Dissecting a Cocktail

DISSECTING A COCKTAIL

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White Wine Sangria

Story and Photograph by Tony Cross

Spring is peaking, and patio drinking is a must. Myriad cocktails fit the criteria and, for me, they’ve got to be light and refreshing. There should be a handful of options in your arsenal: mojitos, gin and tonics, spritzes and so on. So, choose your own adventure.

A cocktail I recently rediscovered is the white wine sangria. This is a simple, classic recipe from Canon owner and bartender Jamie Boudreau. I’ve never been keen on traditional sangrias — I like my red wine without any fuss — but a white wine sangria makes perfect sense. I love French 75s and other Champagne cocktails, so adding clear spirits to a dry or crisp white wine (dry white wine on its own in the spring is lovely, too) only seems right. Boudreau’s recipe calls for a citrus-forward gin in Martin Miller, but you may sub in Tanqueray 10, Sutler’s Spirit Co. or your personal favorite. He uses elderflower liqueur from St. Germain, which adds a touch of sweetness and all the lovely floral notes of St. Germain.

The recipe below is for a small pitcher or carafe for sharing. Make sure to add the St. Germain after the sparkling wine and gin; the liqueur is rich and heavy, so it will slowly sink to the bottom. Take advantage of your local farmers markets for seasonal fruit — whatever is available works, whether its blackberries, strawberries or raspberries. Any brightly colored fruit will make the aesthetic of this cocktail pop.

Specifications

12 ounces dry sparkling white wine

2 ounces St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur

1 ounce Martin Miller Gin

Lemon and lime wheels

Seasonal fruit

 

Execution

In a small pitcher, add ice, sparkling wine, St. Germain, gin and and fruit. Lightly stir and top off with more sparkling wine. Serve in wine or Collins glass with ice and more fruit.

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

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Duck and Cover

How to keep your personal information safe

By Stephen E. Smith

When my mother was a teenager, she was the only all-night operator in a town of about 2,000 souls. The hours were long, so she eavesdropped on private conversations. When she got home, she shared the latest gossip with my grandmother, and within a few hours, everyone in town knew everyone else’s business.

In theory, it still works that way, except, of course, that our personal data is managed by computers — our iPhones, laptops, tablets and the clandestine eavesdropping monsters that lurk in the mystical ether — which speed up and amplify the collection process while disseminating our confidential information globally. The result, however, is the same: There are no secrets, finally or ever.

This is why Lawrence Cappello’s On Privacy: Twenty Lessons to Live By is a timely little book (151 pages) that’s surely worth the few minutes it takes to read it. It won’t be the most exciting book you’ve read, but it might be one of the most important.

Cappello is a professor of U.S. legal and constitutional history at the University of Alabama. He’s the author of None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, and he’s a certified information privacy professional. He’s on top of this data collection stuff, and his advice might help you sleep a little more soundly.

We’re hammered daily by claims that the equity in our homes is being stolen, our bank accounts plundered, our reputations besmirched, and our children driven to suicide. And then there are the endless scams that pop up on our screens (I consider everything a scam until it proves itself otherwise, and then I know for sure it is a scam). And now the government — who should be protecting us — has gotten into the info-distribution game via the unsupervised plundering of heretofore confidential databases.

On Privacy is written for those who are fearful about the disclosure of their personal data but who are reluctant to toss out their electronic devices. Cappello cuts through the noise and confusion and enumerates in short, sensible steps the necessary safeguards we need to adopt to be secure in the digital age. He offers practical insights into why privacy matters, how it shapes free societies, and how it rules our lives in an increasingly interconnected electronic world.

What Cappello doesn’t do is bombard his readers with terrifying stories about unfortunate fellow citizens who’ve suffered life-altering internet crimes. Horrifying examples only encourage despair. Instead, Cappello begins by addressing the requisite rationalization, “The Nothing-to-Hide Trap,” in which we maintain that if we are full-time do-gooders, we have nothing to fear from those who’d access our personal data. “Our personal information exists in snippets,” he writes. “When taken out of context, the private details of our lives . . . too often paint a picture of us that is skewed and not entirely true,” and thus we are often misrepresented. Since first impressions matter, we should focus on what computers collect and, more importantly, the distribution of our personal data.

Cappello breaks down the threats to our privacy into easy-to-read chapters that present the problems and suggest solutions. After a brief discussion of “Privacy Is Essential to Mental Health,” he appends suggestions on “How to Talk About Privacy’s Mental Health Benefits,” followed by “How to Protect Your Mental Health Through Privacy.” It’s all very straightforward.

He claims, for example, that we have the right to be forgiven our youthful transgressions. We make mistakes. “Unfortunately, the mistakes we make in life will remain instantly accessible,” he writes, “to any stranger inclined to take thirty seconds for a quick online search.”

Moreover, we are constantly under surveillance; our movements are tracked by our phones, computers and cameras on the street. If that’s not intrusive enough, outside sources can read your private electronic communications. He offers a solution: Secure your email with PGP encryption, a popular tool that scrambles your writing so that only the intended recipient can read it. The same is true for texts; encrypted text messaging apps are readily available and require only a quick download to your phone. These email and text apps also have an automatic delete option. And he recommends you buy a Faraday bag, a small pouch that blocks all signals; otherwise, you can be tracked by your phone even if you turn off your GPS.

Not only are we surveilled by private entities, but the government has, for many years, been poking into our business. Surveillance is the enemy of free expression: It discourages people from participating in political movements by instilling the fear they’ll be arrested for speaking out against the powerful, which inhibits the right of free assemblage as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Cappello reminds us that the “belief that the surveillance powers of the state must be constantly kept in check is a cornerstone of what it means to live in a free country.”

