The Art of N.C. Wyeth

THE ART OF N.C. WYETH

The Art of N.C. Wyeth

How did his illustrations for Drums get here?

By Bill Case

It was 1927 and, for Southern Pines author James Boyd, life was coming at him fast — albeit in a good way. His first novel, Drums, published two years earlier, had flown off bookstore shelves. To meet the unanticipated demand, publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons had reprinted the novel three times in the first month following its release. Forty thousand copies of the surprise bestseller were sold in five months.

Boyd’s tale, set mostly in North Carolina, was also earning critical acclaim. A New York Post reviewer declared Drums “the best novel written about the American Revolution.” Fellow author (and Boyd confidante) Struthers Burt heaped more extravagant praise, calling his friend’s work, “by far the best . . . American historical novel ever written.”

Buoyed by his surprise hit, Boyd authored a second historical novel for Scribner’s — this one with a Civil War backdrop. The book, titled Marching On, released in the first quarter of 1927, was going gangbusters too. Early sales were bettering those of Drums. On the heels of this latest tour de force, Scribner’s inked a deal for a third novel.

While Boyd’s association with his publisher was financially profitable, it was proving more time-consuming than he preferred, expressing frustration when production demands precluded his engagement in his favored rural pastimes, like foxhunting. The author grumbled to an interviewer, “My brother looks after my money for me; my wife looks after my kids and the house; now if I could get you (the interviewer) to do my writing for me, I could look after my dogs myself and fox hunt during the winter. Seems to me that would be an ideal arrangement for everybody concerned.”

In the fall of 1927, Boyd’s renowned editor, Max Perkins, pitched a new project designed to create a fresh wave of sales — and the author would barely need to lift a finger! Scribner’s wanted to produce a new, lushly illustrated edition of Drums. Boyd would need to make some minor text changes, but the bulk of the creative work would involve the artistic depiction of passages from the novel.

This was not a new concept for Scribner’s. The publisher first featured color illustrations in children’s books in 1904. Well-received, Scribner’s began color illustrating full-length novels, aiming primarily at the juvenile trade. An early one was Treasure Island, published in 1911. A landmark hit, Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling yarn became the first in a series labeled “Scribner’s Illustrated Classics.”

Subsequent books in the series like Kidnapped, Rip Van Winkle and The Last of the Mohicans told stories of high adventure. The authors of those classics, Stevenson, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, respectively, rank among the greatest American writers. The fact that Boyd was joining these legends underscored his arrival on the literary scene.

The choice of Drums for the series represented a departure for Scribner’s. While the book contains battle episodes and other dramatic moments, its subject matter was aimed at mature readers. In Drums, intractable political conflicts and social class barriers bedevil the young protagonist, Johnny Fraser. Editor Max Perkins minimized any perceived switch in Scribner’s targeted audience, writing, “Most of the best books in the world are read both by children and adults. This is a characteristic of a great book, that it is both juvenile and adult, and that is what assures it a long life.”

The primary conflict in Drums occurs in the lead-up to the war, when Johnny Fraser is coming of age in the backwoods of North Carolina, and Americans are bitterly divided on the issue of independence. Johnny’s father, Squire Fraser, sees both sides; while acknowledging that taxation without representation is anti-democratic, he is convinced no good will come from revolution. He remains a Loyalist, and Johnny follows his father’s lead.

Squire Fraser seeks to keep his son out of the growing tumult by sending him to Edenton to receive a gentleman’s education, but after war breaks out in Massachusetts, the revolt impacts Edenton, too. The British collector of the port there, Captain Tennant, is forced by a jeering mob to leave the colony. Johnny, a wavering Loyalist, receives his own share of harassment and also departs Edenton. Squire Fraser, still protecting his son, arranges for Johnny’s passage to England, where the young man obtains a clerical position at an import firm in London.

It’s then that Johnny crosses paths with American naval hero John Paul Jones, the “Father of the American Navy.” Jones persuades Johnny to join his ship’s crew. Whether his decision is premised on a newfound fervor for independence or the urging of the charismatic Jones is for the reader to discern.

Johnny is wounded in battle aboard Jones’ ship, the Bonhomme Richard. He returns to North Carolina and rejoins his parents in the backwoods of Little River. Fully invested now in the cause of independence, Johnny joins the militia and is wounded again. The book concludes with the battered Johnny Fraser sitting on his front porch, watching Nathanael Greene’s victorious army march by. As the soldiers are nearly out of sight, he staggers down to the fence and raises his stiff arm in salute to the last man of Greene’s rear guard, far off in the distance.

Scribner’s assigned the artwork for the new edition of Drums to the man unquestionably regarded as the finest illustrator in America, Newell Convers Wyeth, age 45. N.C. Wyeth painted the bulk of the artwork contained in the Scribner’s classics series, beginning with Treasure Island. During his unparalleled career Wyeth also illustrated hundreds of scenes for magazine stories, especially those published by Scribner’s Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post.

Wyeth was raised in Needham, Massachusetts, where his father made a decent living dealing in hay, grain and straw. His mother, an immigrant from Switzerland, was chronically homesick for her place of birth, and her depressed state was an ongoing drain on the family. Nonetheless, N.C. maintained a close relationship with his mother, and after he left Needham, the two corresponded with one another almost daily.

Wyeth displayed immense artistic ability during his teenage years, attending the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware. Pyle was then the country’s leading illustrator and quickly recognized Wyeth’s talent, advising his prodigy to submit illustrations to magazines. One of his first compositions was for The Saturday Evening Post — a cowboy astride a bucking bronco that appeared on the Post’s cover the week of Feb. 21, 1903. It was a promising start, and with magazines catering to public thirst for Western-themed stories, Wyeth received multiple commissions.

Pyle believed Wyeth’s cowboy illustrations would gain authenticity if he experienced Western life for himself, so in October 1904, N.C. journeyed west and found employment at a ranch. On Oct. 6, he wrote his mother: “I did my first work of the cowpuncher . . . Elroy and I went out and rounded up about 300 head of cattle, including calves. We started at 7:30 a.m. and were in the saddle continually until 5:15 that afternoon.”

Wyeth remained out west until December. The sojourn led to an explosion in commissions, and Wyeth’s subsequent Western illustrations demonstrated an increased grit and realism gained from his personal experience. With his career off and running, he received offers from magazines at the rate of two or three a week, and demand for his illustrations never slowed. Yet, he often disparaged this genre of painting as unserious, purely commercial and barely art. Though painting illustrations brought him fame and prosperity, Wyeth groused that it prevented him from being “able to paint a picture, and that is as far from the realms of illustration as black is from white.”

Churning out illustrations, however, earned enough to support a burgeoning family. He married Carol Bockius in 1906, and they had five children. Several of his offspring would become talented artists in their own right, most notably, celebrated mid-century painter Andrew Wyeth. In 1908, N.C. moved the family to bucolic Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in the Brandywine Valley, 10 miles from Wilmington, Delaware. He had become smitten with the community’s horse-drawn surroundings during Pyle’s summer school sessions.

Wyeth relished life in Chadds Ford. Its warm meadows and rolling hills provided an idyllic environment for his work. Author David Michaelis described the painter’s peripatetic labors in his biography, N.C. Wyeth: “He had no time to waste. He divided his days, pushing himself to do more than one person could. In the mornings he made studies in the open fields around Chadds Ford. After lunch he cranked out pictures for Scribner’s and The Saturday Evening Post, then returned to the open air in the late afternoon. As the evenings lengthened in May, he remained in the fields and on the riverbanks, sketching, often through supper.”

The hard work paid off. Wyeth’s Scribner’s Illustrated Classics paintings received increasing acclaim. His depictions stood out because they appealed to all the senses. Michaelis wrote, “Wyeth’s illustrations make the viewer not only see and feel but also hear. We hear the clatter of dishes and goblets breaking during a fight, coins falling on heaps, sand squeaking under the feet of the stretcher bearers.”

