Category: Feature

The Little Nine faces an uncertain future

By Bill Fields

Golf courses come and go, enduring or failing at different times for different reasons, their guaranteed survival as rare as a calm day on a links. A particular nine-holer in Southern Pines, though, has been a good walk uncertain for a long time, not used for its original intent in 15 years, but also not utilized for a formal new purpose.

Known to many as the “Little Nine” of Southern Pines Golf Club — owned by Lodge 1692 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks since the middle of the 20th century — it has sat dormant since 2004, when tight finances in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks caused the Elks Lodge to shut down a design that opened in the 1920s, a track that, like the club’s surviving 18 holes, is credited to legendary golf architect Donald Ross.

The Elks have negotiated with multiple potential buyers for Southern Pines Golf Club since it closed the Little Nine, most recently a proposed $3.2 million deal that fell through early last year. The result is that for more than a decade, the forsaken Little Nine property (45 acres, plus 55 acres of adjoining land) has remained valuable green space in a town that has seen lots of growth — a place for dog walkers, high school cross country runners and, after snowfalls, sledders on the steep “Suicide Hill” at the former fifth hole.

A recently formed nonprofit community group, Little Nine Conservancy (LiNC), whose leadership includes members of Lodge 1692, is hoping it can cooperate with the fraternal order to protect the land from being developed. Its plan: Purchase a conservation easement from Elks Lodge 1692 to ensure that the land is sustained as a natural buffer instead of potentially becoming crowded with residential housing.

“I just don’t want to see this become another suburb of Fayetteville,” says Little Nine Conservancy President Gus Sams, a neighboring landowner. “I moved here not to be part of that. One of the offers the Elks received was talking about putting between 200 and 400 homes on the hundred acres. Would the infrastructure even handle something like that? That density is more than double what we’ve got around the Little Nine right now.”

Bill Savoie, exalted ruler of Lodge 1692, says a sale that would have led to such heavy real estate development in the Little Nine space was “discounted very quickly” by the Elks. But he acknowledges that the status quo of de facto green space — taken for granted by some locals who falsely believe it can’t ever be built upon — isn’t a given.

“For the many years the Elks have owned the golf course, we’ve tried to be very good stewards of it and the adjoining property,” Savoie says. “We own 300 acres of land. The golf course pays for itself, but golf isn’t a business most people are going to want to buy into these days. At some point, how much longer does the lodge hold that land? What are its choices? The highest and best use comes into play.

“What I’ve said to [Little Nine Conservancy] is if the goals of that entity and the goals of the lodge are meshed, I support what they’re trying to do,” Savoie continued. “They see an opportunity to put an organization together to preserve the land as open space. I don’t think that is at direct odds with the goal of the Elks being stewards of the land.”

Although Sams, who grew up in Atlanta, and some of his fellow board members are transplants to Moore County, others such, as John Buchholz, Marian McPhaul and Marsh Smith, are Southern Pines natives who once lived close to the Elks Club.

“It’s a holy ground for kids who have grown up there,” says Smith, a Southern Pines attorney who has been involved with obtaining conservation easements at several other locations in the area over the last couple of decades. “It was a very important part of my life. In the fifth or sixth grade, I was so chubby my pants split when coach Wynn was teaching us how to do the forward roll. I got up the next day, in the dark, and decided I was going to run on the Little Nine. I couldn’t go a hundred yards without getting a stitch in my side but I kept at it, and I was a runner for 30 years.”

Buchholz, a retired Pinecrest High School teacher and still the Patriots’ cross country coach, came upon an overgrown Little Nine, grass as tall as a second-grader, shortly after the course closed. He believed the property — where he and his pickup football-playing childhood buddies were kicked off more than once by longtime SPGC head professional Andy Page — would be perfect for a 5K cross country course. He has cut a 5-foot swath through the former fairways ever since for prep races. Suicide Hill proved an unpopular part of the course with rival runners in the Sandhills Athletic Conference and was taken out of the route, but the incline remains part of the Patriots’ training regimen.

“We host most of the conference meets because this is one of the few courses on turf that’s available,” Buchholz says. “It is the best high school course in the state. I’ll match it against anyone’s.”

