Allen Treadway, mastermind of the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. F. M. Kimball, proprietor of the Eagle Inn in Orwell, Vermont, happily assumed the reins at The Berkshire. Kimball’s clerk, R.H. Butterworth, worked summers at the Hobbs Inn in Wolfboro, New Hampshire. J.L. Pottle headed the Magnolia, traveling south each winter from Jefferson, New Hampshire, where he operated the Highland House.

These managers encouraged their staffs to join them during the winter, and many did. After Tufts negotiated discounted fares from the railroads and steamship companies, droves of Northeastern bellmen, maids and cooks began descending on Pinehurst in late autumn like falling leaves. Since Tufts’ clientele likewise hailed from New England, Pinehurst advertising stressed the employees’ Northern connections. One newspaper ad touted the Holly’s “Unsurpassed Cuisine, with Table Service by carefully selected New England girls.” The Magnolia advertised that its “cooking will be done by one of the best of Northern cooks.”

An 1899 Pinehurst Outlook article described the home away from home atmosphere Tufts established this way: “The guests, being made up so largely of New England people, are sociable to a degree that makes one feel quite at home after a day or two here, and although there are some 200 over in the Holly Inn, they seem to be almost of one family.” This idyllic atmosphere bonded these early guests with Pinehurst, and many would establish a family tradition of annual pilgrimages.

The success of the hotels motivated Tufts in 1898 to build a far grander one — the Carolina Hotel. Completed in 1900, the magnificent four-story structure emerged as the largest frame hotel in North Carolina. Painted yellow with white trim, the hotel featured 250 guest rooms accommodating 400 guests. According to early advertising, the hotel boasted “every modern comfort and convenience, including elevator, telephone in every room, sun room, steam heat night and day, electric lights, and water from the celebrated Pinehurst Spring, and a perfect sanitary system of sewage and plumbing.”

Tufts chose Harry Priest, proprietor from June to October of the Hotel Preston in Beach Bluff, Massachusetts, to run The Carolina and also serve as the general hotel manager for all of the various Pinehurst lodgings. Throughout 1900, Priest labored on the massive task of recruiting seasonal staff from his own Hotel Preston and other New England lodgings. He enticed them with the prospect of free lodging and board in the hotel’s three story dormitory wing, which Tufts had attached to the rear of the hotel. Fully staffed, Priest welcomed The Carolina’s first guests on January 1, 1901.

By 1910, H.W. Priest had switched his summer employment to the Hotel Wentworth (now Wentworth by the Sea) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Several of the Wentworth’s key staff followed Priest to Pinehurst for winter jobs at The Carolina, including head bellman Jack Mulcahy, and headwaiter Jimmy Mahar. They in turn encouraged co-workers to shuttle between the two hotels, people like Hungarian immigrant Sam Lacks, who at the age of 32 first appeared on The Carolina’s payroll as a pastry assistant in 1908.

While engaged in his summer employment at The Wentworth, Lacks became smitten with co-worker Emma Lyons, a chambermaid and waitress who was born in New Brunswick. The couple married in 1911. Their union would produce two sons — Sam Jr., in 1913, and Stanley, in 1916. Sam Lacks Sr. would work at The Carolina for four decades, rising to a prestigious and lucrative position as the hotel’s doorman before retiring in 1947. In 2002, Sam’s younger son, Stanley (who himself worked several years at The Carolina prior to a distinguished banking career), authored papers, now housed in Pinehurst’s Tufts Archives, concerning his family and Carolina hotel operations during the first half of the 20th century. Stanley’s writings give a vivid picture of the nomadic lives and challenges of hotel workers of that long-ago time.

In the early days, “most migrating workers had several things in common: they were white, Christian, unmarried, and of Irish or English descent. They were capable of reading, writing, and doing arithmetic, but few had completed high school . . . The women had long hair and the men were clean-shaven,” writes Stanley Lacks. At the time most younger female employees “considered hotel work as a transition period prior to marriage and children.” Emma Lacks left her employment at The Carolina prior to the birth of her first child. She would return as the “newsstand lady” after her two boys graduated from high school. Stanley indicated that the majority of workers were Irish Catholics, including the aforementioned supervisors Mulcahy and Mahar. Church services for employees were held in their common area — “Help’s Hall” — until the Sacred Heart Catholic Church was erected in 1921, a chip shot distance from the hotel.

Before departing south for Pinehurst, workers stopped by the headquarters of the Boston Uniform Company to be fitted for their job attire. Waitresses were issued yellow garb to wear while serving breakfast and lunch, and crisp white uniforms for dinner. Bellmen were provided single-breasted navy blue uniforms of the same serge material that adorned U.S. naval officers. The head bellman and doorman (Sam Lacks) “wore double-breasted models with two gold stripes on the sleeves.” The uniforms and personal dress items were shoehorned into the workers’ suitcases and leather valises in preparation for the journey.

Until highway driving became less harrowing than a moon shot, there were only two feasible means for Hotel Wentworth employees to make their way to Pinehurst for the winter season. The excursion could be taken exclusively by rail, but the most popular method (and the one preferred by the Lacks family) involved boarding a Merchants & Minors steamship that would depart South Boston’s harbor about two hours before sunset. Upward of 100 hotel workers, most known to one another, would be aboard. Stanley Lacks recalls that “if the ship left Boston on Monday evening, it arrived in Portsmouth, Va., on Wednesday morning.” The disembarking passengers then boarded a Seaboard Line train that chugged them into Southern Pines in the evening.

The Lacks family did not attempt to travel the distance by automobile until 1927. Even then, road conditions outside cities and towns were generally deplorable. Stanley Lacks recalls it took seven days for the family to drive to Pinehurst. “Not a day passed we did not have to stop and patch an inner tube or find a small stream to get water for the radiator,” he would ruefully reflect. “We had to take a ferry across two or three rivers and forded several small streams with water up to the hubcaps . . . We had to avoid running out of gas because filling stations were few and far between.”

The employee dormitory (the “Help’s Quarters”) housed married couples, pairs of single men and pairs of single women on three floors. Men’s and women’s toilets and bathing facilities were located on each floor. All rooms were windowed, equipped with sinks, and large enough to accommodate two people, though department heads and a few others were afforded private rooms.

Some hotel jobs mandated continuous coverage from early in the morning until late at night, thus requiring two shifts of workers. Stanley wrote that in this situation, “one shift worked a long day (7 a.m. to noon and 6 p.m. to closing) while the other shift worked a short day (noon to 6 p.m.), with alternating long and short days. By assigning two staff members working opposite shifts to a room, each could get some private time.”

Following the death of his father, Leonard Tufts would construct other houses for employee lodging. The Lacks family resided several seasons at Thistle Cottage, a four-apartment dwelling on Community Road. “Little Sure Shot” Annie Oakley, who taught riflery at the Gun Club, occupied an adjoining unit.