Illustrator John Lechner added, “Unlike previous illustrators, who designed their compositions neatly on the page, Wyeth’s paintings leapt right out of the book, with a vibrancy and power that made you feel the passion and pain of their subjects.”

An assignment from Scribner’s to illustrate a classic novel required production of 17 individual paintings. Fourteen of them, each depicting a scene from the book, would be sprinkled throughout the text. The cover, title page and end page would also feature illustrations. Scribner’s art director, Joseph Chapin, allowed Wyeth carte blanche freedom in choosing scenes.

Lechner observed the subtlety within N.C.’s selections: “Wyeth was very sensitive to the author’s words, and his philosophy was to avoid depicting scenes that the author describes in detail (what was the point?) and instead illuminate smaller moments that are only briefly mentioned, in order to enhance the story. The resulting illustrations are neither trivial nor superfluous but help develop the characters and advance the story.”

Wyeth used canvases for the classics series that were 47 inches tall and 38 inches wide. For final publication, Scribner’s engravers would reduce the size to 6 1/2 inches by 5 1/4 inches. Wyeth was billing Scribner’s approximately $5,000 for a set of paintings around the time the publisher retained him to illustrate Drums.

Wyeth always read the novel he was illustrating. We know he liked Drums because of a letter he wrote to his father, who apparently did not share his enthusiasm. Recognizing his father was accustomed to stories involving the confrontation of a perfect hero with a perfect villain, N.C. asserted that real life was not like that, claiming modern literature, and Drums in particular, provided more realistic, and thus more interesting, portrayals of human nature. The imperfect Johnny Fraser, according to Wyeth, was “like most of us,” a “fundamentally worthy sensitive person,” yet “vacillating and a victim of influence and circumstances.”

His western trip taught Wyeth that the essence of a scene is best captured by exploring the area where the action occurs, so plans were made for him to visit Edenton. Who initiated the trip is unclear, but Boyd — who had previously visited Wyeth in Chadds Ford — did send Wyeth a telegram inviting him to visit Weymouth on his way to Edenton.

Wyeth responded on Dec. 3, 1927. “I have carefully completed the next to last study of Drums and am now prepared to absorb the material I need from you, Little River Country, and Edenton.” Wyeth planned to arrive at Weymouth on Wednesday, presumably Dec. 7.

The next recorded contact between the author and artist took place later in December when Wyeth wrote Boyd from Edenton extending his “warmest thanks to you and Mrs. Boyd for your kindnesses.” He expressed further gratitude to Boyd “for the use of your motor,” and the “careful but not dull driving of Calvin.” Wyeth’s word pictures were nearly as lush as his illustrations. “For the last two hours, lying by the open window, I have listened to the night sounds of this little town and have contrasted those Johnny Fraser heard so often, and by doing so have enjoyed revealments which, for moments of time, become very poignant and moving,” he wrote. “Dimly bulking against the glow of the moon on the water I can see the angular shapes of three warehouses. There they stand as Johnny Fraser saw them! This afternoon was spent wandering in and about these relics of 1770. My heart went out to them, because you, Boyd, have made them live for me.”

Wowed by N.C.’s eloquence, Boyd responds, “It is an injustice of nature that a man who can paint like you should also be able to write like that . . . I might be obliged to ask myself why I am in the business at all.” Boyd is also struck by the fact that Wyeth’s sentiments present a perfect echo of his own. “Two people are seldom so as one on anything in life,” Boyd writes. “And when that thing happens as with us to be a common enterprise, the coincidence is so far-fetched as to excite a wonder in my mystical Scots nature, only exceeded by my hard-headed Scotch-Irish nature that there must be a catch somewhere.”

There is no hint in their correspondence that James Boyd accompanied Wyeth on his coastal wanderings, but a humorous anecdote in the Jan. 10, 1931 Pinehurst Outlook suggests otherwise, claiming that Wyeth was seeking models for two boys in the story, and that he and Boyd toured the Cape Fear area together in search of suitable subjects. “Stopping at a country school near Wilmington, they looked through the windows and saw in a corner two boys who served Mr. Wyeth’s purpose very well. He and the author, to get a closer view, stooped down and looked through the keyhole. ‘Just the type,’ said the artist, and the author agreed. The schoolteacher, unfortunately, overheard the conversation and opened the door to investigate, and both Mr. Boyd and Mr. Wyeth fell in.”

After the new year, Wyeth began work on his Drums illustrations. In addition to the set of 17 paintings, he agreed to render a number of pen drawings for the new edition. On Jan. 5, 1928, he reported to Boyd on his progress or lack of same. “I am not taking easily to this medium for it is years since I have handled it,” he wrote. “Have done about twenty which I destroyed this morning and feel better for it.”

Wyeth’s message expressed agonized frustration concerning his work, startling when coming from the greatest illustrator alive. “How I do yearn for the technical ability to put down in color and pattern the things that are almost tearing my insides out,” he wrote.

The 17 illustrations for Drums included several of high drama like “The Fight at the Foretop” aboard the Bonhomme Richard; “The Horse Race” (which Johnny won); “Johnny’s Defeat at the Dock,” when he was treated roughly in Edenton; and “Captain Tennant,” where the British official cooly confronts the crowd demanding his departure. Others like “The Fraser Family,” depicting young Johnny and his parents riding their old chaise to church; and “The Mother of John Paul Jones” lack drama, but help the reader visualize the characters. The Drums title page illustration includes a pastoral landscape, supposedly portraying the Little River Country, though it actually came from a Chadds Ford area view.

Though their effusive correspondence suggests an exceedingly collegial friendship, there is no record of further dealings between Boyd and Wyeth following the 1928 publication of the Illustrated Classics edition of Drums, which sold exceedingly well. It’s hard to imagine, however, that they didn’t see one another during the Yuletide stay of Wyeth and his wife, Carol, at Southern Pines’ Highland Pines Inn in 1931 (reported by The Outlook on Dec. 19 of that year). There is no mention there or elsewhere, that the Boyds and Wyeths saw one another. By contrast, Boyd’s hobnobs in Southern Pines with other revered men of the arts like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and John Galsworthy were copiously reported. It’s puzzling.

Even if they did not meet during that visit, the two men presumably had further contact because Boyd wound up acquiring three of the 17 canvases Wyeth painted for Drums: the “Title Page” illustration; “The Fraser Family” painting; and “Captain Tennant.” Those canvases are currently on display at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities as part of its Celebration of Drums. This year marks the centennial of the novel’s initial publication. The Wyeth paintings are on loan from the town of Southern Pines, which now owns them.

But what were the circumstances of Boyd’s acquisition of the illustrations? When did he take possession of them? Was it possible he got them from Scribner’s instead of Wyeth? Did Boyd purchase the paintings, or were they a gift?

The earliest mention referencing Boyd’s ownership of the illustrations came from a Dec. 7, 1939 Outlook blurb. It read: “Above the fireplace in the Southern Pines Library are two of the original N.C. Wyeth illustrations used in depicting scenes in Mr. James Boyd’s book, Drums. These interesting illustrations, on display through the courtesy of Mr. Boyd, add much color and charm to the reading room of the library.” (The library was then located on Connecticut Avenue and operated independently by the Southern Pines Library Association.)

Michaelis’ biography makes it clear that Boyd obtained the paintings from Wyeth. During N.C.’s early work for Scribner’s, he was squeamish about speaking up for himself, and the publisher kept most of his paintings. Over time, however, he became more forceful in negotiations with the publisher. By 1920, Scribner’s was returning all of Wyeth’s canvases to the artist. A check of Scribner’s archival records confirmed the company sent the Drums illustrations back to Wyeth.

