Golftown Journal

Golftown Journal

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Shutterbugs

Making art in the golden hour

By Lee Pace

My stock-in-trade over four-plus decades has been the written word, but I admit the layering of subjects, verbs and adjectives pales in comparison to the display of a well-conceived and executed photograph. An advertising executive from the early 1920s is credited with coining the phrase “One picture is worth a thousand words,” and I say bravo to that. In the fat coffee table books I’ve crafted for golf clubs the last two decades, I strive for a mix of 50-50 words and images but admit that if not one word is absorbed, the photos make it worth the toil and tariff.

The Sandhills and its golf courses are evolving more and more today as an exquisite canvas for shutterbugs of all makes and models, and the ability to immediately display the visuals on social media and assorted blogs and digital venues multiplies their visibility a millionfold over the old days of weekly and monthly magazines.

John Hemmer, who had a 45-year association with Pinehurst back in the Tufts family days, took photos of the golf, racquet, shooting and equestrian pursuits at Pinehurst beginning in 1925 and dispatched them to newspapers and wire services. He also made prints in his darkroom and mailed them to the hometown newspapers of resort guests. Today the Tufts Archives has some 85,000 Hemmer images in its vast collection.

In 2012, John Gessner — a frequent contributor to this magazine — won the naming contest for the elaborate putting course Pinehurst built on 2.5 acres outside its clubhouse, suggesting Thistle Dhu in a tip of the cap to the pitch-and-putt venue that James Barber built on his Pinehurst property nearly a century earlier. Four years later, Gessner was the first photographer to capture the unique landscape of The Cradle, the resort’s nine-hole short course adjacent to the massive putting green. His early morning shot has appeared in Forbes, GOLF magazine and other outlets, and depicts the brownish wire grass in the foreground, green fairways and putting surfaces in the middle, and blue sky above, the backdrop punctuated by the classic columns and red roof of the south side of the Pinehurst clubhouse. 

Kaye Pierson began taking photos with her phone from her perch on a golf course mower while on her shifts with the resort maintenance staff and in 2013 snapped what she pegged “First Light at Pinehurst.” The Putter Boy statuette looms at dawn from its location within Thistle Dhu, enveloped by a dew-laden grass, fog and glints of sunlight to the east. The image caught fire on social media and has been featured on prints in resort gift shops.

John Patota has had careers as an engineer and a school system administrator, and all along has enjoyed photography as a hobby and avocation, though these days he’s available for hire. He bills himself on social media as “Pinehurst Photographer” and enjoys taking photos of “people doing the things they love.” He’s all over the North & South competitions at the resort and has a special niche capturing the golf course maintenance staff.

Matt Gibson is a native of the United Kingdom, growing up in London and attending the University of St. Andrews, and for two years has been on staff at Pinehurst as its “digital storyteller.” His background on the sandy landscapes of the British Isles provides excellent perspective to generate and curate a rich mixture of images and video clips.

“I think the best sports photographers are the golf photographers,” he says. “You think about an NFL game or a baseball game, you have the same feel essentially every match, right? There are only a certain number of lines you can find. But every golf course is different. The lines are infinite.”

The photographer who has most caught my eye of late is Chris Auman, the 41-year-old nephew of Clyde Auman, a longtime peach grower and state legislator from West End. Chris was among the thousands of spectators ringing the 18th green of Pinehurst No. 2 when Payne Stewart sank his putt to win the 1999 U.S. Open, and he’s pictured in the lower right of photographer Rob Brown’s classic “One Moment in Time” panorama. Auman has generated numerous images of the village and the Pinehurst golf courses in recent years, finding particular fodder in the magical light of early morning and late afternoon.

Early one morning, he lined up six Adirondack chairs along The Cradle and captured their glow bathed in the orange of the eastern sky. Crisp fall mornings have provided the setup to capture the village at daybreak and a golf setting with the same technique Hemmer used nearly a century ago — framing the hole with the trunk of a pine tree to one side, and boughs of needles and cones hanging at the top. He’s snapped the 18th green of No. 2 from the veranda, dozens of purple tulips and yellow flowers in the foreground. The passing locomotives and freight cars of the Aberdeen, Carolina & Western Railroad as it skirts the western edge of the resort are a favorite prop.

The ideas are endless.

“I’m drawn to the golf courses in Pinehurst and the Sandhills because one, the nostalgia; and two, the natural beauty,” he says. “I love shooting low light around the village and the golf courses. It brings the dew and the haze into play. You get more interesting colors in the morning. The evening with sunsets can be great, but orange is the dominant color.

“Golf brings people together,” he continues. “Not everyone is into golf, but when I take a photograph of a golf course, people can appreciate the photograph. They can appreciate the beauty of the natural landscape. You are actually bringing people into the sport who otherwise wouldn’t be interested in it. A photo like the chairs beside The Cradle — it asks, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be sitting in those chairs right now?’ People always tell me, ‘Well, I’ve been by there a thousand times and I’ve never seen it quite like that.’”

