POEM

October 2024

The Doorman at the
Washington Hilton

Regal in his red cap and Nehru tunic,

he summons with a silver whistle,

depended from a silver tassel

around his neck,

a taxi for Jacob,

our first-born –

mere minutes to make his train

to Philadelphia, then another

to New York, and the plane

to Dubai, then Zambia.

How can it be that you raise children

for the world and they rush off to it,

places and people you’ll never see.

Is that your son, the doorman asks.

When I am unable to answer,

he tells me of his son, in Iraq,

his fear of the telephone

he can’t bear to answer.

All week, this man has held doors for me,

hailed cabs,

smiled as if he did not have such a son.

— Joseph Bathanti

SUNBLOCK

Sunblock

Scientists flocked to Pinehurst for the eclipse of 1900

By Bill Case

Situated on Ritter Road in the Old Town section of Pinehurst is a decidedly quirky monument that could conceivably double as an immovable outdoor coffee table. A rectangular brick base, 18 by 21 inches wide and 18 inches in height, supports a circular sandstone slab 4 inches thick and 30 inches in diameter. Punched in the middle of the slab is a tiny hole.

Curiously, there are no inscriptions on the monument to indicate its significance. In 2001, the Pinehurst Civic Group placed a small engraved marker near the monument, a foot above ground level, for the purpose of enlightening puzzled passersby. The marker, titled SOLAR ECLIPSE MONUMENT MAY 28, 1900, reads:

On this spot astronomers and scientists from around the country came to observe and photograph the eclipse. The punchmark in center is basis for all computations of location and distance measurements in this section of the country. It is also part of a gigantic scheme of world mapping that covers the entire Earth. Additional information at Tufts Archives in village.

To increase awareness of the mostly overlooked site, a tall historic landmark sign with identical verbiage was recently erected along Ritter Road by the village of Pinehurst.

So, what circumstances caused eminent men of science to select Pinehurst, then solely a winter resort town, as the ideal spot to observe and study the solar eclipse? It would have been an inconvenient time for them to work here. By May 28, 1900, the fledgling resort and town would have already ceased operations for the summer. Who were these scientists, and what did they accomplish? Where did they eat and sleep?

While the Tufts Archives has in its collection numerous photographs pertaining to the Pinehurst eclipse expedition of 1900, it has little documentation concerning it. Like the resort, the Pinehurst Outlook, first printed in 1897, was in mothballs for that summer and would not resume operations until early November. The January 5, 1900, edition of the paper did, however, herald the fact that “an excellent view of the total eclipse of the sun (on) May 28 . . . one of the great events of 1900, may be had at Pinehurst.”

Fortunately, other newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun, Charlotte Daily Observer, Charlotte News and the Henderson Gold Leaf, did report on the Pinehurst eclipse expedition. A digital search of these ancient publications helped piece together the story.

The Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., was the prime mover in organizing the Pinehurst expedition. Stimson J. Brown, the director of the observatory, petitioned Congress to authorize $5,000 to fund three eclipse stations. Two were in Georgia — one in Barnesville and the other in Griffin. The third was to be located in the vicinity of Southern Pines. The three expeditions were charged with performing identical missions, the thought being that if cloud cover hampered observations at one of the sites, hopefully the sky would be clear at the others. The May 28 total solar eclipse was the first in America since 1878, and with scientific techniques having improved markedly, there was much to be learned.

Brown tabbed the observatory’s professor of mathematics, Aaron N. Skinner, to find a suitable location to observe the eclipse in or near Southern Pines. Following Skinner’s two-day visit to the area in April 1900, he chose Pinehurst as the site. Though the town would be closing down on May 1, four weeks before the eclipse, resort owner, James W. Tufts (according to a report authored by Skinner) “courteously extended an invitation to the N.O. to locate an eclipse observatory on the property.” Tufts assigned resort general manager C.D. Benbow the task of arranging necessary housing. Skinner reported that J.M. Robinson, owner of The Lenox rooming house (which later burned down and is now the site of a residence at 175 Cherokee Road), was induced to keep his operation open “for our entertainment.”

In fact, the emptiness of the town was viewed as a plus, according to the May 20 edition of the Charlotte Daily Observer (in an article reprinted from the Baltimore Sun), which said, “There are no curious persons to hinder the work . . . on the eventful morning.” Furthermore, the Pinehurst location seemed “to be all that is desired. There are no trees, woods, or buildings to obscure the view of the sun.” A marked contrast to the Ritter Road of today.

Professor Skinner and the observatory’s assistant astronomer, Theo King, arrived in Pinehurst on May 3 to begin preparations for the expedition on the “plot of ground about 800 feet southeast of the Carolina Hotel,” which was then in the final phase of construction. Because the station’s precise longitudinal and latitudinal position was critical, the first order of business was to lay out a “meridian line” toward true north.

Naval Observatory records indicate that Skinner, in locating that line, placed a landmark exactly 1,100 feet north from the tiny hole in the monument slab. Does this landmark still exist? Using the compass on an iPhone and proceeding due north from the monument approximately 1,100 feet, I saw a circular metal object in the ground off Caddell Road. It was covered with design features that looked like astrological symbols. Could this be the long lost marker?

Uh, no. What I had discovered was a manhole cover — albeit an intricately designed one — made in India. The marker does, however, still exist. As luck would have it, Jill Gooding, the granddaughter of Pinehurst’s jack-of-all-trades (including surveyor) Rassie Wicker, was able to show me the location of the true north marker stone I had failed to find.

On May 8,^,1900, team members began trickling into Pinehurst to join Skinner and King. This was more than just a Naval Observatory operation. A contingent of six from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, led by 35-year-old physicist and professor Joseph S. Ames, would play a key role in the expedition. Ames would later ascend to the presidency of Johns Hopkins. He would also serve as a founding member and longtime chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA. Professor R. W. Wood from the University of Wisconsin, Dr. F.L. Chase from Yale, and the Cincinnati Observatory’s E.I. Yowell rounded out the expedition. Ultimately 16 team members would have roles to play during the actual eclipse.

Other expeditions were arriving at various destinations along the eclipse’s 50-mile-wide path. The Smithsonian Astrological Observatory shipped several railroad cars of equipment from Washington, D.C., to Wadesboro, N.C. They were joined by teams from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the British Astronomical Association. Wadesboro was chosen because of the belief that the town’s high elevation made it less likely that clouds would impede visibility. Unlike Pinehurst, spectators flocked to Wadesboro in massive numbers (including those who arrived on a special excursion train from Charlotte) to view the eclipse and the feverish efforts of the Smithsonian expedition. The wave of people and publicity would cause Wadesboro to be generally remembered as the best place to have witnessed the 1900 eclipse.

The Naval Observatory’s longtime historian, Geoffrey Chester, explained to me why eclipse expeditions proliferated at the turn of the century. Scientists were eager “to help refine the theory of the moon’s orbit in order to provide more precise data for navigational almanacs,” he says. “By observing the actual times of the ‘contacts’ of the moon’s climb with that of the sun, and comparing those with predicted values, those corrections could be incorporated into a refined theory.”

Moreover, the Naval Observatory’s historian says that “there were many measurements that could only be made during a total solar eclipse — in particular, high-resolution spectrograms of the sun’s chromosphere . . . and the solar corona,” which enabled scientists to measure the elements present in these areas.

A May 26, 1900, article in the Charlotte Observer confirmed that the Naval Observatory’s expedition would indeed be studying the “the nature and constitution of the corona and chromosphere of the sun,” and elaborated on the reasons in layman’s terms: “(The atmosphere) of the sun consists of vapors or metals such as iron, calcium, and silver, together with many ordinary gases, such as hydrogen and oxygen. This atmosphere is called the chromosphere. Outside it, and seen on the Earth only at times of total eclipses, is a sort of irregular halo, with streamers going off in different directions, all of a brilliant white color against the blue of the sky. The cause of this corona is unknown . . . an attempt will be made to see how many different agencies are taking part in it, and to learn if its existence depends solely on the sun itself.”

On May 8, the various instruments required by the expedition were shipped from Washington to Pinehurst by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad via freight car, and the team members diligently worked to assemble them. With the exception of last-minute adjustments, the staging of the Pinehurst site was completed several days later. A number of brick and cement piers, as well as wooden structures and tarps, were constructed to support and house the equipment. Among the instruments was a telescope mounted on two axes of motion parallel to the Earth’s axis, transits, and several types of spectrographs designed to assist the scientists in their quest to analyze the corona and chromosphere by splitting their emitted light into its component parts. A darkroom and 40-foot tower housed the camera equipment that would photograph the various phases of the eclipse. From a distance, the site would have given the impression of an outdoor produce market next to an oil well.