Whether the artist sold or gifted the illustrations to Boyd is a more complicated issue. The fact that Wyeth had previously sent a picture of one illustration to Boyd “thinking it might interest you,” seemed the sort of thing a seller might say to kick off negotiations. But a scouring of Boyd’s personal papers at the University of North Carolina’s Wilson Library revealed no support for this theory. Carrie Hays, administrative coordinator for the town of Southern Pines, compiled background information concerning the paintings, but nothing relates to how Boyd obtained them from Wyeth.

N.C.’s great-granddaughter, Victoria Wyeth, speaks regularly concerning her legendary family’s legacy. (She was featured in Ray Owen’s October 2018 PineStraw article “America’s First Family of Art.”) While Victoria had no information concerning her great-grandfather’s disposition of the paintings, she graciously put me in touch with folks who did at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford.

The museum includes Wyeth’s studio and holds a treasure trove of his paintings along with records of their provenance. Amanda Burdan, the senior curator of the museum, provided valuable, though not conclusive, insight on the issue. “It is most likely that he (Wyeth) sold those three paintings to (Boyd) directly,” she said. “He did occasionally gift paintings, but it tended to be for special occasions like weddings of friends.” Burdan said that “several of the Drums illustrations stayed with the Wyeth family until well after N.C. died in 1945.”

Burdan and her assistant, Lillian Kinney, took a look at Wyeth’s tax records in hopes they might reveal income from sales of illustrations to third parties. There was some, but the records were inconclusive — another rabbit hole.

Sandy Gernhart is the archivist for the Weymouth Center, which houses many Boyd documents. She found a 2005 Weymouth inventory binder that indicates Wyeth gifted the illustrations to Boyd. According to Gernhart — and prior Weymouth Center historian Dotty Starling — it has through the years been “known” at Weymouth that the illustrations came to Boyd by way of a gift from Wyeth. Both women concede there is no documentation, aside from the non-contemporaneous inventory binder, that backs up this lore.

Nonetheless, the apparent closeness of the two kindred spirits during their time together and the generous hospitality exhibited by the Boyds to Wyeth provide strong circumstantial evidence supporting the likelihood of Wyeth’s tendering such a generous gift.

How did the town of Southern Pines eventually obtain ownership of the illustrations? After World War II, the town constructed a new edifice on Broad Street that would house the library — now the home of the town’s utilities office. Soon thereafter, the library came under the town’s umbrella. A wing was added to the structure in 1948 that was dedicated to the memory of James Boyd, who had passed away in 1944. Katharine Boyd contributed a number of historic artifacts to be displayed in the James Boyd Room, including a desk purportedly used by Lincoln while he was in Congress, an autograph collection, several pieces of early American furniture, and the Wyeth illustrations.

Katharine Boyd’s 1969 will (she died in 1974) mentions nothing about the paintings, so presumably she considered them already donated to the town, perhaps when the James Boyd Room was opened in ’48. But if so, the gift, like other dealings in this account, appears to have been accomplished without written record.

The town is permitting the Weymouth Center to display the illustrations throughout most of 2026. As of now, it’s unclear where Wyeth’s illustrations will be housed once they are returned to the town.

Wherever they wind up, security will be paramount. There is no hiding the fact the canvases are valuable. N.C. Wyeth illustrations frequently sell at six figures. The highest amount paid to date is $5.99 million for his Portrait of a Farmer at a Sotheby’s auction in 2018. Wyeth, who belittled the merits and value of his own illustrations, would undoubtedly be gobsmacked at such stupefying prices.

Wyeth died in 1945, one year after Boyd, at the age of 62. His demise was both tragic and mystifying. While driving near Chadds Ford, Wyeth’s car stopped on the track at a railroad crossing. An onrushing train crashed into his auto, killing him and his 3-year-old grandchild. Why Wyeth was stopped on the track remains an unknown.

While a bit of mystery lingers regarding the Wyeth-Boyd relationship and the three illustrations, there is none concerning Wyeth’s artistic greatness. Though in the grand sweep of time the regard given to the works of Boyd and Wyeth may have traveled in different directions, their association, while brief, made for a memorable collaboration.

Nature’s Nightlife

NATURE'S NIGHTLIFE

Nature's Nightlife

In search of wonders in the dark

Story and Photographs by Todd Pusser

Nara City, nestled within Honshu, the largest of Japan’s four main islands, is renowned for its numerous historic temples and shrines. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city is perhaps most famous for its resident sika deer, a native Asian species that looks like a stouter, more heavily spotted version of North Carolina’s white-tailed deer.

In the Shinto religion, deer are viewed as messengers between mortals and gods. As such, the sika deer of Nara have been considered sacred for centuries and pretty much have the run of the town. They wander the crowded streets (where they always have the right of way) and frequently panhandle for rice crackers in front of local businesses. Tourists flock from all over the world to see and feed them.

Over the years, hungry deer have learned to bow to people, in customary Japanese tradition, in order to receive a cracker. When our family visited the city this past summer, my daughter spent the better part of two days roaming the streets and parks, constantly exchanging bows and crackers with every deer she encountered. My back ached just watching her.

While bowing deer are indeed charming, my primary reason for visiting Nara lay just outside of town, on a thickly canopied mountain slope that overlooked the city. There, in a forest with the rather foreboding name of Mt. Kasuga Primeval Forest, lives a very special squirrel. Not just any run-of-the-mill-backyard-birdfeeder-raiding gray squirrel, mind you, but one of the largest squirrels in the world — the aptly named Japanese giant flying squirrel. At nearly 3 feet long from the tip of its nose to the tip of its fluffy tail, the squirrel is larger than a house cat.

I first learned about Nara’s giant squirrels from my good friend Jon Hall. Jon, who originally hails from the United Kingdom but currently lives and works in New York City, has obsessively traveled the globe for the better part of three decades in search of mammals. During that time, he has managed to see a third of the world’s mammals — over 2,300 species as of August 2025, an unrivaled number — and has established the internet’s premiere mammal-watching website, www.mammalwatching.com. Jon visited Nara several years ago and saw the squirrels firsthand. Before our family trip, he kindly offered a few tips on how to the find them in the forest that overlooks the town.

Strictly nocturnal, the Japanese flying squirrel emerges from its home tree cavity at dusk. Spreading its flying skin (a thin membrane that stretches between its front and hind legs) like a superhero’s cape, the arboreal rodent glides from tree to tree, throughout the nocturnal forest, in search of nuts, fruits and leaves to eat.

It was just after 10 p.m. when my partner, Jessica, and I first found the squirrels. We had spent the better part of the evening hiking up a steep dirt road through the old-growth forest without much to show for our efforts, other than sore legs and some mild dehydration from the humid, summer night air. It was Jessica who first heard their strange vocalizations, which sound remarkably like the guttural calls of American crows, high up in the canopy.

Clueing in to one particular vocal individual, Jessica spotted the squirrel’s distinctive eye shining among the leaves with her flashlight. “Here’s one,” she exclaimed. I rushed to her side with my camera in hand. There, on a branch 20 feet above our heads, munching contently on a mouth full of leaves, sat the largest squirrel I’d ever seen. Though I have seen other types of flying squirrels — like Southern flying squirrels in the backyard of the home where I grew up in Eagle Springs — those diminutive, big-eyed critters paled in comparison to the size of the furry beast staring down at us.

As we watched in amazement, another giant flying squirrel called out from a nearby tree, and then another quickly responded, just down the slope. We were surrounded.

Eager to take a break from our strenuous hiking, we sat down on the dirt road beneath the squirrels and turned off our flashlights. For several minutes we sat in the dark listening to the grunts and growls of the squirrels as they foraged in the trees above. Fireflies flickered on and off along the edge of the road, and a Ural owl hooted in the distance. All was right in the world.

