Out of the Blue

Matinee Idyll

A screen shot from the good ol’ days

By Deborah Salomon

I miss the movies. Not art films, or chick flicks, or computer-generated blockbusters. Certainly not superheroes or chatty corpses. Just an engrossing story played out over two hours.

Movies represented a simple but profound part of my childhood, teens, parenting, grandparenting and old age. Here’s how.

Growing up in a New York City apartment before TV and without siblings could, Mary Poppins notwithstanding, be boring. I pounced on Life magazine each week, hoping for a new Disney film ad. My mother objected but usually relented. Yet she exposed me, barely 10, to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. Amazing how easy Shakespeare goes down on screen. Sir Larry became my first movie-star crush (obligatory for little girls in the late ’40s), followed by Gregory Peck, after Gentleman’s Agreement. Redford, Cruise and Clooney melted down and reassembled as Brad Pitt couldn’t hold a candle to either.

The situation was different in Asheville. I was 12, plenty old enough to sit through Singin’ in the Rain and a parade of other silly musicals with friends at the lavish Art Deco Imperial Theater. Admission: 9 cents. One mother would drop us off, another pick us up. To my everlasting embarrassment, Mario Lanza — The Great Caruso — replaced Olivier and Peck.

The upside: By 13 I felt comfortable with Shakespeare and Verdi.

Soon, local fellas with hot-off-the-press driver’s licenses usurped Mario and the Bard. Movie dates were the thing. I can’t remember a single movie . . . maybe Sabrina and the original A Star is Born . . . only being panicked he’d try to hold my hand, now greasy from popcorn.

At least we were spared nudity and expletives.

I drew the line at Westerns, war and horror flicks which, compared to current offerings, look like Looney Tunes.

The early ’60s found me busy with three babies and James Bond — a new installment released almost every January, for my birthday. What better gift than a babysitter, steakhouse dinner and 007? When Sean Connery departed, so did I. Some things, like the scent of roses and fresh-squeezed orange juice, can’t be synthesized. Neither can “Bond . . . James Bond” in a low growl.

The babies grew up. I was the only mom on a block of 10 children that had a station wagon big as the Hindenburg plus the patience to herd/referee. Their pestering started as soon as a cartoon feature opened. Lessons learned: “Sugar high” is serious science. And no two kids ever have to pee at the same time.

Watching the first 3D (House of Wax) and IMAX reminded me of the “What have they done to my song?” lament. What have they done to plots and acting? Whither movie dates, Photoplay magazine, musicals, James Dean in Cinemascope and Marlon Brando in black-and-white?

Time passed. Films adapted. Rainy Saturday afternoons were spent with my grandsons at the multiplex, a phantasmagoria of arcade machines that swallowed dollars like Jujubes. The movies I endured there had no plots, no acting, only special effects. When the boys were pre-teens, out of desperation I took them to The Blind Side, where they sat, rapt and wide-eyed.

“That was a really good movie, Nanny,” the older one said. Now an attorney, he still remembers it.

During the pandemic some releases go straight to streaming, to be watched “in the comfort of your home,” where interruptions happen. The sound of the toilet flushing breaks the spell. Marie Osmond interrupting Daniel Day Lewis is blasphemy.

Therefore, I watch faves only on commercial-free channels.

So, which have survived?

The envelopes, please:

Best performance by an actor . . . ever: Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.

By an actress: Meryl Streep: Sophie’s Choice.

Best chick-flicks: Bridges of Madison County, (sob) and The American President (yay!).

Best musical: Timeless, happy-sad, plot-intensive Fiddler on the Roof.

Best feel-good: The King’s Speech, where in my scrapbook Colin Firth replaces Olivier, Lanza and Peck.

Best all-round movie; The Godfather, but only the first installment and the prequel from Part II. I know the script by heart. And I always add a little sugar and a splash of wine to my spaghetti sauce.

Runners-up: The Shawshank Redemption, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Help, Philadelphia.

Most Overrated: Titanic, aka Gone with the Wind gone to sea.

Obviously, movies need some technology/methodology, which limits Citizen Kane, City Lights and Casablanca — all fine period pieces. But when the lights go down and the corn pops up I want to be transported, entranced, disturbed, inspired and even challenged. Crying is a good sign. Snoozing is not. Private Ryan — out. Oskar Schindler — in. Sean Connery, dead, never to be replaced by nice guy Tom Hanks.

The last satisfying movie I sat through was Doubt (2008) starring, no surprise, Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman; Viola Davis copped Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for 10 minutes onscreen.

So there’s hope, I hope.  PS

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

Character Study

Of Palettes and Perps

From landscapes to wanted posters

By Jenna Biter

Walk up a narrow flight of stairs and hang a left into the corner studio above Eye Candy Gallery & Framing in downtown Southern Pines and you’ll find Pat McBride. Wearing a crisp white shirt that — if you know any artist — has obviously not yet seen the business end of a paint brush, she waves and introduces herself with an upbeat hello. She’s surrounded by a dozen paintings, ranging in size from a few inches to a few feet.

“I always liked art, but I hadn’t really thought of being an ‘artist-artist,’” she says. That was until she refused to take no for an answer in a class at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

“I took art as one of my electives and, on the first day of class, the professor said, ‘OK, if there’s anybody in here with any other majors, this is a class for art majors. You just need to let me know and get out now.’”

She backtracks. “Well . . . first, he said to put up your hand. Of course, I, being ornery, did not, but everybody else did and politely marched out . . . you’re not kicking me out of this class.” She relives the memory, shrugs her shoulders, smiles. “Anyway, I took the class and ended up becoming an art major.” She got her undergraduate degree in fine art and has been at it ever since.