Most of Cappello’s recommendations are simple and easily implemented: “When in doubt, log out,” delete apps you aren’t using and any accounts associated with them, tape off the camera on your computer, clear your browser history, get rid of caches and cookies, turn off and lock your computer when not in use, and purchase your own Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which makes it difficult to track your online activity. And those are just a few of the suggestions that might save you money and safeguard your reputation. 

Of course, the obvious way to protect your future information — there’s little you can do about the past — is to disappear or “go dark,” as folks are wont to say. This would necessitate the destruction of all your electronics — computers, streaming devices, tablets, phones, smartwatches, etc., and all storage systems — thumbnail drives, hard drives, data stored in the cloud (the global network of remote servers that functions as a single ecosystem), old floppy disks, credit cards, etc. Everything. All of it. Then disappear. Forever.

Hometown

HOMETOWN

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Aced Out

The elusive hole-in-one

By Bill Fields

Given that I played my first shots on patchy grass in our yard to empty soup cans sunken in the ground, I’ve gone on to have a full golf life. I’ve played thousands of rounds, chronicled hundreds of tournaments with a keyboard or a camera, and been privileged to spend time with dozens of golfers who shaped the sport.

But there is a gap in my golf history. I haven’t made a hole-in-one.

Of course, more talented folks play longer than I have without making an ace. The odds are against anyone: 12,500 to 1 for an average golfer, and even 2,500 to 1 for a tour pro. Those kinds of chances remind me of the “Greyhound Derby” contest at the Colonial grocery store when I was kid. Every Saturday night that we watched the races on television, our dog looked like a lock for the $1,000 winner’s prize . . . until fading like a cur in the homestretch.

An ace has been the mechanical rabbit that I can’t catch.

About the same time the dogs were disappointing us, I was becoming obsessed with the Guinness World Records book that I received one Christmas. It was chock-full of the biggest or tallest you name it. As a budding golfer, I was fascinated by the entry for longest hole-in-one: 444 yards by Robert Mitera, Oct. 7, 1965, on the 10th hole of the appropriately named Miracle Hill Golf Course in Omaha, Nebraska.

I’ve seen holes-in-one in the flesh. Two flew straight in, another rolled in like a Ben Crenshaw putt, and a fourth took a fluky hard-right bounce off a greenside mound. A scorecard, as the saying goes, doesn’t have pictures. That said, a good friend of mine is loath to claim one of his 1s, a skulled short iron that was an ugly shot by any measure until the ball skittered into the cup.

No doubt the most memorable that I’ve witnessed occurred nearly 40 years ago at a par-3 course in New Jersey. I was playing with my pal Michael Dann, with whom I’d enjoyed many games when we lived in the Sandhills. He usually beat me in those days, and I was motivated to change that when we convened at the short course on a busy Saturday afternoon. The first tee was bustling, and we had a de facto gallery when it was our turn on the 80-yard opener. I went first, snuggling a wedge only a foot from the flagstick, and crowed about it to Michael. It was going to be my day.

Then he flew his shot into the cup.

I came close as a teenager. I one-hopped an 8-iron off the pin on the first hole at Knollwood. I hit a 4-wood to 6 inches on the formidable 13th at Mid Pines Inn & Golf Club. Although I’ve had a couple of hole-outs from the fairway from a hundred yards or so, since giving Michael something to shoot at that day in New Jersey, the closest I’ve come on a par-3 tee shot is about a yardstick away.

Perhaps I’m thinking about aces because there have been some notable ones made starting last summer.

I was working on the TV production of the 2024 U.S. Senior Open when Frank Bensel Jr. made a hole-in-one on the par-3 fourth hole at Newport (R.I.) Country Club with a 6-iron. Newport is the rare layout with back-to-back par-3s. Bensel used the same club to ace the fifth hole. It was only the second time in 1,001 USGA championships that someone made two aces in a round. The only other case of consecutive holes-in-one is thought to be by John Hudson in a 1971 tournament on the British PGA circuit.

Last fall, Bryson DeChambeau went viral by trying to make an ace hitting a wedge over his house. On his 16th day of attempts, the U.S. Open champion at Pinehurst succeeded. This February at the South African Open, Dale Whitnell became the second man to make a pair of holes-in-one in one round on the DP World Tour. Three golfers have achieved the 67 million-to-1 feat on the PGA Tour, most recently Brian Harman in 2015.

I am not greedy. One would be plenty. I checked in with my friend Mike Fields of Southern Pines, a golfer good enough in his mid-60s to have shot his age twice within a week. He didn’t make his first of three aces until he was 57. I shall keep swinging.

Sporting Life

SPORTING LIFE

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Treasured Memories

Old companions can be the best medicine

By Tom Bryant

“The storehouse of our memories is like an unused room in which lay aside the odds and ends of many treasured things.”
— Roland Clark, Gunner’s Dawn

For the last several months a debilitating illness seemed to dominate all my thinking. It felt as if it had been an interminable time since I had roamed the woods and streams hunting and fishing. The calendar that Linda, my bride, kept of assorted obligations was filled with doctor appointments. My life was centered around pills and stethoscopes.

It was a depressing time. So what to do?

“Quit whining,” I told myself. “Head to the woods. That’ll make things better, or at least improve your outlook.”

I hollered to Linda, who was in the laundry room putting on a load of wash, “Hey, Babe, I’m gonna ride down to the farm and check things out.”

It had been several months since I had been to “the farm,” as I call the old tobacco workings to which my friend Joe Rosy lets me have access. It’s a wonderful corner of the Drowning Creek swamp area, teeming with deer, doves and turkeys. Back toward the swamp, there’s a beaver dam, and wood ducks live, nest and enjoy a habitat that is hard to find in our so-called modern world.