Late one afternoon, Auman was walking with his camera up the sandy path between the 18th holes of course No. 1 on the left and No. 4 on the right. The light was perfect, just kissing the western edges of the tree trunks and the undersides of the pine needles hanging above. There is sand, wire grass, serrated bunkers and a soft sky.

“I looked up and I just thought, ‘Man, that’s the way this place used to look,’” he says. “That’s what James Tufts saw. That’s what Pinehurst is, and that’s what I was trying to capture.”  PS

Lee Pace has written about the Pinehurst experience for more than three decades from his home in Chapel Hill. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.

Sporting Life

Sporting Life

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An Ambitious Plan

And the ducks did their part

By Tom Bryant

The Old Man said you couldn’t set too much store by a fire; that a fire was all that separated man from beast, if you came right down to it. I believe him. I’d rather live in the yard than in a house that didn’t have an open fireplace.   —Robert Ruark from The Old Man and The Boy

The low grey clouds were close enough to almost touch, or they seemed that way as they scudded southeast before a gusty north wind. I was hunkered down in the first blind on the number one impoundment at our Whistling Wings duck club. It was mid-November, almost Thanksgiving, and I was all by my lonesome, escaping the chains of civilization. The plan was to do some writing, hopefully interspersed with some duck shooting.

There are six of us in the duck club, all of us seasoned in a lot of ways but more so in the mysteries of duck hunting. The varied group includes a couple of textile magnates, a lawyer, a judge, a textile broker and an itinerate writer, myself. I was behind on several writing projects, including a past-due novel, thus the reason I was holding forth alone at the club. The other members were planning to show up after Thanksgiving for a group hunt. Successful or not, anytime we got together it was a good time.

My plan was to get a little writing done after an early morning hunt, eat lunch and work a little more before the evening shoot. Then repeat that for three or four days and head home to enjoy Thanksgiving with the family. After that, I’d make it back to the club to meet up with the rest of the boys. An ambitious plan, but I hoped to make it work.

Our lodge is really a small two-bedroom house that sits right on the marsh where the corn impoundments are located. Impoundments are fields of corn that are flooded before duck season, their purpose being to bring in the ducks. The cabin and the impoundments are about a half mile from the Pamlico Sound. As the crow flies, or better yet, as the duck flies, our farthest blind is right on the water, and it is exactly 8 miles across the Pamlico to Ocracoke Island.

The day I arrived the weather promised a good blow out of the northeast. The temperature took a nosedive so things were looking just right to bring in a few early ducks. I hustled unloading all the gear and left most of it lying about in the kitchen so I could make it to the blind before sundown and the end of legal shooting hours.

Low clouds and a squally wind brought dusk on early. I missed a couple of fast-flying teal that came right at me, corn-top high. The gale added to their speed and I shot way behind them. I grinned as I unloaded my shotgun and slung my gunning bag over my shoulder. “Come back tomorrow, you little rascals, and give me another chance.”

I fast-marched back to the lodge, before black night settled in, to unpack and sort through the cooking box. I had bought eating utensils that needed to be stored in the right place. There is a gas fireplace in the living room, and I turned it on. With the northeast wind whistling around the cabin, it added a cozy feeling to offset the early cold of the evening.

I put a pot of venison stew on the stove to heat for supper and laid out items to take to the blind in the morning. It promised to be an interesting day. I was pretty tired, so I opted for an early evening, promising myself to catch up on writing tomorrow.

At 4:30 a.m. I eased the door of the little lodge shut and headed to our number one blind. The early morning wind still held out of the northeast, but the cloud cover was gone. It was clear as a bell, and a nearly full moon was settling in the west. Hopefully, the gusty blow was strong enough to keep ducks moving off the sound.

As I trudged down the dike that led to the blind, loaded with shotgun, gunning bag and a few more decoys to add to the spread I had put out the afternoon before, the thought occurred to me of the many times I had enjoyed this same adventure. Never, in all the many hours spent in a duck blind, have they been the same.

I could hear hundreds of ducks as they got up out of the corn and headed out to the sound. I swear, it’s almost as if they have a timer in their little duck brains that enables them to leave the impoundments just before legal shooting time — a half-hour before sunrise — and arrive back for their evening corn feast an hour after legal shooting time, sundown.

I’ve been fortunate on a few occasions to catch them confused about timing, but that always involved weather. Rain, sleet or snow and a dark sky with the wind blowing hard have sometimes made for a memorable shoot. Not this day, though. It looked to be one of those bluebird mornings.

And it was. By 10 o’clock I had seen a few high-flying snow geese. A couple of mergansers landed right in the middle of the decoys, swam around a bit, then swam on into the corn and disappeared. I figured it was time for breakfast.