McBride points at her large painting of the Carolina Hotel. “Right now, I’m working in oils.” She used to work mostly in acrylics and pencils, detailing people. But a class in oil painting inspired her to take up the medium, and the historical architecture and unique sporting events of the Sandhills have captured her imagination. “Everything is kind of fun because everything is kind of . . . new,” she says, though she and her husband, Larry, moved to the area over three years ago. “When we moved here, our house needed so much work that we didn’t really get to do a lot.”

Before coming to the Sandhills, McBride and her family lived in Greensboro for 15 years and, before that, they lived in a half-dozen other places, including Buffalo, New York, and Annapolis, Maryland. Larry worked as a special agent for the FBI, so the family was packed up and moving every two years. At least, that’s how it was at the beginning.

McBride kept up with her art regardless of where they lived. “I was working in frame shops so that I could be around art and afford to get my stuff framed.” She showed her artwork in galleries and continues to do that in Eye Candy just below her studio and It’s Art for Art Sake in Pinehurst.

In the spring of 1984, however, McBride’s most prolific work hung not in a gallery but in post offices and malls across the United States. It was the wanted poster of Christopher Bernard Wilder, better known by the epithet the Beauty Queen Killer.

It was McBride’s husband who, in the early 1980s, recommended she apply for an opening as an illustrator in the special projects division of the FBI. She geared her portfolio toward the job and got the position. “There were craftsmen who were woodworkers; there were photographers; there were graphic artists,” she says. “The craftsmen would create, like, a golf club that had a microphone in it. Of course, the photographers were photographing different things and crime scenes — stuff for courtroom presentations. And the graphic artists were for in-house publications.

“I did illustration,” she continues, “and they also trained me to do photo retouching.” In the pre-Photoshop days, McBride retouched photos by hand with what looks like a single- or double-haired paint brush, opaque watercolors (gouache) and her imagination. She reworked photos of at-large criminals, imagining potential changes in their appearance for wanted posters.

“It was just what I thought they might look like,” she says. “There wasn’t really a lot of science to it.

“When they brought this one to me, it was going to be a standard poster . . . dah, dah, dah. But then, they’re bringing in photos of all these beautiful young girls. And every day they’re bringing them in, and they’re preparing for a press conference. They’d go marching past my desk with these giant photos.”

The Australian-born serial killer lived in Florida and had a dark past rife with sexual assault and rape allegations. But he was also a successful real estate investor who drove race cars and lived fast. Wilder would lure away unsuspecting teenage girls and young women by hanging around malls, pretending to be a photographer looking for young models. “For whatever reason, probably because he was successful, probably because he didn’t look the part of a monster, he got away with it,” she says.

In the spring of 1984 Wilder went on a cross-country killing spree and murdered at least eight women. He catapulted to the top of America’s most wanted list and, ultimately, shot and killed himself on April 13 when two police officers approached him at a gas station just miles from the Canadian border in New Hampshire.

“Apparently, he usually had a beard and a mustache,” McBride remembers, “but he was on this crazy spree, and they heard word he might have shaved — nobody had a photo of what he looked like prior to a beard.”

It was her task to overpaint the serial killer’s photo and reimagine him without a beard. “At the time, I thought, ‘Man, if I never do anything again, this was probably the most important thing I ever did,’” she says. “He actually was clean-shaven when he died, but I never saw pictures. I asked the agents afterward how close I came, but there’s no way I could really know.”

McBride Googled Wilder nearly 40 years post mortem and discovered an Australian TV special that flashed previously unseen photos of the killer clean-shaven. “I went ekkkkk!” she said, in a mixture of accomplishment and disgust, “because it came out looking correct.”  PS

Jenna Biter is a writer, entrepreneur and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jenna.biter@gmail.com.

Simple Life

In the Beginning

A grande dame, an old beech and other memory-keepers on the path to this gardener’s genesis

By Jim Dodson

Fifteen years ago, a grande dame of English gardening named Mirabel Osler smiled coyly over a goblet of merlot and said something I’ll never forget. “You know, dear,” she declared, “being a gardener is perhaps the closest thing you’ll ever get to playing God. Please don’t let on to the Almighty, however. He thinks He gets to have all the fun.”

The café in Ludlow, Osler’s Shropshire market town, claimed a Michelin star. But the real star that early spring afternoon in the flowering Midlands of England was Dame Mirabel herself. Spry and witty, the 80-year-old garden designer had reintroduced the classic English “cottage garden” to the mainstream with her winsome 1988 book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos.

The intimate tale of how she and her late husband transformed their working farm into a botanical paradise where nature was free to flourish became a surprise bestseller that fueled a worldwide renaissance in cottage gardening. It’s actually what inspired me to create my “faux English Southern Garden” on a forest hilltop in Maine.

My visit with Osler was one of several stops I was making across England in the spring as part of a year-long odyssey through the horticulture world while researching a book about human obsession with gardens – including my own.

When I asked Dame Mirabel why making a garden becomes so all-consuming and appealing, she had a ready answer.

“I think among the most valuable things a garden does for the human soul is make us feel connected to the past and therefore each other,” she said, sipping her wine.

“We’re all old souls, you know, people who love plants. Especially trees.”

She was delighted that I shared her enchantment with trees, mentioning a gorgeous old American beech that stood beside our house in Maine and how it became the centerpiece of my own wild garden.

When my children were still quite young, we carved our initials into the beech — as one must do with its smooth, gray bark — hoping our names and the tree might reside together forever, or at least a couple hundred years. Unfortunately, our great beech was visibly ailing, which sent me on an odyssey to try to save it. That quest ultimately became a book called Beautiful Madness.