The Little Nine opened in time for the 1924 winter season, 18 years after the first holes were constructed at SPGC (then called Southern Pines Country Club) and a decade after Ross revamped the original 18 into the well-regarded layout that exists today.

“I’m long on record on Golf Club Atlas saying the main 18 at the Elks occupies the best land in Moore County [for golf], and people parrot that back to me in agreement,” says Ran Morrissett, founder of the website for golf architecture aficionados, and a Southern Pines resident and Elks Club member since 2000. “The detail work, the bones of the Ross routing, the fact that you only see homes on a couple of holes — it’s such a compelling environment.”

The third nine, to accommodate a growing tourist business, was built south and east of the clubhouse. Before the 1920s were over, it had been joined by a fourth nine. In a 1930 promotional pamphlet, Ross noted 36 holes at Southern Pines. In accounts during the 1930s, local newspapers credited Ross’ engineer and draftsman, Walter Irving Johnson, with having drawn up the plans. Johnson, hired by Ross in 1920, was an important part of his operation, executing detailed drawings from the architect’s rough sketches.

“Do I see Ross features [on the Little Nine]? Not necessarily,” says Richard Mandell, Sandhills resident, golf course architect and author of The Legendary Evolution of Pinehurst, which details the arc of golf courses in the Sandhills. “Ross is one of the top five architects of all time, but there is so much stuff that he did that wasn’t inspiring because it was on a small budget, or other people did it in his name. He probably didn’t have the ability to let loose on that third nine. And who knows what was rebuilt over all the years?”

As it expanded, though, SPGC was proud of itself. “Golf Course Extended Over The Hills and Streams, And Into The Most Rugged Section of the Sandhills,” a 1928 advertisement for the club announced in The Pilot. “The hills are rugged little mountains, giving all the charm desired for a climb or a walk in the pursuit of the game or in a ramble among the pine woods, where walks and roads, and springs, and forest foliage, suggest the primeval.”

The club’s second 18 was a par 71 of 6,120 yards, and regardless of who was most responsible for it, the layout had variety: 290-yard, par-4 No. 2; 445-yard, par-4 No. 9; 635-yard, par-6 No. 14; 126-yard, par-3 No. 15, 241-yard, par-3 No. 17. Both 18s survived the Great Depression and featured grass greens by the end of the 1930s, but the next decade wasn’t kind. World War II and ownership changes contributed to the abandonment of the fourth nine, in the Hill Road area, in the late 1940s.

Twenty-seven holes plus nine more holes “that can be easily re-conditioned” and “50 large valuable building lots” were advertised for sale in June 1948 for $110,000. Almost three years later, the Southern Pines Elks bought the property for just $58,500.

Over the years, the Elks sold some of the 500 acres included in the 1951 sale. The Little Nine became a mixture of the front and back nines of the second 18 — comprised of the opening four holes of the front and closing five holes of the back, but with the monster par-6 14th, formerly a double dogleg, shortened considerably.

The Little Nine had taken on its hybrid makeup by 1958 when Page and his wife, Margaret, started their 40-year stint running the club’s golf operations. “It had quite a bit of play over the years,” Andy says. “If we were real busy, I would send folks to play it first before playing the big course. I like to play it. Older people and kids loved to play it.”

One of those kids was Southern Pines native Chris Buie, now 55, who wrote about the Sandhills’ golf history in The Early Days of Pinehurst. “My dad became an Elk specifically because of the Little Nine,” Buie says. “It was our babysitter. It was where I learned to play golf. It was $22 for the entire summer for us kids. We would be out there all the time, a gang of us playing two or three times a day. It kept us out of too much mischief.”

If the Little Nine Conservancy (www.linc-sp.org) is able to achieve its objective, current and future generations of children might continue to be able to utilize the land. Those behind the effort would have no problem if the Little Nine was reopened as a golf course, but that seems a long shot.

“Golf is still contracting in this area. There is already an oversaturation of the market,” Savoie says. “If we had the deep pockets of a Pinehurst and wanted to turn a section of that into something like The Cradle [Pinehurst Resort’s acclaimed new short course], that would be fabulous. Unfortunately, we don’t have those resources.”

“The lodge is not desperately trying to sell,” Savoie continues. “We’re not actively speaking to people about buying. I want to see if Marsh and the Little Nine Conservancy can put something together that is good for the lodge and good for the community.”