After a morning in the field, breakfast is the best meal of the day, and I had come prepared. As I walked back to the lodge, I mentally put together the morning feast. Preparing it is almost as good as eating it. Not so, says my good friend John Vernon, our usual lodge chef. He’s the main cook when the group is together, and it’s a real grin just to watch him prepare one of his culinary masterpieces.

My breakfast on the first day of the hunt didn’t hold a candle to what John could fix. But even he, I think, would have smiled in appreciation. Six extra-large eggs, cooked over medium; a platter of link country sausage; biscuits, a half dozen bought from Biscuitville (I picked up two-dozen before leaving town. I’ve found you can’t have too many biscuits.); and a pot of yellow, stone-ground grits cooked slow and steady over a low heat.

After that feast, I settled in at the kitchen table with my iPad and did a little work on the never-ended novel and surprised myself with the amount I got done.

The rest of the week went by in a flash. The routine I had set worked, and on the last day, the lords of the duck marsh smiled on me. About noon it started raining — hard, so hard it blew sideways. I put on all my wet weather gear and sloshed out to the impoundment. Just as I crawled into the blind and loaded the shotgun, a flurry of teal buzzed the blind so close it seemed as if I could reach up and catch one. I hunkered down, knowing they would be back. Sure enough, they circled and came back, afterburners wide open. I led the group as far as I could, pulled the trigger and three teal splashed down right outside the decoys.

While wading out to pick them up, I looked up just as a pair of widgeons dropped out of the sky, wings folded, yellow feet fixed forward like landing gear. I snapshot at the lead duck and got him but missed his companion twice. I picked up all four ducks and made it snappy back to my hide.

The rest of the day was like that. I already had four ducks and the limit is six. I had to slow down so I just watched and waited. Ducks were everywhere. Just before shooting time was over, I shot my last one, a magnificent pintail almost the size of a snow goose.

Later, after I got back to the lodge and put on some dry duds and relaxed in front of my fireplace, gas logs blazing, wet hunting gear hanging everywhere, I celebrated with two fingers of good Scotch. I remembered Robert Ruark’s quote about loving an open fire and thought even he would put up with our little gas effort after the end of this wonderful duck hunt.  PS

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

Birdwatch

Birdwatch

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Flying Under the Radar

The rarely noticed double-crested cormorant

By Susan Campbell

Overlooked by many, the double-crested cormorant is a waterbird found alone or in small groups across our state during the cooler weather. This large, black, gull-like bird has few admirers. It only gets noticed when sitting with wings outstretched, drying in the sun, on an exposed perch such as a low snag or bulkhead. Although cormorants are less waterproof than most, their lack of buoyancy makes it easier to swim after prey in deep water. They can be found in a variety of bodies of water, from retention or farm ponds to larger lakes and reservoirs. However, if you are at the beach during the winter months, you may see them in the open ocean, often foraging together by the thousands.

This bird is hardly a striking waterbird. Cormorants actually look odd — somewhat like a cross between a loon and a goose. Although it seems to be a dull black bird with a long neck and pointed wings, should you see it at close range it actually does sport some color. The bright orange-yellow facial skin and shockingly aquamarine eyes of adult birds are apparent. Furthermore, breeding individuals have two black and white tufts as well as a blue mouth from early spring through mid-summer.

Double-crested cormorants are widely distributed across North America. They breed on rocky outcroppings off the coast of Canada and Alaska as well as on islands in wetter portions of the Upper Midwest. They place bulky nests in stout trees or on the ground in colonies. Flocks migrate inland across the United States to coastal wintering sites. Some cormorants can be found farther away from the coast in wetter habitats of the Southeast.

Given that this species primarily feeds on a variety of fish, and can congregate in large numbers, it is sometimes considered a nuisance by fish farmers and fishermen. Double-crested cormorants have strongly hooked bills which, along with their strong, webbed feet, definitely make them good fishers. More often than not, however, their foraging goes unnoticed, especially here in North Carolina. Moving from place to place, like so many species of birds, they form skeins or V-formations. Significant flocks have been known to show up during the fall in the Sandhills. Flying low, they appear in the afternoon to drop in to feed on one of our larger lakes. Just before dark they will fly up into an older pine to roost.

It is hard to believe that double-crested cormorant populations were once imperiled. Widespread use of pesticides in the 1960s and ’70s impacted the breeding success of many birds, especially those high up on the food chain. Compounds such as DDT caused eggshell thinning and thus, a precipitous decline in breeding productivity until it was banned in the U.S. in 1969. Recovery was swift, however, and numbers remain high in spite of increased human activity throughout the species’ range.  PS

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

Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue

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The American Holiday

Giving thanks, both great and small

By Deborah Salomon

Just about the whole month of November will be influenced by Thanksgiving, a truly American holiday not co-opted by other countries. Yes, Canada has Thanksgiving, but it’s in October and minor, with no school closings or family gatherings. Or Black Fridays.