Suddenly, Jessica jumped up and shouted, “What the hell is that!” Startled, I turned on my flashlight, thinking perhaps she had stepped on a mamushi, a local pit viper that closely resembles a cottonmouth, the venomous denizen of Sandhill swamps. “Get it off!” Jessica shouted. Shining my flashlight on her, she pointed down to her leg. “Hurry!” she said.

Scanning the length of her leg, I finally saw it. Just above the sock line, a leech had attached itself to Jessica’s skin and was sucking her blood like a rabid vampire. My flashlight soon revealed four more leeches clustered on the side of her tennis shoe, each searching for a patch of bare skin. The slimy invertebrates evidently found her irresistible and were swarming her like sharks attacking a bleeding fish.

Now frantic and dancing a jig in the middle of the dirt road, Jessica was shaking her leg left-to-right and up-and-down, trying to dislodge the bloodthirsty vermin. It looked like a scene straight out of the movie Stand by Me, and I couldn’t help but chuckle.

That was a mistake.

“Todd, get these damn things off me! Now!” she demanded. I tried to explain that, unlike ticks, leeches don’t carry any known human diseases and are entirely harmless. This factoid failed to impress. And when I insisted on photographing the engorged leech attached to her leg before removing it, Jessica was neither pleased nor amused. The walk down the mountain and back to our hotel was a long one indeed.

The primeval forest had lived up to its name. I held out hope that our little squirrel-watching adventure left no lasting scars on Jessica, physically or emotionally. No doubt it served to reinforce preconceived notions that venturing into the wild at night can be perilous.

As kids, we are taught to fear the dark in countless fairytales. We learn that the night is filled with perils and dangers. For many, the apprehension of the dark is carried all the way into adulthood. It is a primary reason why humans bathe their yards and city streets with bright lights. Perhaps this fear is innate, stemming from a time our distant ancestors roamed the nocturnal landscape when large predators, with better nighttime eyesight, were much more common.

Growing up, I was always curious about what lurked outside our rural Eagle Springs yard when the sun went down. I have fond memories of sitting outside by our pool, under a star-filled sky, listening to the distant hoots of owls and whip-poor-wills. Humid summer nights found me catching backyard fireflies and placing them in Mason jars. On more than one occasion, turning into our yard late in the evening after a school basketball game, the headlights of my parents’ car would reveal an opossum or raccoon skulking along the edge of the woods. Sometimes we would even see a gray fox.

I still venture out after dark, and many of my most memorable wildlife encounters have taken place long after the sun disappeared over the horizon. In Japan this past summer, I watched as the world’s largest owl, the Blakiston’s fish owl, swooped down to catch small fish out of a tiny creek in front of a makeshift blind. In the Yucatan Peninsula, I spotted the eyeshine of large crocodiles hiding among mangroves in a shallow coastal bay. On a hot August night in the Arizona desert, I once found over two dozen rattlesnakes crossing rural blacktop roads under the moon-cast shadows of giant saguaro cacti. Once, off the coast of Costa Rica, a few hundred Eastern spinner dolphins raced over to our ship to play in the bow wave for nearly half an hour under a bright moonlit sky. Bioluminescent phytoplankton in the water caused the dolphins to glow in the dark. The up-and-down beats of their tails in the water, as they raced along with the ship, left spectacular trails of shimmering blue and green light in their wakes. The scene was otherworldly and jaw-dropping.

Today, I have many more high-tech “toys” available to me than I did as a kid to aid in my nocturnal wildlife observations. Camera traps with infrared beams allow me to capture spotted skunks on remote mountain sides or crafty raccoons foraging just outside our kitchen window, without me actually having to be physically there. Ultraviolet flashlights allow me to find caterpillars munching on the leaves of trees and shrubs throughout the nocturnal forest. Many caterpillars fluoresce under ultraviolet light, and shining one of these flashlights into a persimmon tree on a September night will cause them to light up like Christmas tree lights.

Perhaps the biggest gamechanger for locating wildlife at night has been the thermal imaging scope. Primarily used by law enforcement and the military, thermal imaging scopes were once prohibitively expensive. In recent years, these high-tech scopes have come down in price and are now commercially available in many brands. The scope, as the name suggests, picks up the body heat of animals (especially mammals and birds), making it possible to virtually see in the dark. A walk in the woods with a thermal scope after sunset will reveal creatures you never knew were around, everything from tiny golden mice scampering about in trees to deer foraging in a field several hundred yards away.

Having all this tech so easily available can be addictive for the curious naturalist. A case in point is my current enthusiasm for North Carolina sphinx moths, derived after reading a story involving an unusual orchid from Madagascar and two of the godfathers of the Theory of Evolution, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Sphinx moths (or hawkmoths, as they are also named) are spectacular insects with over 1,500 species found around the world. They are well known for hovering in front of flowers like hummingbirds, with many species rivaling the birds in size.

In 1862, Darwin received a spectacular orchid with a foot-long nectar tube from the island of Madagascar. He pondered what type of insect could possibly pollinate so unique a flower. In a letter to his botanist friend Wallace, Darwin exclaimed, “Good heavens, what can suck it!” He went on to speculate that only a moth with an exceptionally long tongue could reach the orchid’s nectar reserve.

Five years later, Wallace predicted such a moth would be similar to a sphinx moth from the nearby African continent that was known to possess a very long tongue. Wallace wrote, “That such a moth exists in Madagascar may safely be predicted, and naturalists who visit the island should search for it with as much confidence as astronomers search for the planet Neptune — and they will be equally successful.”

In 1903, the long-tongued moth was finally found and described, vindicating both Darwin’s and Wallace’s predictions. It was not until 2004 that a BBC film team finally filmed the moth, now called Wallace’s Sphinx Moth, pollinating the orchid for the first time.

Their saga led me straight down a deep rabbit hole. North Carolina has an abundance of native and non-native deep-tubed flowers, and numerous sphinx moths. According to the North Carolina Biodiversity Webpage (www.nc-biodiversity.com), 45 species of sphinx moths have been recorded in the state.

Faster than you can say “What can suck it?”, I ventured out to the closest patch of ginger lilies on a summer night. Ginger lilies, a species native to Asia, possess bright white flowers that open only at night and are incredibly fragrant, making them popular additions to backyard gardens. Their unique blooming strategy suggests the flowers are pollinated by nocturnal insects. With their deep nectar tubes, I reasoned our native sphinx moths would visit them for a sugar rush. Sure enough, my first night sitting out among the lilies in my friend’s yard, I saw numerous rustic sphinx moths hovering in front of the white blooms like nocturnal hummingbirds. I was hooked.

This past summer found me deploying camera traps around many of North Carolina’s native flowers to see what moths visit them at night. Using ultraviolet flashlights, I spent many evenings looking for glowing sphinx moth caterpillars on grapevines and low-growing shrubs. I even sat out in a large tobacco field near my home in Eagle Springs, watching dozens of sphinx moths hover in front of the white flowers under a bright full moon.

Thankfully, there wasn’t a leach in sight.

2025 Feature Nature's Nightlife

Deep Background

DEEP BACKGROUND

Deep Background

Battling the clock for art

By Jim Moriarty

Photographs by Tim Sayer

“I’m officially bionic,” says Derek Hastings. “I have to charge myself once a week.”

In early August Hastings underwent deep brain stimulation (DBS) implantation at Duke Raleigh Hospital. The surgery required placing two electrodes in his brain, attached to wires that run under the skin to a battery roughly the size of a Zippo lighter installed subcutaneously on his chest not far from his heart.

Hastings has Parkinson’s disease, and the surgery is designed, in combination with medication, to minimize his uncontrollable movements (dyskinesia) and tremors.

Halfway through the operation his neurosurgeon brought him out of anesthesia to test whether or not the electrodes were in the right spot. They asked Hastings to extend his arm. His hand shook violently. The surgeon turned on the device and instantly his hand stopped moving. It was like going from Class V rapids to a tidal pool. Pleased with the results, they put him back under and finished the procedure.