While attendance for the eclipse at Pinehurst was paltry compared to Wadesboro, there was an influx of camp followers in town as the event approached. Ames reported that in the final two days, “all the meals at the astronomers’ boarding house (the Lenox) were served in two or three relays.” The actual working team of the expedition was “given the right of way, and had the privilege, if it may be called that, of having breakfast at 5 a.m.”

After that, according to Ames, “came the preparations of the buildings for action. The curtains were raised from the sides of the observatory, rafters were taken out, and hastily constructed roofs were taken down. In a short time, all the instruments were exposed to the sky, where the sun was slowly rising.”

Final rehearsals followed as the team members synchronized their watches. “We all knew that the instant of second contact had been calculated at 46 minutes, 16 3/10 seconds past 8 o’clock.” Ames confided, “There is enough uncertainty as to the moon’s true position at any time to make it possible there might be an error of a second or two in this predicted time.” The excitement within the team “was more intense than one would have expected. No one was willing to acknowledge this until afterwards.”

When the moment of first contact was announced, tensions were forgotten as the team sprang into action. They knew that the big moment of the “second contact” would be occurring in an hour and 10 minutes. “Everyone had his piece of smoked metal or colored glass,” said Ames, “and was intently watching the wasting away of the sun.”

Ames was fascinated by the spectacle unfolding before him. In conveying its grandeur, he wrote, “No wonder the poets of ancient civilization could picture the conflicts of huge beasts, one consuming the other in this great spectacle of nature.”

One researcher who was especially interested in examining shadow bands readied his stroboscope and spread a large linen sheet perpendicular to the sun’s rays, but the results of that particular experiment proved disappointing. Ames reported that “the shadow bands were conspicuous by their feebleness.”

At 8:46 and 6 3/10 seconds the team “heard the cry ‘Attention!’” meaning there was less than 10 seconds to go before the second contact. “All the photographic slides were withdrawn. Not a sound was heard even from the surrounding crowd,” wrote Ames.

Announcement of the command to “Go!” was assigned to Johns Hopkins team member Dr. W.B. Huff. He was to shout it immediately upon observing the flash signaling the start of the second contact. To perceive it, Huff employed a binocular, one barrel of which was fitted with a small diffraction grating.

Ames vividly describes the flurry of activity when Huff gave the command. “The lenses were uncapped, shutters were opened, and as the monotonous calling of the seconds proceeded one could dimly hear the sounds of changing plates and sliding camera boxes.” The predominant thing in the observers’ consciousness “was the rapidity of the flight of seconds and the absolute need of never allowing one’s mind to leave the work in hand even for an instant.”

However, there was a glitch in the timing of the command. “Unfortunately the small diffraction grating attached to the binocular failed to render viable the flash at the second contact and delayed the starting signal by 25 or 30 seconds,” said Skinner’s report. “Consequently valuable time was lost.”

Once the action started time passed rapidly until Huff shouted, “Done!” The eclipse was over as the crescent of the sun gradually peeked out from behind the moon. After the taking of a few final spectrum photos, the dismounting and packing of the equipment commenced. “As fast as the covers were screwed on the boxes were carried to a freight car standing nearby,” wrote the professor, “and in an almost incredibly short period the appearance of the whole place had changed entirely.” By 10 o’clock, all evidence of the expedition was gone, except, of course, for the monument.

Notwithstanding the delay in calling out the flash, the expedition provided substantial data and excellent photographs of the corona and total eclipse. Ames declared it a success and credited “the energy and industry of Professor Skinner, who has done everything in his power to carry out the plans formed early in the year by Professor Brown.”

The expedition was largely forgotten in Moore County until an article in the Nov. 28, 1931, edition of the Pinehurst Outlook when the paper’s editor, Bion Butler, described efforts to determine the precise longitude and latitude of what is now the Moore County Airport. It was the legendary Rassie Wicker who arrived at a simple solution: Use as a starting point the solar eclipse monument, known to have a north longitude of 35 degrees, 11 minutes, and 38.23 seconds and a west latitude of 79 degrees, 28 minutes, and 12 seconds, then work from there. And that’s what happened.

Thus, the humble “coffee table,” left behind by the Naval Observatory nearly 125 years ago, rather uniquely, served a practical purpose — as well as commemorating a historic astronomical event. Doesn’t that make it the best type of monument?

2024 Feature Sunblock

Art of the Manor

ART OF THE MANOR

Art of the Manor

Grand spaces and small treasures

By Deborah Salomon • Photographs by John Gessner

Imagine a residence resembling an Impressionist watercolor of all things spring. Imagine that it never fades or droops or goes to seed from summer’s heat. Turquoise predominates, cool as a rushing stream, channeling Monet. Birds flutter, some painted, some carved, some blown glass perched on a delicate glass birdbath. Yellow walls warm as May sun illuminates a living room housing two grandfather clocks, skirted end tables, leafy wallpaper, a thickly upholstered extra-long, 60-year-old sofa and, for contrast, a porcelain urn tall enough to house the ashes of a dynasty of pharaohs.

Mallory Hickey, dressed in lime linen, calls the result “my happy house.” Her friends call it “Mallory’s Gallery.”

The house, an elegant yet informal English country manor clad in white stucco with narrow shutters, was built in 1923 by the Tufts organization for a Mrs. Butterfield who, according to correspondence on file in the Tufts Archives at the Given Memorial Library, expressed multiple petty grievances. Subsequently, Richard Tufts is said to have lived there. Without complaint.

In an era when country homes needed names, this mild-mannered specimen was called Blackjack Cottage, not for connections to gambling or even rakish Black Jack Bouvier, Jacqueline Kennedy’s hard-drinking, high-rolling father. Rather, the lot was overgrown with blackjack oak trees named for its bark divided into ebony plaques.

Could this be why Hickey painted the foyer opening onto an otherwise pastel interior . . . black? No. “Black is neutral,” the chatelaine says. It’s also a contrast. The antique Irish rocking horse leaning against the staircase suggests that surprises await.

For 30 years Hickey has been leaving her imprint on this manor on the edge of Pinehurst village, where construction dug up a crumbling tombstone engraved “John O. Fisher 1889,” its provenance a mystery.

In the early 1990s Hickey and her late husband, John, Michigan residents, contemplated early retirement, she from an upper-echelon job with American Airlines, he from marketing. They took two weeks off to scope out Hilton Head, Savannah, et al. Friends had moved to Pinehurst. It made sense to stop on the way home one lovely October.

“We checked into the inn. I thought, what a cosmopolitan place,” Hickey recalls. Just for fun, they looked at houses. In Blackjack Cottage she saw beyond the shag carpet and flocked wallpaper. They rented, then purchased, the property, which she would spend decades transforming.

“I’ve done the kitchen twice,” she says.

First, they needed to replace the upstairs master suite with something more substantial and comfortable, preferably on the ground floor. The new wing of mammoth proportions has a vaulted, timbered ceiling rising 20 feet, dwarfing two queen-sized beds. Its seating area with sofa, tables, fireplace and bay window overlooks a terrace. Here, summery pastels give way to richer hues, forest green and deep coral, a contrast continued in the TV/library/den, just off the living room, where dog art rules.

On the bay windowsill, Gracie, a 14-year-old retriever mix, stretches out in her bed. “We found her in a dumpster in the Dominican Republic, when she was a puppy,’’ Hickey says. Also in residence, three cats, the eldest pushing 20.

Each room contains something notable. In the dining room one of three corner cupboards displays Hickey’s collection of vibrant Majolica pottery. The dining table (with no extensions) seats six — eight in a pinch — since this hostess prefers intimate, informal dinners seasoned with lively conversation. Its skirted chairs are upholstered in white. Not to worry, she explains, ketchup wipes off.

About that twice redone kitchen: If most Pinehurst manor house kitchens are sequined ball gowns, this one is a finely tailored suit in sand, beige and off-white with a beadboard ceiling and furniture-finish island, softened by an eyebrow window over the farm sink. In here, the cry of the Wolf range goes unheeded. Hickey did not submit to Sub-Zero, either. In a home a shade under 5,000 square feet, the proportions of the modest but elegant kitchen meet her needs. “When guests congregate here I chase them out,” she says pleasantly.

Upstairs belongs to family mementos, beginning with photos of Hickey’s mother and grandmother in the stairwell, continuing with a framed christening dress, a bedroom set, quilts, art and snapshot collages. “My grandfather came over from Russia,” she says, drawing attention to a photo. “He jumped ship in New York.” She saved his bed, along with a figurine of a lady that was broken in a fall and mended by a child with chewing gum. A narrow indoor balcony overlooks the sunroom, a veritable bower adjoining the living room. Sitting there is like being outdoors minus inclement weather.