Columnists regularly compile “thankful” lists centering on family and friends — also football, turkey and pumpkin spice lattes — ignoring the agonies of delayed flights, resurging COVID and the price of that Butterball bearing no resemblance to the flat-chested, gamey-flavored bird the Pilgrims supposedly spit-roasted over an open fire and consumed al fresco. If they were even able to shoot one.

I’ve attended a re-enactment and, believe me, it’s no picnic.

This November initiates another ominous happening: the 12-month election countdown, promising an extra helping of vitriol, animosity, rants and ravings.

Fear not. I won’t go there. You can be thankful for that.

Instead, I am grateful for the Sandhills winter, a reward for surviving hot, humid summers, which can last six months. I recall only one uncomfortably cold day last winter: Christmas, which required my Vermont goose down parka at the Santa Project bike giveaway. Otherwise, classify local winters as “brisk,” nothing more.

I am thankful for animal lovers, who care for homeless, hungry dogs and kitties. Moore County is fortunate to have several rescue organizations, but there are never enough. I am a lifelong caregiver but won’t divulge the details. I feed the birds, too. Watching them and their humanesque behaviors (including a pair of crows raising their young ’uns every spring) is more relaxing than anything Big Pharma prescribes.

I am extremely thankful for our medical community. When I tell people who live elsewhere about the gorgeous hospital, the separate cancer and cardiac facilities, the free parking/shuttle bus, the walk-in locations, concierge service to free clinics, the Clara McLean Hospitality House for patient families, the nurse navigator service, Hospice House on a pond beside a chapel, they dismiss it as exaggeration. But I know, from writing about them, as well as needing them.

I am thankful for farmers markets and farmstands. We need one in West Southern Pines. How about an old-fashioned curb market, where farmers sell directly from their trucks?

I am thankful for my grandsons who, in a world consumed with problems impacting young adults, turned out so well. They grew up without a father, my son, who died when they were 6 and 7. Yet at 25 and 26 both are happy, healthy, outgoing, and self-supporting in careers they chose when they were still little boys: one a successful attorney, the other a certified mechanic at a fancy car dealership. Best of all, they love their Nanny and are generous with hugs.

After 15 years, I am super-thankful for my job. The Pilot and PineStraw have become beacons in an industry whose lights are fading. I’m in touch with colleagues working for faltering news organizations, while ours keeps expanding — new products, fresh young staffers, an updated workspace suitable for a thriving journalistic mini-empire.

Lastly, I’m thankful for the millions of turkeys who sacrificed their lives so we could gather around a table laden with goodies. I don’t eat meat except on holidays and in the line of duty as a food writer. But on Thanksgiving I enjoy a well-done turkey thigh beside a mound of homemade cornbread stuffing, which means roasted inside, not outside, the bird, all doused with cranberry chutney.

So, bad as things may seem — war, famine, pandemics, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes — I hope everybody succeeds in putting some practical, meaningful thanks into their own Thanksgiving.  PS

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

In the Spirit

In the Spirit

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Barware Breakthroughs

Drink smarter, not harder

By Tony Cross

Every now and then while I’m scrolling through social media, I’ll come across a bartending or kitchen tool that catches my eye. This has become more frequent in the past couple of years as bartending/cocktail influencers flood my algorithm like a Category 4 hurricane. There are a ton of folks online who will do anything for likes and are way too flashy, but there are a few quality accounts with a passion for spirits, cocktails and hospitality. I’ve actually found new ways to make drinks easier and more fun from a couple of the better-quality sites. Since we live to serve, here are a few of my favorites:

 

Morgenthaler Triomphe Atomizer

Having an atomizer is nothing new when it comes to my collection of bar tools, but it’s the details of this one that made me splurge. I’ve been following longtime bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler for years, whether it’s his bartending blog, cocktail books or YouTube videos. When he announced he was collaborating with Cocktail Kingdom, I pretty much knew that I’d be interested in whatever he was pitching. Plus, I’m a fanboy, so there you go. The main reason I purchased my first atomizer years ago was to make my Sazerac cocktails better: On busy nights, I was wasting absinthe by rinsing my rocks glasses with it. An atomizer gave me the opportunity to evenly coat the glasses by spraying a mist of absinthe inside them. Another perk was saving absinthe; having a 1- or 2-ounce atomizer makes whatever is inside it go a long way. In addition to having a fine mist, the Morgenthaler atomizer has one detail that makes it more user-friendly: a rotating, color-coded system. When I see a green dot, I know it’s absinthe; when I grab my orange dot atomizer, I know it’s Angostura. There’s also an option to turn it yellow and red. This makes grabbing the right atomizer easier without having to label them. The fact that it’s easy to fill and use makes it a great addition to my set.