“You be careful,” Linda responded. “Take your phone.”

“OK,” I replied. “I’ll be back a little after dark.”

I grabbed my hunting bag, a battered old Orvis pack that I’ve had forever. I keep it stuffed with items I’ve learned over the years would, in a rush, come in handy — everything from a Swiss Army knife to shotgun loads of all gauges from 28 to 12. Depending on the gun I happen to be using, I’ll not run out of ammunition.

It’s a short ride down to the farm, and I usually take a little detour through Pinebluff, where I spent many happy years growing up. The old house where we lived is still there. After my father died, Mother sold it and moved to the farm in South Carolina that’s been in the family for years.

The Pinebluff house is a little worse for wear, but every time I drive by, memories come flooding back. Ironically, on this particular day, my first in weeks out of the house, just as I got to the corner, a black dog came bursting out of the pines and ran right in front of the truck.

“Smut,” I thought for a quick second of my old canine friend. But no, this dog was more like a pointer than a retriever, just with a black coat. Smut was my first dog, a curly-coated retriever, black as the ace of spades. Dad got him for me when I was in the third grade, and he became my constant companion until I went off to college. Smut was not a champion hunting dog by any means, but he had a natural instinct that helped him overcome his lack of obedience. Not his fault, more mine and my lack of knowledge about training a working dog. Our timing was perfect, though. We were both untamed when it came to the woods, and we spent many a day and night roaming that Pinebluff area of the Sandhills looking for adventure.

When Mother protested the little pup coming to live with us, complaining that she would be the one responsible for him, my father said, “A boy and a dog should grow up together.” In looking back, I can see how she loved the impish, tiny puppy almost as much as I did.

I continued on down Pinebluff Lake Road and decided to pull into the small gravel parking lot and maybe eat a snack from my gunning bag. It was good to have an appetite again. Food hadn’t meant a lot lately. I grabbed a pack of nabs and walked to the pier of the little lake where many years before I had learned to swim.

As a youngster before the town outlawed dogs in the lake, Smut and I would swim from the pier to the dam. He was more at home in the water than I was. As a matter of fact, he roamed Pinebluff and the lake area as if it was his domain, to be enjoyed at his leisure.

It was a quiet morning, and I watched a sheriff deputy’s car roll around the near curve and head toward town, and I decided to meander on to the farm. Remembering Smut brought to mind another furry best friend that lived with me during my early years of hunting — Paddle, a little female yellow Lab. I learned more about training a dog, or more to the point, acquiring the knowledge of how to train a dog, from the best teacher, Paddle herself. She was amazing and accomplished more afield in unusual situations than any animal I’ve ever known.

I thought back to a cold morning at a beaver dam. Paddle and I hoped to catch wood ducks as they came off the roost. The beaver dam was located in a little bottom about a hundred yards down a small rise. We had scouted the area the evening before when we noticed ducks winging their way back into the swamp. We pretty much had the lay of the land the next morning when we silently drove the Bronco, lights off so as to not disturb roosting ducks, down a little dirt fire break and parked under a giant white oak tree.

Frost on the broom straw crunched underfoot as I eased through the outer rings of the swamp to the beaver dam where we would set up for the hunt. Paddle, walking at heel, was anxious to go.

The swamp turned gray with early dawn as we hunkered down awaiting the morning flight. We heard the ducks as they came off the roost, and that was about it. They had flown in the opposite direction from where we were hiding.

I decided to give it 30 more minutes before heading home and to work. Just as I stood up on the narrow edge of the beaver dam, a lone wood duck came whistling over at the edge of the range of my gun. I snapped off a shot anyway, and the duck hit its after-burner and sailed on out of sight. Paddle took off after the bird and I whistled her back to heel.

“No bird, Paddle.”

She looked up at me expectantly as if I needed a good excuse for missing the duck. “It was out of range. We’ll get the next one.”

But there wasn’t another one, and after 30 more minutes, I decided to head up the hill to the truck. Just as we stepped off the beaver dam, Paddle tore off, racing toward the edge of the swamp with me shouting and whistling to get her back.

“Now where is that crazy dog going?” I thought as I hustled in the direction she had taken, concerned that we would be delayed getting home. Just as I stepped out of the tree line bordering the swamp, here came Paddle over the rise with the wood duck in her mouth, the same wood duck that I had shot at and thought I had missed. She knew somehow that I hadn’t.

It was a great morning in the woods at the farm, and my impromptu visit to Pinebluff and remembrances of the wonderful dogs that have accompanied me through life was therapeutic. I felt as if I had another lease on the days to come.

As Dick Coleman, my good friend and hunting buddy, so eloquently put it shortly after his big, rangy black Lab, Honcho, had died, “Do dogs go to heaven? Well, if they don’t, I don’t want to go either.”

Almanac April 2025

ALMANAC APRIL 2025

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Almanac

By Ashley Walshe

April is a drift of dandelions, cheerful and bright.

Can you hear them giggling? Listen. It helps if you slip off your shoes.

Somehow, bare feet in the cool grass, you can access new frequencies: the whir of tiny wings, the swelling of tender buds, the rhythmic flow of nectar.

Wiggle your toes. Breathe into your belly. Surrender to the urge to lie down.

Yes, that’s better. Draped across the softening earth, the sun on your skin is medicinal. You close your eyes, brush fingertips across feathery blossoms, let your inner child run wild.

Perceive the world through the eyes of a dandelion. Anticipate the tickle of bee feet, the tender kiss of mourning cloak, the ecstasy of thunder and rain.

Are you giggling yet?

Listen.

The song of spring rises in all directions.

In the distance, a chorus of peepers rouses the burgeoning woods. Wet and trembling, a swallowtail clings to its chrysalis, pumping crumpled wings at the speed of grace. A bluebird whistles tu-a-wee. 