With seven-day workweeks, there would seem to have been little time for workers to form, let alone act upon, attractions with one another while employed at the hotels. Indeed, Stanley wrote that romantic courting was mostly “an off-season practice” occurring during the vacation periods between the workers’ Northern and Southern hotel assignments. Perhaps that was so, but one suspects people in love generally find ways of spending time with one another.

The employees used three separate dining areas at the hotel. The jobs performed by the workers determined their dining locations. The manager and his wife, the hosts and hostesses sat at a large table in the corner of the cavernous main dining room, provided they were properly attired (coat and tie, etc.). Other higher-up staff, like the “department heads, doormen, desk clerks, switchboard operators, newsstand manager, musicians, waitress captains, porter” ate with full waitress service at the Side Hall, located between the main dining room and the kitchen. Help’s Hall (referred to as “The Zoo”) served as the eating area for the remaining employees. The Zoo also provided a central place for employee meetings and get-togethers. An adjacent small store sold Old Gold cigarettes, candy and miscellaneous items. According to Stanley Lacks, some workers never left the grounds of the hotel until heading north in the spring.

The workforce generally reached Pinehurst at least a week before the hotel opened. The early arrival provided “time to get the house ready. The women cleaned and polished while the men painted. Every fall they painted everything in sight: floors, walls, ceilings, porches, and some of the furniture,” wrote Lacks. The hotel booked conventions at the beginning of each season. Management viewed the convention traffic as a “dress rehearsal” opportunity in which employees could “demonstrate competence in his or her type of work,” prior to “encountering the more critical guests.”

And staff members were made to understand that when the blue-blooded social season guests arrived for their month’s stay, they expected service of the highest standard. The employees of Sam Lacks’ era labored in a hotel environment far more formal than that of The Carolina today. The male guests dressed for dinner in dark suits with ties, and their ladies were invariably clothed in colorful evening dresses. The upper crust, Stanley Lacks recalls, would “congregate in the lobby in overstuffed upholstered chairs. Demitasse was poured from a large silver urn by the hotel’s hostess and served in fine china,” while the hotel’s paid orchestra provided soothing musical accompaniment.

This formality led to certain employee positions having greater prestige than would be the case today. One was the “coat room lady,” the post held by Freda Marks. Lacks recollects that Marks “was an important person toward making hotel guests feel at home. She sat on a chair outside the entrance to the dining room and everyone had to pass her going in and out.” Freda took charge of the mink, ermine and sable coats of Cottage Colony females who came for dinner, and shared town gossip with them, practices conducive to substantial gratuities.

Stanley Lacks worked at The Carolina for several years in the 1940s assisting his father as a doorman. He remembers receiving a salary of $8 a week. “But I did not receive that money weekly; it was a book-entry in the Pinehurst, Inc. records,” he recalled. “The company gave me a check at the end of the season for the total amount due. If I had worked a total of 32 weeks, I received a check for $256.” Since he received free room and board and gratuities, Stanley saw the job as more profitable than his succeeding employment with the Federal Reserve Bank in which he received $2,500 annually. Hotel workers not receiving gratuities were paid higher salaries.

It’s doubtful anyone working at the hotel, including the manager, received more in compensation than Sam Lacks collected in tips. When Sam was first promoted to the job of doorman in 1910, his duties mostly involved greeting guests and helping them out of their carriages. But with the advent of motion pictures, Lacks’ standing in the galaxy of employees skyrocketed because it was he who controlled the guests’ access to movie tickets at the popular Pinehurst Theatre. Demand for tickets often exceeded supply, and those that Sam favored with the treasured ducats expressed their gratitude by showering him with silver and paper currency. Stanley Lacks wrote that the “tips came so fast he did not have a chance to see what he received before it went into his pocket.” Sam told his children to never divulge any information about this blizzard of cash. “It was a family secret,” says Stanley. Rather than deposit the accumulated gratuities in a Pinehurst institution, Lacks banked in Southern Pines, where he was relatively unknown. Perhaps out of jealousy that the doorman seemed to be taking home more than they were, the hotel’s managers over the years considered restricting Lacks’ compensation to a fixed amount, but it never came to pass. Stanley Lacks wrote, “Selling the theatre tickets helped my family get through the years of economic depression. It also put my brother and me through Duke University.”

Sam Lacks’ success in receiving this largess was enhanced by his colorful and winning personality. According to The Pilot, he befriended everyone he met, including “members of the European nobility, a former president, several senators, and businessmen and sportsmen of national prominence.” He was also thought to “exercise a mysterious control over the weather,” an ability which he never bothered to deny.

It may have concerned the Tufts family that Pinehurst, Inc., did not own or control the Northern hotels where The Carolina’s manager and employees worked during the summer. There was always a possibility that a manager could resign from The Carolina, go to work for another Southern establishment, and take his employees with him. To guard against this and also provide year-around employment for his workforce, Leonard’s son Richard Tufts entered into a contract in 1931 for Pinehurst, Inc., to manage the Berkshire Hunt & Country Club in Lenox, Massachusetts. Richard shipped The Carolina’s then manager Ed Fitzgerald and his workforce (including Sam Lacks) to Lenox for the summer. In subsequent years, Pinehurst, Inc., owned the Marshall House in York Harbor, Maine, which served as another summer base for The Carolina’s migrating employees.

Pinehurst’s status as a premier winter resort took a hit after World War II when Florida became a more attractive destination due to increasing ease of air travel and newly air-conditioned hotel rooms. Moreover, the old-line guests who customarily stayed in Pinehurst for a month were steadily fading away from the scene. A new generation of Pinehurst, Inc. managers, led by Jim Harrington and William Sledge, maintained that the resulting decline in revenue necessitated a revised business model featuring an increased emphasis on attracting conventions and catering to groups of visiting golfers. Harrington, now 91, also remembers telling Richard Tufts that Pinehurst could no longer afford to have its assets lie dormant five months of the year, and that the company needed to move toward year-round operation.

Finally, in 1961, Harrington persuaded the shareholders to approve the building of a swimming pool and installation of air-conditioning at the Holly Inn. For the first time, a Pinehurst resort property was available for lodging throughout the year. In the mid-1960s, further improvements were underway at The Carolina to enhance convention traffic. Sledge headed the construction project to build the Carolina Ballroom. Air conditioning of The Carolina’s rooms was completed in 1969, but Richard, and those in agreement with him, could never bring themselves to pull the trigger authorizing year-round operation. Ongoing disagreements between shareholders regarding a host of issues led to the sale of Pinehurst, Inc., in 1970 to industrialist Malcolm McLean. Under the “Diamondhead” umbrella, McLean opened The Carolina to full time operation in 1971. With employees now expected to live near the hotel all year, Diamondhead saw no need to keep the Help’s Quarters. The old dormitory wing was razed and the Marshall House was sold.

Ceiling fans and steamer trunks were a thing of the past. It was the end of an era.  PS

Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.