“I think that’s the alchemy of a beautiful tree,” Dame Mirabel agreed. “They speak to us in a quiet language all their own. They watch over the days of our lives and will long outlive us. No wonder that everyone from Plato to the Druids of Celtic lore believed divinities resided in groves of trees. Trees are living memory-keepers.”

Mirabel Osler passed away in 2016, age 91. Not long after Beautiful Madness was published in 2006, however, she wrote me a charming note to say how much she enjoyed reading about our visit in Ludlow. True to form, as my wife, Wendy, and I discovered on that unforgettable spring day, Dame Osler’s final garden was a chaotic masterpiece, a backyard filled with beautiful small trees and flowering shrubs arching over a narrow stone pathway.

Not surprisingly, as this long, dark winter of 2021 approached its end, Dame Mirabel was on my mind anew as I began serious work and planning on what will be my fourth — and likely final — garden.

Five years ago, Wendy and I purchased a handsome old bungalow in the neighborhood where I grew up, allowing me to spend the next three years transforming its front and side yards into my version of a miniature enchanted forest — my tribute to Dame Mirabel’s Shropshire garden.

I nicknamed the long-neglected backyard dense with overgrown shrubs and half-dead trees “The Lost Kingdom.” Reclaiming just half of this space was another odyssey, but more than a year later — and thanks to the assistance of a younger back and a Bobcat — a promising shade garden of ferns, hostas, Japanese maples and a handsome Yashino Japanese cedar now flourishes there. It reminds me of the many Asian-themed botanical gardens I’ve visited.

That left only a final section of the “Lost Kingdom” to deal with, which I began clearing late last fall, resulting in a nice blank canvas half in shade, half in sun.

Since Christmas Day, I’ve spent hours just looking at this space the way the author in me stares at a blank white page before starting a new book.

Creating a new garden from scratch is both addictively fun and maddeningly elusive — a tale as old as Genesis. It’s neither for the faint of heart nor skint of wallet.

Gardens, like children, mature and change over time. At best, gardeners and parents must accept that we are, in the end, simply loving caretakers for these living and breathing works of art. Although the Good Lord may have finished His or Her garden in just six days, I fully expect my new final project — which, in truth, is relatively small — to provide years of work and revision before my soul and shovel can rest.

No complaint there, mind you. As the Secretary of the Interior (aka, my wife) can attest, her garden-mad husband enjoys few things more than getting strip-off-before-you-dare-come-into-this-house dirty in the great outdoors, possibly because his people were Orange and Alamance county dirt farmers stretching back to the Articles of Confederation. Their verdure seems to travel at will through his bloodstream like runaway wisteria.

After weeks of scheming and dreaming, sketching out elaborate bedding plans and chucking them, it finally came together when a dear old friend from Southern Pines named Max, renowned for his spectacular camellia gardens, gave me five of his original seedlings for the new garden. I planted them on the borders and remembered something Dame Mirabel said about old souls and trees being memory-keepers.

Surrounded by Max’s grandiflora camellias, this garden will be a tribute to the trees and people I associate them with.

A pair of pink flowering dogwoods already anchor a shady corner of the garden where a peony border will pay tribute to the plant-mad woman who taught me to love getting dirty in a garden, my mom.

Nearby will be a pair of flowering crab apple trees like the pair that bloomed every spring in Maine, surrounded by a trio of Japanese maples that I’ve grown from sprouts, linked by a winding path of stone.

A fine little American beech already stands at the heart of this raw new garden, a gift from friends that recalls the old beech tree that sent me around the world.

For now, this is a good start. There will be more to come. For a garden is never really finished, and I’ve only just begun.  PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Seeing Triple

Three options at one address

By Deborah Salomon   •   Photography by John Gessner

Houses can be 3-D textbooks chronicling history or sociology.

The first cottages built by the Tufts family were close to the hotel and without kitchens, since renters took their meals in the Casino building. Later on, people who stayed longer, perhaps for the winter “season,” brought children (who attended a schoolhouse built for this purpose), and needed cooking facilities and a maid’s room. Front porches, perhaps a screened one on the side, were obligatory for sitting and conversing with neighbors out for an evening stroll. Fireplaces got them through the winter. Before air conditioning, everybody left in May.

After nearly two decades of attracting wealthy urbanites, the cottages — now built on spec rather than commissioned — became smaller, plainer. Some were occupied by upper-level resort staff and village merchants, others by families drawn to Pinehurst’s rung on the social ladder. The best had enough land to expand.

Acadia Cottage, built in Old Town in 1917, conforms to some of these parameters but with a checkered history. Hugh McKenzie was the first owner, followed by another five by 1951. Only one — Mrs. W.H. Nearing — appears in the Pinehurst Outlook social listing of comings and goings. Records show that a fire burned off the wood-shingled roof, which was replaced by fireproof shingles for $300.

Now, beyond Acadia’s back door or through a side gate lies a magic kingdom — a mossy courtyard with a fire pit, a 50-foot-long and 11-foot-deep pool, massive stone benches for sitting and boulders for diving, a darling little pool house and a roomier guest house, both fully serviced with heat and AC, kitchenette, sitting room, a sleeping alcove and bathroom. No piece of this enclave appears strictly utilitarian. Each, whether it’s a cabinet or a conveyor-belt ceiling fan, offers an artistic, craft or historical component.

Antiques co-exist peacefully with reproductions and artifacts. Only living there affords enough time to notice, and appreciate, the array.

This enlargement and renovation was the brainchild of David Connelly, a Chicagoan with four athletic children, who wanted a vacation haven and found the overgrown back lot completely hidden from street view ideal. Connelly, a self-described wannabe architect, purchased the dull, dated but well-built “brownie house” on half an acre in 2000 and went to work. He and his contractor sourced stone for outbuilding walls from western North Carolina mountains, lumber from a demolished tobacco barn and the Reynolds estate in Southern Pines.