Open your eyes. Turn your gaze toward the flowering dogwood, the mighty tulip, the small, ambrosial apple tree. Everywhere you look, spring spills forth.

The dandelions are chattering now. Turn a cartwheel, one squeals. Dance for rain, blurts another. Pick me, whispers a third. 

Smiling, you reach for a fat, yellow blossom, pluck the stem, tuck the flower behind your ear. Eyes closed once more, you drift into blissful reverie. Among this sea of sprightly yellow orbs, you drink in the playful hum of this budding season, let the song revive your every cell.

Floriography

The Victorians used tussie-mussies (nosegays) to express their true feelings. Apple blossoms and dogwood were code for I like you. Purple violets murmured true love. Tulips? Well, that would depend on the color, of course.

While the language of flowers has withered in these less-than-modest times, we can’t help but ascribe meaning. Surely, every gifted flower says, I’m thinking of you. But what is it that you hear in the presence of flame azalea, redbud, cherry blossom? What do you glean from the iris and bluebell?

The Great Egg Hunt

There, nestled in the branches of dogwood, sugar maple, hawthorn and pine; in gutters, rain boots and dense shrubs; within the cavities of dead and living trees: eggs, eggs, beautiful eggs. Creamy white ones, speckled brown (chickadee, cardinal and nuthatch). Bright and muted blue ones (robin and bluebird). Pale green with rust-colored blotches (mockingbird). And guess who’s out searching for them? Opossums, snakes, skunks, racoons, crows and jays.

Spring is as harsh as it is lovely. And, yet, this circle of life is indeed what makes each spark of creation all the more precious.

Golftown Journal

GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

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Calling Cards

The business of keeping score

By Lee Pace

The world’s oldest golf scorecard dates to December 1820 and the golf links at Musselburgh, Scotland. A member named James Cundell used the card to record 84 shots over 10 holes in a club match and noted in the margin, “Dreadful storm of wind and rain — atmosphere quite yellow — just like the lurid regions of Pandemonium.” The card sold in 2019 at a collector’s auction for the U.S. dollar equivalent of some $6,300.

Over two centuries, literally millions of scorecards have been churned out for golf courses worldwide. Some are simple one color on card stock. Some have a second color. Others have full-color photos, advertising or foil stamping. A nice touch for walking golfers is having a handy little pencil slip.

Odds are if you’ve stashed some scorecards away in your golf memorabilia bin, you’ll find a card with the tiny imprint in one corner of Golf Associates, Asheville, N.C. Quietly and with little fanfare, a small company in the mountains of North Carolina has carved a niche as one of the most pre-eminent manufacturers of scorecards in the nation. It has been in business for 55 years.

“It was early 1989; I had just taken the job at Duke and was at the PGA Show,” says Ed Ibarguen, the director of golf at the Duke University Golf Club. “I was wandering around the show and saw this company from North Carolina. They made scorecards. The guy stood up, shook my hand and said he was a huge Duke fan and would love our business. His name was Sherwood Pinkston. We developed a long-standing friendship. Sherwood’s gone now, but we’re 36 years into working with the same company.”

Pinkston grew up in Asheville and developed his business IQ by selling drinks at Asheville Tourists baseball games and hustling empty bottles for a penny each. He served in the South Pacific in World War II, then came home, started a family and ran assorted businesses — a diner in West Asheville and a dry-cleaning business, to name just two.

“He was the consummate entrepreneur,” says Jerry Davis, who worked for Pinkston from 1996 through Pinkston’s death in 2014. “He was not going to work for anybody. He was an avid golfer and a heckuva competitor. He was an ace at the pool table. He had big hands, but they were soft hands. He could make that cue ball go anywhere he wanted. He was a good golfer and an excellent putter, particularly on fast greens. You always wanted Sherwood as your partner.”

Pinkston played golf regularly at Beaver Lake Golf Course north of the city and Black Mountain Golf Course to the east. One day in 1968, he was paired with a man from California who said he’d just gone out of business trying to sell scorecards with advertising on them. That sounded like a good idea, so Pinkston approached the pro at Black Mountain and said he’d produce a scorecard for free if he could sell advertising.

The acorn was hatched.

He founded Golf Associates in 1970 and at first used the printing press at Hickory Printing Group, an hour east of Asheville. Pinkston called on golf courses from Mississippi to Miami, often sleeping in his car and eating a lot of saltines and Vienna sausage along the way. He got good results from a mail solicitation campaign, with one of his first orders coming from L.B. Floyd, the pro at Stryker Golf Course at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville and father of future Golf Hall of Famer Raymond.

“We offered a superior product, and if they would take advertising, it didn’t cost them anything,” Pinkston said.

One niche for the business was daily fee and public access courses that would allow Pinkston to sell advertising. That approach didn’t appeal to the private clubs, so Pinkston developed formats and ideas for scorecards that clubs would purchase.

“The Duke scorecards had had ads on them, and I wanted to get away from that,” Ibarguen remembers. “Sherwood had the idea of putting the logo in a foil stamp. He said he’d do it for no upcharge. He produced a beautiful card, one that I’d bet was as nice as you would find at the time for a public access course.”

Pinkston grew the business, added staff and eventually purchased a printing press (upgraded several times over the years). He expanded to add rack cards and post cards. His wife, Faye, took over running the business after her husband’s passing, and in 2020 she sold it to Gary Mannies, who had been in the yardage book publication business and had developed a friendship with Sherwood at trade shows over the years.

Today the company does work in its backyard, with cards at Biltmore Forest and Asheville Municipal; across the state at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, and Forest Creek, Dormie Club and Tobacco Road in the Sandhills; and to nationally recognized clubs like Whistling Straits, Fishers Island Club, Streamsong, Valhalla and Congressional.