The gardens are lush and densely shrubbed, a goldfish pond is covered with wire to thwart fishing birds.

Mallory’s Gallery, indeed, enhanced by grand spaces and small treasures — stained glass window panels, a framed Hermes scarf and, on the swinging doors, raised metal finger plates from New Zealand.

“I live in a bubble — secure, far from the madding crowd,” Hickey says. Then admits the obvious: “I love Monet water lilies.”

2024 Art of the Manor Feature

Dressed to Thrill

DRESSED TO THRILL

Dressed to Thrill

Audrey Moriarty

In the early 1930s, in a village not so very far away, masquerade balls were all the rage. Over time, the Carolina Hotel celebrated New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day and Valentine’s Day with dress-up galas. Guests and cottagers were “invited” to attend by Leonard Tufts himself, and admission was by card only. Invitations for guests were procured at the Carolina office. Other balls, sponsored by the Sandhill Shrine Club, were held at the Pinehurst Country Club. Donald Ross was the chairman of the Ball Committee and invited attendees by letter describing the club’s purpose, and enclosing a ticket and a stamped envelope. Tickets were $5, and proceeds supported the community’s “little sufferers.”

These events, however, were no match for the revelry of the employees’ masquerade balls. The annual “Frolic in the Spring” was attended not only by employees, but cottagers and guests as well. Held at the Carolina Hotel, the annual ball started with a parade from the dining room, down the great hall, and into the ballroom. According to the April 3, 1931, Pinehurst Outlook, “The annual employees’ masquerade brings out the best array of costumes seen during the entire season.”

2024 Dressed to Thrill Feature

Poem

POEM

September 2024

Static Apnea

Toes taste water
before it swallows
our bodies.

In a waterfall embrace—
bones brush against
mossy boulders.

Our skin succumbs
to unknown atoms
when the wild decides
where we fall in.

The flow that washed away our sins
is saving someone else by now.

Miles away—
neck deep
in a faith pool,

we hold our breath
to float above
rock bottom.

— Clint Bowman

Clint Bowman’s debut full-length collection of poetry, If Lost, will be published September 5 by Loblolly Press.

2024 Feature Poem

All in a Day’s Work

ALL IN A DAY'S WORK

All in a Day's Work

Shady Maple Farm glows with color

By Claudia Watson

Photographs by John Gessner

On the outskirts of Carthage, a nondescript dirt road leads to a hidden gem. Surrounded by a tapestry of pines, native oaks, vibrant sassafras and fruit-laden persimmons, the landscape is a remarkable sight in late summer. A weathered sign bearing the word “Flowers” hints at the destination: Shady Maple Farm.

Farther down the long road, you get a glimpse of what is ahead — a breathtaking wildflowers-filled space. And in the heart of it all, a woman in a big straw hat tends her flowers. When Jennifer Donovan and her husband, Aloysius, moved to this parcel of land in 2021, it was a blank canvas. The 67-acre farm inspired them to follow their love for the outdoors and simpler times.

Decades ago, the 80-year-old homestead was timbered. Still, it held great promise with two natural ponds and nearby wetlands that drain into Dunham’s Creek. “I didn’t have a grand plan, and so it evolved,” Donovan says. “It started with a small plot that I planted and filled with summer annuals just so I could learn.”

Weeks later, while driving through the country, the couple spied three, “unused,” envy-inducing hoop houses in a distant field. They finally mustered the courage to ask the owner if they could buy them.

“He agreed, but on one condition: We had to dismantle and transport them ourselves. They were a fraction of the original cost and certainly worth it,” says Donovan, recalling the first hurdle in their journey to expand the farm.

It took some effort, but they assembled the largest of the three hoop houses, providing 2,000 square feet of protected growing space for her spring crop for the past three years. “It’s a joy to work there in the winter. It’s warm and full of sunlight, and I can roll the sides down if it gets too cold and still get work done,” she says as she nips a flower stem.

Working in the dirt has always been part of Donovan’s life. A native of Carthage, she graduated from Union Pines High School before attending East Carolina University. During the summers, she’d mow greens and fairways on local golf courses, a job she enjoyed, leading her to transfer to N.C. State University, where she obtained a degree in agronomy.

“I wanted to understand the soil and how it needed to be healthy, so I focused on environmental stewardship classes. That education, and later, earning my N.C. Cooperative Extension Master Gardener certification, gave me a sincere appreciation for our living soil,” she says. “Putting down roots here led to my flower farm dream. I knew when we bought the land that I’d grow something, but I didn’t know what until I saw information online about cut flower production. I love flowers, and they are a product that’s needed year-round.”

So she signed up for an online course in fresh flower production. “I was hooked, obsessed, consumed,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to get started. As soon as I could break ground, I planted that small plot of flowers.”

Donovan never looked back. She started seeds in late fall of 2020 and began selling flowers in the spring of 2021. Despite COVID, she forged ahead, setting up her floriculture business plan and website, and finding novel ways to sell her flowers in a market segment that will generate $52 billion in sales in 2024.

Driven by people’s increased use of flowers and beautiful plants to liven up their homes and businesses, cut flowers dominate the floriculture market. North Carolina is one of the top 10 states in the U.S. in their production, indicating the enduring appeal and demand for floral beauty.

“Flower farming takes a lot of planning and physical work to succeed,” Donovan says. “I reach my market in a variety of ways, including offering flower subscriptions and joining the local farmers markets. During COVID, when there weren’t many farmers markets, we salvaged what we could from the remnants of the old farmhouse and repurposed them to make a self-serve honor system flower stand.” Donovan points to the stand next to the wildflower garden and their home. “People were very happy to come here to buy flowers to brighten their days.”

Surprisingly, she had not grown anything from seed until they moved to the farm. Donovan laughs at it, too. “I never thought I’d be a flower farmer, but it makes sense with my love of the outdoors and my interest in caring for the environment. For me, it is a perfect match,” she says.

The small-scale family flower farm is no-spray, no-till, and focused on organic growing practices. “December and January are my two months to try and get the farm straightened out,” she says, anticipating the work ahead. After a harvest and before transplanting or seeding another crop, she cuts back or mows down the stems of the season’s plant material and covers them with silage tarps for two to three weeks. She removes the tarps and adds a layer of heavy compost on top.

Another part of the process is determining the number of flowers needed for each season. Donovan uses succession planting to ensure she grows a specific number of stems to fulfill her subscriptions and customers at the farmers market.

“As a one-woman show, efficiency is key,” she says. “Once the season begins it’s like being a hamster on a wheel.”

Flower farming is a time-sensitive operation, and if planned and executed correctly, all those long days in the dirt bring a steady stream of thousands of fresh flowers for her customers. Spring brings the first flush of colors: David Austin roses and the overwintering veronica, salvia, sedum, yarrow, sweet peas and mountain mint — which gets its own box to keep it manageable.

Her 2 acres of flower fields are a veritable candy shop of colorful choices. Versatile plants, including biennial Canterbury Bells (Campanulas) and snapdragons, provide an informal cottage look when intermixed with other plants.

Elegant Bupleurum ‘Griffithi’ with its bright chartreuse blooms combines well with jewel tones, the simple, clean white, of False Queen Anne’s Lace (Ammi majus), and Bells of Ireland. Highly fragrant stock (Matthiola incana), forget-me-nots, poppies and spiky delphiniums are prized plants that thrive in cooler weather. And magical ranunculus, born from small octopusshaped corms that continue to generate stems after being cut, are among her spring favorites.

Donovan loves tulips, but not standard tulips. “I’m drawn to the unusual types that are showy and make a bouquet stand out, with fringed or pointed petals, and the double-flowered,” she says. “Some are so ruffled and full they’re mistaken for peonies.”

Donovan points to a recently weeded row marked with pink flags in the middle of the flower rows. “I’m cultivating 10 to 12 varieties of herbaceous perennial peonies that are suitable to our climate. There are 100 in that row and 1,000 in the ground. I flag them, so I don’t need to find them each time I use my stirrup hoe to weed. I don’t want to cut off the little eyes on the crowns,” she says, noting those eyes generate a mass of new upright shoots.

For the past two years, she has disbudded the peonies to allow a young plant (aged 1-3 years) to strengthen. The most important part of the disbudding ritual is timing. “As soon as I see a bud, I cut it off,” she says. “It’s a sacrifice, but what’s needed to get those deep tuberous roots to focus on storing moisture and food. That growth will chug out the thick foliage and the large bountiful blooms I’ll have in another year or so.”

Early summer brings the dramatic globes of allium, perennial phlox (Phlox paniculata) and black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia). Once the ground is warm, she plants 600 sunflower seeds every Monday. “Who doesn’t love a sunflower?” she says, spying ladybugs and hovering dragonflies on her healthy crop.