Papadaddy’s Mindfield

Getaway

Or, how to start your own Vacation Club

By Clyde Edgerton

When my wife, Kristina, was told we could get four days and three nights in a Marriott hotel luxury suite with two bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, three or four TVs in Myrtle Beach for $9 (OK: $134) if we’d sit together for a one-and-a-half-hour lecture about time-shares, I said: Goodness. Why not?

Excuse me — not time-share, but some other name, like: Marriott Vacation Worldwide Club Getaway. “Time-share” is out of fashion in some quarters . . . the name, not the concept. There’s a guy who comes on cable radio and says, “I’m a lawyer, not very smart, but mean, and I’ll get you out of your time-share contract by suing the hell out of the time-share company, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll burn down your time-share and we will split the insurance.”

But with the Marriott Vacation Worldwide Club Getaway, rather than buying a two-weeks-a-year stay at one hotel suite, apartment, small closet or room (after which other people use it for the rest of the year, and get it dirty), you — in this new kind of setup — buy the possibility of staying in a luxury hotel about anywhere in the world when you go on vacation, and you use up a certain number of points each time that happens, depending on how big your abode is. You buy so many points a year for the rest of your life. If you don’t like the deal, that’s OK because you will die and leave it to your heirs, and they can do the same, like a home. Resale value? I don’t know.

Let’s jump ahead about one hour and 15 minutes into our lecture. I asked: “What’s your return rate?”

“Excuse me?”

“How many couples out of 10 buy in?”

“Three.”

“Wow, I’m surprised it’s that high. That’s pretty good.”

Now mind you, Kristina and I had decided that there was no way we could buy in. I mean there was the very slightest chance, but we vowed we would not be swayed. 

The luxury hotel was, well, luxurious. The January weather was nice, there were several football-field-size heated pools, a Jacuzzi. Our suite was two big bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, living room, all that. We just kind of relaxed. Our kids did what they do at home: They sat on a bed and looked into a cellphone. Well, that’s not fair — they do other things. Perceptions are sometimes a product of fear.

We got there on a Friday, and on Saturday morning, while the kids sit on their beds looking into their cellphones, Kristina and I head for the lecture. On the way, we walk around, out onto the beach and back. I mean, who needs the beach when you are at a luxury hotel? There is this bevy of nice grills near the beach area (inside the gate to the beach), these big cabinets of dark wooden cubbyholes for your beach paraphernalia (inside the gate to the beach). There are beach chairs, ping-pong tables, a gym (inside the gate to the beach). Suddenly, I realized the thing you go to the beach for, the beach, was not central to a Marriott Worldwide Vacation Club Getaway. Why? A guess: Nobody makes money when you go for a walk on the beach. And the gate keeps out the undesirables who might be walking by on the beach.

Just before the lecture, we enter a large room with bar, snacks, drinks, many couches, big green plants and lamps. I’d thought other folks would be coming in. Nope. It ended up, at first, being just three of us.

A nice young man, very relaxed, open collar, sports jacket, sits down with us and says, “This is definitely going to be low key. No high-pressure stuff.” We talk about where he’s from, his brothers and sisters, where he went to school. I like him. Surely he thinks we’re not interested, I think.

It is very low pressure . . . for about 40 minutes. After about 45 minutes we have taken a little stroll past beautiful, large 3-D photos of resort areas around the world, and we are now in a very small room. A guy who looks like Pancho Villa comes in. He wears two belts of ammo, crossed on his chest. He starts putting numbers on a white board with a blue felt-tipped pen — what our payments will be for a certain number of points a year. He’s good. I will later admit to Kristina that I was almost swayed. Then I think to ask, “Is there a maintenance fee?” Well, there is. Two grand a year for the moderate package we’re examining, and I think to myself: If we get away for only four nights in a certain year, that’s $500 a night out the gate.

We say to Pancho: “We are not doing this, sir. The end.” He changes tactics, halves all the numbers on the board, unclicks the safety-guard strap on his pistol.

We persist. Pancho gives up, and they run a woman in on us. No ammo belts. She says if we call her by 1 p.m. that day, we can get three nights and four days at any Marriott luxury hotel for $199 if we promise to come together for a 1-hour, 30-minute lecture. This is true. I realize that it’s the three out of 10 that’s driving the bus. I say, no thanks. She says $149. I say no. She gives us a business card and says, “Call me if you change your mind.”

We return to our suite, relax, enjoy our stay for another day, talk about how lucky we are to be one of the seven in 10. We gather our kids and their cellphones off their beds, return to Wilmington a day early, and have a family meeting. We’re going to start spending time at the beach, and in the yard, and walking, and going to state parks. We’re going to start our own Vacation Nature Getaway Club.

Features? Yard, beach, state parks.

Cost: Nada.  PS

Clyde Edgerton is the author of 10 novels, a memoir and most recently, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Keenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW. 

Golftown Journal

Eye of the Needles

The USGA returns to a polished gem

By Lee Pace

The continued evolution of Donald Ross’ vintage Sandhills golf courses back to a more unkempt and rugged look over the last decade will be on display in May when the United States Golf Association stages its U.S. Women’s Senior Open at Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines. The 1928 course that has hosted three U.S. Women’s Opens has come under the nipping and tucking auspices of architect Kyle Franz over the last two years and will offer a visual presentation more in keeping with what Ross cobbled from the sandy ground nearly a century ago, and certainly integrate some shot values more consistent with the Scottish designer’s original intent.

Franz ran a bulldozer and other shaping and construction implements on Pinehurst No. 2 in 2010-11 under the employ of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw as the course was transformed from its sleek green appearance to a sandier landscape chock full of wire grass and jagged edges. He then took his skills and initiative and pitched Kelly Miller, president of the company that owns Pine Needles and is a partner in Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club, on the idea of restoring Mid Pines, a 1921 Ross design, in a similar fashion. That job was completed in 2013 to rave reviews, including designation by Golf magazine as the Best Course Restoration of the year.

“Except for lacking the Pacific Ocean, it almost has the visual appeal of Cypress Point,” magazine course rating panelist John Dempsey said. “It almost looks like the old pictures you see of Mid Pines of people wearing coats and ties and watching a match finish on 18. I can’t say enough about it. Going out and playing nine holes in the last of the winter sunlight in late afternoon, the visuals are fabulous.”

The next step was to apply many of the same ideas to Pine Needles, across Midland Road. The hook of converting Pine Needles’ greens from bent to MiniVerde Bermuda — as they had been at Mid Pines — was a convenient base from which to operate. Pine Needles closed during the summer of 2016 for the greens conversion, and Franz used that period, as well as the following two winters, to rebuild every bunker on the course, rearrange the fairway dimensions and add some new tees.

“The old stigma on Bermuda greens is that they were grainy and slow, but that’s not true anymore with the new ultra-dwarfs,” Miller says. “We had nearly 50 days with temperatures in the 90s during the summer of 2015, and it was a struggle to keep the bent healthy. Meanwhile, the greens really thrived at Mid Pines. After watching them closely for two years, we thought it was time to pull the trigger at Pine Needles.”