“Sherwood is from ‘The Greatest Generation,’” says Davis, who knew Pinkston from playing golf around Asheville when he was looking for a career change in the mid-1990s after decades in the insurance industry. “He came back from the war determined to be a success. He just happened to find golf scorecards. Back then, most scorecards were bland and utilitarian. He introduced four-color. He started printing cards with UV coating on one side. That was a big innovation. It made the club logo stand out and pop off the card. That was a game-changer for us. For higher-end clubs, he started using linen and gold foil.”

Today, company sales representatives pay calls on courses across the nation and set up shop at trade shows like the PGA Show in Orlando every January, and the Carolinas PGA Show in Greensboro in February.

“I love the game, I love the people I work with, and it’s a creative business,” says Brayden Pitcairn, who’s been with Golf Associates for three years, as he looks over a display table of the company’s scorecards at the Greensboro show. “We want to produce something the golf staff is proud to hand to members and guests.”

Davis stands nearby, shaking hands with show attendees and reminiscing about the success of a company lasting well over half a century. His favorite story is having traveled with Pinkston to a trade show in St. Louis, driving back to Asheville and stopping at a motel in Nashville at 2 a.m. Davis went to park the car and bring the luggage in while Pinkston went into the office to register.

“I came into the office and Sherwood was trying to talk the guy at the desk into a deal for rack cards,” Davis says. “Now, the guy at the desk at 2 a.m. is not the decision maker. But that didn’t put Sherwood off.”

Entrepreneurs and golf. Some stumble, but the good stories are worth a round of applause.

Pleasures of Life

PLEASURES OF LIFE

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Ueck and Me

There are no bad days at the ballpark

By Ron Johnson 

It was a particularly hot midsummer morning in New Orleans. It was 1964, JFK had been assassinated the previous fall, and I was an 11-year-old knucklehead with a Butch Wax crew cut and a $9.95 Spalding catcher’s mitt from Atlantic Thrift Center. We were spending our second summer in a 900-square-foot brick house about 3 miles east of the city limits, with only a noisy attic fan to protect us from the hot, sticky air.

It was my third year as an enthusiastic collector of Topps baseball cards. I had begun stockpiling them for a required merit project as a Cub Scout from Pack 222, Den 9. It seemed a lot more exciting than stamp collecting. The photos on the cards would come to life on Saturday afternoons in front of our monochrome Western Auto TV. And I had become addicted to the hard slabs of bubble gum, a bonus for me and for my young dentist, Dr. Murret, who looked a little like Vincent Price, and was Lee Harvey Oswald’s first cousin. But that’s a story for another day.

I had some great cards. Pretty much all of them, in fact, from Stan Musial to Mickey Mantle, to my favorite player, Tim McCarver, the 23-year-old catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. He was a Southern boy from Memphis and was sure to be an all-star for years to come. He might have even been Irish. I could relate to him.

In the ’60s, before cable TV, our roof antenna could pull in a game on Saturdays at 1 p.m. on our minuscule screen. Mostly it was the St. Louis Cardinals playing the Cubs, Reds, Giants, Dodgers or Braves. The games were called by the often brash Dizzy Dean, a former Cardinal pitcher himself, and Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger great, who would provide color — as if Dizzy needed the help. Less frequently, it would be the Yankee “Game of the Week,” which I didn’t mind because I could see the best the American League had to offer, names like Mantle, Roger Maris, Harmon Killebrew and Carl Yastrzemski.

In the years before the hapless Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros) were established and before the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, the Cardinals were the closest team to New Orleans. In fact, in those days, they had the largest geographical fan base in the U.S., stretching from Tennessee to Colorado. And they were huge in New Orleans. At night, I could hear Harry Caray call the Cardinal games on KMOX, the 50,000-watt clear channel giant, all the way from St. Louis to the transistor radio in my bedroom. Even after the Colt .45s joined the National League, watching them play baseball was painful. I once saw a Houston pitcher lose both games of a double-header. I saw another throw a no-hitter, and lose.

In the ’60s, St. Louis was an industrial juggernaut with factories up and down Manchester Road, their smell drifting for miles. It was a family-oriented, blue-collar city. The Gateway Arch was under construction. But most of all, St. Louis was the best baseball town in America on the hot summer day my mom and I boarded the “Southern Belle” at Union Station for our annual trip to visit my Aunt Winnie there. My dad would join us when he could, carrying a promise to take me to a Cardinals game at the old Sportsman’s Park, just renamed Busch Stadium.

Stan Musial had retired the previous year but they still had some elite all-stars on the team, including the hard-boiled Bob Gibson; steady Kenny Boyer; Bill White, who eventually became president of the National League; Curt Flood, the centerfielder who changed baseball forever by legally challenging baseball’s reserve clause; and Lou Brock, the prolific base stealer acquired from the Chicago Cubs in one of the most one-sided trades in baseball history.

I always slept in the basement at Aunt Winnie’s house, adjacent to the coal chute, often waking up with residual black dust on my cheeks. No matter. It was the day of the game. After a breakfast of Sugar Pops my dad and I walked down the steep hill to Manchester Road, toward the Mississippi River, and climbed up on the city bus, heading toward our connection and eventual destination at Grand Boulevard and Dodier Street. By the time we got near Busch Stadium, it was getting warm, scorching in fact, on its way to the high 90s. My dad bought me a wool St. Louis Cardinals cap from a street vendor, several sizes too large, in bright red with the iconic redbird logo. A heavy pair of Sears binoculars — which I still have — hung uncomfortably on my neck.