Was he nervous before the surgery? Damn right. Who wants someone tap dancing through their skull? But deep brain stimulation was, perhaps, the only way Hastings, at 54, was going to be able to recapture a modicum of what passes for normalcy in a life that was decidedly not normal.

For the last decade and more, you could find Hastings and, as Elliott Gould says in Ocean’s Eleven, “a crew as nuts as you,” pulling all-nighters in a string of warehouses in Southern Pines creating backdrops for The NFL Today show on CBS. With apologies to The Jetsons, covering live sporting events requires something akin to a steamer trunk full of Spacely sprockets and Cogswell cogs. If football is the ultimate team sport, televising it is the ultimate team undertaking. There are directors and audio engineers and replay operators and graphics coordinators and researchers and electrical engineers and camera operators and talking heads and on and on and on.

What Hastings, who’s had a hand in winning three Emmys (two at ABC, one at HBO), and his volunteer crew did was manufacture “feel.” The gritty artwork of their backgrounds gave the pre-game interviews a unifying and distinguishable look achieved because it was done by hand and not by computer. “It was like the glue sprinkled through the show, an aesthetic thread that would kind of tie it together,” says Hastings. “Subconsciously for most people.” It was also more expensive than a graphics app and, in a time when network TV doesn’t reign as supreme as it once did, something of a luxury.

Though “luxury” is hardly the word for the work. The deadline for the finished product was 10 a.m. on Saturday morning. Once Hastings got the subject matter and bullet points from New York, usually on a Wednesday, implementation was up to him. He had a three-day turnaround, soup to nuts. The core group of Moore County helpers included Patrick Phillips, his wife, Jen, Matt Greiner and Karen Snyder. They worked construction, painted sets and backdrops, built a dolly system with — if you can believe it — roller blade wheels, made sunrise runs to Bojangles, helped with bookkeeping, picked up overnighted packages of photos, and pretty much did everything and anything to help a friend out.

“I figured I could come in and help Derek with whatever he might not be able to do physically,” says Patrick Phillips. “If I saw that his alarm was going off for medications, I’d let him know. If he was starting to feel uncomfortable, or get bad, I’d try to make sure he’d eaten. Anything he needed, really. My mentality was, I wanted to give him more longevity.”

Hastings grew up in Miami, the son of two artists who, though divorced, both ended up living in Pinehurst. His father, Lynn Courtlandt Hastings, who passed away in the fall of 2014, was an interior designer, but his printworks are in the collections of both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. His mother, Sandra, who also suffers from Parkinson’s, has won prizes for her ceramics in Arts Council of Moore County competitions at the Campbell House. “I really didn’t have a shot at doing a 9-to-5 banker’s job,” says Hastings.

In something of a misdirection, Hastings went north from south Florida to attend college at Michigan State University, where his major was a smorgasbord of theater, communications, English, film studies and art history. “Which meant unemployment,” he says. While he was at MSU, however, he latched onto half a dozen jobs with ABC as a runner for college football games. Post graduation, he did a stint as a lobbyist’s aide, then moved to L.A. to be an actor.

“I lived in a closet above Arnold Schwarzenegger’s restaurant,” he says, but quickly wound up back in Michigan, out of work and sleeping on a friend’s couch. He reached out to ABC and began going anywhere and everywhere they needed someone. Horse races in Kentucky. Time trials in Indianapolis. The odometer on his leased Mustang recorded miles from Maine to Miami.

“I found out that they had one position in New York that they hired every year from the pool of runners. At the time ABC sports was the global sports leader. They were everywhere. I’m like, I’m going to get that spot,” says Hastings. He did.

Bob Toms, an ABC exec, recognized Hastings’ artistic skills and took him under his wing. Hastings quickly achieved launch velocity. He got his first associate producer contract at 27, bumped up to producer in 1999 when he was honored for design and art direction for the opening graphics of the “Showdown at Sherwood” with David Duval and Tiger Woods, followed by more accolades for work on Super Bowl XXXIV between the St. Louis Rams and Tennessee Titans in 2000. Hastings left ABC to work for Tupelo Honey Productions until the 9/11 terrorist attacks brought its business to a sudden halt, launching him into the freelance world.

Six years later Hastings won another Emmy as a field producer for HBO Sports’ 24/7 Mayweather/De La Hoya. “I spent six weeks in Puerto Rico with Oscar, planning the days, what we were going to shoot,” says Hastings. “That was kind of the pinnacle of me doing that stuff.”

Though Hastings didn’t receive formal credit on ESPN’s award-winning 30 for 30 series production Run Ricky Run, he was instrumental in getting it made. The show’s writer and director, Sean Pamphilon, spent six years shooting the documentary on Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams. Pamphilon and Hastings are something of kindred spirits. “It was like we were rainbow fish who saw each other in this sea of sameness,” says Pamphilon. “He helped me do the sizzle reel for Run Ricky Run. We were both broke. We edited it in a trailer park near Santa Cruz, California. It was like The Odd Couple.”

They put together 20 minutes that was so compelling ESPN was hooked before it finished. Run Ricky Run remains the only one of the series shot in cinema verité. “I don’t get that deal if it’s not for Derek,” says Pamphilon.

After Lynn Hastings moved to Pinehurst from Miami in 1990, Derek was a regular visitor. He met and married Rachael Wirtz, who worked for his father. Now divorced, the couple have two daughters, Reade and Elizabeth. It was his daughters who took Hastings off the road in 2011.

“I told myself I wasn’t going to miss another Christmas with my kids,” says Hastings. “I bought this beat-up car and drove all the way back from California. Ended up living in Anthony Parks’ pool house for about nine months.”

There remained the minor hurdle of making a living in a small Southern town when your day job involved working on location with NFL athletes and franchises in 32 cities across the country. Like the players themselves, Hastings got there via the draft.

“We did stuff for NFL Network that kind of got my friend at CBS interested,” says Hastings. The friend at CBS is Drew Kaliski, who was named the producer of The NFL Today (among many other credits) in 2013. “We did all these backgrounds for the NFL Combine. We called it ‘First Draft.’ It was a series of short features on the top 50 players. We’d create these sets, and the players would come up, and I would direct them.” Kaliski thought Hastings could bring a similar feel to their Sunday show interviews.

Hastings’ link at the NFL Network, where he contributed freelance jobs from 2013-20, was Brian Lockhart, another one-time up–and–comer at ABC, who today is ESPN’s senior vice-president in charge of all original content. “My first time getting a chance to work with Derek was around 1997-98,” Lockhart says. “I would see the things he was doing, and I would be like, how does that guy do that? I remember being on his heels, trying to soak up all the knowledge he had. Derek was the first person in this business who said to me, ‘Man, you could be really good at this. Trust your instincts.’ He was so generous with his feedback and his encouragement. He was an inspiration then and remains an inspiration to this day.”

The first “studio” Hastings cobbled together in Southern Pines was an open space in a storage building. He worked by the headlights of his car. “I had to call AAA like three or four weeks in a row when my car battery died at 3:30 in the morning. Sometimes friends would come by and give me a jump,” says Hastings. “I think we did six or seven weeks in there.”

In the early going Hastings and members of the merry band built the backgrounds, broke them down, drove to the relevant city and put them back together again. Then, one week in season two, it snowed in Green Bay and a flight got canceled.

“I told my boss I thought I could get some camera gear quickly,” says Hastings, who now uses a broadcast-quality Canon C-300 and multiple lenses rented from a place in Cincinnati. “We built a couple of sets on the fly, shot them and got it up to New York, and they loved it.” No more trips to Green Bay, or anyplace else.