Franz grew up playing golf in Oregon, and when it came time to pick a college, he knew what he wanted: Oregon State’s turf management program. One summer he landed an internship working for architect Tom Doak on Pacific Dunes, the second of five courses created at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, and later he met Coore and Crenshaw, who were designing another course there named Bandon Trails.

“Being an Oregonian, it was a really special experience,” Franz says. “Just being able to work on a piece of land like that was really cool. It got me interested in links-style architecture, and I had always been a fan of classic courses.”

Now 37, Franz has worked in Scotland, Australia and California, and more recently was on Gil Hanse’s staff in the design and construction of the course in Rio de Janeiro used for the 2016 Olympics. He’s also just finished a multi-year project at the Country Club of Charleston, which will be the venue for the U.S. Women’s Open one week after the Pine Needles Senior Open.

Among the tweaks Franz made that golfers who played Pine Needles in 2007 and are returning for the first time a dozen years later will notice are these:

* Expanded fairways to original margins to 38 to 60 yards;

* Restored and/or reconfigured all 70 bunkers to Ross’ rolled-over style of the mid-to-late 1940s and added eight new bunkers to challenge modern length;

* Re-established what Franz calls “horse-and-blade caliber micro-contours” in the greens to add interest and challenge to the putting element;

* Removed 11 acres of Bermuda rough and replaced them with native hardpan, wire grass and pine straw;

*Replaced the uniform-looking expanses of love grass in front of many tees with a more rugged “Pine Valley” look of sand and native growth.

“Overall, it’s a little more clean and manicured look and different from Mid Pines,” Franz says. “There we went guns blazing with the native stuff around the edges. At Pine Needles now we have a cool and rugged look, but it’s a little more manicured than No. 2 and Mid Pines.”

The championship will be played May 16-19 and is the second Women’s Senior Open, christened last year at Chicago Golf Club. Laura Davies, who finished in the top five at Pine Needles in 1996 and 2007 but missed the cut in 2001, won the championship by 10 shots over Juli Inkster. The field included noted LPGA players Danielle Ammaccapane, Helen Alfredsson, Liselotte Neumann, Rosie Jones, Hollis Stacy, Amy Alcott, Betsy King, Pat Bradley and Jane Geddes. The course will play just under 6,100 yards.

“The Women’s Senior is similar to the U.S. Amateur or Walker Cup in size and scope,” Miller says. “There are basically no grandstands, though we might put one on the 18th green. There are no skyboxes. It’s a very fan-friendly event. We rope off the tees and greens, but otherwise spectators walk with the players.”

The Women’s Senior is something of a prelude to the 2022 Women’s Open at Pine Needles, and having tees that can stretch the entire course to 7,000 yards will give USGA officials adequate flexibility when they host the longer LPGA players vs. the over-50 crowd.

“I think the Bermuda greens and wider fairways will work well for both events,” Miller says. “In Ross’ era, golf was played more along the ground. Now it’s more in the air. But the Bermuda greens are firmer and offer a more challenging surface. It’s more important now to be on the proper side of the fairway to have the shot you need to knock it close.

“For ’22, they can lengthen some holes, but I don’t think you’ll see a lot more rough. I think Donald Ross would have loved testing the players with longer shots and the strategy of proper placement of the tee shot versus having penalizing rough.”

One change that embodies the new-look Needles as much as any is the bunker complex down the left side of the par-4 18th hole. The finishing hole was actually the first hole of the course as it was designed, when the St. Joseph of the Pines assisted-living facility was the original Pine Needles hotel. When Peggy Kirk Bell and husband Warren acquired the golf course in the 1950s, they reconfigured the start and finish to be more convenient to the new lodging facilities they built on the southwest side of the course. Thus the second hole became the first and the first became the 18th.

Eighteen plays downhill and before there was no trouble down the left side. Now there is a natural sandscape with miscellaneous vegetation and whatever nature might deposit there, from pine needles to cones to wire grass.

“You could hit a speed slot on that side and the ball would roll forever,” Franz says. “What was conceived as a relatively easy starting hole didn’t stand up as a finishing hole.”

Miller remembers playing the 18th when he first visited Pine Needles in 1980 with a driver and 7-iron. “And that was with a persimmon wood and balata ball,” he says. “If you looked back up the fairway from the green, it looked like a bowling alley. Ross always had great motion to his fairways. Now it’s a cool look. You don’t just see all grass and two straight lines. This will make for a memorable finish.

“The best look at the flag is from the left side of the fairway. You’ll have to pause and think how far you can go over there.”

You blink around the Sandhills and realize it’s been five years since that back-to-back Open double-header on No. 2 in 2014. The chapters keep unfolding, as they have for more than a century.  PS

Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst-area golf scene for more than 30 years, including authoring Sandhills Classics — The Stories of Mid Pines & Pine Needles. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com

Southwords

Georgia on My Mind

Fond flashbacks from Augusta

By Jim Moriarty

In April, every golfer’s fancy turns to the Masters. In 1979 Fuzzy Zoeller and I were both rookies. Fuzzy won the Masters. I got to meet Dan Jenkins. The late, legendary Jenkins, hisownself, spent well over a year of his 90, in Augusta, Georgia, one week at a time, writing about everyone from Ben Hogan to Jordan Spieth.

Dan’s Mount Everest of attendance is well beyond anything I could contemplate but I was there for some big moments: Jack Nicklaus in ’86; Ben Crenshaw in ’95; all of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. Toss in a Ballesteros, a Spieth and a Faldo or two and it was a good run. As precious as those memories are, there is something equally satisfying about the little moments, away from the fist pumping and Mickelson jumping.

There was no microphone to record Justin Leonard on the par 5 second hole — the exact year escapes me — when he went for the back left pin placement in two, landed on the green and watched as his ball finished up on the embankment among the patrons, Augusta’s oh so civilized word for badge-wielding spectator. When a ball skitters in amongst the punters at the Masters everyone knows exactly what to do. They stand, fold their chairs ever so politely and back away to form a perfect semi-circle around the player, ball and caddie.

When the pin is in the back left on the second green at Augusta National, being on the bank behind and above it is about as appetizing a spot as being in the starting gate at the top of an Olympic ski jump. If Leonard’s chip didn’t hit the pin and go in the hole it was destined to race all the way down the green, maybe off it entirely. He might as well have been Galileo trying to get his head around the effect of gravity on a free falling object.

The couple nearest Justin was an elderly man and, presumably, his wife. The gentleman had the mien of a British colonel of the 1st Bombay Grenadiers recently returned from the Second Opium War, who just happened to be married to Scarlett O’Hara. They stood at attention, more or less directly behind Leonard’s ball, clutching their folding metal and canvas chairs to their chests like gladiator shields.

As Justin and his caddie were discussing his dismal prospects, the elderly gent turned to his wife and whispered in a voice — as elderly gents are sometimes wont to do — that was a notch or two or three above your garden-variety whisper. “This is a very difficult shot,” he cautioned Scarlett.