We picked up a scorecard listing the starting lineups. All the usual names were penciled in, except for the one I wanted to see more than any other, Tim McCarver. In his place was a reserve catcher named Bob Uecker. Could it be true? Is it possible that I had come all the way from New Orleans to see my hero, and he wouldn’t be in the lineup? Had he been traded? Had he been injured? I thought it was a fluke. I was confident the, manager Johnny Keane, would change his mind and McCarver would somehow be perched behind the plate that day.

The first thing I saw as we walked up the ramp and through the opening to our seats was the famous home run porch in right field — a trademark of Sportsman’s Park. Our seats were good. My dad made sure of it. He always saw to it that things were near perfect for me. We were on the third base side, about halfway up and partially under the high overhang. The old stadium was intimate and cozy. It felt like we could reach out and touch the players. Comfortably in our seats, we were ready to watch our Cardinals pummel the San Francisco Giants.

Looking down on the field, I saw a big guy in a loose cotton button-down shirt, interviewing Willie Mays. It was Dizzy Dean. Pee Wee Reese was standing nearby, chatting it up with some players around the batting cage. Soon the lineups were exchanged by managers Alvin Dark, a multi-sport athlete with Louisiana ties, and Keane, who would resign at the end of the season to take the same job with the Yankees.

Not known to me at the time, Harold Peter Henry “Pee Wee” Reese was more than just an eight-time all-star shortstop. He was one of the first white players to embrace Jackie Robinson when he arrived in New York. And he stood proudly at the side of Robinson when the boos rang down from racists, at home and on the road. They remained friends until Robinson’s death in 1972.

As the Cardinals took the field, my heart sank. As expected, McCarver’s number 15 wasn’t behind the plate. Instead it was the number 9 of Bob Uecker. All I knew about Uecker  was what I had read on the back of a baseball card. And it wasn’t much.

As the Giants trotted out their own all-star lineup of Mays, Willie McCovey, Duke Snyder and Orlando Cepeda, it was quickly obvious that this was not going to be a good day for the Cardinals, who went on to lose the game 14-3. There was plenty of action, though. Mays, earning a whopping $85,000 in his prime, uncharacteristically dropped a fly ball. Curt Flood slammed hard into the center field fence pursuing a sure double, which he caught, before being knocked out cold. Harvey Kuehn had five hits for the Giants while, totally in character, Uecker was 0-4. Counting Dean and Reese, there were no less than a dozen eventual hall-of-famers on the field that day. It would have been a lifetime of first-game bragging rights for any pre-teen baseball fan, even if his team had been mercilessly embarrassed.

And it would not be the last time I crossed paths with Bob Uecker.

As a young stringer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, I ran into him at a few events in New Orleans, once at the famous and exclusive Sugar Bowl seafood party, another time at Commander’s Palace, and much later at spring training in Florida. He was always cordial, calling me “Spike.” I am not sure if he recognized me or simply called every young male sportswriter by the same nickname. I even told him the story about his Cards getting crushed 14-3 in St. Louis, which he remembered vividly. And later, when I lived in Dallas, I saw him occasionally at Arlington Stadium when the Brewers were in town to play the Rangers and he was broadcasting. Chance meetings all.

After abandoning my “career” in journalism, I got into the construction equipment business and eventually relocated to the Milwaukee area. On the way from my office in Menomonee Falls to our home near Okauchee Lake in Nashotah, I would sometimes drive by Uecker’s home off Pilgrim Road and wave to him when I saw him in his yard. He would always wave back though I’m certain he had no idea it was “Spike” behind the wheel.

And, of course, I would listen to Bob and his broadcast partner, Pat Hughes, whenever the Brewers were playing on those beautiful summer nights in the Lake Country of southern Wisconsin. Bob was the best ever at making a bad game good.

Known for his appearances on The Tonight Show, his role as Harry Doyle in the movie Major League, and his hall of fame broadcasting career, Ueck was also a skilled salmon fisherman with a nice rig on Lake Michigan. In those days, the lake’s eastern shore was a world class salmon fishery. I spent many days casting for kings and cohos on those nausea-inducing swells.

Like calling a bad baseball game, when the fish were nowhere to be found, you could hear Uecker on the ship-to-shore radio cracking jokes and telling stories with his dry Midwestern wit. I guess the Coast Guard was also amused because they never put a stop to his entertaining diversions. Everyone loved Ueck.

I ran into him at the marina a few times, never troubling him with lengthy conversation, but always happy to have seen him. Bob enjoyed home-smoked salmon for breakfast and would frequently offer a sample to anyone who was around at 5 a.m. A day on the lake was better when it started with Ueck.

I saw him several times at Kuhtz General Store and Tavern, right across Okauchee Lake from my home, near the shoreline where Norwegian Ole Evinrude invented the first practical outboard motor in 1907. Like the great Marquette University basketball coach, Al McGuire, he loved the chili at Kuhtz. So did I. But I never saw him drink anything harder than Diet Coke while entertaining anyone within earshot.

His accomplishments and successes in sports entertainment are too numerous to mention. But what greater aspiration can any human being have than spending their life making people laugh, sometimes on the field, as a player who once led the league in passed balls and errors while catching only 59 games? And what greater distinction can one have than being loved by most everyone who knows you? His self-deprecating manner was legendary. He never promoted himself, he promoted laughter. He seemed uncomfortable in a serious world.

While I thought Ueck belonged to me, and to the people of the Milwaukee area, where he was born, played and broadcasted baseball, fished, and lived and, last January, died, he actually belonged to all of America. For more than 50 years, I have welcomed in each baseball season, thinking of freshly cut grass, the smell of leather, and my connection with Ueck. But it will be quite different this April.

Ueck was part of my life. We certainly were not friends. I am not sure we needed to be. I just knew him a little. And that was enough.