Savoie and Smith agree a conservation easement won’t be inexpensive, given the location of the land that is the focus of LiNC’s concern.

“One hundred acres of land in close to Southern Pines’ center would be of particular attraction potentially for real estate development,” Savoie says. “I think it’s going to have to be a fairly substantial amount before the Elks say we’re going to let a potential resource like that go.”

“I think it’s fair to say the Elks’ leadership has told us their preferred outcome is for this to be protected open space, but they need a fair price for it,” Smith says. “They’ve got their club’s mission, which is to help people who are in need — school kids, veterans, handicapped folks. They’re trying to raise money.”

For now, it is the Little Nine Conservancy that is in the fundraising mode. The group is reaching out to residents who live near the Little Nine and connected woodlands, and those with ties to the area who remember it before so much growth occurred.

“I come from D.C. and know what overcrowded — really heavy development and traffic — looks like,” says Robert Simmonds, the LiNC webmaster, who recently moved to Southern Pines. “We moved here specifically because of the natural surroundings. I want to do everything I can to help it stay as natural as possible. We’re all volunteers; this is a selfless, we-think-this-is-good-for-the-community effort.”

To Morrissett, maintaining the natural setting would be good for golf, keeping the character of Ross’ surviving 18 holes. “So many courses built since Ross’ death have hinged on real estate sales,” Morrissett says. “One of the reasons the Elks course is as good as it is, is that it wasn’t built with homes in mind. If the conservancy can protect the land, the course essentially will remain alone in nature, which would be very encouraging. As an Elks member, I would be horrified at the thought that somebody could buy, say, to the right of the 13th hole and start slapping up condos. If outside intrusions start to bear down on the course, a lot of the charm would unravel. As it is now, it’s kind of cocooned in there.”

Savoie, speaking for himself and not the fraternal order, concurs. “If this were to look like a mini-Myrtle Beach, then it’s going to destroy the character of the golf course,” he says. “I certainly don’t want to be the one who puts 300 houses on a historic golf course. My personal belief is that I want to make sure we can protect the contiguous property that we have.”

The Little Nine Conservancy will do what it can. “A lot of people move to the area because of its character,” says Buchholz, who graduated from East Southern Pines High School 50 years ago. “If they want to keep it, they need to step up and be active. If we don’t do something to keep some of these natural areas, we will lose it all.”  PS

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

An adventure gone wrong turned into the night of their lives

By Bill Case

The white pages listing is for Richard Wayne Penniman. If you dial it the first thing you’ll hear is programmed classical music. Elevator stuff. If you’re lucky, it’s followed by Mr. Penniman himself. There was a time when talking directly with this man took more than a phone call. That was when Richard Penniman — aka Little Richard — rock and rolled the national music scene of the 1950s along with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino. His monster hits like “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Lucille” became rock ’n’ roll anthems.

Now 86, Little Richard no longer keeps an entourage, living quietly far from the limelight in Lynchburg, Tennessee, the home of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. My call had nothing to do with his mega-hit celebrity. I was interested in his hardscrabble days performing in African-American roadhouses of the South during the late ’40s and early ’50s — the far-flung network of nightclubs informally dubbed the Chitlin’ Circuit and one place in particular, the Ambassadors Club.

Penniman, once the most flamboyant and attention-seeking of all rock ’n’ roll performers, wasn’t interested in “any of that.” He thanked me for calling and promptly hung up. Little Richard had no desire to remember a part of his life that one Pinehurst boy would never forget.

After World War II Sam Arnette opened the Ambassadors Club hard by the railroad track on Rt. 5 in Jackson Hamlet, a small African-American enclave bordering Pinehurst. It was home to the cooks and maids and caddies — the flesh and bone — of the grand resort. Both the club and Sam are long gone now, but in 1950 it was a hoppin’ place for rhythm and blues and dancing late into the night. Denied access to whites-only venues by the Jim Crow laws of the day, artists including Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Fats Domino and James Brown mounted the Ambassadors Club’s stage, performing for sums barely sufficient to get them and their bands to the next town.