While the backgrounds were becoming more complex and the warehouse space more expansive, Hastings’ health was deteriorating. The tremors began nine years ago, and it was five years before his Parkinson’s was diagnosed. If not for the help of his crew, the work of the last few seasons would have been impossible. At the conclusion of last year’s Super Bowl, they shared a Champagne toast.

“This year felt a little different,” says Hastings. “It felt like closing time. We could just kind of see the writing on the wall.” CBS, recently acquired by Paramount Skydance, didn’t renew Hastings’ contract for a 12th season.

His mother’s Parkinson’s has descended into dementia, and Hastings is looking for a care facility for her near where he now lives in Wake Forest. In the meantime, he shuttles to and from Southern Pines to see her and his cohorts.

His brain surgery has no positive effect on the progression of his disease. It’s a quality-of-life issue and a lifeline, he hopes, tethered to the business he’s spent 26 years doing. He’s had the Super Bowl trophy in his hands at least 15 times. He’s had the run of the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, after dark. He brought his disc golf movie, Chains — along with some of the best disc golf players on the planet — to the Sunrise Theater. He was on the goal line at the Super Bowl in 2010, eye to eye with Anthony Hargrove, the subject of the NFL Network piece “Sinner to Saint” that he helped produce, as the defensive end celebrated. “I have so many things to be grateful for. This business has been amazing,” he says.

Field producing was always Hastings’ wheelhouse. “My kids are grown now. I can travel again,” he says. Deep brain stimulation, he hopes, was the boarding pass. The great unknowable is whether his professional connections and resume will be enough to overcome the stark reality of his Parkinson’s.

“I don’t know what’s next. I really don’t,” says Hastings.

“Myself and Derek, you can never count us out,” says Pamphilon. “I hope the surgery gives him the dexterity and the comfort that he needs to be able to do his job at the highest level, not just because of his capacity to earn but because it feeds your soul. When you have the ability to do something you know no one else can do, that will keep you going. That will bring the sun up for you.”

2025 Deep Background Feature

Poem November 2025

POEM

November 2025

Why I Bought the Economy Size

Because she was not pretty,

her overbite designed to rip prey,

canines sharp as javelins, slight

lisp. Because she could stand

to lose a few pounds, and wore

a flowing flora, and a gray cardigan

strained across her chest. Because

she smiled when she talked, her voice

soft as a mother soothing a fussy child;

because she suggested the best bargain

but did not insist, just gently opened

the jar, offered it like a sacrament,

invited me to dip my finger into the cool

face cream, gently imploring, try it;

because I needed moisturizer, and she

needed that job, I bought the large size,

thanked her for the free gift, samples

wrapped in tissue paper and tucked

inside a pink pouch, the color of her dress.

— Pat Riviere-Seel

2025 Feature Poem

A Creative Corner

A CREATIVE CORNER

A Creative Corner

The refurbishing of Lamont Cottage

By Deborah Salomon
Photographs by John Gessner

A house doesn’t have to be a home. It can evolve into an office, a store, a B&B, a museum. In can even be a serene hideaway for Writers in Residence at the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities.

Lamont Cottage, tucked behind the Boyd homestead and shielded by overgrowth, answers to this role. After decades as a rental property, it has been remodeled, adapted, refurbished and furnished in mid-20th century mode plus AC, Wi-Fi, washer/dryer and a patio.

So where’s the giant wall-mounted, stream-fed TV? Nowhere to be found.

Writers are there to write, not watch the Game of the Week. After days of solitary work, midnight confabs with other writers occupying the four bedrooms (two adapted for mobility issues) carries forth a tradition practiced by James Boyd, when Thomas Wolfe, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other literary giants of the 1920s Jazz Age stayed for a spell at Weymouth, the sprawling Boyd estate. According to legend, Wolfe arrived in Southern Pines by train late one summer night, walked up the hill to Weymouth, got in through an open window and crashed on a sofa. Whatever the actual details of his visit, Fitzgerald later felt compelled to send Boyd a letter of apology.

Katharine Lamont, barely out of her teens and from an equally wealthy/sporty clan, fell in love with James and built the cottage (originally called The Gatehouse because of its location) for herself, living there until their marriage in 1917. The couple occupied the cottage again in 1922 during the construction of the current Boyd house, and Katharine served as her husband’s secretary/acolyte while he wrote Drums, a hefty volume published in 1925 and touted in its day as the best historical novel of the Revolutionary War. Katharine lived in the cottage one more time, moving back after James’ death, at 50, in 1944.

The literary coterie that flourished in and around Weymouth added glitter to Moore County’s reputation for mild winters, golf and horses. Its artistic dimension was greatly enhanced in 1979 when Sam Ragan, N.C. poet laureate, editor and publisher of The Pilot, and Weymouth board president, instituted the Writers in Residence program. Published North Carolina authors were invited to stay in the house for one or two weeks to work on their projects. Writers had to reside in N.C. or have strong ties to the state.

As vast and charming as the Boyd house is, navigating its stairways presented an accessibility problem. A solution came from the writers themselves, says Glenda Kirby, current board chairman. Why not renovate Lamont Cottage? The possibility was discussed but derailed by COVID.

Tabled but not forgotten. When the subject was broached again in 2024 the entire board agreed. “It was part of our mission,” says Kirby. Funds came from donations and other sources, and the project came in under budget.

The ground floor now has three bedrooms, one accessibility-friendly, with a ramp at the front entrance. Adjustments were made without harming handsome woodwork, heavy paneled doors, moldings, baseboards, mantelpiece and native knotty pine floors that were newly refinished.

Each of the four bedrooms bears the name of a female N.C. Literary Hall of Fame author. A terrace and several porches invite socializing on cool evenings.

Except for the pale yellow kitchen, walls throughout share a soft, calming green. “I selected it to create a sense of serenity,” says Kathryn Talton, one of the muses responsible for planning the cottage renovation, along with Kirby, Katrina Denza, Pat Riviere-Seel and a committee of dedicated volunteers.

Furnishing the house was a challenge, even for a muse. Word got round and donations trickled in, some from the recent renovation of the Carolina hotel lobby do-over. Volunteers scavenged through used furniture outlets in search of hidden gems. Wing chairs were reupholstered. A butter-soft leather settee speaks to a quality lifestyle, as does an enormous sleigh bed and side table/nightstands, some dainty, one with a thick, dark marble top. Quilts are made from flat, small-print fabric, nothing puffy. Donated lamps cop the blue ribbon, especially a classic “trumpet” and a stocky part-porcelain Chinese specimen, one of several nods to Asian décor. The art is spectacular, from landscapes to prints and portraits. Writing niches, some looking out over treetops, have office-friendly tables to accommodate a laptop and source materials.

In Katharine Boyd’s time, kitchens leaned utilitarian. Here, the muses part ways, opting for black appliances (including a dishwasher and oversized fridge), a smooth-top electric stove and a pantry divided into four so each guest can stash his or her coffee and cereal. Pots, dishes, cutlery, of course, for DIY meals. Chatelaines of Katharine Lamont Boyd’s echelon didn’t use sporks and paper plates.

The word “cottage” underestimates this 2,000-plus-square-foot showplace, especially when it comes to its tall, multipaned windows in the sitting room, the shimmering sunlight revealing wavy original glass. No ghosts have as yet been spotted, but writers might watch for a slender lady with big round eyeglasses peering through the wavy panes watching over authors plying their craft.

“Sometimes you can feel Katharine’s presence here,” Riviere-Seel says. “She’s a good spirit.”

2025 A Creative Corner Feature

Magical History Tour

MAGICAL HISTORY TOUR

Magical History Tour

Scavenger Hunt

Photographs by John Gessner & Ted Fitzgerald

How to Play

1. If this scavenger hunt does nothing more than encourage an exploration of the fascinating history of the Sandhills, we’ll consider it a success. You’ll find yourself trekking across the county, though probably not in need of a survival kit — maybe a full tank of gas. Not many of the destinations are one-offs, so may we suggest a bit of pre-planning to avoid a lot of to-ing and fro-ing? It’s the age of GPS, so you’re going to have to work awfully hard to get lost.