Out of the Blue

OUT OF THE BLUE

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Pet Peeves

There’s always something cringeworthy

By Deborah Salomon

Back in the day when columnists led off with “Back in the day . . . ” or “Webster’s Dictionary defines . . . ” people had “pet peeves,” with peeve defined by Webster as an annoyance or irritation. No explanation on how pet — a warm, fuzzy adjective — got hooked up.

Call them what you will, I’m sure peeves surfaced in the Bible, certainly Shakespeare. By any other name the irritations haven’t gone out of date. Perhaps owning them outright lessens the sting.

Mine include:

Prime-time TV ads for generic versions of remedies that treat sexual dysfunction, both male and female. Ditto “all-body” deodorants hawked on prime time cable. Imagine the questions posed by 8-year-olds.

People who give away puppies in the Walmart parking lot enrage me. Some pups go to good homes, I assume. But for others I fear the worst.

Silly yogurt. Like confetti and birthday cake flavors. The silliest is Oui brand, 5 ounces in a tiny glass cup that, unlike jam and mayo jars, has no reusable lid. My favorite yogurt is lowfat Greek vanilla, with a drizzle of real maple syrup.

“Pancake” syrup . . . yuck. Living and working in Vermont for 21 years taught me that real maple syrup — still gathered and boiled down the old-fashioned way by winter-idled farmers — is true nectar of the gods, priced accordingly but worth the splurge. Mix with mustard and use sparingly on broiled salmon and roasted chicken, plain on cooked carrots, oatmeal. Dilute with cider vinegar for salad greens. March was syrup month long before it was basketball madness.

Talking to a machine. Bank, power and cable companies leave me foaming at the mouth. I finally cracked the code: Say “representative” over and over until you get one, who is usually polite and helpful from six time zones away.

TV anchor-and-weather women wearing cocktail or mini-dresses and strappy sandals at 7 a.m. Cleavage and knees don’t go with bacon and eggs.

Event ticket prices. Moore County boasts an inordinately large roster of lectures, plays, concerts and other entertainments both low- and highbrow. But with ticket prices starting at about $25, how can a couple have a reasonable dinner out and attend for less than $100? Student prices are some help but the upshot keeps Gen Now shackled to streaming. I spent college summers working in New York City. We starving students spread sleeping bags outside Broadway theaters at midnight, to cop SROs available at dawn for $5. What fun! But not new. At Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, common folk stood in the “pit” just below the stage for a penny. This practice inspired the Bard to include characters and situations familiar to mosh-pitters.

Remember Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands? Current version: Cecelia cellphone hand. She walks through life, cellphone Krazy Glued to her palm, as though awaiting a call from the ghost of Elvis.

Too many burger joints. I’ve heard tell there’s a spot on U.S. 15-501 that is equidistant from six, maybe seven burger emporia. Enough already!

Climate change deniers. If they have a better answer to the hurricanes, blizzards, floods, tornadoes, heat and cold waves I haven’t heard it. Abandon Mother Earth? For Mars?

Southerners running around on the coldest day sans coats. “I’ll only be out for a minute,” they protest. Get a grip — and a puffy jacket or double-breasted tweed. The trick to staying warm is to not get cold in the first place.

Supermarkets that don’t offer rain checks. “Loss leaders” aim to get shoppers through the door. But unless rain checks are offered for specials not in stock I feel cheated.

Politicians who spit out rambling non-answers to pointed questions. “Yes” and “no” aren’t in their vocabularies. I say, throw ’em into the mosh pit!

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

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Mountain Thriller

Murder in the Grove Park Inn

By Anne Blythe

If you’re someone who likes to armchair travel through the pages of a good book, Terry Roberts, a native of the North Carolina mountains, has a thriller of a journey for you.

In The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape, Roberts transports his readers to the luxurious Grove Park Inn, a stately and historic resort in Asheville that serves as the dark yet alluring backdrop for a murder mystery that exposes the tiers of a justice system that doesn’t always treat the wealthy and the poor equally.

The book starts with a bang when a nameless man standing near a tousled bed pulls out a pearl-handled derringer, shoots a naked college girl and leaves her on the thick, soft carpet to die in a pool of her own blood.

We quickly meet Stephen Baird Robbins in his home in Hot Springs, 30 miles downriver from Asheville. He’s a twice-married, once-divorced and once-widowed man who has stood trial twice for murder and been acquitted both times.

It’s October 1924, and Robbins, a retired investigator with a reputation for solving seemingly unsolvable crimes, is living a somewhat relaxed existence in a rental home with Luke, his 3-year-old son whose mother died in childbirth. Life had dealt them some wounds and bruises, but Robbins and his two neighbors were optimistic that together, they could raise Luke to adulthood.

When Robbins received a letter on fancy stationery from Benjamin Loftis, owner of the Grove Park Inn, trying to stir him out of his secluded piece of the world, he balled it up and threw it in the fireplace. Loftis persevered, first with a telegram telling Robbins his “presence is required due to a matter of some urgency,” and then with a personal follow-up in a chauffeur-driven trip to Hot Springs.

Loftis, a “newspaperman, chemist, pharmaceutical manufacturer, self-styled architect and — this is important —hotel man,” gave his pitch to Robbins. The hotel’s renown was in jeopardy after a college girl was found dead in one of the plush rooms.

“So in sum, you have a murder on your hands, and not just any murder, but the worst kind — a supposedly innocent young woman,” Robbins responds to Loftin. “The publicity is killing you. Two weeks have gone by and the sheriff hasn’t been able to nail anybody for it and you are getting desperate.” Robbins, a character who has appeared in two previous books by Roberts, let the hotel owner know from the start that he might not like the results.

“I want the murderer caught and punished, so that the inn’s reputation will remain unsullied,” Loftin responds.