 

Vintage Kitchen’s “The Press”

This citrus press has gotten pretty popular, pretty damn quick. It seems like I saw it for the first time on an Instagram account and within a few months, everyone had their own — maybe not this exact brand, but a version of it. “The Press” is another way to juice your lemons and limes. What makes it different from your standard hand juicer, you ask? A couple of things. First, if you’re using a hand juicer and you press the citrus, you’re getting the juice, but the oils are lost. Using “The Press” squeezes the oils into the juice. This gives you a more flavorful fruit juice and will make your cocktails taste better. Second, hand juicers don’t allow for juicing oranges and grapefruits; they’re just too big to put in the fitting — even some lemons are hard to fit into hand juicers. This is exactly why I purchased one. Juicing grapefruits and oranges on the fly is effortless and, with the addition of the oils . . . it makes my tiki cocktails tastier and easier to make on-the-go.

 
Crew Supply Co. Crew and Chubby Bottles

The first time I came across Crew Bottles, I thought, “Why in the hell didn’t I think of that?” I was watching a bartender make a flavored syrup, and when he finished, he grabbed a glass bottle, twisted off the bottom and poured the syrup in. I had to have one. So, not only does it make adding syrups easier, it makes cleaning the glass bottles a cinch. Ever clean a bottle through just the small opening at the top? It’s more than a pain, especially if what was inside it stains and leaves an odor. Not only does Crew Supply make their syrup “Chubby” bottles, it also sells standard 750-milliliter “Crew” bottles. The same twist-bottom setup applies, but with the addition of measurements for 250, 500 and 750 milliliters. When the bottle is flipped upside down, you see graduated markings from 100 through 700 milliliters. No more guessing how much juice, spirit, syrup, or whatever else you’ve filled the bottle with, is left. Such a no-brainer moment. Even if you’re not a cocktail enthusiast, these make great gifts for anyone who spends time in the kitchen. PS

Tony Cross owns and operates Reverie Cocktails, a cocktail delivery service that delivers kegged cocktails for businesses to pour on tap — but once a bartender, always a bartender.

Creators of N.C.

Creators of N.C.

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Books and Beans

Etaf Rum forges her own path in Rocky Mount

By Wiley Cash

Photographs By Mallory Cash

Rocky Mount-based writer Etaf Rum’s new novel, Evil Eye, is the story of a Palestinian American woman named Yara Murad who’s struggling to reconcile her identities of wife, mother, artist, professor, native Brooklynite and transplanted Southerner. From the outside, it looks like Yara has it all: a husband who supports her work at a local university; two sweet young daughters; a career teaching the art she loves. But as the novel opens, the reader watches Yara careen through her days in a silent, stifling panic, something unspoken and unfulfilled bubbling beneath the surface of her life.

Yara’s angst finds an outlet when she responds to a colleague’s shocking display of bigotry, but she isn’t prepared for the repercussions that follow. Her mother explains that Yara’s struggles are the result of an old family curse and she dismisses Yara’s frustration by saying that she should be happy that her husband has given Yara more freedoms than Yara’s father gave her.

Many writers would lean into the trope of the age-old curse to carry their plots, but Rum never relies on gimmicks or stereotypes, not in her characters, and not in her narrative. Instead, this character-driven novel investigates the ways in which we curse ourselves by settling for jobs and relationships that don’t fulfill us. Evil Eye is a book about the monotony of unfulfilled days (and nights), yet Rum has crafted this finely drawn portrait of domestic life into a page-turner.

“Actually, I felt like my first novel was a real page-turner, but one that I intentionally crafted to be so,” she says. “With Evil Eye, I did not want to write another page-turner. But as a writer you want to keep the story interesting, and you want the readers turning the pages. And I think for me, I had to challenge myself to write a character portrait.”

She is sitting at the counter at Books and Beans, a coffee shop and bookstore she owns with her husband, Brandon, in Rocky Mount. Light streams through the windows, making the white walls appear even brighter, and the terra cotta tile floors richer and more resonant.

“I was really interested in exploring the internal life of this character in an authentic way, and I hoped and I prayed that doing so would lend a readability that is relatable, authentic, and helps you get into the story. My intention was that it would be her personality and her character and all the things that we don’t know about her past that would motivate the reader to keep going.”

This reader kept going. I finished the novel in a couple of days.

But reading Evil Eye wasn’t always a comfortable experience. While we are firmly grounded in Yara’s point of view, and privy to her difficult childhood, we also have front row seats to the many anxieties she confronts in her everyday life. These anxieties are manifested in the workplace (in this case, higher education), on social media, in her role as a mother and wife, and in her struggles to pursue her passion as an artist.

“I wanted to write about these issues in the perspective of a character we haven’t seen before, a Palestinian American woman who you don’t really think about, but someone who has these universal anxieties that are so common for everyone, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity,” Rum says.

It was her hope that in seeing themselves in Yara’s story readers might see someone like Yara for the first time.