Justin turned his head ever so slightly in their direction and, in a pitch perfect whisper of his own, said to the colonel and his wife, “I know.”

Then, there was 1987. That was the year Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman and Larry Mize went into sudden death as a threesome. Ballesteros dropped out on the 10th hole, the first in the playoff, when he three-putted from the back fringe and trudged up the steep hill to the clubhouse, an inconsolable figure. Norman and Mize advanced to the 11th where Mize missed the green miles right with a hopelessly awful second while Norman safely found the right edge of the green, being careful not to flirt with the pond. It looked as though Greg was about to slay the white whale of his green jacket. But, as Norman later said of Mize’s position, “I didn’t think Larry would get down in two . . . and I was right.”

Having a penchant during my photography career for finding myself consistently in the wrong place at the right time, I was positioned not down with my compatriots in the photo stand but further up the hill on the side of the 11th fairway. Folks aren’t supposed to get inside the ropes at the Masters but, with a wary eye for Pinkertons and green jacketed members, I inched my way underneath, trying to be as inconspicuous as someone who’d been running around all day and no doubt smelled like a musk ox could be. Who should I pop out next to but Larry Mize’s wife, Bonnie, and their one-year-old son, David.

With Norman standing next to the green looking on, Mize — the hometown boy — prepared to play his nearly impossible pitch. All of Amen Corner went as quiet as a mausoleum. CBS even hushed up the fake bird noises. Well, it seemed that quiet. Mize, of course, pitched the ball into the hole from a spot that looked to be about halfway to the Bojangles on Washington Road and commenced to leaping and running about, all of which I missed.

When the ball went in, the valley exploded.  Shocked and scared by the sudden noise, David began to wail. Bonnie, held him close, rocked him back and forth and said, “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s just daddy.”

I wouldn’t have traded places with anyone for all the pictures in the world.  PS

The Omnivorous Reader

Exploring the Carolinas

Early settlers and the Tuscarora War

By D.G. Martin

“In the middle of a dark September night in 1711 in Carolina, John Lawson found himself captive, tied up and flung in the center of the council ring of the Tuscarora Indian town of Catechna,” writes Scott Huler on the opening page of his book, A Delicious Country: Rediscovering the Carolinas along the Route of John Lawson’s 1700 Expedition, recently published by the University of North Carolina Press. 

Lawson did not survive. Tradition says he was tortured to death, with wooden splinters pushed into his skin and set afire. On earlier visits to American Indian villages, Lawson had witnessed and described this type of torture.

Who was this Lawson, and why did the Tuscarora put him to death?

In 1700, English-born John Lawson was a newcomer to North America. Almost immediately upon arriving, he set out on foot from Charleston to explore the endless forests of the backcountry Carolinas. The notes he took became the basis of a book, A New Voyage to Carolina, first published in 1709 and still a classic for its rich descriptions of flora and fauna and the conditions of the native peoples.

Huler wanted to follow in Lawson’s footsteps. He looked for a modern book that explained where Lawson went and described what is there today. When he found that no such book had been written and that no one had even retraced Lawson’s journey, he thought, “That’s for me!”

Huler could have made the trip of several hundred miles in a day or two in a car. But he wanted to go slow, seeing today’s landscapes and peoples at the pace Lawson traveled.

He shares his travels in his new book. Like most other readers of Lawson, Huler is impressed with his descriptions and attitudes about the native populations. Lawson visited Sewee, Santee, Sugeree, Wateree, Catawba, Waxhaw, Occaneechi and Tuscarora Indians. Huler writes, “He stayed in their wigwams, ate their food, trusted their guides. And he emerged with their stories, for some of which he is the only source in the world.”

Lawson, Huler continues, “documented native communities, buildings, agriculture, hunting, dance, trade, and culture through eyes clear, thorough, and respectful. Lawson depicts the natives as fully human — not some subspecies perceived only in comparison to European settlers.”

Lawson’s words were, “They are really better to us than we are to them.”

But Lawson found the native populations to be in a precarious situation. “The Small-Pox and Rum have made such a Destruction amongst them, that, on good grounds, I do believe, there is not the sixth Savage living within two hundred Miles of all our Settlements, as there were fifty Years ago.”

Traveling Lawson’s route through the rural Carolinas, Huler found a discouraging similarity. Contemporary rural and small town landscapes are littered with empty manufacturing plants, corporate farms and forests, empty main streets and deserted houses. Three centuries after Lawson, Huler found that “our world would teeter: a way of life dying in the countryside, implacable new forces once again balancing an entire civilization on a knife edge.”

Setting aside this discouraging report, Huler’s adventures and misadventures on the road entertain and inform. He is the best type of tour guide, one who is well-informed but not at all pompous. His wry, self-deprecating sense of humor helps his serious medicine go down smoothly.

For Lawson, his explorations and the reports about them opened the door to prominence and high positions in the young colony. That success came to a sudden end in 1711 when he was captured and executed by the Tuscarora Indians he had so greatly admired and praised.

Why did they kill him?

To find out, I turned to University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor David La Vere’s The Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies. Lawson is one of the main characters of La Vere’s book. La Vere sets out in detail the background for the Tuscarora War that began in 1711 with Lawson’s execution and a series of attacks by the Tuscarora on the thinly populated and, for the most part, recently arrived settlers in the New Bern area.

Earlier, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, North Carolina was only sparsely settled, mainly by Virginians moving south into the lands around the Albemarle Sound. They encountered small groups of Indians and were generally able to subdue them.

However, to the south and west, the mighty Tuscarora Indian strongholds stood as a barrier.

Meanwhile, Lawson’s glowing descriptions about his travels in the colony sparked the interest of the Lords Proprietors, who were looking for ways to encourage settlement. Lawson met a minor Swiss noble, Christoph de Graffenried, who worked out a plan with the Lords Proprietors to transport groups of German refugees and Swiss paupers to lands along the Neuse River near today’s New Bern.

These lands overlapped with the territories of the Tuscarora, who became increasingly threatened by the growing European presence.

La Vere writes that after overcoming odds, “de Graffenried’s colony of Swiss and German Palatines at the mouth of the Neuse River was thriving.” Therefore, he continues, “expansion up the Neuse seemed a real possibility.”

Lawson and de Graffenried made a trip up the Neuse, through Tuscarora lands, to scout sites for future settlements.

“All the while, the Indians grew more worried and angry as the abuses against them escalated and their complaints fell on deaf ears. That spark came in mid-September 1711,” according to La Vere, with this trip up the Neuse.

The local Tuscarora king, or chief, offended and threatened that his territory had been invaded, captured Lawson and de Graffenried and put them on trial for their lives. When one of the more radical Indian leaders berated him, Lawson lost his temper. “He argued back, his anger and sarcasm apparent to all.”