Tony McKenzie, born in 1936, and his five brothers of Scottish stock grew up in a home adjacent to the Pinehurst Race Track. In those days, the Oldtown area of Pinehurst was almost totally cocooned by a vast pine forest that provided a wondrous environment for Tony and his two older brothers — Fred, four years older, and Gene, two years Tony’s senior — to explore. The boys could virtually guide themselves blindfolded through the forest, blazing shortcut trails to the Pinehurst Dairy, Chalfonte Hotel, Watson’s Lake, Southern Pines, Aberdeen and Jackson Hamlet. They often pitched a tent and slept under the stars. One favorite campsite was the sand pit located, as Tony puts it, “a few skips and a hop or two” from Jackson Hamlet and the Ambassadors Club.

As the three brothers and their friend, Sherrill Cole, lolled around their campfire at the sand pit one Saturday night in 1950, they could hear the pulsating boom of a double bass along with the shockingly loud singing of a high-registered voice that periodically rose two octaves into a spine-tingling falsetto. They’d seen the Ambassadors Club posters tacked to utility poles along the highway advertising the appearance of Buster Brown’s rhythm and blues band, featuring lead vocalist Little Richard. The McKenzie boys had recently seen a movie preview at the Sunrise Theater featuring an unidentified preteen African-American who sang and played the boogie woogie number “Caldonia” on the piano with his hands and elbows to the astonishment and delight of the movie’s star, Van Johnson. The boys assumed (mistakenly) that the child musician on the silver screen had to be the same Little Richard who was now singing his heart out a stone’s throw from their camp.

As he listened to Little Richard’s mesmerizing voice piercing the stillness of the night, the boys’ self-appointed leader, Fred McKenzie, considered how they could get closer to the music. Tony recollects that his older brother “always had a plan, and on the evening of the performance, he put his plan into action.” The plot involved sneaking up to an unlit exterior window of the club, where they would take turns peering inside. Though normally game to participate in Fred’s sometimes misbegotten high jinks, Tony, then 13, remembers cringing a bit at this particular scheme. What would happen if these white boys got caught sneaking around this African-American club? Might they be thrashed by security? Would they be reported to the police? Worse yet, what if their parents found out? Tony’s imagination ran wild at the potential repercussions. Despite his misgivings, the only thing worse than following the plan was being left out of it, so he and his three “accomplices in crime” stealthily approached the club like the army commandos of their imagination.

When the boys reached the window, they discovered it was too high off the ground to get a look inside. But Fred, with the sort of improvisational thinking that would later land him the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army, saw the solution nearby. A pile of empty wooden drink crates was confiscated and stacked together to serve as a perch for the boys. Tony had just mounted the viewing stand and was poised to look inside when a stentorian and commanding voice of authority shouted out, “What are you boys doing out here?” Terrified, Tony froze. On the ground, brother Gene escaped, hightailing it into the woods. Fred began to flee, but after a few steps, he stopped, deciding he couldn’t leave his helpless younger brother stranded on top of a pile of wooden crates. Sherrill also held his ground. Tony remembers the overwhelming dread he felt at the moment when he, Fred and Sherrill had to “face the music.”

To their relief, the moonlighting security guard who caught them was a man the McKenzie brothers knew well. Tom Dawkins was a jack-of-all-trades and had a friendly relationship with the boys. “You boys have no business sneaking around like that,” observed Tom. “If you really want to watch Little Richard, I’ll see if Sam will let you in.”

Dawkins hauled the three boys inside the club into the presence of the imposing Sam Arnette. The boys were acquainted with Sam, having traded empty bottles for candy and soda at Arnette’s small store across the road. After hearing about the drink crates and the window, Sam chuckled, nodded his head, and told Tom to find the young interlopers seats near the stage. Sam reached into his pocket and gave each of the bewildered boys two pennies to buy soft drinks.

Tony did not know what to expect. They were the only whites in the building and young kids to boot. He remembers how spiffily the patrons were dressed — the men attired in double-breasted zoot suits with tightly creased pants, the women in colorful finery — all dancing to the rhythm and blues music of the Buster Brown band.

Of course, the main attraction was Little Richard. Tony recalls being startled that Richard was not all that little, standing 5 feet, 10 inches — too tall to have been that tiny piano player he had just seen in the movie preview at the Sunrise Theater. Just five years older than Tony, Little Richard had not yet adopted the flamboyant makeup and outrageous stage outfits that would mark his later performances. And Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” had yet to be written and recorded. Though his greatest success was years away, Richard Penniman gave a rousing performance that long ago Saturday night at the Ambassadors Club, hitting the high notes that Tony can hear today.