“Most readers can’t possibly connect with having an arranged marriage, but maybe they can connect with being a young mother or feeling like their dreams are unfulfilled or feeling like they’re living their lives and doing all the right things, only to wake up one day feeling so unsettled, thinking, Wait, is this actually what I want?”

In one particularly affecting scene, Yara opens Instagram, poised to post a photo in the hopes of proving that her life is more fulfilling than it actually is, but then she pauses, pondering the ways in which social media is often an aspirational portrayal of the lives we want instead of representative of the lives we’re willing to pursue. For Yara, the question in Evil Eye is whether or not she will ever reach for what she wants and deserves, or will she spend the rest of her life simmering and settling for the life she has?

“Why do we settle for what’s comfortable?” Rum asks. “Because we want to avoid the pain of growth.”

For Etaf Rum, Instagram surprisingly became a place for her to manifest her aspirations. Long before her debut novel, A Woman Is No Man, became a New York Times bestseller and a book club selection by the Today show’s Jenna Bush Hager, Rum was teaching English at Nash Community College. Before each class began, she regularly shared two of her greatest loves with her students: coffee and books.

“I would bring my students coffee and book recommendations,” she says. “And eventually they would ask, ‘What are you reading now?’ And so I created an Instagram account called Books and Beans, and it was like a joke between all of us. That was the year I started writing A Woman Is No Man.”

The Instagram page quickly garnered notice well beyond the walls of the college, and Rum soon found herself as an ambassador of the Book of the Month Club, helping them promote their selections through her Instagram account. Later, when her first novel was published in 2019, it actually included a coffee shop called Books and Beans. Writers call this foreshadowing.

This was around the time a development group was renovating Rocky Mount Mills into an 82-acre campus combining retail, dining and residences. There was a particular part of the campus Rum had her eye on. 

“They had a stand-alone old canteen building they wanted to open up as a coffee shop,” she says. “And so a bunch of people went to them and said, ‘Hey, we can open a coffee shop,’ and I was one of them. My husband, Brandon, worked in restaurants his whole life, so I said, ‘All right, you can help me with the business side of things.’”

They pitched their vision to the developers, and Books and Beans was born.

“It was my way of creating space for myself with things that I loved, and it was also my way of saying, ‘Hey, you can do whatever you want to do. There’s nothing out of reach for you. Just believe in it.’ The coffee shop was literally a manifestation of a dream that I’d had on social media, and we turned it into a physical building.”

A few years later, the shock still hasn’t worn off. Rum continually finds herself mesmerized by the fact that a Palestinian American woman born and raised in Brooklyn could create a community foothold in a small Southern town like Rocky Mount.

“Every time I walk past it I remind myself that there are girls like me who think they have no business running a shop. All it takes is believing that you could become part of something, right? If you don’t see that vision for yourself, if you don’t believe in it, then it will never happen.”

Cursed or charmed, coffee or beans, it all comes down to hard work and dreams.  PS

Wiley Cash is the executive director of Literary Arts at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the founder of This Is Working, an online community for writers.

Hometown

Hometown

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A Sight for Sore Eyes

Being thankful for the small print

By Bill Fields

I travel some for work, and some of the trips are on planes. Over the last year-and-a-half — as sure as people are determined to wedge steamer trunks into overhead compartments designed for briefcases — you would have seen me closing my left eye and training the right on something. It might be the no-smoking symbol, the lavatory locator, or a chyron on a fellow passenger’s television screen. This is not idle squinting.

I do these in-flight vision tests to reassure myself that my right eye is seeing crisply. Fortunately, it is, which is a reason I’m particularly grateful this Thanksgiving.

In early February 2022, my right eye suddenly wasn’t working properly one morning. It was as if a dark curtain was being pulled up from the bottom. I got to my ophthalmologist’s office by mid-afternoon.

The technician who does the scans is usually cheerful and chatty but didn’t say much this time. In the exam room, looking at the eye chart confirmed why he had been mum minutes earlier.

It wasn’t that the smaller letters were blurry — they were obscured by whatever was going on inside my eye. My vision was limited to the largest letter on top, the “Big E.” I joked about Elvin Hayes, but the young man asking what I could see had no clue about my reference to a basketball star from many years ago.

In the nervous minutes waiting for the doctor to come into the room, I thought about the life of my eyes.

I didn’t even need glasses until I was in college. Covering a Carolina-State football game in Raleigh during the fall of 1979, I realized I was having trouble seeing the jersey numbers. A subsequent exam indicated nearsightedness, and I got glasses for distance.

Contact lenses came later. In my early 40s, like so many others, I began to have trouble seeing up close. I thought about my dad at the breakfast table and how he had held the newspaper increasingly farther away before finally getting a pair of magnifying readers. I recalled my mom saying, “You’re in my light” and not understanding why that was a big deal.

My moment came when I was helping a friend hook up a television on a shelf in an armoire. The back of it was a shadowy tangle of cords, and I had a hard time. I stopped at a drugstore on the way home to purchase reading glasses.