Lawson, of course, was doomed and shortly executed. His companion, de Graffenried, remained in custody while the Indians planned and carried out their first attacks on September 22, 1711, appearing at first as friendly visitors to the settlers’ farms and then striking suddenly from ambush when the defenses were down.

North Carolina’s efforts to beat back the Tuscarora were unsuccessful. The colony didn’t have enough manpower, firepower, or money. Help finally came from the wealthy sister colony to the south. South Carolina sent two expeditions to relieve its northern neighbor.

The first expedition, led by John Barnwell, set out with a force of about 700 men. Only 35 were regular militia. The rest were Indian allies. The results were mixed, and the Tuscarora remained a threat. The second expedition, led by James Moore and made up of 113 militia and 760 Indians, wiped out the Tuscarora at their stronghold at Neoheroka, near present day Snow Hill in Greene County, and opened the door to settlement in the interior of North Carolina.

What explains why South Carolina so enthusiastically aided its neighbor and how the South Carolina Indians were persuaded to provide the critical manpower? “Above all,” La Vere writes,“it was a chance to enrich oneself by looting the Tuscarora towns and taking slaves, which they could sell to waiting South Carolina traders for guns and merchandise.”

This sad footnote to North Carolina’s early history shows that the colonists secured their victory in the Tuscarora War only by facilitating and participating in the enslavement and sale of captured Tuscarora.

Scott Huler’s route through today’s Carolinas following Lawson’s path

In South Carolina: Charleston, Intracoastal Waterway, Buck Hall Recreation Area, Mouth of the Santee River, Hampton Plantation, McClellanville, Jamestown, Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion, Congaree National Park, Pack’s Landing Rimini, Mill Creek County Park, Poinsett State Park, Horatio, Boykin, Camden, Hanging Rock Battleground, and Lancaster.

In North Carolina: Pineville, Charlotte, Concord, Kannapolis, Salisbury-East Spencer, High Rock Lake, Denton, Asheboro, Burlington, Saxapahaw, Hillsborough, Durham, Morrisville, Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Flowers Crossroads, Wilson, Greenville, Washington, and Bath. PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Poem

The Heaven of Lost Umbrellas

They have to be somewhere;

those ribbed and fabric

servants who have held

off storms so grandly, quietly,

and with such solemn

unassuming elegance.

They come to us

in colors but mostly

that ubiquitous black.

Plaid, polka dots, birds,

butterflies, Monet’s

water lilies . . . he must

be laughing at the irony.

Van Gogh’s sunflowers,

one grand, glorious sun

of yellow.  We have

monograms, advertisements,

golf ones big enough

to cover a room

of golfers . . . except

it never rains on a golf

course. Nor in this

way out of the way

heaven of lost things.

Here umbrellas lie

folded in resting pose.

They hold their own

handles, their work

for the moment

completed. Yet

they wait to be

unfurled

and walked

wherever

they need to go.

— Ruth Moose

Sporting Life

Easy Floatin’

A new canoe takes an old trip

By Tom Bryant

My new canoe slid into the blackwater river easily. I was pleased with the boat. She was quick but stable and promised to be a pleasure to paddle. It was early morning, and a soft mist drifted out of the ancient cypresses that lined the bank like river ghosts from days gone by. I tried to be extra quiet and not disturb wildlife that might be close. Downstream just around the bend, I could hear the raucous call of a wood duck; and in just a few seconds, a pair flew upriver, gaining altitude as they saw me and all my gear. They screamed indignantly at the interloper, headed toward the swamp and were gone. I’ve always had a hard time identifying a wood duck call from a hawk. They sound a lot alike.

It was a beautiful morning, not unlike the many mornings I had spent on the river long ago with my granddad. This was to be a kind of déjà vu adventure. Here I was with a new canoe on an old low country river that I hoped had not changed that much from the early times my grandfather and I paddled the same fast flowing water.

He had taught me how to paddle when I was a youngster. He had a fish camp located several miles from Galavants Ferry right on the banks of the Little Pee Dee; and during the summer when work on the farm slowed, we would get our gear together, or my granddad would, mostly. I’d be dispatched to the old catawba trees to pick fishing worms and to the tobacco fields to hustle up a bait can of tobacco worms. They were messy creatures. They had a habit of spitting tobacco juices when I plucked them off the leaves. This was way before pesticides became so prevalent, and usually I could fill up a can of worms, no pun intended, from three or four tobacco stalks. The catalpa worms were a different story. They were valued as much by fishermen farmers as their crops were, and in many cases, harvested just like their garden vegetables. The worms were superb fish bait.

Linda, my bride, had dropped me off at a boat landing I found on a map of the river and was to pick me up at Galavants Ferry later in the day. I had packed a lunch, typical of what Granddad and I would share back in those long-ago days. Sardines, Beanie Weenies, a slab of rat cheese, a loaf of crusty bread, a can of Vienna sausages, hot mustard, and for dessert, a pack of Moon Pies. Linda had given me a Yeti cooler for my birthday, and I had it filled with bottles of water, a couple of Pepsis, and a few cold beers. That was the only deviation I took from Granddad’s menu. He was a teetotaler, but I knew he would forgive my one indiscretion. I also put my small tackle box, a spinning outfit, and a bait-casting rod and reel in the bow of the canoe. I was ready for a great day on the water.

I was pleased with my new canoe, an Old Town Penobscot. She cut through the water and was really sensitive to the paddle. I could turn her on a dime, and I practiced several strokes as we floated down the fast flowing river. It’s just like riding a bicycle; once you learn, you don’t forget. I settled down and began enjoying the scenery.

The Little Pee Dee River actually starts in North Carolina. Drowning Creek is part of its headwaters and flows into the Lumber River. The Lumber flows into the Little Pee Dee, which merges with the Big Pee Dee, then next stop, the Atlantic Ocean at Georgetown, South Carolina. One time in my young carefree days, a couple of friends and I tried to paddle the entire stretch, but unfortunately, we had to pull up short due to lack of time and supplies. It was quite an adventure, though.

The river eventually moved slow but steady, and with a few strokes of the paddle, I could keep the boat in the middle and fish the banks with my spinning outfit. I caught a few bream, none big enough to keep; and after a short time, I put the rod down and just watched the wild river and the cypress trees back in the swamps as I floated south. It was just as I remembered, with the exception of maybe more trash floating in the sloughs. I was surprised at the numbers of waterfowl. I saw many wood ducks. Great blue herons were numerous, and every now and then, I could hear the plaintive cry of a pileated woodpecker.

Many years ago while floating this same stretch of water, Granddad pointed out a huge bird flying in a slow, loping style that many big woodpeckers have. It was heading across the swamp but lit on a decaying branch of a giant cypress and started pecking on the limb. Pieces of dead wood flew as if he were swinging an ax. Granddad said, “Son, that’s an ivory bill woodpecker. Wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t declare that particular bird extinct in a few years. That’s the first one I’ve seen in a long time on this river.”