Wrung out by the dazzling Little Richard and the up-and-down emotions of their escapade, the boys headed to the exit after the performance, escorted by Arnette himself. Before they hit the door, Sam took them aside and in a manner pleasant yet stern, said, “Boys, thanks for coming. I hope you enjoyed the show. But don’t come back!”  PS

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

(In a previous version of this story Tom Dawkins was misidentified as Heck Dawkins.)

But coming to a neighborhood near you?

By Michael Smith

It happened on Sunday, October 30, 1938, at 8 p.m., a time to kick back and listen to a favorite radio program. Many had tuned their radio to an anthology series, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Suddenly the music on that station was interrupted. There was an announcement about a large metal cylinder from outer space, perhaps Mars, which had crashed in a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey. A Professor Farrell of Mount Jenning Observatory was said to have lately detected explosions on Mars.

Now this radio announcer had begun describing what he said appeared to be a Martian exiting the cylinder that had just crashed:  “Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me . . . I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it . . . it . . . ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”

Naturally, the public soon learned that it was nothing more than Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. A ruse. Still, it was reported that the announcement caused widespread panic from fear of an extraterrestrial invasion. Naiveté? Perhaps. But what if a similar credible-appearing deception were perpetrated today? Would you panic?

Perhaps not; most folks today probably doubt the existence of extraterrestrial beings and roll their eyes at those that don’t. Then again, what to make of a 2005 Gallup poll showing that fully a fourth of Americans thought outer space beings had already visited Earth; and a 2015 poll which revealed that 54 percent believe there is extraterrestrial intelligent life?

What do you believe?

Many have hedged their bets. More than 40,000 Americans have forked over $19.95 to Florida’s UFO Abduction Insurance Company for $10 million of protection against alien abduction. Elizabeth April should have paid for a policy, but it’s too late now. Elizabeth’s already become a UFO “abductee” or “experiencer,” as they’re called.

The “Tall Whites” beamed her up to their ship when she was only 18, implanted something in her ear and returned her unharmed. Soon after, she came to understand that in a previous life she was a Tall Grey from the 6th or 8th dimension. UFO enthusiasts pay to hear Elizabeth speak at conferences for believers. She says in her present life, she exists as an interdimensional being or “energetic hybrid.”

David M. Jacobs isn’t buying it. Jacobs, a bona fide Ufologist, has explained that though Elizabeth was possibly abducted, there is absolutely no way she is a hybrid. “Hybrids can control humans neurologically, and we cannot control them. True hybrids use abductees to help them blend into regular society.” Jacobs says Elizabeth is confused. As to Jacobs, himself, he is a former American history professor at Temple University. According to Jacobs, he had tenure so they couldn’t get rid of him, as his colleagues had fervently wished.

It’s also too late for Susan Stockton to apply for abduction insurance. Susan’s trip up to a space ship came in 1989. After swirling straight up, she “went through this opening, and all of a sudden I was in this room. I was medically probed by two beings.” Susan says her abductors were green in color. “Do you know Gumby? They were that color green. They had no hair, or genitalia, but I knew immediately that one was a woman and one was a man. The woman communicated with me telepathically the whole time. She said, ‘Don’t worry.’ She told me to eat chicken livers.” The Eat Mor Chikin cows would undoubtedly agree.

David Huggins takes issue with Susan’s claim about the absence of genitalia. Rightly so, as he lost his virginity to a female extraterrestrial. David’s close encounter of a different kind materialized in the woods near his rural Georgia home. It was 1961 “when an alien woman appeared and seduced him.” Since, life has been good for him. At 74, he wrote in his book, Love and Saucers, “these visits from extraterrestrials, and sexual relationship(s) with them, continued into adulthood.” David says he’s fathered hundreds of alien babies.

John Mack has studied about 200 cases of people claiming to be experiencers and found them “of sound mind, they ask many questions, they doubt themselves. They describe a seemingly real, intense experience, a light, something happening to their bodies.” John knows a sound mind when he confronts one. Dr. Mack is a former psychiatrist and Harvard professor. Nonetheless, as with most folks afflicted with this or that nowadays, there are help sources for experiencers.