Late summer is usually when a garden runs out of steam. But that’s when the flower harvest at Shady Maple Farm hits its crescendo. It is a breathtaking display of color and abundance, a true testament to the farm’s thriving nature. Zinnias, celosia, amaranth, marigolds, summer snapdragons, heirloom mums and another succession of sunflowers brighten the landscape. But it is the dahlias that elicit a strong emotional response from many.

“Dahlias are so unique, with all shapes, sizes and colors imaginable,” Donovan says. “Plus, one dahlia tuber makes many more tubers in the first season. They never disappoint and are the workhorses.”

Her favorite dahlias include ‘Cafe au Lait’ and ‘Break Out,’ renowned for their creamy blooms in soft pink, beige and peach that make romantic summer bouquets. ‘Lavender Perfection’ is a fully double flower with huge lavender-pink blossoms that can grow 40 inches tall. Dahlia ‘Platinum Blonde’ resembles doubleflowered echinacea with fuzzy buttercream centers surrounded by bright white petals. Pollinators like bees, butterflies and hoverflies are drawn to dahlias’ vibrant colors and diverse forms, finding sustenance from mid-summer to frost.

In May she plants a mass of dahlias to take her through the fall farmers markets, where she sells flowers from her vintage-style bus that she’s named Bloom. “I love this bus,” Donovan shouts while unloading buckets of freshly cut flower stems and wrapped bouquets. “It keeps me efficient. Farming is figuring out how to make it work, understanding where to put the cover crop and get the succession right for smooth transitions.” It requires tough decisions, she notes, adding that the farm’s outdoor capacity has by no means reached its limits. Next year, she will add more rows and 3,900 more plants.

“This farm makes me appreciate the wisdom of farmers who’ve been doing this for a long time. For me, to finally get a system in place feels good,” she says as the sun begins its descent and the flower fields take on a golden glow.

After a long silence, she smiles, grateful for the day. It takes energy, determination and sensitivity to nature’s flora and fauna. Still, for Donovan, it is all in a day’s work — a day that makes her proud.

2024 All in a Day's Work Feature

Some Kind of Terrific

SOME KIND OF TERRIFIC

Some Kind of Terrific

The many odysseys of Wiffi Smith

By Bill Case

My compulsion started in the late 1950s, around age 9. I’d spring out of bed and bolt to the front door where our daily newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, awaited. I’d grab the sports section and absorb its contents, especially baseball and golf. When it came to the statistics, no pitcher’s earned run average or touring pro’s also-ran fi nish was too obscure to escape my attention.

I not only studied the results of PGA Tour events, but also those of the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Mickey Wright, Betsy Rawls and Marlene Bauer Hagge were among the LPGA stalwarts I became familiar with, all eventually inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

I also recollect Plain Dealer accounts concerning another LPGA player of that era, Wiffi Smith, whose tournament successes from 1957-1960 rivaled those of her legendary contemporaries. She won eight LPGA tournaments before turning 24 — the same number Jack Nicklaus would win on the PGA Tour by that age though, in fairness, Jack’s victories included three major championships. I remember photos of a smiling, and often victorious, Smith. Sturdily built with curly auburn hair, Wiffi ’s friendly freckled face stuck in my memory bank.

Mentions of Smith abruptly disappeared from the sports pages around 1960. She was little more than a distant memory when I began research for a story involving the Moore County Hounds. In the process of delving into the archives of The Pilot, the name Wiffi Smith kept popping up in stories from 1963 to 1981.

A 1976 Pilot story confi rmed the woman in question was golf’s, and my own, missing Wiffi . “Behind the continuing reputation of the Moore County Hounds,” wrote Mildred Allen, “is a champion among champions — Wiffi Smith, who after winning her place in the golfi ng world before permanently damaging her left hand in a minor accident in 1959, found a second love when Mrs. Ginnie Moss invited her to manage the kennels and become Second Whip for MCH.”

Allen’s piece described Smith’s myriad duties at Mile-Away Farm, MCH’s home. Arriving at daybreak, she pitched hay, mucked stalls, personally trained the hounds and, once hunting season was underway, saw to it (as whipper-in) that the hounds, when afield, remembered “what Wiffi Smith . . . has taught them.” Wiffi was quoted as saying, in training the hounds, “Love is basic to discipline. They’ve got to love you enough to do what you ask of them or demand of them.”

Another Pilot article, this time from 1981, reported that Smith was leaving her position as “kennel huntsman” at MCH and returning “to her first love — golf.” She would be offering private lessons and “three-day intensive golfing seminars.” It was not an entirely new gig for Smith. During her tenure at MCH, she moonlighted at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club, giving lessons to women in Peggy Kirk Bell’s Golfaris.

Smith’s segue from championship golfer to foxhunting maven and back to golf teacher had the makings of a fine story, but she was long gone from Moore County. An internet search yielded a 2005 blurb identifying Smith as a golf instructor in Darrington, Washington. Efforts to locate her there were fruitless. Moreover, the commonness of her given name, Margaret C. Smith, rendered directory searches a hopeless endeavor.

Finally, a circuitous route involving the MCH’s current whipper-in, Mel Wyatt — who said Smith is fondly remembered in MCH circles —and a veteran MCH member, Leonard Short, produced a telephone number in Edgewood, New Mexico, where the 87-year-old now resides with her younger brother, Latimer Smith Jr., and his wife.

In several phone conversations, Smith engagingly reminisced about her life, a mostly fun-loving and joyous ride, from her perspective. “But what about the injury to your hand that derailed what could have been a Hall of Fame golf career?” I asked. “That can’t be a happy memory.”

“I wasn’t happy about it,” Smith said, “but it led to great times in Southern Pines with the hounds, Pappy and Ginnie Moss, and the Bell family. It was a wonderful time to be in Southern Pines. When things happened in my life that sent me in a different direction, it has led to something wonderful.”

Smith’s attitude regarding life’s curveballs is a trait shared with her mother. Mary Decker Smith was a brilliant woman of many talents — architect, librarian, artist, naval navigator and sportswoman. While married to Latimer Smith Sr., and living in Redlands, California, she was employed as a librarian at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Later, she would serve her country in seemingly more clandestine employments in Mexico, England and Spain. Wiffi is uncertain as to her mother’s precise role in these foreign assignments but suspects her stint in Mexico involved keeping tabs on former Third Reich military officers who hurriedly relocated to that country in the aftermath of World War II.

This international woman of mystery was a vagabond whose adventurous avocations took her far from home. While Latimer Sr., employed as a designer of airplane parts, stayed behind at the couple’s home in Redlands, Mary pursued a special interest in ancient Central and South American civilizations, visiting ruins accompanied by archaeologically minded friends who shared the same passion. During a 1936 excursion to a remote village, Mary encountered a tribal healer who, after poking her midsection, exclaimed “Wiffi!” which, in the tribe’s dialect, meant “something is coming.” The healer proved prescient. That “something” was Margaret C. Smith (aka “Wiffi”), who arrived that September.

Latimer and Mary’s marriage ended in divorce when Wiffi was 11. Mary and the children left Redlands and moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, where the pre-teen Wiffi learned Spanish in short order. “At one time, I was fluent in three languages (English, Spanish and French). Now I can’t speak any of them,” she says with a chuckle.

The young Smith relished riding horses, playing piano and taking ballet. She excelled in all sports, and dreamed of emulating the accomplishments of Babe Didrickson Zaharias, one of the greatest female athletes in history. She took up tennis, but it proved frustrating finding competition in Guadalajara. Mary suggested Wiffi try her hand at golf, a game she could always play by herself. Moreover, golf aptitude was in the family genes. Latimer Sr. had once entertained the notion of turning professional. After

Mary joined the Guadalajara Country Club, Wiffi, by then 14, took up the game in earnest.

Within a year she was shooting close to par. She wasn’t just good; she was long. Generating power from her solid 5-foot, 6-inch, 160-pound frame, Wiffi could smash her driver 265 yards. At 16, she entered the 1953 Mexican Women’s Amateur and won going away, routing her opponent, Luz de Lourdes, 7 and 6 in the finals. Later that summer, she won low amateur laurels at the World Championship of Golf in Chicago, where she met her idol Zaharias, then made a major splash by reaching the semifinals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur.

Despite this early success, Smith’s short game, by her own admission, lacked finesse. To address this deficiency, she took lessons from renowned teacher and two-time PGA champion Paul Runyan in Pasadena. “He told me to hit some pitch shots to the right side of the green, and make them bounce left toward the pin, and vice-versa,” recalls Smith. “I couldn’t make my pitches bounce the way he wanted so I said, ‘Let me watch you.’” After Runyan hit a few shots, all of which bounced in the desired direction, Smith knew what she needed to do. Mimicking the Hall of Famer’s technique, she quickly had the ball bouncing as requested. “He didn’t need to tell me how to do it, I just did it.”