On a damp day, the boards still smell like tobacco.

They removed walls in the two-bedroom cottage, creating an open living/dining/den space, and installed a modern kitchen that, somehow, looks like it’s been there forever. A bath/laundry room with a half wall tile shower was added, as well as a Carolina room off the dining area. Details mattered; moldings aplenty, sometimes painted a color different from the walls, delineate the 10-foot ceiling. Over the front door, a transom pane. An old-timey wood screen door fit the timeline. Then, to frost this cake of many layers, a faux specialist painted wide pastel stripes from Marshall Field’s shopping bags on a powder room’s walls. Even more striking is the colored grid applied to the kitchen floorboards creating the look of scuffed linoleum, circa 1940s. 

The dull brownie house, called Acadia now, inside and out, glowed a pale green, neither mint nor avocado, froggy nor kiwi, but so organic to the setting that Jay and Kim Butler, who purchased the property in 2010, didn’t paint over it.

The story of their acquisition rings familiar:

The Butlers, from Virginia, with a second home at Nags Head, spent a weekend in Pinehurst. Kim had never been here. “We rode by the house on a Saturday and saw it was for sale. It had great curb appeal,” Jay recalls.

After 10 years, Connelly was ready for another project.

“I had to have a pool, so I loved that feature,” adds Kim, retired from the retail pool business, with an avocation for collecting mid-century modern furniture and unusual décor accents.

“We just liked the quaintness,” says Jay, an executive in a family recycling business. Golf was a draw, confirmed by memorabilia decorating walls in the TV den opposite the living room. Most of all, “It was in move-in condition, exactly the way we liked it.”

About a month later, they did exactly that.

Soon, their friends were lining up for invitations to test private guest and pool house accommodations which set this address apart from Pinehurst estates with designated guest quarters under one roof. Their verdict, Jay says: “Kinda cool.”

Each outbuilding has only one room — but enough features to fill a catalog, like a queen-sized Murphy bed hidden by wood paneling suggesting a library, or chapel. “Antiqued” cabinetry and metalwork, distressed painted pieces, leather chairs with half-moon ottomans, beadboard, an old porcelain sink, refrigerated drawers, vaulted wormy chestnut ceilings illuminated by stained glass inserts, a drop-leaf kitchen work surface that, with leaf raised, becomes a table. The guest house has a round-topped Dutch front door rescued from a wine cellar, and the pool house bathroom, with direct access to the yard, is split into shower, toilet and vanity sections along a narrow hallway.

Obviously, planning coupled with imagination were at work here.

However, fitting so much furniture into relatively small spaces can be challenging. Not for Kim Butler, who positions modern glass sculptures on a rustic table and adorns dressers with large, bare branches. Throughout, she uses traditional wide-slat wooden blinds.

Back in two-bedroom Acadia — compact but perfect with the living area opened up and furnished with Kim’s retro pieces — one standout is a small drop-leaf kitchen table made of aluminum tubing and Formica, with vinyl-upholstered chairs. “I thought about an island,” always convenient in a kitchen with limited counter space. Instead, Kim settled for what has become an emblem, a conversation piece.

Kim’s collection of colored pottery pitchers brightens a bookcase flanking the shallow living room fireplace, converted to gas for safety; other pottery and glass pieces cover tabletops. Texture, texture everywhere. The chandelier over the dining table is made of wood, and the upholstered club chairs qualify as shabby-chic. No two lamps claim the same parentage.

Kim furnished the screened porch in Chinese red lacquer and black wicker, strong colors that pair with the darkened knotty pine floors milled from trees cut out back.

Room to room, comfort prevails.

Who would guess what’s inside from strolling by, as Annie Oakley might have done when she lived in an apartment across the street? The well-tended walkway, flower beds and porch provide no hint.

Acadia may lack the pedigree of homes built before and during the Roaring ’20s — the Mellons and Rockefellers never stopped here. The Fownes and Marshalls opted for bigger and fancier rather than livable and convenient.

But, after 10 years walking to the village for dinner after a relaxing float in the pool, then chasing the dogs around the fenced yard, Jay Butler concludes, “It’s just a good place to have a home.”  PS

Photos by Joseph Hill

We arranged to meet inside the Welcome Center on the north side of the train station in Southern Pines. “I’ll be the guy with the red scarf,” I said.

“I’ll be the guy with the camera,” Joseph Hill replied.

Most locals are familiar with Hill and his story. He’s become as distinctive in Southern Pines as the Yield to the Left signs that confound visiting drivers at every intersection of the downtown business district. Hill is autistic and, in that long ago pre-COVID era, you would see him most Saturdays — and pretty much any day he had a reason to come to town — wandering around with his Nikon and Fujifilm cameras.

“In a way, it’s peaceful,” he says of his photography. “I can just be wandering around, minding my own business, and I come across something I haven’t seen before — maybe neither of us have seen before — and I take a picture of it. Every day, what you call mundane, that we pass by and see but don’t notice fully, if I happen to see it at just the right angle, looking up or looking down at the ground, hey, I take a picture.”

Hill will turn 27 the month that this magazine appears. “I’m blessed,” he says, “and I hope to make every birthday of each year count.”

Since we’re all still using best practices to avoid the spread of the virus, Hill wears his mask. It says Kindness Is Contagious. The town never had a more good-hearted face.   — Jim Moriarty  PS

Portrait by Tim Sayer

For more information about Joseph Hill read Jaymie Baxley’s story in The Pilot at https://www.thepilot.com/3-a-different-angle/image_3c8e794e-281d-11ea-8949-db91e82ba31d.html or go to josephhillphoto.com.

Birdwatch

Hardy Hummers

Rufous hummingbirds are midwinter guests

By Susan Campbell

It may sound odd, but this is a good time to talk about hummingbirds. I have been fielding reports of these tiny, winged jewels for weeks. So far, I have banded 17 and have details on almost 100 more — and counting! Yes, even in the middle of the winter.

Here in North Carolina, hummingbird lovers can find or attract these amazing little fliers any month of the year. And this winter has been a particularly productive season for hardy hummers across the state. Predictably, the bulk of the hummingbirds I have encountered in the Piedmont have been rufous hummingbirds.

Annually, shorter days and cooler temperatures herald the return of rufous hummingbirds from points far to our north and west. The species breeds from the Rocky Mountains up into southern Canada and across to southeastern Alaska. They begin nesting when there is still snow on the ground and vegetation is sparse. In the cooler months, the majority of rufous can be found wintering in southern Mexico. However, it has been discovered in the last few decades that a wintering population exists in the southeastern United States. Across North Carolina, dozens of rufous take up residence between October and April. Many go unnoticed unless they appear at late-blooming plants or sugar water feeders. These are extremely tough little critters.

These tiny birds that spend their summers at high latitudes are well adapted to cold weather. They can forage in below-freezing temperatures, searching thick vegetation for insects with little difficulty. At night and during colder, wet periods, they will seek out thick evergreen cover and use torpor, a nighttime hibernation, to conserve energy. The pines, cedars, hollies and magnolias in central North Carolina make excellent winter habitat for rufous hummingbirds.

The male rufous is very distinctive, having rusty body feathers in addition to a coppery iridescent gorget. Females, however, are a different story. Their size and shape are not very distinctive. Aside from reddish-brown color at the base of their tail feathers, and perhaps a smattering of brownish feathers around the face and flanks, they appear much like immature male ruby-throateds. They also look very similar to a few other species of Western hummers such as the Allen’s, broad-tailed or calliope hummingbird. For those with a good musical ear, the vocalization — a loud series of “stick” notes — may give a rufous away.

It is interesting to note that some of these tiny marvels return to the same feeder from one winter to the next. In fact, some individuals are faithful to the same location over their lifetime, which can be seven years. To date, we have had three females that have done just that, proven by the tiny aluminum bands I placed on their legs the first year. Some individuals choose to overwinter in different locations in the Southeast. This year we have two “foreigners.” One of them was originally banded by a colleague of mine outside Mobile, Alabama, two winters ago.

Furthermore, there have been some extremely lucky folks, including hosts in both the Sandhills and the Triad, who have hosted not one, but multiple rufous over the course of a single season. Last November, both a hostess in Asheville and another at Riverbend County Park outside Hickory each had three female rufous coming in for sugar water. A friend and research colleague who runs that park is investigating a fourth female rufous who turned up on February 1.

And no need to worry: Winter sugar water feeder maintenance is straightforward. Hang it in an open location and simply rinse and refill every two weeks or so. In our area, a feeder hung close to the house will be protected most days and many of the nights. The regular solution (4 parts water; 1 part sugar) will not freeze unless the air temperature drops below 27 degrees.

So, go ahead and hang a feeder any time. It is absolutely never too late to get noticed. Who knows? It may be found by a passing rufous hummingbird or two. PS

Susan would love to receive your wildlife observations and/or photos at susan@ncaves.com.

Golftown Journal

Story Time

Classic voices and classic memories

By Lee Pace

I was merely a babe in the pines in 1990 when the powers that be at Pinehurst Inc. put their historic life in my hands. Why anyone would entrust the concept and execution of a coffee table book on what then was a 95-year-old golf club and resort to the hands of a 33-year-old is beyond me. To write about history, you need a little history yourself, right?

“We were figuring it out as we went along,” says Pat Corso, the man who commissioned that book as part of the club’s branding and campaign to land a major championship on Pinehurst No. 2 — a U.S. Open, PGA Championship or Ryder Cup chief among the targets. Corso, the president and CEO of the resort, was himself not quite 40 at the time.   

And he needed that youthful vigor. In 1990 Pinehurst was in year six of being owned by Robert Dedman Sr. and his Dallas-based company, Club Corporation of America, as it was known at the time. Old-timers today forget the degree of problems Dedman inherited, and newbies don’t even know about them. But the grand old resort that has now been the venue for three U.S. Opens since 1999 and is on the docket for five more was gasping for breath in 1984 after two years being run by a consortium of banks holding the bad paper from the previous owner, the Diamondhead Corp.

“Remember that no one wanted this place,” said Corso, who ran the resort from 1987-2004. “The banks brought every big company in the golf and hospitality business through here and everyone went thumbs-down. They thought it was gone. Literally, the place had died. Now, not all the citizens would agree with that. But to a lot of people inside the game and outside, Pinehurst was dead. It was unredeemable. The banks were going to sell off the golf to someone and the hotel to someone else. They made Robert buy the hotel. He just wanted the golf. But marrying the golf to the hotel kept the whole thing alive. Otherwise, you’d have five or six owners and it would have been a free-for-all.”

Corso and his chief lieutenant, Director of Golf Don Padgett Sr., were diligently trying in the late 1980s to restore the good name Pinehurst enjoyed in the golf universe for 75 years under the founding Tufts family. Staging the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1989 on No. 2 was one step. Now they wanted the PGA Tour or a men’s USGA championship.

And they wanted to remind the current generation and make them aware of what those before had known of “the St. Andrews of American golf.”

So off I went in October 1990 with exactly one year to write, design and print a book with factual and aesthetic substance for Corso and resort officials to hand to golf’s power brokers, competitors, talking heads and ink-stained scribes and say, “This is our story. This is who we are.”

I was rummaging through the files at the Tufts Archives in the village of Pinehurst just as I was getting started when I found Ben Hogan’s file and learned he won his first professional tournament in Pinehurst in 1940, that he teetered on quitting competitive golf altogether after eight fallow years on tour, and that the injection of confidence and swagger he found in the North and South Open on Pinehurst No. 2 catapulted him to one of golf’s most storied careers.

What about, I mused, a book built around the stories of noted individuals in golf and their experiences at Pinehurst?

The dominoes started to fall, and I set about making arrangements over the next six months to visit some very high-profile golfers who had a good Pinehurst story. Now, exactly three decades later, the images of those visits bound past like 35 mm slides in a vintage carousel projector:

Hogan, the “wee ice mon” himself, sitting nattily attired in a seersucker sports coat in his office in Fort Worth, reflecting on that landmark win half a century before;

Ben Crenshaw the very next day in the grill at Barton Creek in Austin remembering his second PGA Tour event, that 144-hole colossus known as the World Open played on the No. 2 and 4 courses in November 1973 and his second-place finish to Miller Barber;

Bill Campbell having lunch at a meat-and-three diner across the street from his insurance office in Huntington, West Virginia, words like “salutary” and “winsome” rolling from his tongue as he talked of his annual April visit to Pinehurst for the North and South Amateur;

Sam Snead rubbing the head of his golden retriever, Meister, sitting in his living room in Fort Pierce, Florida, ruminating on his three victories in the North and South Open and how he thought the short par-4 third hole on No. 2 “was one of the nicest little holes;”

Frank Stranahan appearing in workout togs drinking a vitamin-laced smoothie in the lobby of The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, recounting stroke-by-stroke his North and South Amateur finals matches with Harvie Ward in 1948-49;

Harvie Ward himself with that ever-present twinkle in the eye sitting on the porch of the Carolina Hotel in Pinehurst, having returned home to North Carolina in the twilight of his life and admitting it was a little embarrassing the ruckus his Chapel Hill fraternity brothers made in the gallery of those matches with Stranahan, which they split with one championship apiece;

Arnold Palmer and his vice-like handshake and welcoming demeanor in his office at Bay Hill in Orlando and a self-deprecating story about Stranahan dusting his rear end 12 and 11 in the 1949 North and South Amateur and then offering to give Arnie a lesson on bunker play;

Curtis Strange walking a fairway during a practice round at Doral and talking about all his visits to Pinehurst while on the Wake Forest golf team and how caddie Fletcher Gaines helped manage him around the course in winning the 1975-76 North and South Amateurs;

Golf architect Pete Dye rambling into the wee hours at Kiawah Island during Ocean Course construction and speaking of how the tenets of Donald Ross were never far from his mind on every course design project;

Billy Joe Patton pausing from a conversation at his home in Morganton to leave the room and compose himself, the memories of his salad days in Pinehurst in the 1950s and ’60s with his favorite caddie, Jerry Boggan, washing over him.

And those were just the highlights.

I assembled the fruit of these conversations with essays commissioned from golf writing heavyweights Charles Price, Dick Taylor and Herbert Warren Wind, and the result was Pinehurst Stories — A Celebration of Great Golf and Good Times. I know for a fact the book didn’t make any money, but that wasn’t the goal. Two years later the USGA did, in fact, award Pinehurst the 1999 U.S. Open, and the dominoes have been falling ever since. Not that one caused the other, mind you, but perhaps it factored into the mix.

Thirty years. Roll that around in your mind.

I’ve been chasing another assignment like that for three decades to no avail and with a keen appreciation for the old saw, “Youth is wasted on the young.”  PS

Lee Pace has made countless drives from his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to the Sandhills 70 miles away to chronicle the Pinehurst story, which includes four books, most recently the 2014 volume, The Golden Age of Pinehurst.

Pleasures of Life Dept.

How I Learned to Skate

By Nancy Roy Fiorillo

One night not too long ago, I dreamed I was roller skating. The rink was big, and I was all alone except for my dad. He was standing at the railing. I tried a difficult jump and fell, not once but three times. Then my dad said, “Hold your head up — that will help you keep your balance.”

I tried again and mastered the jump. It was a dream that came from long ago, before I really grew up, before high school and boyfriends and life.

I grew up in a small town in New England. Famous for the manufacture of Frye Boots, Marlborough was an unremarkable haven for first generation immigrants — French, Italian, Irish, Greek and more. I was third-generation French Canadien, my antecedents hailing from Prince Edward Island and Toronto. My parents met at a St. Mary’s Catholic Church youth group and later dated as the King and Queen of the Mardi Gras. I was told the priest attended the crowning of the “royalty,” but the dancing could start only after he made his exit.

Our modest two-bedroom house sat on 12 acres with enough room for two parents, one sister, batches and batches of kittens and me. My paternal grandfather lived two houses away, and both he and my dad raised chickens. Often I accompanied my dad to the chicken coop to feed the squawking birds, eagerly plunging both of my hands down into the mash we mixed for their dinner, and more often than not coming up with nothing much more than an itchy nose. Dad always kept one hand out of the feed, free to scratch my little nose for me.

Receiving the fluffy, yellow chicks we called peepers and putting them in the little room with the bright warming light was a cozy act of faith. On Saturdays my dad was the egg man, and I rode the route with him. His regular job was at a General Electric facility called Telecron. When I asked him what he did, he told me he put faces on clocks. And indeed he did, on an assembly line.

My sister and I walked to school and back. Summertime was a flight of imagination in the large woods behind our house. We buddied up with a couple of kids from across the street and built a bike trail, including jumps. One summer we put together a three-room house with bundling sticks and string. We discovered a pond that we named Crystal Lake and told imaginary stories about who drowned there and who drew their drinking water from this little muddy lagoon. We built a 9-hole cement miniature golf course complete with twists and turns and waterfalls. The architect was the boy across the street (who would become an engineer), and we were his crew. We dug holes, moved rocks, poured cement and cleared paths. We made sandwich signs for our bikes and rode all over town advertising a round of miniature golf, 5 cents. We made enough money that summer to go to the finest amusement park in New England — my dad drove four of us as if he were delivering eggs and we stayed all day.

In the winter we’d sling our ice skates over our shoulders and walk to Lake Williams, as frozen as the concrete we poured. We changed into our skates near the warmth of the burn barrel and stayed on the ice until we couldn’t feel our feet, then returned to the barrel to change into our frozen boots and head home.

Just before fourth grade we found out I needed allergy shots and special shoes. My mother was offered the entire vial of medicine for $85, or we could pay $5 per shot. She took the installment plan and then declared she would be going to work at a factory in Sudbury. My sister and I left public school to attend St. Anne’s Academy adjacent to our church. The academy was both a school and a novitiate, run by the Sisters of St. Anne. Most of the students were boarders, and my sister and I joined the ranks of the day students. School started at 8 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. We had a half day of French and religion and the other half of the day was for everything else our nuns knew. We diagrammed sentences ad nauseam but learned little history, geography or science. To fill the full day we had 2 1/2 hours for lunch, time used in the winter for skating on Lake Williams, a group of wobbly young girls led by penguins on ice. Our nuns were strict and unyielding, but they could skate like Boston Bruins, gliding along with their hands behind their backs.

My dad eventually closed down the egg business and, with help, dismantled the chicken coop. I remember them removing the baby chick room, then pulling off sides of the troughs. The roof was still standing when they pulled up the floor. Underneath was beautiful hardwood, perfect for roller skating. Our neighborhood engineer was no skater, so he rigged up a bowling alley, too.

One day after watching us, my dad announced that we were good enough skaters to go to the real roller rink, named Lyonhurst, up on the hill above Lake Williams. In earlier days the Big Bands, even some famous ones, performed there. When the music died out, a couple bought it and turned it into a skating rink with smooth flooring, organ music, dances and games. My first Saturday afternoon was pretty scary, but Dad stayed close by leaning against the rail to give me confidence. The rented skates were big and heavy on my skinny legs, and I didn’t have a skating skirt like most of the older girls, but I rolled on, weekend after weekend.

Soon my dad presented me with a used pair of excellent skates — Douglass-Snyder’s — with toe stops. My mom knitted skating skirts for me and bought the panties that go underneath. I took lessons and became a real skater. I won some games and learned some jumps and danced, going over the steps before I slept just to make sure I knew every single one.

Then it happened. I woke one Saturday morning to the news that Lyonhurst, my skating rink, had burned to the ground during the night. I was heartbroken! Other skating rinks were too far away to even think about.

We still ice skated on Lake Williams when it froze over in the winter, but as we grew older, the woods held no interest for us. Our backyard rink was gone and high school was ahead. I was forced to give up my skating and learn to do more grown-up things. But sometimes, even now, I dream about mastering a jump with someone standing against the rail with a free hand.  PS

Nancy Roy Fiorillo, a former mayor of Pinehurst, loves reading and occasionally a little writing.

The Omnivorous Reader

Feeling a Bit Eel

A deep dive into mystery

By Stephen E. Smith

When asked why women found him irresistible, heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson responded in the first-person plural: “We eat cold eels and think distant thoughts.”

If you’re wondering what that means (the probable double entendre notwithstanding), you’re not alone. Unfortunately, you won’t find the answer in Patrik Svensson’s The Book of Eels, although this New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Outdoor Book Award contains information aplenty about the enigmatic eel — a fish belonging to the order Anguilliformes, comprised of eight suborders, 19 families, 111 genera and about 800 species.

Unless you’re an unlucky fisherman (eels are not a sought-after game fish) or a bumbling scuba diver, it’s unlikely you’ve come in contact with this squirmy creature that lurks in the darkness at the bottom of oceans, rivers and lakes, and you’re probably wondering why you’d read a book about them. But Svensson’s focus is on an important and timely truth: The lowly eel is linked with every other organism, including the squirmiest of them all, homo sapiens — and that makes The Book of Eels a compelling read, especially in light of the pandemic that has swept the planet.

To this point, Svensson weaves a series of personal vignettes with believe-it-or-not facts (e.g.: The Pilgrims were saved from starvation by eating eels) and biographical sketches of scientists who were determined to discover the eel’s place in the ecosystem.

He opens with a detailed breakdown of the eel’s life cycle, which begins in the Sargasso Sea where fertilized eggs hatch into gossamer leptocephalus larvae known as “willow leaves.” Over a period of years, these delicate organisms drift the ocean currents and are eventually deposited in rivers and lakes (the eel can survive in salt and fresh water and for long periods in the open air), where they transform into elvers and then into yellow eels before becoming the silver eels that return to the Sargasso Sea to spawn and die. This progression can consume decades, and eels have been rumored to live more than a hundred years, suspending the aging process to adapt to environmental stresses.

The personal narratives that frame the story center on Svensson’s father, who worked asphalting roads during the day and fished for eels in the evenings. Recalling the time they shared becomes a metaphor for one’s passage through life. “The stream represented his roots, everything familiar he always returned to . . . (The eels were) a reminder of how little a person can really know, about eels or other people, about where you come from and where you’re going.”

Other narrative threads explore the professional lives of A-list eel fanatics, beginning with no less a personage than Aristotle, who spent years studying eels and believed that they sprang spontaneously from mud (so much for Aristotelian logic). Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist and philosopher, guessed that eels reproduced by rubbing up against rocks that loosened particles that turned into baby eels. Other eel aficionados abound — Francesco Redi, Carl Linnaeus, Carlo Mondini and Giovanni Grassi. Even Sigmund Freud was a devoted eel researcher (what could be more Freudian?), who spent four weeks in Trieste, dissecting eels in an unsuccessful search for their male reproductive organs.

It was Johannes Schmidt, a marine biologist, who achieved the great breakthrough concerning the eel’s life cycle. In 1904, he chartered the steamship Thor and launched a determined effort to find the eels’ breeding grounds, spending most of his professional life doggedly trawling for willow leaves in the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic until he tracked them by size back to the Sargasso Sea, an astonishing 18-year exercise in singular obsession.

But it’s Rachel Carson, best known as the author of The Silent Spring and an early heroine of the environmental movement, that garners most of Svensson’s admiration. Despite her proclivity for anthropomorphizing the eel, he finds her writing in The Sea Around Us both inspirational and personally revealing, quoting her extensively: “As long as the tide ebbed, eels were leaving the marshes and running out to sea. Thousands passed the lighthouse that night, on the first lap of a far sea journey . . .  And as they pass through the surf and out to sea, so they also passed from human sight and almost from human knowledge.” Svensson is thus lulled into humanizing eels, speculating that they don’t experience tedium the way humans do, and sliding again into metaphor “. . . life is over in the blink of an eye: we are born with a home and heritage and we do everything we can to free ourselves from this fate . . . but soon enough, we realize we have no choice but to travel back to where we came from, and if we can’t get there, we’re never really finished . . .”

Sprinkled throughout Svensson’s narratives there are tips on eel fishing, a litany of less-than-appetizing eel recipes (the Japanese consider eel a delicacy), a touch of philosophical speculation, and more than enough sentimentality, including a conclusion that borders on mawkish.

So who would enjoy Svensson’s eel book? If you’re a fan of John McPhee’s work — The Control of Nature, Encounters with the Archdruid, Oranges, The Pine Barrens, etc. — you’ll likely find The Book of Eels a compelling and informative read. Like McPhee’s monographs, Svensson’s story is more profound than its technical parts, evolving into philosophical musings on the mysteries of life and death. At the very least, readers will discover a level of environmental awareness that’s timely and valuable. 

Do we know all there is to know about the eel’s life cycle? Despite Schmidt’s intense devotion to discovering the eel’s reproductive behavior, no human has ever seen two eels mate, and no one has seen an eel, alive or dead, in the Sargasso Sea. It remains a mystery. Probably Jack Johnson’s snarky response to inquiries about his love life was right on the money: There are questions that don’t require answers.  PS

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

Southwords

Year of the Fox

The subtle magic of a different kind of circus

By Ashley Wahl

My sweetheart and I share a birthday in February. Last year, same as the year before, we took each other to the circus to celebrate. This year we are training a fox.

OK, the fox is actually a dog. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, we think she might be training us. The point is, it’s a different kind of circus this year, and a timid red dog with large, pointy ears is showing us a thing or two about magic.

In our former life, Alan and I spent the coldest months in Florida, near Sarasota, where the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus maintained its winter quarters for over 30 years. There, the circus arts are still alive and thriving, and each year — with the exception of this year — its Circus Arts Conservatory puts on Circus Sarasota Under the Big Top, which always falls on our birthday. The show is fantastical. No wild animals, of course. Just a dazzling display of human potential. For us, it felt like the ultimate celebration of life on this strange and beautiful planet. 

Although we were technically living in Asheville (as in, that’s where we got our mail), our Florida home was a no-frills camper van equipped with the bare essentials, including a single-burner camp stove and a portable fridge. Rarely did we stay in one spot for longer than three days, and on weekends, we set up our canopy tent at art and craft festivals up and down the coast, vending our wares alongside fellow travelers.

Suffice it to say there was no room for a dog in our traveling carnival. 

But life twists and turns like a master contortionist. When we put down our stakes in Greensboro last fall, we felt it was time to add a member to our troupe.

Back when we thought we were looking for a guard dog, we hooked up with a German Shepherd rescue that had recently taken in a mama with eight pups. The dam wasn’t exactly a Shepherd — or any other breed that was easily defined. She was smaller — maybe 50 pounds — with a short, red coat and large, pointed ears. Someone found her dodging traffic on a busy road in Fayetteville and, as it turned out, had an unneutered German Shepherd waiting at home. You can guess what happened next.

The whelps were darling — half Shepherd, half whatever their mother was — each one adopted as soon as they were old enough. We brought home mama.

This is a good time to mention that Alan and I are first-time dog owners. And while we had binge-watched several seasons of Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan, nothing can prepare you for bringing home a shy little fox of a dog who is, quite literally, scared of everything.

And everyone.

While she isn’t exactly the guard dog we envisioned — at least not yet — we named her for the Hindu goddess Durga, protective mother of the universe often depicted perched on the back of a lion or tiger. Talk about a circus act. As for the name, we figured she might grow into it.

Admittedly, watching Dog Whisperer before adopting a dog is a bit like reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods before hiking the Appalachian Trail, but our big takeaway is that, often, a dog’s behavior hinges upon its human’s energy. We are witnessing firsthand that Durga’s trust and confidence starts with our own. It’s a wonderful practice — leading by example rather than trying to “fix” what’s “out there.”

And what a beautiful lesson on patience.

Our only expectations are that of our own reactions and yet, by some miracle, our shy little fox is blossoming. 

No, she’s not jumping through hoops or walking a tightrope yet, but what is the circus if not a celebration of the extraordinary?  And isn’t it extraordinary to live life fully and without fear?

We’re getting there.  PS

Contact O.Henry editor Ashley Wahl at awahl@ohenrymag.com.