CERO-France is one such source. Myriame Belmyr heads up CERO, an organization devoted to helping abductees. She easily relates to experiencers experiences, as she, herself, claims to have been abducted in 1987. According to Ms. Belmyr, extraterrestrial Earth visits are “definitely for genetic engineering.” Also, “they are particularly intrigued by our emotions and our art. They don’t know about any of that.”

An excellent candidate for CERO’s ministrations might be Ms. Jo Ann Richards, who says her husband, now in jail for 30 years, was falsely convicted of masterminding a murder. Says Jo Ann, “We know that the shadow government just wants him out of their hair. My husband’s been around aliens ever since he was a kid. He was trained in the U.S. military and the Raptor military.”

Obviously, Jo Ann suspects the United States government of suspect behavior regarding UFOers. So do many others. In 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower approved adding “Area 51” to the Nevada Test Site, located about an hour’s drive from the Las Vegas strip. There, the government tested secret aircraft and other military weapons. And there the government consciously fanned the fires of doubt as to what exactly was going on in Area 51. For starters, it denied the area even existed. Then, as is most frequently the case, that lie led to another lie, one many believe is perpetrated to this very day — that the government stonewalled about debris one William “Mac” Brazel had previously discovered.

Mr. Brazel, a farmer near Roswell, New Mexico, discovered a miscellany of metal rods and such that he could not identify. One thing led to another till the military arrived and carted the stuff away. Many years later the government announced that the debris was nothing more than a crashed weather balloon. Trouble was, pictures had been taken of the debris and published in newspapers, and the objects in no way resemble parts of a weather balloon.

UFOers think the articles found during the Roswell “incident,” as it is now famously known, were really the remnants of a crashed flying saucer that wound up in Area 51 where experiments on aliens and their accoutrements are secretly conducted. The government dismissed all this and did nothing to dispel the characterization of UFO believers as tin-hat flakes.

In December 2017 the Washington Post published a story about the government’s secret Advanced Threat Identification Program. (That’s government speak for “Pentagon Alien Program.”) Apparently the government had blown through $22 million from 2007 to 2012 to study what else but “anomalous aerospace threats.” (That’s government speak for UFOs.)

Funding for that particular government SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program dried up in 2012. What didn’t dry up is speculation about the results of the program. As recently as December 2017, Luis Elizondo, the fellow that served as head of the secret Pentagon program, said the existence of UFOs had been firmly established. Elizondo said, “In my opinion, if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of ‘beyond reasonable doubt.’ I hate to use the term UFO but that’s what we’re looking at,” he added. “I think it’s pretty clear this is not us, and it’s not anyone else, so no one has to ask questions where they’re from.”

It turns out that there have been numerous secret government SETI programs: Project Sign, in the 1940s, succeeded by Project Grudge, then Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969. Edward J. Ruppelt, first head of Project Blue Book, is on record as saying that UFOs reported in the study were estimated to have been “interplanetary.”

So what do we have here? For certain, there are tin-hat flakes among us. Equally certain is that there are too many credible reports to lightly dismiss. A former Georgia peanut farmer turned POTUS comes to mind. In 1969, Jimmy Carter and 10 to 12 other people stood and watched a UFO for 10 to 12 minutes, as he later reported. Like President Carter, most credible UFO reports have come from current or former military officers or civilian airline pilots.

Such men are not given to glibness. Nor was the man who was inadvertently responsible for the term “flying saucer.” Civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold is widely credited with having reported the first credible sighting of unidentified flying objects in the United States. On June 24, 1947, he reported seeing, while flying, nine objects, glowing bright blue-white, flying in a “V” formation over Washington’s Mount Rainier. He estimated the objects’ flight speed at 1,700 mph and compared their motion to “a saucer if you skip it across water.” Newspaper reports of Arnold’s sighting mistakenly interpreted Arnold’s account to mean that the objects were shaped like saucers, thus, flying saucers.

As far as the public knows, the U.S. government presently has no SETI program. Of course NASA is still about, blasting off to hither and yon, but presumptively has no SETI. Not to fear, however, private interests are taking up the slack. The biggie effort to find aliens is the $100 million project called Breakthrough Listen. The program was spearheaded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and the late Stephen Hawking. How’s that for creds?