I had just been letting the canoe go where it wanted with only a stroke of the paddle every now and then, but just ahead I could see the water pick up speed as it approached a tight bend to the right. I grabbed the paddle and eased the boat to the right bank to keep away from a tree that had fallen and was partially submerged, blocking the left bank route.

I don’t know who was more surprised, the old gentleman fishing off the sandbar that pushed way out in the river, or me as I silently came around the bend and was on him in an instant. The old guy had several cane poles anchored in the sand and was fishing in the lee of the bar. I moved the canoe out in the river to get out of his way and did a backstroke to slow the boat. “How they biting?” I asked.

“Well sir, they been kinda slow this morning.” I eased the boat closer to the downriver side of the bar.

“Mind if I join you for a minute?”

“Naw sir. Make yoself at home.” I dragged the canoe up on the sand and went back to talk to the ancient fisherman.

“You’ve got a nice setup here.”

“Yassir, I’ve been doing it for a lotta years. It’s restful and sometimes I catch myself some supper.” He grinned and looked up at me from the little stool he was sitting on. “You floating down the river?”

“Yep, going to Galavants Ferry. Three or four more hours, I reckon.”

“That’s about right. Watch out for blown-down timber. We suffered a might in the last big storm.”

We chatted for a little while and I found out the fisherman was a local. As a matter of fact, he had lived on the river all his life, or as he put it, “Not quite, but that’s the plan, with what I got left.” He was a happy soul.

The rest of the paddle was uneventful. I didn’t even try to fish the remainder of the trip. I had to portage around a couple of downed trees, saw a humongous cottonmouth snake that I gave plenty of room, and arrived at the ferry about 4 o’clock. Linda was waiting, and in no time, I had the canoe lashed on top of the Cruiser, and we headed down to Huntington Beach, where we were camped with the little Airstream.

Later that evening, while kicked back in a rocker under the awning of the Airstream, I thought back to the day’s adventure on the river and to the aged philosopher I met fishing. Right before I left him and paddled downstream, the old fellow and I were talking about changes in the area, good and bad. He said something that brought everything into perspective.

“Mister, this river was flowing to the ocean long befo I came along and will be flowing to the ocean long after I’s gone. The important things don’t change, I reckon.” PS

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

Birdwatch

Carolina Bird Club

Come join the flock

By Susan Campbell

So, are there any bird nerds (like me!) out there wondering where you just might find others of a like mind? Then check out the Carolina Bird Club (CBC). This 82-year-old organization is a very active club with members of all ages from all walks of life who have one thing in common: They love birds. Although some in the club may be termed “birdwatchers,” those who passively enjoy the birds they see at their feeders or around their neighborhoods, are, in fact, full-fledged “birders.” The term has only been in use since about the early 1980s, just about the time I myself became a bird-crazy teenager. “Birders” have a real passion for their fine-feathered friends — some might say an addiction.

Our club (yes, I have been an active member since I moved to the Sandhills 30 years ago) has more than 1,200 members, many of whom spend hours in the field not just satisfying their own curiosity about things bird-related but gathering details that further our knowledge collectively of the region’s avifauna. Started in 1937 as the North Carolina Bird Club, it has been the one and only ornithological organizations of both North and South Carolina for well over 50 years. The results of countless hours of birding by literally thousands of Carolinabirders (not surprisingly, that’s what we call ourselves) can be found in The Chat, the club’s journal, published quarterly. There is also a quarterly newsletter that keeps members up to speed on the group’s activities, and documents interesting bird sightings and other assorted news items. Although academics and other professionals doing scientific work in the Carolinas do share their findings through the club’s publications, much of what we know has been documented by the large cadre of very serious but amateur birders. They always seem to be out there, looking for any and all birds they can find from dawn to dusk (and some even at night, for we do have a number of nocturnal species regardless of the time of year).

Three weekends a year, one in September (fall), January (winter) and late April or early May (spring), a meeting is planned somewhere particularly birdy. More than a hundred members descend to eat, drink, socialize and — wait for it! — go birding. And, as I type this, ambitious plans are well underway for the spring meeting which will be headquartered in Southern Pines. It has been 10 years since the last CBC gathering in the Sandhills — so the excitement is building among the local volunteers involved.

By meeting time in early May, dozens of species will have just arrived. Spring migration will have just peaked. All of the singing and displaying will be hard to miss. And many of our year-round avian residents will be scurrying around as they care for newly hatched nestlings. There will be more than enough activity for us birders to take in one short weekend. So, should you spot a group of us on the trails at Weymouth Woods, along Nick’s Creek Greenway or poking around at Reservoir Park with binoculars in hand and eyes to the sky, feel free to join us. You, too, can become a CBC birder. PS

For more information on the Carolina Bird Club, visit our website: www.carolinabirdclub.org

Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by email at susan@ncaves.com.

Return of the Birds

John James Audubon on exhibit again

By Jim Moriarty

It is such a small space to hold the passion of a lifetime.

In a corner on Level B of the North Carolina Museum of Art, John James Audubon’s four bound volumes of The Birds of America are back on exhibit, joined by instructive videos and an immersive wilderness experience. There are roughly 200 extant copies of the so-called double-elephant folio version, comprised of 435 hand-colored, life-size prints. North Carolina’s copy — minus two pages that were added later — was acquired in 1846 from Joseph Green Cogswell, a book dealer in New York, as part of a larger purchase by North Carolina’s then-governor, William Alexander Graham, who was intent on expanding the state’s library. It was transferred from the N.C. State Library to the museum in 1974. The last time the four volumes, each enclosed in its own specially constructed case, were on exhibit was July of 2016.

The engravings will be shown one page per volume — so, naturally, four at a time — for three months before changing them in the open-ended exhibit. The four on exhibit now include a wild turkey looking back as it crosses a Louisiana canebrake — the first plate produced in the project that consumed near the entirety of Audubon’s life. “The hand-coloring is light sensitive so we don’t want to expose it too long,” says John W. Coffey, the museum’s deputy director for Collections and Research. “People approach any art exhibit with different expectations. You have people that just stumble into the exhibition and, hopefully, they’re engaged by the story of Audubon. And then there are people who are bird lovers. There are lots of those who venerate Audubon as a naturalist. There are people who just like fine art. What Audubon created were not just accurate renditions of the birds of America but also quite beautiful compositions. They held their own as works of art in their own right.”

John James Audubon was born Jean Rabin, the “backstairs” child of the sea captain Jean Audubon and a French chambermaid, Jeanne Rabin, on Audubon’s sugar plantation in Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue. The child’s mother passed away from an infection mere months after the boy’s birth. The sea captain had his son and the boy’s half-sister (the daughter of a second mistress) transported to his home in Nantes, France, in advance of the revolution that engulfed Saint-Domingue, eventually establishing the Republic of Haiti. His lineage a closely held secret to preserve his inheritance, the boy grew up in Nantes as Jacques Fougère Audubon during the Vendéan counterrevolution and the terror that accompanied it.