2. Note to selfie. We’ll not require you to pose in front of anything specific at these locales. Use your best judgment. Don’t do anything dangerous or illegal. (That’s our official disclaimer.) All we ask is that we can identify you and the place in question. It’s perfectly all right if you want to have your trusty companion take the picture for you. After you’ve documented each stop on the tour upload your photo to our gallery at www.pinestrawmag.com/scavenger. The last chance to submit is midnight Oct. 31.

3. Hail to the victors! If you visit all 14 we’ll salute your accomplishment in PineStraw. Your name will be added to an honor roll that will, undoubtedly, be passed down from generation to generation. Bonfires will be built. Poems will be written. Songs will be sung. There might even be swag. And if you don’t manage them all — or even any of them — but enjoy exploring and learning a little bit along the way, you’ll be a winner in our book.

Thanks for playing!

Bethesda Cemetery

The Old Bethesda Presbyterian Church on Bethesda Road in Aberdeen was founded in 1788 by Highland Scots. The Gothic Revival building, used today mostly for weddings and other special events, was built in 1860 and dedicated in 1862. The congregation, having outgrown Old Bethesda long ago, still meets there once a year in a “homecoming” service on the last Sunday in September. During the Civil War, Sherman’s army camped on the church grounds during its march through North Carolina. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Adjacent to the church is the Bethesda Cemetery, in continual use since the early 1700s. Some of the important historical figures buried there include Aberdeen’s founder, Allison Francis Page (1824-1899), known as the Lumber King, who established the town after buying 14,000 acres of Moore County timberland. The cemetery also contains the tomb of Walter Hines Page (1855-1918), whose journalism career included staff positions at the New York Evening Post and the Atlantic Monthly. He became a partner in Doubleday, Page & Co. publishing a long list of world-class authors, including Rudyard Kipling. During World War I Page was appointed U.S. ambassador to Great Britain by President Woodrow Wilson. Pay your respects.

Our Donald

You can drape your arm around the shoulders of the most prolific golf course architect of the game’s “Golden Age” and grab a sandwich at the same time in the middle of the village of Pinehurst. Raise your hand if you’ve heard all this before: Donald Ross was born in Dornoch, Scotland, in 1872. Encouraged by Harvard astronomy professor Robert W. Willson, he took a job at Oakley Country Club in Massachusetts. In 1900 he was hired by James Walker Tufts to be Pinehurst’s golf professional, where he began his architecture career. Ross is credited with designing over 400 courses. A fine player, he finished eighth in the 1910 British Open and competed in the U.S. Open seven times. His brother Alexander, “Alex,” won the U.S. Open in 1907 at the Philadelphia Cricket Club. The life-sized version of the Ross statue, sculpted by Gretta Bader, is behind the 18th green of his world-renowned No. 2 course, the site of four U.S. Opens with more to come.

Pine Knoll

The majestic Pine Needles Golf Hotel, five stories high with its distinctive Jacobean-Tudor architecture, opened in 1928 and, for an all too brief time, was the “in” place to stay in the Sandhills. The hotel rises behind what was originally the first hole (now the second) of the Donald Ross-designed golf course. The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression forced it to close. Beginning in early 1942, the Army Air Force Technical Training Command was headquartered there. After World War II the hotel was sold to the Catholic Diocese of North Carolina and reopened in 1948 as the St. Joseph of the Pines Hospital. In 1953 Warren and Peggy Kirk Bell, along with their partners Julius Boros and Frank and Masie Cosgrove, bought the golf course. The old hotel now has 86 independent living apartments owned by St. Joseph of the Pines.

SCC Gardens

There’s something in bloom every month of the year at the Horticultural Gardens at Sandhills Community College. Regardless of the season, the grounds are a cornucopia of statuary art among its flowering trees and plants. Kim, created by Gary Price, is a statue of a boy holding a bird. He also did Circle of Peace, pictured below. Sleep is an imposing head of carved stone in the Japanese Garden. Sara is a girl with a watering can in the Hackley Garden, also by Gary Price. Ciao Bella, by Mike Roig, depicts a Japanese maple. The Dog Ate My Homework, created by Randolph Rose, is a bronze of a girl and a dog on a bench in the Hoad Children’s Garden. Eric Bruton’s Red Oak is in the Conifer Garden. Karen, another piece by Gary Price, is a statue of a girl stepping toward a creek outside the Succulent Garden. And Dragon Tail is a stainless steel tail rising out of the ground with a mobile of the moon and stars dangling from it, on display in the Conifer Garden.

Tufts Archives

The Tufts Archives, housed in the back room of the Given Memorial Library on the Village Green, is at its core Pinehurst’s history museum. The archives has a complete and unparalleled collection of artifacts, documents and images from the time when the village was nothing more than barren land, through its extraordinary rise to become one of America’s premier golf destinations. On display are items from the Tufts silverplate collection and the American Soda Fountain Company, the source of founder James Walker Tufts’ wealth. You can view china that was in use at the Holly Inn in 1895; holiday menus from the Carolina Hotel; hand-colored postcards, posters and other ephemera; a playing card shot-through by Annie Oakley; dozens of the more than 150,000 historic images (many taken by John G. Hemmer); hundreds of original golf course drawings created by Donald Ross himself in addition to pin flags from many of the courses Ross designed; and thousands of cataloged historic documents. The archives holds the world’s largest collection of Ross memorabilia.

Center of Pinehurst

Hidden on a brick path in a garden area adjacent to the Village Green in Pinehurst is a plaque affixed to a large rock near a bronze sculpture of two children on a bench reading. The plaque commemorates the spot where, in June 1895, James Walker Tufts drove a stake into the ground to mark the center of the new community he was going to build on the 5,800 acres of land he was accumulating in parcels at the cost of roughly $1 per acre. Letters from Tufts written just a few weeks later mention the plans for the village drawn from topographical maps by the New York firm of Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, so it seems likely that in marking the spot he was following the design of the famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose vision would be executed by Warren H. Manning, an employee of the firm. Manning would later consult on projects for the Rockefeller family in Westchester, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island. He was a driving force in the formation of the American Society for Landscape Architecture.

Poplar Street Entrance

Near the intersection of Fourth and Poplar streets in Aberdeen, a cement gateway of terra-cotta tile and cement marks the entrance that never was. The “Spanish” structures are all that remain of Montevideo Park, the development envisioned and designed by Harry A. Lewis, J.J. Stroud and W.D. Shannon in the 1920s and ultimately doomed by the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. The 530-acre project, written about extensively in a 1927 February edition of The Pilot, was to have a four-story Spanish Colonial-style hotel with a tiled roof and 227 guest rooms, a dining room that could seat 1,000, a sunken garden, tennis and croquet courts, a grill room in the basement that included an artificial ice rink that could double as a dance floor (what could go wrong?), riding stables, a golf course designed by Donald Ross’ right-hand man, Frank Maples, 12 miles of streets, private dwellings, a boat club with access to Aberdeen Lake, and gondolas on Aberdeen Creek.

Aberdeen and Rockfish

Aberdeen is your basic two-caboose town. Both are artifacts of the Aberdeen and Rockfish Railroad. Caboose No. 309 is outside the old Aberdeen train station that houses a museum, while caboose No. 303, for display only, is adjacent to the present day Aberdeen and Rockfish offices, a short line railroad that continues to run freight to Fayetteville. The railroad was built in 1892 by John Blue to get timber and turpentine products to market. In the next 10 years a number of lines were extended and/or abandoned as need be. Passenger service ended in 1949. The Union Station Railroad Museum, open by appointment only, contains artifacts and memorabilia. Built around 1900, the station — listed on the National Register of Historic Places — was designed by T.B. Creel and features Victorian architecture. Caboose No. 309 is renovated and sits on the tracks nearby.