Cataract surgery on both eyes in the fall of 2020 was liberating — I was able after 40 years to ditch corrective lenses for distance. But my vision bliss was short-lived. The ophthalmologist told me I had a detached retina and presently was on the phone to a retina specialist across town. A doctor there confirmed the retina in my right eye was fully detached, and I was headed for surgery the next day.

“You were a 5 out of 10,” the surgeon told me after he had finished. “Not the easiest, not the hardest.”

He had reattached the retina and inserted a gas bubble to encourage healing. The bubble appeared as a dark circle in my vision for more than two months, getting smaller as it dissipated, from the size of a nickel to a speck of black.

For three weeks after the operation, I had to be face-down — “Looking at the Earth,” as the doctor put it — eight to 10 hours per day to maximize the bubble’s effect on the repaired retina. I rented a chair designed for such recoveries. Its mirror allowed me to watch TV, which mitigated the boredom because reading was difficult.

Through months of checkups and eye drops, vision in the surgical eye improved. After the bubble shrank enough to allow some sight, what I had was like looking through a frosted window. Over time, the vision improved and I began to be able to read the smaller lines of type on a poster across my living room couch, my at-home eye chart.

It was 20/120, then 20/80. Earlier this year, an eye test indicated even more improvement: 20/25. Being able to see the little letters is a big deal indeed.  PS

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

Bookshelf

Bookshelf

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November Books

FICTION

The Little Liar, by Mitch Albom

Until his 11th birthday, Nico Krispis had never told a lie. When the Nazis invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading toward “the East,” where they are promised jobs and safety. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the honest boy tells the frightened passengers they will be safe. But when the final train is loaded, Nico sees his family being pushed inside. Only after it is too late does he realize he has been helping send everyone he loves to their doom. He never tells the truth again. Albom interweaves the stories of Nico, who becomes a pathological liar, his brother Sebastian and their schoolmate Fannie, who survive the death camps and marry as teenagers, and Udo Graf, the Nazi officer who duped Nico into losing his soul, in this deeply moving story about the harm we inflict with our deceits, and the power of love to ultimately redeem us.

The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez

Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in this New York Times bestselling author’s ninth novel. A solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other, and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress.

NONFICTION

The Explorers Club: A Visual Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of Exploration, edited by Jeff Wilser

The discovery of the North and South Poles. The summiting of Everest. The moon landing. The birth of climate change science. These are just some of the stories from The Explorers Club, the book released by the organization that, since its inception in 1904, has pushed the envelope of human curiosity. This guided tour of the club’s most riveting journeys includes hundreds of photos and fascinating anecdotes about its distinguished members, including Teddy Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong and Jane Goodall. From the darkest depths of the ocean to the highest points on Earth, and to outer space and beyond, this book shares the inspirational history of exploration.

A Woman I Know, by Mary Haverstick

The true story of a filmmaker whose unexpected investigation opened a new window onto the world of Cold War espionage, CIA secrets and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Haverstick, an independent filmmaker, thought she’d stumbled onto the project of a lifetime — a biopic of a little-known aviation legend whose story seemed to embody the hopeful spirit of the dawn of the Space Age. After receiving a mysterious warning from a government agent, what she found as she dug deeper was a darker story of double identities and female spies, a tangle of intrigue that stretched from the fields of the Congo to the shores of Cuba, from the streets of Mexico City to the dark heart of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

 

 

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Illusions in Art: Animals, by Chiêu Anh Urban

Simple illustrations of a monkey, a seal, a fox, a swan contain cleverly hidden drawings of entirely different animals in this exploration of positive and negative space. Art! Animals! Together time! There couldn’t be a more perfect “sit in my lap and read” book than this. (Ages 2-4.)

I Want 100 Dogs, by Stacy McAnulty

Getting a new pet is always a delicate negotiation between the pet “wanter” and the ultimate pet “caretaker.” This delightful new “tail” tale hilariously, yet poignantly, digs into the how, what, when and why of pet ownership. Fun for anyone considering adding a furry family member. (Ages 3-7.)

Okra Stew: A Gullah Geechee Family Celebration, by Natalie Daise

You can almost smell the salt marsh in this stunning homage to Gullah culture, father-son love, and okra. With art reminiscent of Lois Ehlert or Faith Ringgold, this one is a must for all young Southern foodies. (Ages 3-7.)

There Was a Party for Langston,
by Jason Reynolds

There was a hoopla in Harlem. A whizbanger for the wordsmiths. Young readers can celebrate the joy of Langston Hughes through the verse of Jason Reynolds and the illustrations of Jerome and Jarret Pumphrey in this must-have new picture book. (Ages 3-7.)

5,000 Years of Awesome Objects: A History of Art for Children, by Aaron Rosen, Susie Hodge, Susie Brooks,
Mary Richards

Go on a trip through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and get lost in a book that features 5,000 years of the most unusual, bizarre, fascinating and awesome objects in history including Mayan jewelry, Egyptian amulets and even American baseball cards. (Ages 8 and up.)  PS


Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally.