Thus begins a tale that takes Robbins, who describes himself as “hill born and runaway” with “rarely two bills in my wallet to rub together,” to a resort where a man of his socioeconomic background is rarely a favored guest. Given wide access to the large granite stone inn described as “the finest pile of rocks ever built,” in October, “when fall began to wrap its cold hands around the mountains,” Robbins checks into the third floor hotel room next door to the murder scene.

The cast of characters includes an array of hotel workers and well-heeled guests such as judges, politicians and other townspeople who want to mingle and be seen among the wealthy travelers seeking retreat.

The hotel workers, its dining room servers, front desk managers and dutiful housekeepers are an interesting lot. The hotel itself, with all its corridors, luxurious amenities and nooks and crannies, becomes its own character.

Then there are the “girls” — the young women brought in to “keep the party lively” for events that might draw mostly men and a few bored wives. Robbins, a tenacious investigator with a knack for building rapport with the working people, has no qualms about standing up to the powerful. He is determined to find out who killed Rosalind Caldwell, or “Rosie,” as the locals called the young woman found dead in the hotel.

“Perhaps only Stephen Robbins could do what must be done here,” Roberts writes in his acknowledgements thanking the character for yet another appearance in one of his books. “After all, this is a book about prostitution and politics — a timely topic — and it required a hard hand and true voice to find justice.”

The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape is about social status, privilege, racial injustices a wrongful arrest and a forthright observation that things are not always as they seem, even if that’s what the wider community wants you to believe. In fast-moving, descriptive prose, Roberts takes readers on a pursuit filled with danger and love that reveals the deaths of two other young women found lifeless in circumstances eerily similar to Rosie’s.

These were not the sort of women whose deaths would typically draw big headlines in Prohibition Era Asheville, Robbins notes. Their bodies were not discovered in a fancy hotel, nor did they come from the well-to-do neighborhoods of the town’s rich and famous.

Even if there are enough clues to figure out the likely killer long before the story ends, Roberts is adept at pulling his readers through to the conclusion to find out whether or not there will be justice for these victims. It’s an entertaining pursuit, a journey to another place and another time well worth taking.

Southwords

SOUTHWORDS

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Live in the Meow

Curiosity didn’t kill this cat

By Emilee Phillips

Cats having nine lives is a cliché. Orange cats being a menace is another. But my childhood cat, Simba, fits the bill for both.

He was trouble from Day One. We found him abandoned under an azalea bush and roaring his little kitten head off. I had never heard such a small animal make so much noise. After capturing the terrified little guy, I discovered he also had six toes, like the Hemingway cats. Trouble.

Simba has always preferred the jungle — er, pine trees — to the cushy indoors. He roamed and picked fights, holding his own in the wild kingdom (our neighborhood). The cat was a scrapper through and through but always came when his name was called. He had a soft spot for family. Or so we thought.

When we moved to horse country Simba went along for the ride. It’s not uncommon for animals to run off after a move. They may get confused and try to find their way back to their former abode. 

Shortly after we relocated, Simba disappeared. I imagined him weaving in and out of briars, riling up goats, scurrying around towering horses like a night bandit. I hollered for him daily, nightly. Not a meow was heard in response. The family searched for him but the new house was out where coyotes regularly lurked. We feared the worst.

After a couple of months, we accepted that our family cat was gone. We honored him with a framed picture that read “Forever in Our Hearts,” with the years of his life inscribed on the back.

But we were wrong. He hadn’t used up all those lives just yet.

My mother and I were shopping in Raleigh one day the next summer when she got a call. “Hi there. I’m a security guard at Penick Village. I, um, think I have your cat.”

We exchanged looks of confusion. “Is it black?” asked my mother, thinking perhaps our second cat, Zelda, had decided to visit some distant, unknown aging relative. 

“No, ma’am, it’s orange.”

“Orange!” we exclaimed in unison.

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve seen him out here every night for the last few months. I figured it was a stray. He finally let me get close enough to grab him and he had a collar. Thought I would try calling.” 

We zoomed back. It was dark by the time we got there, and the cat was nowhere to be seen. I stalked the retirement community for the next three days. 

I asked anyone I saw outside on the street, “Have you seen an orange cat?” To my amazement, nearly all of them said, “Yes.” Great, I thought, my cat has been family shopping. No doubt capitalizing on extra rations from multiple residents. I handed out my phone number like I was passing out Junior Mints. 

On the third day, I got a call. A sighting!

I rushed to Penick Village and jumped out of the car. “Simbaaaa!” I yelled. Next thing I knew I hear a “bwrrr” and out popped my cat from the bushes. I half expected it to be some lookalike, some faux Simba, but it was my very own six-toed little feline. He rolled on his back and purred, seemingly indifferent to the fact that he had been missing for 10 months.

I coaxed him with treats and, after a moment of deliberation, he sauntered over with an accusatory look as if to say, “Yo, where you been?” Once in the car, he jumped into my lap as though this was just another chapter in his great escape.

A wave of emotions rushed over me: happiness, bewilderment . . . and annoyance that my cat decided he wanted to experience an easier pace of living. Well, I was taking him out of early retirement.

The reasons for Simba’s disappearance remain a mystery, having chosen assisted living even over our previous residence. Once I got him home, he didn’t bother with the cat bed we’d set up for the return of the prodigal tabby. Instead, he flopped down on the windowsill, resuming his rightful place with a lazy stretch.

We knew at that moment he wasn’t just returning from his brief sabbatical. He was back, all the way back, ready to once again rule over his empire of pillows and food bowls, with no intention of going missing again, except perhaps to a particularly sunny patch of grass somewhere nearby.

As for us, we crossed out the dates on the back of Simba’s frame and updated the picture — mug shots, front and side.