Smith played several important amateur tournaments in the first quarter of 1954, including Pinehurst’s North & South Championship, but her golf development slowed when, along with her mother and brother, she moved to a small cottage in the village of Wincham, England. There were few opportunities to play competitively, but Smith kept her game in shape at nearby Windwhistle Golf Club, a modest nine-hole layout where sheep grazed on the course. Her brother shagged her practice balls.

While Windwhistle was not a memorable test of golf, it did possess scenic beauty. “The course was high up overlooking the countryside. I watched foxhunts down below,” remembers Smith. “I could see the fox, the hounds and the horses, all in full flight.” It would be a harbinger of things to come. Smith did, in fact, enter the Women’s British Amateur in July 1954 and played creditably, winning two matches before bowing to Canadian finalist Marlene Stewart.

Mary instructed her daughter to choose either golf or college. She could afford to subsidize one or the other, but not both. Smith had arrived at a fork in the road. Gaining admission to college appeared an iffy proposition, since Wiffi had not stayed in one place long enough to earn a high school diploma. Motivated by her desire to win the U.S. Junior Girls Championship — the 1954 championship would be her final opportunity to compete in it — she chose golf.

After sailing to America, the teenager blew away the field. Golf World reported that Wiffi “waltzed through four matches, five or more up in each of them.” The magazine labeled her “the greatest traveler among the teenage starlets,” given the fact that in the previous year alone, she had “moved from her home in Guadalajara, Mexico, through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, the British Isles and sundry points west, amazing all with her shot-making.”

Among those Smith impressed was Peggy Kirk Bell, who along with husband Warren “Bullet” Bell, the Cosgrove family and Julius Boros, had recently purchased the Pine Needles golf course with the objective of transforming it into a resort property. Peggy Bell provided a helping hand to many talented female golfers, and Smith was among the first beneficiaries. The Bells hired her to work in the office, where her duties left ample time to play with guests and work on her game.

During one practice session at Pine Needles in March 1955, Smith experienced a golfing epiphany that astounds her to this day. “I was hitting 6-iron shots getting ready for the North & South at Pinehurst, when something magical came over me.” Suddenly, it seemed impossible to mishit a shot. “I didn’t exist anymore,” she said. “Somebody else was hitting the ball. It was perfect. Today, they would call it the zone.”

The euphoria carried over to the North & South. Smith played beautifully throughout, beating U.S. Amateur champion Barbara Romack in the semifinal, then cruising to a 3 and 2 victory over Pat Lesser in the championship match. The victory cemented Smith’s status as a top amateur and resulted in her selection to the 1956 United States Curtis Cup team.

The Bells were proud of their 18-year-old protégé and protective of her. They became a second family for the young woman. When the Holden family, owners of the St. Clair Inn in Michigan, hired the Bells to manage their property during the summer of 1955, they brought Smith with them to work in the inn’s office.

During that summer Smith also grew close to the Holden family and babysat for Bob Holden’s children. “Bob was a wonderful man,” she reflects. “His whole family took me in and helped me financially and encouraged me with all my endeavors. I learned to dance in their kitchen.” St. Clair became her new home. Later, when the Holdens sold the inn and built a hotel property in Orange, Texas, Smith moved to the Lone Star State with them.

Playing in the ’56 Curtis Cup proved a godsend. Though the American side was defeated by Great Britain and Ireland at Prince’s Golf Club in County Kent, England, Smith won both of her matches, including a 9 and 8 beatdown of singles opponent Philomena Garvey. The following week she crossed the English Channel to play in the French Amateur and won that, too. Smith capped off her remarkable three-week run by capturing the British Women’s Open Amateur at Sunningdale, dusting her finals opponent Mary Patton Janssen 8 and 7.

After returning to the States, Smith entered the Trans-Mississippi Amateur held in October at Monterey Peninsula Country Club in Pebble Beach. She won again in lopsided fashion. The highlight for Smith was having her father by her side throughout the tournament. “I loved my dad, but we didn’t get to see each other much,” she says today. “Having him see me win at Monterey meant a lot.”

But for Smith, the memory of this reunion would turn bittersweet. After his lengthy drive home, Latimer Sr. felt ill. The following morning, the 47 year-old was found dead, the victim of an enlarged heart.

The combination of amateur successes and her dad’s death caused Smith, then 20, to consider turning pro and joining the ranks of LPGA Tour players. She announced her intention to leave the amateur ranks and play the LPGA’s 1957 tour schedule. The Bells hooked Smith up with Spalding’s staff of touring pros. “That got me balls, clubs, bags, tees, shag bags and 3,000 bucks,” says Smith.

While lodging with the Bells during the holiday season, Wiffi prepared for life on tour. A priority was finding a car to drive to the first event, the Sea Island Open in Georgia. She became smitten with an ancient auto on display at the local Ford dealership — a 1928 Model A Ford. Told the car was privately owned and not for sale, Smith refused to take no for an answer. She tracked down the flivver’s owner while he was playing a round of golf at Pinehurst No. 3 and bought the auto for $1,000 before he could add up his scorecard.

On the 400-mile drive to Sea Island, the Model A sputtered to a stop in Sumter, South Carolina. The needed distributor parts to repair the antique couldn’t be found, but a resourceful mechanic managed to handcraft a fix for $17. Smith was back on the road. If trusting the roadworthiness of a 30-year-old auto seemed questionable, the incident did gain Smith (and the LPGA) a splash of publicity in Golf World and other publications. It didn’t hurt that she finished fifth in her debut.

Smith was the only rookie to win on tour in ’57, at both the Dallas Open and the United Volunteer Services Open in San Francisco. And she came close to winning three LPGA major events, finishing second to Patty Berg in the Western Open, second again at the LPGA Championship (won by Louise Suggs) and fourth in the Titleholders Championship (Patty Berg won again) at Augusta Country Club.

While it’s not unheard of for tour pros of either sex to begrudge the success of a rookie, most of Smith’s contemporaries were charmed by her personality and appreciated her go-for-broke style. “She was something you couldn’t imagine,” recalled Polly Riley. “She’d take chances with shots. We’d think, what on earth? But she’d pull them off. It was almost as if she wanted to see how many situations she could escape from. She was something wonderful.”

Smith’s devil-may-care antics off the course brought smiles to her peers and the public alike. “We’d look up and she’d be walking on her hands, or trotting along on someone’s horse, or at a party sliding down a banister,” said LPGA founding member Betty Jameson. “She was everyone’s young hope, but in the form of a mischievous angel.”

In 1958 Smith captured her third LPGA title at the Peach Blossom Open at Spartanburg Country Club in South Carolina in addition to a pair of top seven finishes in majors. She switched to a more conventional automobile — a Volkswagen bus — but that choice proved a bit quirky, too, when she outfitted it with a piano. She could also play the violin and cello. Another Smith gambit involved the acquisition of Flashy Mike, a parade horse she trailered with her on tour. When Wiffi participated in pre-tournament clinics, she would ride up to the tee on Flashy Mike to the delight of the spectators.

Eventually, the hauling of and caring for Flashy Mike became a distraction, and Wiffi needed a stable for her horse. Peggy Kirk Bell suggested her friends, the Mosses, might be willing to take care of the horse at their Mile-Away Farm outside Southern Pines. Ginnie Moss was reluctant to house a parade horse with her foxhunters but, as a favor to Peggy, acquiesced. When not on tour, Smith would frequent the barn at Mile-Away, attending to Flashy Mike and visiting the Mosses. She also befriended numerous MCH members. Smith grew to love the Sandhills horse country, and with recently inherited family money, purchased 82 acres of what Golf World described as “wild tree-covered land,” outside Vass. She envisioned building a cabin and stable on the remote property.

Country life would have to wait because Smith’s golf career was in full swing. Her 1959 LPGA season got off to a rousing start. She won the Sunshine Women’s Open in February, and a month later led the coveted Titleholders’ championship in Augusta with one round to play. But a spontaneous whim would prove costly. Following the third round, Smith spotted a caddie’s motor bike in the Augusta Country Club’s parking lot. She asked if she could take it for a spin. “Sure,” the caddie replied, “but be careful because the brakes work the opposite of a motorcycle.” Once in motion, Smith couldn’t stop. She ran into the back of a car and was thrown over the vehicle’s hood, sustaining a severe injury to her left wrist.

The nagging pain caused Smith to struggle in the final round and she tumbled to third place with a closing 77. Smith continued on tour, despite increased difficulty in setting her wrist at the top of her swing, and generally managed good finishes. In April, she won again at Spartanburg. By then the tournament had been renamed The Betsy Rawls Open.