Beyond the Milky Way, Breakthrough Listen “listens for messages from the 100 closest galaxies to ours. The instruments used are sensitive enough to hear a common aircraft radar transmitting to us from any of the 1000 nearest stars. Spectroscopic searches are being conducted for optical laser transmissions. They could detect a 100 watt laser (the energy of a normal household bulb) from 25 trillion miles away.”

P.S. In case you missed it this year, you might want to plug in to next year’s World UFO day. It is celebrated by believers on June 24, the date of Arnold’s UFO sighting, or on July 2, the date of the Roswell incident. Live long and prosper.  PS

Michael Smith lives in Talamore, Southern Pines, with his wife, Judee. They moved here in 2017 and wish they had moved here years earlier.

Exploring nature’s creative connection

By Jan Leitschuh

Springtime is a celebration of creation. The birds and the bees get that.

So do artists — and florists.

Got a bad case of spring fever? Looking for a vernal vibe? Seeking some free flower arranging inspiration for your home, or maybe some centerpiece ideas for your next bash?

You can inhale a little color and beauty at the end of March with “Blooming Art,” the inaugural Sandhills festival of art and flower arrangements, at the Campbell House in Southern Pines, March 30-31, with a special gala reception the evening of the 29th.

The creative premise is simple: Take a piece of art, any art — painting, pottery, sculpture, even a hanging quilt — and use that as a jumping-off point for an arrangement, floral interpretation and inspiration.

Sponsored by the Garden Club of the Sandhills, over 20 floral masterpieces will be displayed. “The Garden Club of the Sandhills looks forward to our exhibit of ‘Blooming Art’ as an opportunity to share with the community a passion for horticulture in the form of interpretative floral designs,” says club President Linda Lindsey.

While the interpretive florals are inspired mainly by the works of predominantly local artists, a few interesting pieces from private collections will be featured. Taking their inspiration from their particular assigned piece of art, the florists represent both top area design professionals as well as talented area garden club members. Once assigned a piece of art, the flower arrangers fashion their vision of the artwork in natural materials.

“This is not a professional show and will not be judged, but is rather an expression of our love for nature in its many forms, and an opportunity to share this passion with the community,” says Lindsey.

Interpreting art via flowers is a growing gallery trend because, let’s face it, who couldn’t use a little lift of beauty at winter’s end? Come springtime, art galleries worldwide sponsor similar floral interpretive exhibits, both to highlight their collections and draw visitors.

“Blooming Art” is the local Sandhills twist. While the Campbell House exhibit echoes the enormously popular “Art in Bloom” annual event at Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Art, there’s one essential difference: intimacy.

While the Raleigh exhibits are often wonderfully vast, fantastical, museum-scale and institutionally grand, the Campbell House’s “Blooming Art” program will feature many intimate pieces that might actually find themselves onto one’s dining table or front hall entrance.

“We hope that people attending will be inspired to create arrangements for themselves, after seeing what others do with simple greens from the garden, natural materials like sticks or pods, and flowers you might get at the supermarket or farmers market,” said Hartley Fitts of the “Blooming Art” steering committee.

The florists use the assigned art as a springboard for an arrangement. “You start by getting to know the art you are going to interpret,” says Carol Dowd, a member of the American Institute of Floral Designers, owner of Botanicals, and a five-year veteran of the prestigious Raleigh museum show. Dowd’s work will also be featured in the Campbell House program. “You ask yourself questions about the art such as color, lines, shapes and theme, do some research on the artwork. This may inspire you to look at the artist and artwork differently than you had originally thought. In a museum or gallery, you also need to know the parameters that you will be designing under, such as, what size does this need to be, what flowers can I use that will last as long as it is on display?”

Ultimately, the florists create their own story reflecting the art. “All these different elements need to be worked out, but doing interpretive design is so enjoyable,” says Dowd. “From the discovery of the art to working out the final design, it challenges you as a designer, and it is always fun to share your designs and your joy of flowers with the public.”  PS

“Blooming Art” will open with an evening reception at the Campbell House, 482 E. Connecticut Ave, Southern Pines, on March 29, 6-8 p.m. The open exhibition is Saturday, March 30, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m., and Sunday, March 31, from 1-4 p.m. Tickets are $50. To purchase tickets contact Marilyn Grube at (910) 420-2062.