“Losing his mother in infancy, separated from whoever mothered him afterward on Saint-Domingue when he was shipped off to France at six, just months ahead of a bloody revolution, enduring dreadful days as a young boy in Nantes when Carrier [Jean-Baptiste Carrier] was emptying the prisons with slaughter and his family feared for its life, was a full burden of trauma for a child,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning Audubon biographer Richard Rhodes. “In maturity Audubon would expunge the stigma and the trauma from his family story by relocating his birth to Louisiana and to ‘a lady of Spanish extraction . . . as beautiful as she was wealthy’ when he knew full well that he was the bastard son of the chambermaid Jeanne Rabin.” And, if in the fullness of time, he found his résumé in need of further padding, Audubon would sometimes claim to have studied under Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Bonaparte’s favorite neoclassicist painter.

Sent to America by his father to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s army, Jacques Fougère Audubon became John James Audubon on his transatlantic journey, settling on his father’s Pennsylvania farm, Mill Grove. “He had begun drawing birds in France,” writes Rhodes. “Now, ‘prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and coloring.’ This is retrospect, of course, but it catches the eighteen-year-old’s excitement and bravado.”

Audubon cut a dashing figure. The wife of a physician friend would describe the 30-something ornithologist and painter this way: “Audubon was one of the handsomest men I ever saw. In person he was tall and slender, his blue eyes were an eagle’s in brightness, his teeth were white and even, his hair a beautiful chestnut brown, very glossy and curly. His bearing was courteous and refined, simple and unassuming. Added to these personal advantages he was a natural sportsman and natural artist.”

While at Mill Grove, Audubon met his wife, Lucy Bakewell. He would begin a career as a merchant, floating down the Ohio River to Louisville and Henderson, Kentucky, and eventual bankruptcy. It was in Louisville that Audubon met Alexander Wilson, who was selling subscriptions (the method of the day to finance costly reproductions) to his own book, American Ornithology, but Audubon’s work was already vastly superior to Wilson’s.

Like any artist, Audubon’s style matured. One of the earliest innovations was the creation of his “board,” allowing him to pose the birds he killed — alas, it wasn’t as though he could hire them as models; besides, some made excellent eating — in the positions he observed in life. By May of 1812, he was drawing birds in flight. “Unlike birds posed on branches or standing on the ground, birds in flight required foreshortening to create the illusion of depth across the span of their wings or down the length of their bodies,” writes Rhodes. “Since Audubon’s limited formal art training had not progressed to foreshortening, he had to learn that complicated technique on his own by trial and error.”

Another breakthrough came when he added color chalk. “I resorted to a piece that matched the tint intended for the part, applied the pigment, rubbed the place with a cork stump and at once produced the desired effect!” he wrote. Then, in 1821 and ’22, he revamped his style again. “He already knew the traditional French medium of pastel very well; he had been perfecting it since he was a young man. Now he added to his repertoire a crystal-clear watercolor technique, the ability to use gouache effectively, and an extraordinary varied use of the pencil, together with the talent for combining all of these graphic means to render a single bird,” writes art critic Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. “No one in America equaled him for graphic inventiveness until Winslow Homer some sixty years later; as for European parallels, one can only think of the great English watercolorists, both contemporaries of Audubon: J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer.” The original watercolors for The Birds of America are in the collection of the New-York Historical Society and rarely seen because of their sensitivity to light.

Having run financially aground in the Panic of 1819, Audubon journeyed to New Orleans to collect a debt from Samuel Bowen that involved the ownership of a steamboat. Things didn’t go well. Bowen had already given the boat over to settle debts of his own. One thing led to another and Bowen attacked Audubon. As it turned out, he brought a cudgel to a knife fight, and Audubon stabbed him with his dagger. Later, appearing in front of Judge Henry P. Broadnax, Audubon defended himself before the court and was acquitted by reason of self-defense. “Mr. Audubon,” the judge added, “you committed a serious offense — an exceedingly serious offense, sir — in failing to kill the damned rascal.”

Having lost everything in Henderson, Audubon turned to portrait painting to make a living. Then, envisioning himself as “a one-man ornithological expeditionary force,” as Rhodes put it, he went back down the Mississippi, returning to New Orleans in 1821 with his assistant, Joseph Mason (one of several assistants who painted the backgrounds in Audubon’s works). His commercial portraits included the nude of a woman, Mrs. André, a mysterious client requiring his absolute discretion and to whom he referred as “The Fair Incognito” in his diaries. Eventually, he was joined in New Orleans by his wife, Lucy, living at what is now 505 Dauphine Street. Audubon was producing his ornithological paintings at a dizzying pace. After New Orleans it was up to Natchez, Mississippi, then Louisville and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and on and on. His sources of income weren’t confined to portraits. He taught dancing, drawing, even fencing.

Knowing that obtaining engravings of the number and quality necessary to produce The Birds of America could only be done in Europe, Audubon sailed from New Orleans on the Delos on May 18th, 1826. The ship was carrying 924 bales of cotton and a seasick John James Audubon with more than 300 drawings in tin-lined wooden portfolios.

An American backwoodsman with crates full of art proved a topic of considerable novelty in an Old World keen for knowledge of the new one. Audubon was well received. The first engraver to take on his project was William Lizars in Edinburgh. Lizars did approximately 10 engravings before a strike by his colorists forced Audubon to turn to Robert Havell Sr. and his son in London.

“Robert Havell Jr. was a more painstaking engraver than William Lizars and his father supervised the London colorers perhaps more carefully but there was a qualitative difference between the technologies Lizars and the Havells used to make Audubon’s colored plates,” writes Rhodes. “The Havells used a process known as aquatint, which allowed them to print shadows and shadings in a range from light gray to black, leaving the colorists only the more limited task of applying a uniform wash of color over the aquatinted area: the shading made the color appear darker.” Havell retouched the early Lizars plates, something that’s noted in the lower right-hand corner of the wild turkey engraving currently on view. While even the Havells had their ups and downs satisfying Audubon’s very specific instructions and expectations, it proved a match made in artistic heaven.

The last plate of The Birds of America was completed in June of 1838. Audubon was 53. His estimate of the project’s cost, monies he raised himself, was “$115,640 — in today’s dollars, about $2,141,000,” reckons Rhodes. He began work on the octavo edition (a smaller and, hence, more profitable version) two years later. Audubon would suffer a stroke in 1848, and begin slipping into dementia. “His vivid personality faded into vacancy,” says Rhodes. He passed away in January of 1851.

“What’s beautiful about Audubon is that these birds are so dynamic and alive, it feels like they’re almost jumping out of the page,” says Silvia Fantoni, the director of Audience Engagement and Public Programs who put together the immersive exhibit comprised of 19 of Audubon’s birds in varied habitats over a 24 hour period. “That’s what we wanted to do. I find his work fascinating, how driven he was by this project. It’s always interesting to see when an artist has this kind of obsession and vision and dedicated his life to do that. That’s why we still celebrate him almost 200 years later.”  PS