At the end of ’59, Smith underwent surgery for her wrist in California, but it was still hurting as she embarked on her 1960 LPGA season. Adjusting her grip to alleviate the discomfort, Smith won the Royal Crown Open in March at Columbus, Georgia. Its top prize of $1,330 was the largest purse she would win on tour. In May, she won again at Spartanburg. Remarking on her trifecta, Smith said, “I think I’ll take this course home and put it in my backyard.”

In July, Smith fashioned two good finishes in major events, a fifth place in the LPGA Championship and sixth in the U.S. Women’s Open. In August, she won her eighth and final event on tour, the Waterloo Open, but her wrist was getting worse, not better. After she shot a first round 79 in late September at Memphis, the nagging injury forced her to withdraw from the tournament.

Her announcement one week later was a jaw-dropper. Smith said her hand issues would prevent her from playing competitively “for at least two years” and that she was leaving the tour. “Under these conditions, I can’t play my best and I want an education anyway,” said Smith. “Golf is getting to be hard work, and I love it too much to allow it to affect me in that way.”

Then a further shocker. “I have written to the USGA applying for amateur status. Maybe someday, I’ll be able to play in the national amateur.”

Even as Smith decided to retain her professional status, her wrist worsened. “I couldn’t lift a piece of paper,” she says. Despite two surgeries, it was never the same. Though the wrist eventually improved enough for Smith to play good golf, she was unable to regain the power that allowed her to play great golf. One final sentimental appearance in Spartanburg in 1964 was her last LPGA tournament.

Off the course, Smith pursued her education at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, able to enroll despite her lack of a high school diploma. She studied at WNMU for three years, but left school short of the requirements for graduating. “I got all upset with a boyfriend and a couple of teachers,” she says.

Hoping to land a position at Pine Needles, she reached out to Peggy Kirk Bell in June of 1963. There weren’t any jobs available, but Bell suggested Smith contact the Mosses at MCH. “They said, ‘Come on over. Work in the barn.’ Eventually, they thought I could feed and take care of the hounds,” Smith recalls. She adapted to the job with relative ease. “One of the hardest things was learning each individual hound’s name.”

Though Smith had not previously engaged in foxhunting, the Mosses knew an excellent rider when they saw one. When she was young Smith rode frequently on her cousins’ 10,000-acre ranch in New Mexico. Soon, she advanced up the MCH staff’s pecking order to be the hunt’s second whipper-in. Riding to the hounds and keeping the canines on task proved to be an excellent outlet for Smith’s sporting side.

There’s still a tree on the Walthour-Moss Foundation known simply as “Wiffi’s Tree,” the scene of an accident involving her. “During hunts on the foundation, I kept running into branches of this tree with my hat,” says Smith. “I decided to cut it down.” Perched on the back of a truck, she sawed off an offending limb but, when it fell, it hit the side of the truck and Wiffi, too. She managed to heave the whirring chainsaw away from her body but the falling branch broke her wrist — the left one, of course.

With the assistance of her co-workers and milled floorboards from trees on the Moss property, Smith built her dream cabin on her 82-acre parcel. Her friends relished their visits to the pastoral retreat she called Faraway. “They’d get so relaxed, they’d all fall asleep,” she says.

And the Bells still called on Smith to help out at Pine Needles, sometimes at the oddest of hours. “I remember Peggy calling me at 2 a.m. and pleading with me to show up at 8 a.m. the next morning to help with a group,” says Wiffi. “I told her I couldn’t because of having to do my morning chores at the farm. She said, ‘Can’t you do your chores earlier?’”

Smith continued in her roles at Mile-Away and with the hunt through the 1970s. After Pappy Moss died in 1976, wife Ginnie took over his role as MCH’s Huntsman. Within a few years, Mrs. Moss decided to leave that post and thus MCH looked for a new “Huntsman” to replace her. Smith hoped she would be considered for the position, but MCH instead chose a veteran professional who personally took charge of kennel operations, thus replacing Wiffi. Though she continued to perform other farm-related work for Mrs. Moss at Mile-Away, Smith’s reduced workload enabled her to devote more time teaching at Pine Needles alongside other noted golf instructors including Sally Austin and Ellen Griffin. Wiffi made teaching visits at Ben Sutton’s Golf School in Ruskin, Florida, and also served as a golf teacher at St. Mary’s school in Raleigh.

Then, in 1987, Smith encountered a group of visiting women golfers from Port Townsend, Washington, a small village on a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific Ocean. The more the women raved about Port Townsend, the more Smith became intrigued. “I had mountains and the Pacific coast on my mind,” she says.

Smith and a friend decided to check out Port Townsend but instead found themselves in Darrington, Washington — an inland, rural locale, and hardly a golf hotspot. There was one nine-hole course. Smith was enamored with Darrington’s ambience, however, and elected to move there. She gave lessons at the local driving range and became a traveling instructor at various Penny Zavichas Golf Schools throughout the West. She lived in Darrington until her move to Albuquerque to join her brother and his wife.

One cannot help but wonder what Smith might have achieved in golf absent her injury. “She was going to be a fantastic player,” said Hall of Famer Marilyn Smith. Peggy Kirk Bell said Wiffi “had one of the greatest golf swings and was longer than Mickey Wright.” Despite her extroverted, playful personality, Smith retreated from public view, happily living in remote areas, surrounded by pastoral beauty.

Having heard much about her cabin in Vass, I wanted to see it for myself but the property didn’t have a street address when Smith owned it. Frustrated in my efforts to locate it on my own, I called Smith from my car while driving slowly west on Youngs Road. I read off the names of the intersecting roads.

“That’s it. Turn left!” she finally urged.

I made my way to the front door of a log home where I was greeted by the owner, Bonnie Caie. “Did this cabin once belong to Wiffi Smith?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, and for the 25 years we’ve owned this place I’ve always hoped she might stop by and tell us about her time here,” said Caie.

“Well, I’ve got Wiffi right here on the phone. Talk to her.”

The two women chatted until my cellphone nearly ran out of juice. As they talked, I gazed around the property, mesmerized by the shimmering pond, the well-tended paddock, and towering pines. It was clear what a wonderful, restful retreat Wiffi had built. When later I mentioned this to her, she asked me, “Did you fall asleep?”

2024 Feature Some Kind of Terrific

Return of a Southern Band

RETURN OF A SOUTHERN BAND

Return of a Southern Band

BIG STAR CELEBRATES THE ANNIVERSARY OF RADIO CITY

BY TOM MAXWELL • PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN GESSNER

I started drumming in a local band before graduating from UNC. One day, when I was about 21, our aged guitar player — a venerable 28-year-old — handed me a record. “Check this out,” he said nonchalantly. “I think you’ll like the drummer.” The album cover was an arty picture of a bare light bulb in a stark red room. The back cover was a flashbulb shot of three guys, who I presumed to be the band, hanging out in a darkened bar. They looked to be half in the bag, or at least very happy. Some dude with shades and impressive mutton chops was playing pinball behind them. The band was called Big Star; the album was Radio City, released in 1974.

I knew nothing about it. Radio City did not leave my turntable for weeks.

Radio City did not have the commercial success it deserved (which would have been a mixed blessing at best), but its longevity was guaranteed simply because it’s so damn good: a bright, restive, smart, immaculately produced power-pop album created during a time when most other popular music was as dense as clotted cream. Radio City might have been influenced by the Beatles, but Big Star was a Memphis band, so it’s Southern in foundational ways. For one thing, the lead vocals are sung with a slight drawl. And, for all the catchy guitar riffs and melodic hooks, there’s a pervasive melancholy to the record; a feeling of accumulated weight and encroaching decay. There are songs with titles like “What’s Going Ahn.” It’s like the British Invasion went native — which historically, I guess it did.

Beyond its Southern appeal, Radio City contains two irresistible singles — “Back of a Car” and “September Gurls” — both chiming-bright and impossibly catchy. I noticed this immediately the first time I played the record, while deeper cuts like “Morpha Too” would grow on me with every subsequent spin. In other words, Radio City is a proper album. Yet, I’d never heard of it, much less Big Star.

The reason for this is as tragic as it is ordinary: In 1972, the band’s parent label Stax Records (owner of their home label Ardent Records) entered into a distribution deal with Clive Davis at CBS Records. When Davis was fired almost immediately after, CBS lost interest in its Stax. By the time Radio City was released two years later — and although it received rave reviews and enthusiastic support at some radio stations — it was nearly impossible to find in record stores. As a result, the album died an obscure death.

But what leaped off the grooves of Radio City and into my headphones years later was very much alive and unlike anything I’d ever heard: It’s loose and tight at the same time; it incorporates both light and dark, sonically and emotionally. And my guitar player was right — I loved Big Star’s drummer, Jody Stephens. Equally powerful and melodic, his style is reminiscent of all my favorite late-’60s British drummers; rock and rollers brought up with tonal and rhythmic jazz sensibilities. By the time they recorded Radio City, Big Star was a three piece consisting of Alex Chilton on vocals and guitar (who’d already scored a few hits in the late 1960s with his previous band The Box Tops), Andy Hummel on bass, and Stephens on drums. There’s enough space in the arrangements for each of them to shine. Ardent Studios engineer John Fry captured it all in stunning high fidelity.

I asked Stephens recently about making Radio City and the nature of his professional ambitions at that time. “I don’t know that I had expectations,” he said. “I was focused on the spirit of the recording. You start with a blank slate, and it’s exciting to create those parts that you feel fit wonderfully with the other two members of the band. I got that done, and then it was just a sigh of relief. I figured rock writers would love it because I did. I figured everybody would love it because I did.”

Interestingly, it was a group of rock writers who inspired Big Star to reunite and record Radio City. Founding member Chris Bell had left the band soon after the release of their glorious debut, 1972’s #1 Record, because despite near-universal critical acclaim (“Every cut could be a single,” Billboard enthused), Stax — a soul label unsure exactly what to do with a band of white Anglophiles — didn’t get enough albums into stores to take advantage. Disillusioned, Bell withdrew.

“We drifted apart after Chris quit the band,” Stephens told me. “Then (Ardent Records co-founder) John King got us back together to do the Rock Writers Convention and that went incredibly well.” During Memorial Day weekend in 1973, more than 100 members of the National Association of Rock Writers convened in a Memphis Holiday Inn to booze, schmooze, and possibly start a union. A reunited Big Star (minus Bell) closed out the convention’s final night and blew everybody’s mind. The response was so positive that King was able to convince Chilton to stay in the band and make another record.

It appears that King conceived the Rock Writers Convention as a way to legitimize Big Star (and by extension, Ardent Records) in Stax’s eyes — which it may have done, but Stax’s ongoing decline, accelerated by its doomed distribution deal, created an inescapable reality. Big Star toured in support of Radio City, opening for Badfinger, but by that time bassist Andy Hummel had also left the band in order to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and later an associate degree in mechanical engineering technology. He went on to have a long career at Lockheed Martin.

There would be a qualified third act: Stephens and Chilton (along with assorted friends and lovers) would go on to record a project that wasn’t so much finished as abandoned. Third (sometimes called Sister/Lovers) wasn’t even sequenced, much less issued. The recordings languished in the vault for years before being released several times; each with a different name, track list and sequence. There was even some serious discussion as to whether it was a Big Star record or an Alex Chilton solo project.

Not that the music was inconsequential: Third — with its pop mastery and exquisite overtones of dissolution — created the blueprint for indie music 20 years later. Still, as far as the late-’70s music industry was concerned, Big Star’s story had ended. Stephens went on to manage Ardent Studios (where all the Big Star records were made), while Chilton embarked on an iconoclastic solo career; one diametrically opposed to his pop music past.

But the ripples of Big Star’s influence were already making their way out of Memphis and throughout the South. Chris Stamey, a young North Carolina native, had heard the Big Star single “When My Baby’s Beside Me” in his hometown — “a radio hit in Winston-Salem (but nowhere else it seems),” he noted in his memoir A Spy in the House of Loud. Chris snagged a copy of #1 Record from a local DJ for a dollar, later discovering the “even more compelling” Radio City, “which seems to have gone directly to the cutout sale bins at the local Kmart.”

Stamey ended up playing bass with Alex Chilton when both men lived in New York in the late 1970s. Around the same time, he also founded Car Records, which issued the only Chris Bell single released during the artist’s lifetime. (Bell died a few months later in December 1978, losing control of his car on the way home from band practice and driving into a pole. He was 27.)

A year later, another young bassist named Mike Mills from Macon, Georgia, discovered Big Star — courtesy of his new friend and musical collaborator Peter Buck, who also turned Mike onto other lesser known groups like The Velvet Underground. The two would go on to form a band initially called Rapid Eye Movement, a name they later shortened to R.E.M.

“Big Star encapsulated everything I loved about rock and roll,” Mills told me recently. “Number one, they wrote great songs. Number two, they sang well. They had great guitar tones and appealed to me in a way that Top 40 radio used to when I listened on my little transistor radio. I was just blown away. Big Star records were something we could aspire to, and R.E.M. did talk them up, along with several other underappreciated bands.”

The ripple effect widened to reach the ears of a young Mississippi multi-instrumentalist named Pat Sansone, who would go on to join Wilco.

“I came across Big Star in the mid-’80s,” Sansone said. “I probably read the name ‘Big Star’ through R.E.M. — I was a big R.E.M. fan as a Southern teenager — so I gobbled up everything I could about them.”

In a way, Big Star would come to Sansone. “I went to the Bebop Record Shop in Jackson, Mississippi, which was the closest place where I could buy cool records. On one of those recordbuying trips, the clerk put Big Star’s Third on my stack and said, ‘You’re buying this.’ I took it back home to Meridian and put it on late at night — wearing headphones so as not to wake anybody up — and it just blew my mind. I bought #1 Record and Radio City as soon as I could. That music went right into my bones as a 15-year-old musician who was already in love with the Beatles.”

Jody Stephens is the only surviving member of Big Star. Andy Hummel died in 2010, as did Alex Chilton, right before a Big Star appearance at South By Southwest (for the first time since leaving the band, Andy played in tribute that night). But Big Star lives on — and not just because they made great records or influenced talented musicians. Stephens, Stamey, Mills and Sansone — augmented by The Posies’ Jon Auer (who also participated in a late-era Big Star incarnation) — have been performing Big Star material live: first with an all-star revue of Third (Stamey’s idea), followed by tours celebrating the 50th anniversary of #1 Record and now Radio City. I asked Sansone and Mills how it felt playing with the OG drummer.

“It’s amazing. There are times when we’re running a song and Jody does Jody, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up — because it’s him: that very particular expression you’ve listened to so many times. Jody’s not winging it. He’s a drum composer. Those parts are composed, and he’s very serious about them. He’s still playing them with power and grace,” Sansone said.

“I stick to the arrangements,” Stephens told me. “It’s important. I’ve seen some musicians change arrangements on stage of songs I grew up with and loved. It might have been fulfilling to them, but it was disappointing to me.”

Mills is doing a deep dive into Hummel’s bass parts. “I feel an affinity to what he did; some of it’s what I would have done, some of it is stuff I never would have thought of. It’s really broadening my palate. But I want people to understand that we’re not slavishly imitating anything. There is a joy to this — that’s the main takeaway for us. We truly love this music and put ourselves into it.”

Their audiences resonate with and reflect this emotional commitment. “There was a lot of weight going into this,” Stephens said. “The weight of having lost Chris and Alex and Andy and John Fry. But when you hear those songs and they’re true to the recordings, it’s emotional for a lot of people — including me. At one show, a girl was holding up her boyfriend because he was sobbing. The audience is rooting for us. They want to feel those things they feel when they listen to the records. Even if it’s melancholy, there’s some comfort there.”

Long live Big Star.

2024 Feature Return of a Southern Band

Home on the Hill

HOME ON THE HILL

Home on the Hill

Perfect landing spot for a young family

By Deborah Salomon

Photographs by John Gessner

Consider it a good omen when a classic, formal, rambling house atop Weymouth Hill is strewn with kiddie stuff: high chair, playpen, toys, even a big dog bed. Birthday parties have replaced cocktail soirees; gates will secure stairways; and breakable ornaments will be shelved out of reach. The old house has a renewed purpose, with a few twists.

The trappings of youth belong to Simryn, 11-month-old daughter of Lt. Col. Stephen Peterman, stationed at Fort Liberty, and Maj. (retired) Nisha Patel, both dentists. Neither knew much about the area as they prepared to return after being stationed in Germany for three years. “We asked patients who recommended Southern Pines as a nice family neighborhood. History wasn’t our goal,” Peterman says. Starting a family was.

So was space. The couple envisioned their home as a Christmas/Thanksgiving destination for extended family. COVID, however, had dried up the market, so they relayed their requirements to a Moore County Realtor and waited.

Luck happens. At 4,900 square feet on an acre of land, this brick extravaganza dating from the mid-1920s met their spatial requirements. Peterman liked the patio for grilling and eating outside. A grassy area could be fenced for Mila, their poodle mix. The Carolina room was a bonus. They both appreciated being able to walk downtown.

But this property’s pedigree would not be swept under a Persian rug.