The Omnivorous Reader

The Omnivorous Reader

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Portrait of a Genius

When art and politics collide

By Stephen E. Smith

At a moment in our cultural/political history when we disagree about almost everything, you’d expect an ambitious pundit to pen a bestseller titled America vs. America: A Definitive Analysis of Our Cantankerousness. Although books aplenty attempt such revelations, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to articulate the forces at work in the here and now, but literary critic Scott Eyman has given us the next best thing to an explanation: Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided, an exposé/biography of a man who defined, at least in part, the last century, and who suffered the slings and arrows of an America gone wacky.

Eyman’s latest offering — he’s authored six previous books on the film industry and various movie stars — may strike readers as a story told a trifle too late. After all, Charlie Chaplin is ancient history, a wobbly, bowler-topped, black and white stick figure balanced on a rubbery cane who inexplicably entertained our grandparents with the silent knowledge that authentic comedy has its source in the concealment of anguish. The day-to-day details of Chaplin’s life notwithstanding, there’s insight aplenty in this cautionary tale of an artist whose universal popularity among Americans diminished to the point that he was run out of the country and forced to take up residence in Switzerland for the later years of his life.

Chaplin was born in England and suffered a childhood of poverty and hardship. His alcoholic father abandoned the family, and he and his brother were sent to a workhouse. His mother was committed to a mental institution when he was 14, and Chaplin was forced to find work touring theaters and music halls as a stage actor and comedian. At 19, he toured with a company that traveled the United States, where he eventually signed with Keystone Studios. By the age of 20, he was the best-known man in the world.

Chaplin co-founded United Artists and went on to write and produce The Kid, A Woman of Paris, The Gold Rush and The Circus. After the introduction of talkies, he released two silent films, City Lights and Modern Times, both film classics, followed by his first sound film, The Great Dictator, which satirized Adolf Hitler. After abandoning his Tramp persona, his later films included Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight and A King in New York. His credits and awards would fill this page, but less-than-knowledgeable readers need only grasp this basic fact: Chaplin was a creative genius who had a profound influence on popular culture and the art of filmmaking.

The focus of Eyman’s biography is Chaplin’s fall from grace. Early in his career, Chaplin was accused in a paternity suit in which he was found guilty, although blood tests proved conclusively that he was not the father (at the time, the state of California didn’t recognize blood tests as evidence); but the scandal was enough to attract the attention of gossip columnists, Hedda Hopper foremost among them, who were always collecting dirt on celebrity targets that would sell newspapers.

More destructive to Chaplin’s reputation was the public curiosity regarding his politics. Although he lived much of his life in the United States — indeed, he made most of his fortune here — he never applied for citizenship, which generated a cloud of suspicion that never quite dissipated. Chaplin claimed to be an anarchist, “not in the bomb-throwing sense,” Eyman writes, “but in his dislike of rules and a preference for as much liberty as the law allowed, and maybe just a bit more.” In truth, he was little interested in politicians and politics, outside the restraints placed on the arts by contemporaries who were politically minded.

Having suffered through a childhood of poverty, he harbored a great concern for the underprivileged, which is evident in all his films. But when he released Modern Times, which thematically explored the unending struggle against authoritarianism, and The Great Dictator, which mocked Adolf Hitler, both films, humorous but essentially didactic in intent, further thrust Chaplin into the political arena. Prior to our involvement in World War II, he publicly advocated an alliance with the Soviet Union, and members of the press and the public were scandalized by his marriage when he was 54, to 18-year-old Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill.

Because of his support of Russia, Chaplin was accused of being a communist sympathizer, and the FBI opened an investigation, all of which fed into the Red Scare and McCarthyism of the early 1950s. Chaplin fell into such disfavor with the public that he was denied re-entry to the U.S. after leaving for the London premiere of his film Limelight.

Eyman’s book is a “social, political and cultural history of the crucial period in the life of a seminal twentieth-century figure — the original independent filmmaker who gradually fell into moral combat with his adopted country precisely because of the beliefs that form the core of his personality and films.”

Certainly, the activities of the press — particularly the gossip columnists who fed on Chaplin’s foibles; and the FBI, which launched a long, out-of-control investigation of Chaplin’s life — will give the thoughtful reader pause. FBI files on Chaplin ran to over 1,900 pages, mostly hearsay procured from dubious sources, material that was fed to friendly reporters who used the misinformation to besmirch Chaplin’s character and promote themselves.

Are there definitive elements in Chaplin’s life that precisely parallel the political/cultural moment in which we find ourselves? Probably not. As usual, Mark Twain is credited with having said it best: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” and readers, regardless of their politics, are likely to find themselves singing along with whatever sad tune history is humming at the moment.   PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He is the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards.