By Ash Alder

The flowers of late winter and early spring occupy places in our hearts well out of proportion to their size.

– Gertrude S. Wister

February morning . . .

The coffee is freshly ground, and you hold in your hands the last grapefruit from the bushel. Remember how your grandma used to eat them? And how, when the birds started singing, she would visit the camellias, maybe cut one for the green vase on the windowsill?

Suddenly you feel like dancing.

Sliding in your socks across the cold kitchen floor, sweet memories flicker like the warm crackling of vinyl.

You put on the coffee. Slice the grapefruit. Reach for the sugar bowl.

In the cupboard, on the highest shelf, you notice the little green vase. The birds are singing, and you are waltzing to the windowsill.

Won’t be long, now, until the camellia flowers.

The waltz of winter is one of the simple pleasures.   

Sweet as Pie   

The last full moon rose on Jan. 31; the next rises March 1. No full snow moon this month, but the new moon falls on Feb. 15, the day after Cupid strikes. Cold as it’s been this winter, perhaps we can call it the new snow moon. And if the god of the great wintry winds gifts us with more of it, you’ll want to have the (coconut/almond) milk and honey on hand for snow cream.

Friday, Feb. 16, marks the celebration of the Chinese New Year. Cue the paper lanterns. This lunar New Year is a time to clean house and create space for good luck to arrive. In the spirit of the Earth Dog, a little advice from man’s best friend: Be happy; be loyal; live from the heart.

National Cherry Pie Day is celebrated on Feb. 20. Although the old chestnut about George Washington and the cherry tree is a myth, it’s true that cherries were one of the president’s favorite foods. Chill some to sweeten a romantic evening, or if you feel inspired to bake pie, make a date of it. 

Calling in a sacred partner? A Japanese love spell suggests tying a single strand of hair to a blossoming cherry tree. No lie.   

Roses & Rutabaga

Red roses say I love you, but nothing says our love is eternal like the whole fragrant bush. February is generally a good month to plant roses. And if you’re already playing round in the garden, consider popping a few early rutabagas into the ground. Also known as the swede, this root vegetable is believed to prevent premature aging, improve eyesight and, because it’s loaded with vitamin C (one cup contains 32 milligrams), it’s an excellent immune system booster. Maple-glaze them. Roast them with brown butter. Or if you’re craving savory, they, too, make good pie.

Tree Wisdom

The ancient Celts looked to the trees for knowledge and wisdom. According to Celtic tree astrology, those born from Jan. 21 – Feb. 17 associate with the rowan (mountain ash), a tree whose wood has long been used for spindles and spinning wheels. Rowans are the philosophers of the zodiac. They are visionaries, eccentrics, and like Aquarians, are often perceived as cool or aloof. But that’s just because they’re busy dreaming up a whole new world. Rowan people are most compatible with ivy (Sept. 30–Oct. 27) and hawthorn (May 13–June 9) signs. In the Ogham, a sacred Druidic alphabet, the symbol of the rowan represents insight, protection and blessings.

Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle. . .

a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl.

And the anticipation nurtures our dream. – Barbara Winkler

Intrepid and fearless, the widow of James Boyd became the unflinching voice of the Sandhills

By Bill Case

In the depths of the Vietnam War, Washington Post owner-publisher Katharine Graham agonized over her decision in 1971 to print the Pentagon Papers. The top-secret Department of Defense study leaked to both the Post and The New York Times established that multiple administrations had misled Congress and the American people regarding the government’s conduct of that war. The Post and Mrs. Graham were threatened with potentially dire consequences if they elected to publish the damning document. Mindful of the threat government retribution could pose to a free press, Graham persisted. Steven Spielberg’s movie about that decision, The Post, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, will be shown at the Sunrise Theater in February, sponsored by The Pilot.

At the time she made her fateful Pentagon Papers decision, Katharine Graham was in her eighth year as the Post’s publisher, having succeeded her talented but troubled husband, Phil Graham, who took his own life in 1963. Though management of the Post was a role Katharine Graham never imagined she would fill, she served that paper with distinction for 29 years and presided over its growth into a media giant.

Graham’s ascendancy to the Post’s leadership due to her husband’s demise mirrors, writ large, the experience of another Katharine — Southern Pines’ own Katharine Boyd. In February 1944, her husband of 27 years, 55-year-old James Boyd, The Pilot’s editor and publisher, suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. His death presented a daunting challenge for the patrician daughter of New York tycoon (and Grover Cleveland’s secretary of war) Daniel Lamont.

Prior to James Boyd’s death, Katharine’s primary activities in Southern Pines had involved raising the couple’s three children, riding to the hounds, gardening, and entertaining James’ literary friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green and Maxwell Perkins at the couple’s home, Weymouth, built by the Boyds in 1922. Her previous writing experience had “consisted of doing editorials one year for the Sandhills Daily News, a small sheet whose fiercely Republican subscribers eventually got fed up with my writing and I was politely fired,” as she later put it. She did, however, have one advantage. Since her husband suffered from writer’s cramp, Katharine often took down his dictation of novels, stories and poems. “My real training in writing was gained through the experience of watching my husband work; learning something of his respect for words and feeling for style. Any facility I . . . acquired is due to him.”

And James Boyd’s style was a first-rate exemplar. During his heyday of 1925 until his death, few could better him, having practically invented the historical novel. His first book, Drums, published when Boyd was 37, became a best-seller and was lauded by reviewers at the time as perhaps the finest novel written about the American Revolution. Boyd authored four other historical novels and numerous short stories for literary magazines. After acquiring The Pilot in 1940, he wrote prodigiously for the paper.

In one respect at least, Katharine Boyd’s new responsibilities at her small-town newspaper were more all-encompassing than those of Katharine Graham at the Washington Post. Boyd now served in the dual roles of publisher and editor, personally contributing columns and editorials to the weekly. She took over writing her deceased husband’s popular “Grains of Sand” column. At first, Katharine could not bear to remove James’ identification as the paper’s publisher from the masthead. Only after the passage of several months did she start listing “Mrs. James Boyd” as publisher. It took another year before the masthead was changed to identify the publisher as “Katharine Boyd.”

New to newspaper work, Katharine adjusted to its unceasing deadlines and the unfamiliar jargon. In her “Grains of Sand” column in 1968 she wrote that the paper’s business manager, Dan Ray, would periodically come to her office with questions that would “send scaredy-cat shivers” down her back. One such inquiry during her first days at The Pilot occurred when Ray asked her, “We’re all set; you got the jumps?”

Katharine indignantly and furiously shouted back, “Of course I’ve got the jumps! I’ve had them ever since I took this job. Talk about jumps — I do nothing but shake.”

Ray guffawed in response, “Are you crazy? Why the ‘jumps’ are the continuations onto other pages.”

Katharine had been on the job for only a few months when she intrepidly waded into turbulent waters with a controversial editorial castigating the Republican Party’s bigwigs after its 1944 convention. The staunch Democrat railed against the GOP’s leaders. “They want to swing America into the role of big business which they themselves personify,” she wrote, thundering on that their leaders’ “imperialistic tendencies, coupled with the propaganda constantly fed our people by the Republican-supported press, are straws in an evil wind.”

There followed a blizzard of protests from readers who were aghast that their local paper was dipping its toes into the thicket of national politics. It was pointedly noted by one reader that the previous editor had confined his political editorials mostly to local issues. Another letter writer argued, “We can get all the politics we need from the BIG CITY DAILIES. Can’t we have our nice home paper free at least from the partisan brand?”

But Katharine Boyd refused to back down. “The policy of The Pilot has not changed,” she responded. “It has always stood for what it considered best in the community and in the nation. It has supported no political party over another except as one or another stood for things, which The Pilot believed. It has tried to represent fairly the great issues of the times and to take a stand on what it considered the right side of those issues. It is the hope of the present editorial board that it may always continue to do so.”

That early brouhaha aside, Boyd learned to love the daily hum of newspaper life. One of the paper’s longtime staffers, Mary Evelyn de Nissoff, reflected that “(I)t was a familiar sight to find her (Katharine) seated on a high stool or standing hunched over the proof-reading desk, her nose pressed against the galleys she held in hands badly crippled by arthritis, proofs of editorials she had written or stories someone else had written. She wanted to know, even though she had another editor or two or three, what was going into her paper.”

Katharine later recalled her biggest thrill on the job came when the newsboys got their papers and rushed to hawk them. “The number of boys — 12 to 20 — stand ready to go as the big moment approaches,” she wrote. “ First the shop people do a football charge, plunging through the crowd with enormous piles of papers in their arms, each pile to go to one of the various stands around town. Then the great moment is here and each boy picks up his pile and off they go, on the run! They swarm out the big high door at the back, run like antelopes around the corner, whooping. They take a deep breath and start to shout ‘PILOT!’”

She also reveled in expressing herself journalistically. Katharine’s first-person accounts of her tours to Scotland and Egypt graced the paper’s pages. Her musings in “Grains of Sand” won awards. She leaped at the chance to travel by train with fellow Democrat Adlai Stevenson during the final swing of his ill-fated 1952 presidential campaign. She filed daily reports of the campaign’s doings with The Pilot. Coincidentally, Katharine Graham later dated Stevenson after her husband’s death. Graham revealed in her autobiography Personal History that Stevenson collapsed and died in 1965 shortly after spending “at least an hour” in her London bedroom, and leaving behind his tie and glasses.

Like Mrs. Graham, Katharine Boyd could not, or would not, sidestep the major controversies of her day. After Southern legislators crafted a document known as the “Southern Manifesto,” urging defiance of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision in 1954, Boyd unhesitatingly condemned the Manifesto, believing that adherence to it would only lead to lack of respect for the rule of law. She applauded the brave decision of local congressman Harold Cooley not to sign it. The Pilot’s editorial page stated, “The sooner the South accepts the fact that the Supreme Court’s decision is lawful under our Constitutional system of long standing, the sooner we will see the current rising tide of emotionalism subside and the sooner we can get on with the work of finding peaceful and reasonable ways of meeting the problems presented by the segregation ruling.”

She became incensed when Birmingham’s police chief turned the hoses and dogs on civil rights marchers. An angry Katharine excoriated Alabama’s governor with this invective: “In refusing to treat the marchers as human beings and as citizens, in encouraging the brutality of the police and the mob spirit of that mountain area, Governor Wallace and those behind him are playing with a fire whose fuel is from the same source that fed the fires of Dachau.”

Mrs. Boyd even criticized North Carolina’s legendary senator Sam Ervin, whom she felt had not done enough to afford access to the ballot for African-American voters. “Senator Ervin knows as well as anyone else that thousands of American citizens are being denied the right to register and vote by unfair, so-called literacy tests, intimidation and subterfuge of one sort or another. Yet here he is using every stratagem to defeat a simple, workable, and fair law to eliminate a situation that is nothing less than a national disgrace.”

Similarly, in expressing her contempt for legislators’ claims that they were simply complying with the wishes of their constituents by opposing federal intervention in the registration of voters, Boyd remarked that these representatives “never seem to consider that Negroes are their constituents too.”

Katharine exhorted local businesses to hire African-Americans and pay them well. She combined practical and moral arguments to make her pitch. “Aside from the economic benefits certain to accrue to any community or area or state which uses its full human potential well, there is a moral issue which can no longer be denied: ‘to give men and women their best chance in life.’ Can any goal be more American than that?”

While the paper flourished during Katharine Boyd’s tenure declining health would force her to sell The Pilot in 1968 to veteran newspaperman Sam Ragan, although she did stay on for a time as a contributor. Ragan, who came to know and admire Mrs. Boyd, later summed her up this way: “Katharine Boyd was both tender and tough-minded in her views and outlook. She was gentle, generous, and gracious, but she could be equally strong against sham and hypocrisy.” Mary Evelyn de Nissoff remembered Boyd as being shy but nonetheless gregarious. “She liked her friends around her, sometimes in masses, as they gathered for her Christmas ‘sings’ in her big, hospitable home, Weymouth, and sometimes, one or two at a time.”

While Katharine Boyd enjoyed an outstanding career at The Pilot, her achievements as its editor and publisher are dwarfed by her acts of philanthropy that continue to enrich the lives of residents of Southern Pines, Moore County and North Carolina. Her unflagging contributions of time and treasure to charitable institutions such as Moore Memorial Hospital, St. Andrews Presbyterian College, Sandhills Community College, the Southern Pines Library, the North Carolina School of the Arts, the North Carolina Symphony, Penick Village and the American Ballet Theatre are unparalleled. Her deeding of 400 acres of wooded land to the State of North Carolina in 1963 for establishment of the Weymouth Woods-Sandhills Nature Preserve provided a permanent refuge for wildlife and a lasting benefit for our environment.

Katharine died in 1974. Her bequest of Weymouth and its surrounding 200 acres for charitable purposes led to the establishment of the Weymouth Center, which supports North Carolina’s writers and recognizes their literary achievements, thereby serving as a lasting tribute to the legacy of both James and Katharine Boyd.

Her friend Jane McPhaul remembers her as a person who provided “advanced leadership” to civic causes despite never having held elective office. Noting her qualities of fearless independence and leadership, McPhaul has always considered Boyd a wonderful role model for women. She recalls her as a person who “stood on her own two feet” in a time when society often expected women to take a backseat.

While their times in charge of their respective newspapers did overlap from 1963 to 1968, it is doubtful that Katharine Boyd and Katharine Graham ever met, though they had much in common. Borne of prominent families, they each leaned in the direction of the Democratic Party, Katherine Boyd more emphatically so. Both relished entertaining friends, including numerous national figures. And despite the enormous disparity in circulation of the two newspapers for which they labored, the two Katharines shared a similar philosophy regarding how papers, of all sizes, should be run. It is a philosophy celebrated in Spielberg’s upcoming movie and captured in the pithy Sam Ragan quote still carried on the editorial page of every edition of The Pilot:

A long time ago, a wise old editor said,
the function of a newspaper
Is “to print the news and raise hell.”
I haven’t been able to improve upon that definition.

-Sam Ragan, Editor and Publisher, 1968-1996   PS

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

How Three Tenors inspired Lucas Meachem to find his voice and opera stardom

By Deborah Salomon

Lucas Meachem sings lead roles at the Metropolitan Opera.

Lucas Meachem struts the stage at the Paris Opera, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, British Royal Opera, Hollywood Bowl, as well as premier concert halls throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Lucas Meachem belted out the national anthem at Los Angeles Clippers and New York Rangers hockey games.

Lucas Meachem took home a Grammy in 2016.

Lucas Meachem has been dubbed “opera rock star!” by music critics.

Lucas Meachem, 6 feet 4 inches, is a rugged, blue-eyed, ebullient, earthy 39-year-old — a fan of karaoke and Elvis, an attentive son and tenderhearted clown, as comfortable in T-shirt as tux.

Yet the former Whispering Pines resident, Union Pines Student Council president and football/basketball/soccer standout remains virtually unknown to Tar Heel audiences. Lucas had never performed locally until a recital at the Sunrise Theater, in September. No press, no home-state hero status.

“Yeah . . . I wondered about that,” he says.

Blame opera, not exactly a kingmaker like America’s Got Talent or The Voice.

Opera! Its Golden Age peaked early in the 20th century, when ladies in tiaras and men in capes occupied boxes at the old Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. Then, opera was as much a social as musical event. Plump divas and temperamental tenors performed the classics by Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Bizet, Strauss and Mozart. As high society waned, so did the opera scene. English librettos, supratitles and modern dress versions attracted a boutique audience who identify with ripped younger singers. Porgy & Bess, Evita, Les Miserables and smash hit Hamilton proved the success of opera by another name.

Moot, for Lucas, who grew up on Led Zeppelin, The Who and Boyz II Men. At Union Pines he was athletic and popular but not Mr. Cool.

“I was always the friend, never the boyfriend. I had acne.”

He also had a barrel chest to support that booming voice. Lucas sang everywhere — in the house, mowing the lawn, in the church choir and school chorus where he caught the attention of choral director Anita Alpenfels:

“He gathered such joy from music.” It’s an example, she says, of how public schools should tap into talent. She promoted the 15-year-old to advanced chorus, advised his mother to seek private instruction. Following his career, Anita noticed, “Lucas has remained grounded, not self-serving or full of ego. He has made an intimidating art form approachable.”

Despite Opera Carolina (Charlotte), Opera North Carolina (Raleigh) and UNC School of the Arts A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute (Winston-Salem), opera wannabes don’t proliferate in the land of basketball and NASCAR. Early on, singing — especially classical music — didn’t seem a likely career. As a young teen Lucas worked part time installing pool liners. “I wanted to be a landscape artist like my stepfather (Vince Zucchino).” Or perhaps an architect, like his father, who lives in California. He even started a business with his grandfather’s old riding mower. Then, for his 16th birthday, Lucas received a 4-track recording device. “I’d lock myself in my room for the whole weekend.” Not recording arias, safe to say. “But I knew who the Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras) were from their tape.”

Lucas attended Appalachian State — “the cheapest college I could afford” — where he studied vocal performance and music education, also discovering that “chicks dig karaoke,” which he mastered easily. The singing part of college was great, the studying, not so. In 1998, he and a buddy scraped together enough money for a Three Tenors concert in Charlotte. “We stayed at a Motel 6,” Lucas recalls. “Our seats sucked, but everything else was really impressive.”

And, just maybe, possible.

Soon after, Lucas ditched his drawl (“Nobody could understand me.”) and left App State for a summer program at Ohio Light Opera, a company specializing in repertory, which meant learning several parts — a trial by fire for most novices, less for Lucas, who has a “magic memory” that absorbs and retains music in a flash. There, he dated a harp player who was studying at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in upstate New York. When summer ended, Lucas visited her. His harpist, duly impressed, arranged for an audition. “At first the guy didn’t look at me. Then I opened my mouth and he sat up like, ‘Oh, my God.’”

Lucas went home, packed his stuff and returned on a full scholarship, still never having witnessed the performance of a proper opera from out front. “The first one I actually saw was one I performed in.”

Sounds almost like a plot in progress.

Lucas was recruited by the Yale School of Music, another stellar institution. “First they offered me a half scholarship. I told them I was poor and that I didn’t want student loans. We negotiated.”

Guess who won.

“I’m not good at the school part. I just wanted to get jobs singing.” Rather than complete a degree, Lucas followed his father’s advice: Do whatever gives you chills.

When invited to join the San Francisco Opera as a prestigious Adler Fellow, Lucas jumped.

The yellow brick road was fast approaching Oz.

Inside the rehearsal costume of Bohemian artist Marcello in Puccini’s La Bohème are sewn labels bearing names of famous baritones who have sung the role at the Met. Add Meachem to that list. “My goal was to sing at the Met by the time I was 30,” he says, with a wicked grin. Lucas made it in 2008, at 29, as a nobleman in War and Peace, a five-hour marathon sung in Russian. His reaction to stepping onto that famous stage: “Awe and joy.” Now, he is a regular; in 2015 he sang a leading role in Pagliacci for “The Met: Live in HD” seen on 2,000 movie screens worldwide, including the Sunrise. “These simulcasts allow more people to experience the excitement of the Met’s high quality performances . . . an easy, affordable method of checking out a new art form,” a Met blurb reasons.

New, indeed, meaning instead of a stationary frontal view the camera moves around and up close, exposing facial expressions, agility and acting ability — Meachem fortes, all. Jitters aren’t a problem. “I have this burning desire to be onstage, to sing. I just love it.”

However, tenors are usually the glamour boys and baritones the sidekicks or villains.

The baritone may survive but rarely gets the girl.

Not in this opera.

Enter, smiling, Irina Nedelcu-Erickson, born in Minnesota of Romanian refugee parents — petite, dark-haired, exotic, with flashing eyes and a million-dollar smile. When she settles at the piano, optics disappear. Like Lucas, music is her lifeblood. After piano lessons in Minneapolis, Irina’s parents sent the 15-year-old back to Romania for two years of serious instruction. Her education continued with noted teachers at universities in the U.S. and elsewhere. She became a soloist, an accompanist and voice coach. Irina and Lucas crossed paths in 2013 when he showed up a week late for rehearsal, yet “all confident.”

“From that first night I knew he was the one,” Irina says. “He was a natural. He had an energy — very intellectual and smart, but funny and cool and handsome, passionate and unpredictable. I was floored. I deleted every guy in my phone.”

Lucas explains over sushi that he had just gotten out of a relationship.

Irina became his accompanist, traveling the recital circuit, seeing the world from first-class accommodations while enjoying his teddy bearish joie de vivre.

They married in July 2016, in Wilmington, N.C., celebrated their first anniversary by hitting 10 European countries in 10 weeks — from Greece to Albania, Hungary to Spain — combining gigs with sightseeing.

“Lucas learned Romanian just so he could talk to my grandmother,” Irina says.

What a life.

The supportive wife helps. But first, every opera star needs . . . Mom. Susan Zucchino, a longtime speech pathologist at STARS Charter School, oozes pride speaking of her firstborn. “Lucas was always singing, from the time he was 3 or 4,” she recalls. Maybe earlier: “I came out of the womb singing,” is his recollection. By the time he turned 12, Lucas and his two little sisters put on plays with costumes and props. “He was always easygoing, never went through a snarly phase — a good boy, kind and considerate, stood up for kids not in the group,” Susan says. The family listened to classical music but never opera. Now, Susan speaks confidently about roles and plots, venues and singers. She has attended music festivals and, overcome with emotion, applauded Lucas at the Met.

“I did all I could to support him while he was in North Carolina,” she says. “But don’t forget, I was working and taking care of three younger children.”

Lucas didn’t forget. He flew her to Paris and Rome for performances, Susan’s first trips abroad. “He had an apartment in Toulouse; he took me to the market — the cheese folks greeted us, they knew him already.”

But really, how many grown men squire Mommy to karaoke bars in Paris? Or, for that matter, how many sons get a private after-hours tour of the Louvre, where “I had Mona Lisa all to myself.”

Modern-day stars, be they opera or otherwise, must cultivate a fan base. An autograph scrawled on a concert program doesn’t suffice. Groupies demand an offstage presence, online. Not hard for Lucas, as pictured in dreamy promotional stills.

Wanna watch him, from underwater, dive into the seas (catch that tat) off Albania and Malta? Eat a banana? Treat a cold? Emerge from his dressing room shower? Sing all four parts of Carol of the Bells? Wanna see his precious pooch Teemo (who stays with Irina’s family) board a plane in Chicago? Have a beer and flop on the bed in their new Minneapolis condo? Shop for a designer gown in Bucharest with Irina? Speaking of clothes, notice that Lucas prefers orange swimsuits, baseball caps and silver gray down jackets with mufflers round his golden throat.

Don’t miss how he turned vegan and lost 50 pounds. “Lentil soup and ratatouille for dinner,” Irina smiles.

These juicy details and reams more texturize his image on his website, Baritone Blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Then, absorb his philosophy, poetically expounded, on life, love, everything in between, including, “It’s never over until you say it’s over.”

Far from over for this baritone whose voice has not fully matured. “We plan four years in advance,” Irina says. “When Lucas’ voice gets bigger he will venture into Verdi — maybe 10 years before Rigoletto.” The title role in this tragic tale of the hunchback court jester who loses his daughter to a scoundrel is considered the pinnacle of the baritone repertoire. And if he manages to pull it off at the Met.

Through a life packed with acclaim and applause, long-stemmed roses and Moet, Lucas, along with James Taylor, keeps a bit of “Carolina on my mind.”

“The second I get off the plane in N.C. I feel it . . . there’s a palpable energy here. I love the smell of the pine trees” that surround Mom’s ranch-style house across from a lake in Whispering Pines. His travel schedule does not allow many trips South, which made the Sunrise gig arranged through the Arts Council of Moore County Classical Concert Series momentous. Lucas played to a full house, including many familiar faces who got a shout out from the stage. Ever the showman, their soccer goalie wore pink socks and patent leather shoes — hardly noticed when Irina appeared to accompany him wearing a clingy black lace gown. The program included Aaron Copland, German lieder, some Gershwin, a ballad from South Pacific and “Me” from Beauty and the Beast. His encore, dreamy Elvis: “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.”

Before leaving, our hometown hero gave a master class at Union Pines. “He was so good at connecting with the students,” Anita Alpenfels says. “He gave them and the teachers a pep talk about staying focused and setting goals,” lessons that apply beyond opera.

Of course there have been regrets, disappointments, tense moments — like falling off the back of the stage in Madrid, without the conductor noticing. Or botching a first audition at the Met because of a cold. Playing Figaro, his favorite role, in The Barber of Seville with various opera companies requires finesse, since directors and co-stars bring different interpretations. Hopscotching time zones 9 or 10 months a year takes its toll; flights are delayed, tempers flare. “When everybody else is being mean, I’m nice.”

Unlike the baritone-role stereotype, Lucas isn’t a brooder. Rather, he is an upbeat philosopher and entertainer of the highest echelon who, thank goodness, doesn’t take himself too seriously. Offstage, anyway.

For now, his goals are to stay booked, keep traveling, but with a bit more bye time. Baritones age into their roles better than tenors. And he’s not yet 40.

“Even though I’ve sung at every major opera house in the world, I think every day there’s so much I haven’t accomplished. There are roles inside me that I have yet to sing.” And, despite admitting, “There’s nothing I love more than singing with my wife at the piano,” he allows, “I’m still chasing a dream.”  PS

Saturday, February 24 THE MET OPERA: LIVE IN HD. 12:30–3:25 p.m. La Boheme. Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production features an exciting young cast. This opera about starving artists falling in love in 1830s Paris is said to be the most popular opera in the world. Cost: $27. Sunrise Theater, 250 NW Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8501 or sunrisetheater.com

A giant of a man in a small town

By Bill Fields

On a mild December morning at Dixie Burger in Ellerbe, North Carolina, several customers of a certain age at a corner table are remembering someone who once sat among them, shooting the breeze and drinking coffee.

“Was grand marshal at the racetrack and lifted a girl on each arm like it was nothing.”

“Used to be booths in here, but he wouldn’t fit.”

“Ate 12 chickens in one day.”

When he wasn’t wrestling, making a movie or otherwise being André the Giant, the man sometimes called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” lived in Ellerbe for more than a dozen years. He enjoyed his time in the Richmond County town of about 1,000 people and loved to kill part of a day at the short-order restaurant, whose tall hamburger sign is the most visible landmark on Main Street.

“André could sit there and talk to people,” says Jackie McAuley, who was a close friend. She, along with her first husband, Frenchy Bernard, a former pro wrestling referee, managed André’s home and cattle ranch on Highway 73. “They treated him just like anybody else they would have seen in town. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, can I have your autograph?’ He was just an average person when he was home in Ellerbe.”

Notwithstanding the mannerly small-town treatment André René Roussimoff received, he was as close to being an average person as Ellerbe is to the Eiffel Tower. André the Giant — who died Jan. 27, 1993, at age 46 — was one of the most recognizable individuals of the 20th century. He was a genuine giant who emerged from the obscurity of his family’s farm in rural France, carrying armoires on his back up three flights as a Paris furniture mover, to become an iconic professional wrestler who drew large crowds around the globe and gained even wider fame playing Fezzik, the rhyme-loving giant in the 1987 romantic-adventure-comedy film The Princess Bride.

Standing 7 feet 4 inches — although there were skeptics who contended the wrestling hype machine bumped up his height so that he could be billed as the world’s tallest man — and weighing 520 pounds when he passed away of congestive heart failure, Roussimoff had acromegaly, a disorder that causes the pituitary gland to produce too much growth hormone in adulthood, resulting in unusual bone growth, including in the hands, feet and face.

His acromegaly was never treated, André refusing medical help when his condition was diagnosed, first during a visit to Japan in the early 1970s and again about a decade later at Duke University Hospital. Doctors there saved his life after fluid built up around his heart and wanted to operate on the pituitary gland to correct his acromegaly, but André, whose paternal grandfather also was outsized, wouldn’t agree to the procedure. “He said, ‘That’s how God made me,’ and he wasn’t going to change,” McAuley says.

To be around André once was to never forget his unique size.

His neck was 2 feet in circumference. It was nearly a foot around his wrist. A silver dollar could pass through one of his rings. In an exhibit devoted to André the Giant at The Rankin Museum of American Heritage in Ellerbe, a pair of his size 26 wrestling boots are on display. “Occasionally I could buy him T-shirts,” says McAuley, “if I could find 5 XL.” The Giant’s clothes were mostly custom tailored in Montreal or Japan to accommodate his 71-inch chest. Nellie Parsons, who ran Pate’s Cleaners in Ellerbe for 30 years, created custom hangers to accommodate the extraordinary width of his dress shirts.

In 1983-84, Burke Schnedl was a pilot for a charter service at what then was called Rockingham-Hamlet Airport and flew André to wrestling matches in cities throughout the Carolinas and Virginia — Greenville, Fayetteville, Richmond — in a twin-engine Cessna 402.

“We had to take out a seat in the back so he could get in,” Schnedl recalls. “The doorway is not that big, and he would have to turn kind of sideways. It had a bench seat on the side. André sat there and used a seat-belt extender to cover a space where two people normally would sit. He was just a lot of guy. When you shook his hand, it was like putting a single finger in a normal-sized person’s hand.”

By the time André was 12 years old, he already stood 6-foot-2 and weighed about 230 pounds, too large for the bus that transported schoolchildren in his village of Molien, 40 miles outside Paris. The playwright Samuel Beckett, who lived nearby in a cottage that Boris Roussimoff, André’s father, helped him construct, filled the void by driving André in his truck.

Before long André, the middle of Boris and wife Mariann’s five children, had outgrown not only vehicles but the sleepy landscape he saw as an impasse stopping his ambition to be famous. Boris Roussimoff didn’t understand, and at 14 André quit school, left home and set out on his own.

“His father told him he would be back soon working on the farm, and André had something to prove,” says Chris Owens, a repository of André the Giant knowledge who authors a Fan Club page on Facebook and has been intrigued by Roussimoff since he was a boy in the Midwest and saw him wrestle televised matches. “He didn’t want to stay in rural France. To me, he was always a guy going after his dream who became a classic success story.”

As a teenager in Paris, André’s preferred game was rugby, although he also got immense pleasure from pranking friends by rearranging their parked small cars while they were dining or drinking. He got 7 or 8 inches taller and gained nearly a hundred pounds before he turned 21, impressing professional wrestlers who noticed him training in a gym. They introduced him to their game, taught him some moves, and by the mid-1960s André René Roussimoff was getting paid to perform as Jean Ferre, Géant Ferré, The Butcher Roussimoff and Monster Eiffel Tower — and he was loving all of it.

“Many men were afraid to go in the ring with him, especially after he reached his 20s, because he was so large and strong,” André’s first manager, Frank Valois, told Sports Illustrated in 1981. “For all his height and weight, he could run and jump and do moves that made seasoned wrestlers fearful. Not so much fearful that he would hurt them with malice, but that he might hurt them with exuberance. He was incroyable.”

Promoters sent him to Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Africa and eventually Japan, a country where he first wrestled as Monster Roussimoff and would have some of his most avid fans the whole of his career. He began to be billed as André the Giant in 1973 by Vince McMahon Sr., founder of the World Wide Wrestling Federation, who discouraged André from being very active in the ring — even though his body at that point still allowed it — and to play up the fact that he was an immovable mountain of a man. “He was taught to wrestle as a giant,” says Owens. “He had a limited set of moves, and his matches generally were kept fairly short.”

Under McMahon, André made a large six-figure annual income and became the most famous professional wrestler in the world who traveled the majority of each year for two decades, his luggage belying his size. “He carried an unbelievably small bag for his wrestling gear,” says McAuley. “I don’t know how he packed as much as he did in that small bag. But if he was packing up at a motel and something didn’t fit, he would leave it behind. There were things left all over, I’m sure. I hope the maids discovered what they had.”

André was a creature of habit on the road because there was enough ducking and crunching just getting around that he didn’t like improvising unnecessarily. “If you gave me the name of the town he was in,” says McAuley, “I could tell you what hotel he stayed at, what restaurant he ate at and what bar he went to, and pretty much be right every time. There was security that came with the habit. He knew his size and where he could fit and couldn’t fit. If he had been going to a certain motel for 10 years and everyone else started going to a fancier place, he’d go to his usual one.”

Wherever André the Giant went, he amazed people with how much he could eat or drink if he was in the mood.

There are stories of his ordering every entrée on a menu, as McAuley witnessed one summer day in Montreal in the mid-1980s as she and Frenchy dined with André and several others. “We were at a small Italian place,” McAuley recalls. “André was in a good mood. He told the waiter he would like one of everything. The waiter said, ‘Seriously?’ Frenchy said, ‘Seriously.’”

Pro wrestler Don Heaton told the Los Angeles Times after the Giant’s death. “Everything came in twos,” he said. “Two lobsters, two chickens, two steaks . . . ”

There were nights of 100 beers, 75 shots, or seven bottles of wine lest any course of a special meal feel lonely.

“I can report with confidence that his capacity for alcohol is extraordinary,” Terry Todd wrote in his classic in-depth 1981 Sports Illustrated profile of Roussimoff. “During the week or so I was with him, his average daily consumption was a case or so of beer; a total of two bottles of wine, generally French, with his meals; six or eight shots of brandy, usually Courvoisier or Napoléon, though sometimes Calvados; half a dozen standard mixed drinks, such as bloody Marys or screwdrivers; and the odd glass of Pernod.”

Actor Cary Elwes recounted the making of The Princess Bride in his book As You Wish. He recalled going out barhopping with André in New York City after the movie’s premiere. The Giant’s beverage of choice that evening, as it sometimes was when they were filming in England, was what André called “the American,” a combination of many hard spirits.

“The beverage came, as expected, in a forty-ounce pitcher, the contents of which disappeared in a single gulp,” Elwes wrote. “And then came another. And they kept coming while I gingerly sipped my beer. We talked about work and movies, about his farm in North Carolina where he raised horses, his relatives back in France, and of course, about life. André was a man unlike any other — truly one of a kind.”

This unique character ended up living in Richmond County after coming with French-Canadian Adolfo Bresciano, who was billed as Dino Bravo in the ring, to visit Bravo’s stepdaughter in the late-1970s. She and her husband owned farm property in Ellerbe. André bought a nearby home, a three-story structure. The Bernards moved from Florida in the summer of 1980.

“We lived there and took care of things,” McAuley says. “If Andre needed something, Frenchy or I would get it. He just had the house for several years, with some cows and horses. Then the property down the road came up for sale, so we bought the ranch. Then he worked on getting the wooded property in the middle. André was in a bar in England once talking to a pilot who had Texas longhorns back home. So Andre decided we should have Texas longhorns, too.”

Some believed that Andre’s residence must have been built for his colossal frame, but it wasn’t. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” says McAuley. “The stairs were narrow. It was three floors. He didn’t care to have a house that was adapted to him because his life was in the real world. You’re not going to raise the light or the ceiling fan, because they’re not going to run into it. It becomes second nature. We really only did two things: We raised the shower faucet, so the water would hit him on the top of the head instead of the middle of the back, and we ordered him a large chair.”

André would often sit in his chair with McAuley’s miniature dachshunds tucked by each tree trunk of a leg. He loved riding an all-terrain vehicle around his property. In the summers, André favored gym shorts, sometimes with a T-shirt, sometimes not. He was an expert cribbage player, owing to his good math mind and so many hours playing before wrestling matches. He didn’t venture far from his property when he was home, but loved his iced coffee at Dixie Burger, weekend meals at Little Bo Club in Rockingham, cookouts at neighbors’ homes, and checking in the hardware or feed stores.

McAuley says she never heard her friend talk about any regrets, that he never second-guessed anything in his life. “I have had good fortune,” André told Todd in 1981, “and I am grateful for my life. If I were to die tomorrow, I know I have eaten more good food, drunk more beer and fine wine, had more friends and seen more of the world than most men ever will.”

In addition to the scary episode of fluid buildup around his heart in 1983, he began to have other health problems during his years in Ellerbe. André had neck and back issues and surgeries, and he sustained a broken ankle in a 1981 match, wrestling on it for days until the pain became too much. To accommodate his size, the largest cast ever prepared at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital was utilized.

An opportunity to be in The Princess Bride came along at a good time, since wrestling was becoming increasingly difficult because of André’s deteriorating body. “He could feel his wrestling career closing down,” McAuley says. “He had been so agile when he was younger. It was tough to watch him wrestle near the end of his life because of how hard it was for him to get around.”

André had acted before — including portraying “Bigfoot” in a two-part episode of The Six Million Dollar Man — but he loved being part of the months-long production of The Princess Bride as Fezzik. “Doing Princess Bride gave him the most happiness,” says McAuley. “He’d call home and talk about all the silly tricks he was pulling, especially the week or so that Billy Crystal was there.” Around the set, as in his adopted hometown in North Carolina, André impressed with his disposition despite his acute pain.

“You could tell he was in tremendous pain, but would never complain about it,” actress Robin Wright remembered in As You Wish. “You could see it in his face when he would try to stand up from a seated position. But he was just the most gentle giant. So incredibly sweet.”

André never tired of watching The Princess Bride, but some of his friends did. “He drove the wrestlers crazy,” McAuley says. “Over in Japan, on a bus from the hotel to the matches, the boys would wait quietly until eventually he’d pull out the tape and say, ‘Let’s watch my movie again.’ They’d say, ‘Please boss. Not again.’ But they’d watch.”

The same year that The Princess Bride came out, André the Giant was headliner at WrestleMania III, where he was body-slammed and defeated by nemesis Hulk Hogan in front of a record crowd of 93,173 at the Pontiac Silverdome. He wrestled the last of his 1,996 matches (a record of 1,427-388-181) on Dec. 4, 1992 in Tokyo, his physical condition worsening. “His walking was compromised,” Owens says. “His posture had changed. He constantly needed something to hold on to or somebody to help him keep his balance.”

André’s last Christmas in Ellerbe was much different than the joyous first one a dozen years earlier. “He was just not himself,” McAuley says. “His color didn’t look good. I remember standing next to him and patting his stomach, which (had gotten larger). It didn’t dawn on me then that the first time that happened was ’83.”

In January 1993 André flew to France to be with his dying father. He stayed over after his dad’s death to be with his mother for her birthday on Jan. 24. On the 27th, André enjoyed a full day with boyhood friends from Molien. A driver was scheduled to pick him up at the Paris hotel where he was staying at 8 o’clock the next morning.

André didn’t pay attention to clocks, seldom wore a watch, and rarely was late. But he was not there to meet his driver, and he didn’t answer the phone in his room.

“The chain was on the door but they could see André in bed,” McAuley says. “The sheet was perfectly neat around him. He must have died as soon as he laid down, because André was one, when he woke up in the morning, the linen would be all shuffled around and when I would go to make his bed, I’d basically have to start over because the sheets would be in all different directions.”

The Roussimoffs were told André’s body was too big to be handled by any local crematoriums. A custom casket was constructed, and McAuley flew to France with her sister to accompany the body back to the United States so that André’s desire to be cremated, set forth in his will, could be carried out. Before returning, she visited Molien to meet André’s mother — “She was shorter than me and just adorable” — and siblings.

McAuley brought photo albums, pictures of “girls André knew” and his daughter, Robin Christensen Roussimoff, born in 1979, with whom he had little contact — a handful of visits and regular holiday phone calls. McAuley flew to the Seattle area once hoping to make André’s wish of a visit by his daughter to his North Carolina home a reality, but Robin, a young girl intimidated by the thought of a long trip to an unfamiliar place, declined.

André was returned to the land he had come to know so well on Feb. 24, 1993. Big-time wrestlers and small-town residents alike attended the ranch service, and after folks had spoken their remarks and paid their respects, Frenchy Bernard got on a horse with a saddlebag containing Andre’s ashes.

In death as in life André Roussimoff was larger than most. His remains weighed 17 pounds after cremation, nearly three times more than a usual adult male. They were spread in silence so different from the mayhem of the arenas and gyms where he had worked, finding their place, just like the man had.  PS