As Southern Pines gained the reputation as a fashionable winter watering hole for wealthy urbanites, New York architect Aymar Embury II was hired in 1913 to design the Highland Pines Inn. With him came engineer Louis Lachine. When inn guests opted to build nearby, Embury, known for elegant vacation homes, obliged. These, as well as schools, banks and offices, left a mark on the developing town. Lachine, cashing in on a lucrative market, bought land and built 10 spec houses himself. Some sported rogue designs, featuring off-center doors and windows with brick as either a building material or decoration.

Lachine had refined his esthetics by the mid-1920s when he produced Patel and Peterman’s faintly Tyrolian cottage, labeled as Colonial Revival by the National Register of Historic Places, on a prime Weymouth corner. Features included multiple dormers, casement windows and gently curved roof lines, sometimes called “skirts.”

Brick dominated — inside, outside, on walls and underfoot. Brick fences, patios, arches and walkways, plus copious greenery, make the house appear to rise from the earth. An extensive renovation/addition in 2005 continued the brick theme initiated during an era when, all too often, fire destroyed wooden shakes, shingles and clapboards.

Such was the fate in 1957 of Embury’s Highland Pines Inn.

A European flavor still sets this house apart from subsequent Weymouth construction, as do features like a closed vestibule with closet, an uncommon accent in warm climates. Patel and Peterman’s Realtor forwarded photos and a walk-through video to Germany.

“We bought it sight unseen,” Patel says. “We got a feeling from the pictures. We knew about the neighborhood. And we were trusting.”

Their return flight landed in D.C. With baggage and dog in tow, they drove straight to North Carolina, arriving at 1 a.m. “That’s when we saw the house for the first time. We knew our leap of faith worked out,” she says.

A renovation performed by a previous owner did not remove the architect’s intent, which, in dark-stained beams and window frames, echoes the Arts and Crafts movement newly popular in America. The kitchen, of course, had to go, replaced by white and stainless steel. A brick archway opening into the new sunroom/eating area with table and banquettes may have been added when the kitchen was enlarged. Otherwise, surfaces are sleek white, black and metallic. In homage to the past, an entire wall of original kitchen cabinetry remains for storage.

Was it a sign? The previous owner left a massive refectory dining room table seating 12, almost enough for those family holidays, as well as a handsome china cabinet. The TV room contains an unusual wall-mounted floor-to-ceiling gas fireplace covered in a sandy design.

Patel appreciates both the amount of light streaming through the windows, and the tall longleaf pines that create shade.

The new owners required only one adjustment in the floor plan: An oversized master bedroom closet is now Simryn’s nursery. A bonus room over the laundry in the addition became a baby-safe play area.

Furnishings are, for the most part, comfortable and family-oriented, although the couple brought back two interesting shelf-bar units based on old wooden filing cabinets. Their piece de resistance, however, is not a Victorian desk or an original Eames lounge chair. Peterman opens the garage door, revealing a gleaming, painstakingly restored 1960 Chevy Impala, red with white leather interior, purchased when they returned stateside. This gleaming specimen of mid-century auto opulence causes quite a stir when Peterman takes it for a spin.

“There’s nothing cookie-cutter about this house,” Patel concludes. “It’s very well built, unique.”

A hundred years later, Lachine’s brick landmark has served as a comfortable interlude in this military family’s life. Soon, they will move on, having added a young family’s imprint to Weymouth’s historic past — James Boyd’s late-night literary confabs morphed into bedtime story hour; bootleg booze gave way to fruit slushies; and steamy August afternoons were soothed by the cool of air conditioning.

And so the beat goes on.

2024 Feature Home on the Hill

Alex in Wonderland

ALEX IN WONDERLAND

Alex in Wonderland

In the kingdom of the dahlia whisperer

By Emilee Phillips – Photographs by John Gessner

The French traditionally design neat, orderly and symmetrical gardens. The English tend to prefer something a bit less formal. Alex Rowland, who lives in Robbins, seemingly uses Wonderland as the blueprint for his, letting a bit of whimsy be his guide.

His home garden, which began as a simple hobby, has blossomed into a vibrant showcase of over a hundred different plants. With the help of his good friend John Boyer, something is always in bloom, but the dahlias — oh, my — stand out as the crowning glory.

Clippers lay around the garden and wedged in fences, smells of passion flowers and tomato plants fill your lungs as you walk through. To the average eye the garden might look unruly, but the tangle of veggies and flower blooms seem to complement his dahlias. Like Wonderland, the ordinary rules of order seem suspended here. Curiouser and curiouser.

“You know how they say, ‘If you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot’? Well, that’s what I do,” Rowland says with a chuckle. “Sometimes I forget what I planted where, until it comes up.”

Many of the paths have arbors wrapped with vines, providing almost a 360-degree botanical spectacle as you walk underneath. In a single section you could spot dahlias, okra, peppers and morning glories. Keeping with the normal course of nature, the garden is something of a Darwinian battlefield. “I have to make sure certain plants don’t overtake others,” he says.

His secret is 20 years’ worth of compost in raised beds. He gets truckloads delivered multiple times a year. The land may have a clay soil base, but even a deep dig in these grounds will now produce rich, dark earth.

Rowland grew up in Southern Pines but moved to Robbins 20 years ago. “It doesn’t even feel like you’re still in Moore County on this property,” he says, recalling how he started renting the farmhouse after placing an ad in The Pilot newspaper looking for something more rural. Today, he owns the 150-acre farm.

The property fits in the horseshoe of Deep River with a house, built in the 1800s, that has been lovingly renovated to retain its charm. The garden is located beside the farmhouse where he lives with his wife, Weynona, daughter, Faith, five dogs, two cats, chickens and a horse. It’s enclosed by a hand-built cedar fence made from trees taken from the farm.

Rowland owns All American Mattress and Furniture and, while he admits to spending as much time in the garden as he does at the office, the garden has begun paying off, too. He delivers the majority of his dahlias to Hollyfield Design. On occasion he’ll bring blossoms to Sweet Basil or Nature’s Own. His own kitchen island is usually covered with flowers, too.

Some of the blossoms, as large as a dinner plate, have delicate petals creating a layered effect resembling the folds of a luxurious velvet gown. Others, the “pom poms,” are smaller but grow in a ball shape, granting no bad side. The stems alone can be 4 feet tall.

The dahlia varieties can have funky names and what Rowland isn’t sure of, he names himself. In his garden you’ll hear him distinguish “Strawberry Ice” from “Cafe Au Lait” or “Mango Tango.”

While dahlias in the Sandhills prefer the cooler fall weather over the intense summer heat — their colors tend to fade under the relentless sun — their full splendor emerges in mid September, early October. By then, you can expect a full display of colors. While they require a ton of water in North Carolina’s climate, despite the garden’s large size, he prefers watering by hand.

“If you plant sunflowers, they’ll bloom for a few weeks, then they’re done,” says Rowland. “But a dahlia plant? It’ll put out dozens of blooms from one plant once it’s in season.”

Rowland’s dahlias have won numerous ribbons at the North Carolina State Fair. “I have a drawer full, I’m not even sure how many. Going to the State Fair is like going to war with flowers,” he says, laughing. He and his mother, Lorna Lee Matthews, bring a truckload of dahlias each year, like knights arriving for the joust, armed with their vibrant buds.

It’s easy to see how such large, breathtaking displays of nature’s artistry would win. The flowers stand tall on sturdy stems, making them a commanding presence in any floral competition.

Though proud, Rowland loves the thrill of experimenting; he has even begun cloning certain flowers. For him, the true joy lies not just in the accolades but in the endless possibilities of what his garden can do. “I used to love taking photos of dahlias and it turned into an obsession,” he says. “I honestly hated gardening. Now look at me.”

Rowland’s ideal times of the day are sunrise and sunset, watching how the golden light transforms the land. He often enjoys the slow quiet of the morning with a cup of coffee as he tends to the weeds. Why, sometimes he may have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

2024 Alex in Wonderland Feature

Category: Feature

POEM

October 2024

SUNBLOCK

Sunblock

Scientists flocked to Pinehurst for the eclipse of 1900

ART OF THE MANOR

Art of the Manor

Grand spaces and small treasures

DRESSED TO THRILL

Dressed to Thrill

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ALL IN A DAY'S WORK

All in a Day's Work

Shady Maple Farm glows with color

SOME KIND OF TERRIFIC

Some Kind of Terrific

The many odysseys of Wiffi Smith

RETURN OF A SOUTHERN BAND

Return of a Southern Band

BIG STAR CELEBRATES THE ANNIVERSARY OF RADIO CITY

BY TOM MAXWELL • PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN GESSNER

HOME ON THE HILL

Home on the Hill

Perfect landing spot for a young family

ALEX IN WONDERLAND

Alex in Wonderland

In the kingdom of the dahlia whisperer