Shaw House

Be honest, you drive by it all the time. Well, it’s time to stop in. The Shaw House is located on its original foundation at the intersection of Morganton Road and what was Pee Dee Road on the edge of Southern Pines. The Pee Dee Road was an ancient Indian trail running south to Cheraw, South Carolina, while Morganton Road provided access to the market town of Fayetteville and the Cape Fear River. Charles C. Shaw, a first-generation Scottish settler, acquired 2,500 acres and built the house around 1820. The date of 1842 on the chimney is thought to have been the year that the front porch and the two attached guest rooms were added. A kitchen was built sometime in the 1920s. One of Charles Shaw’s 12 children, Charles Washington Shaw, inherited the property and became the first mayor of Southern Pines in 1887. The house remained in the Shaw family until it was acquired in 1946 by the newly formed Moore County Historical Association in an effort to ensure its preservation. The house is far more modest than seacoast plantations, its simplicity characteristic of the Scottish families who settled the area. The interior features simple pine furniture, a pair of hand-carved fireplace mantels and early examples of Moore County pottery.

Bellview School

According to a National Park Service registration form dated 1997, the Bellview School, a one-room schoolhouse on the grounds of the Moore County Schools Central Office in Carthage, was in all likelihood one of the 15 Rosenwald schoolhouses built in Moore County between 1918 and 1924. Rosenwald schools, named for the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, helped fund schools for Black children in the Jim Crow South. Roughly 5,000 Rosenwald schools were built throughout the South in the early 20th century, benefiting over 600,000 students. According to the Park Service form, while the building lacks a number of architectural characteristics common to Rosenwald schools, it is believed to have been the Tory Hill School, a one-teacher schoolhouse built in 1920 east of Robbins. The building was restored and moved to the Moore County Schools Administration grounds in 1974.

Buggy Mural

Painted by Chapel Hill artist Scott Nurkin, the mural in downtown Carthage celebrates the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company. The business, founded in 1850 as a wheelwright shop, was purchased in 1856 by Thomas B. Tyson and Alexander Kelly, the county sheriff. William T. Jones, a freed man, was a talented buggy painter who joined the company in 1857 and quickly became a partner. Born into slavery, Jones was the son of an enslaved woman and her white owner. With the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 the buggy company ceased operation, and Jones was among the many who enlisted in the Confederate Army. He was captured and imprisoned. Using food scraps, Jones began making moonshine for his Union guards. At the end of the war he returned to Carthage substantially wealthier than when he left it. Jones used the money to reinvigorate the buggy company, eventually buying out Kelly. At its height the company employed 100 people and was turning out 3,000 buggies a year. Tyson died in 1893 and Jones in 1910. Tyson’s grandson, Thomas B. Tyson II, ran the business until his death in 1924. Legend has it that Henry Ford visited Carthage, proposing that they use their assembly line to install engines in his new vehicles. The company took a pass. The last buggy was delivered in 1929.

The House in the Horseshoe

Built in 1772 by Philip Alston, the House in the Horseshoe in Glendon was the site of the 1781 battle between British loyalists under the command of David Fanning and patriot militia, called Whigs, headed by Alston. The revolutionaries, camped at the home, were attacked by Fanning’s Tories in retaliation for the grisly murder of Kenneth Black. During the skirmish, Fanning’s forces attempted to set the house on fire by rolling a cart filled with burning straw against it. Alston’s wife, Temperance, emerged with a flag of truce, and her husband was taken prisoner. There was a darker side to Alston. In December 1785 testimony was presented to the state assembly that Alston had murdered one Thomas Taylor. As Taylor had been a Tory and Alston was commanding a corps of militia in the service of the state at the time of Taylor’s death, the committee thought he should not be tried and instead was pardoned by Gov. Richard Caswell. Later, a deep-seated enmity would develop between Alston and George Glascock, a first cousin of George Washington. In 1787 Glascock was murdered, and evidence suggested Alston had ordered an enslaved person, Dave, to commit the crime. Alston was imprisoned for his part in the murder. In 1798, the home was sold to Benjamin Williams, who would become governor of North Carolina from 1799 to 1802 and again in 1807–1808.

Dewberry Cafe

Once you’re ruled the dewberry universe, what worlds remain to be conquered? The dewberry, as we’ve come to learn, is a somewhat larger and sweeter kissin’ cousin of the blackberry. For reasons unknown to us, it seems to thrive in our sandy soil. The Lucretia dewberry was introduced to Moore County in 1892, and by the early 1900s farmers were bringing crates of them into Cameron for auction and then transport north to Philadelphia or New York and west to Chicago or St. Louis. From 1910-20 somewhere in the ballpark of 60,000 to 90,000 crates of dewberries were shipped annually from Cameron, earning it the designation of “Dewberry Capital of the World” — with all the rights and privileges attached thereunto. One of the privileges is using the name on a little café housed in the downstairs of the Old Hardware Vintage Depot on Carthage Street. You’ll find an old-fashioned soda fountain with stools and a vintage (please don’t touch) jukebox loaded with 45s.

Astronaut Mural

Robbins native Capt. Charles E. Brady Jr., M.D. (1951-2006), flew aboard the shuttle Columbia in 1996 on a 16-day science mission. During that flight, he was one of the first operators of the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment allowing astronauts to talk with ham radio operators around the world. While with NASA, Brady was chief of space station astronaut training before leaving to return to Navy duty. A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the Duke University medical school, Brady was a sports medicine specialist before joining the Navy in 1986 and becoming a flight surgeon. His assignments as a medical officer included duty aboard the aircraft carrier Ranger and serving as flight surgeon for the Blue Angels. In 1998, he had an asteroid named in his honor, officially called Minor Planet (7691) Brady. The mural in Robbins was painted by Elizabethtown’s Hunt Cole and restored in 2016 by Scott Nurkin.

2025 Feature Magical History Tour

Marooned by the NFL

MAROONED BY THE NFL

Marooned by the NFL

The Champions from Coal Country

by Ron Johnson

In the sweltering late summer of any given year, frenzied and potentially delusional NFL fans wake up thinking this might just be their year. Inside the generally hospitable confines of establishments like Jimmy’s Famous Seafood in Baltimore, Chickie’s and Pete’s in Philly and Bobby Hebert’s Cajun Cannon just outside New Orleans, you might even hear someone yell, “Super Bowl!” The story lines and scenarios spun by NFL fans are too numerous, and often too ludicrous, to follow.

In 1925, however, not a single hewer, pitman or digger in the rugged coal country of southeastern Pennsylvania was delirious enough to believe the Pottsville Maroons, just months out of a semi-pro B-League, would play well enough to win the National Football League Championship. But that’s exactly what they did.

The Maroons officially entered the National Football League in September of that year when Dr. John “Doc” Striegel, a local surgeon thought to be a bit on the eccentric side, paid a $500 franchise fee and a $1200 cash guarantee on behalf of the upstart crew from Pennsylvania’s hard coal country to join the league of 20 teams.

The Maroons were on something of a hot streak, having won the title the previous year in the Anthracite League. As if you couldn’t guess from the name, it was essentially a coal miner’s alliance, and the Maroons captured the 1924 title in their one and only year as members.

From 1920-23, even before competing in the Anthracite League, they had been an independent franchise called the Pottsville Eleven. Pottsville was something more than a wide spot in the road, but not much more. It was a town of roughly 20,000 people, many of whom were involved in coal mining after a significant coal seam was discovered there in 1790. King Charles II granted the land that would become Pottsville to William Penn. The town was named after John Pott, who had an anthracite forge there in 1795. Later, in 1829, D.G. Yuengling opened what many people consider to be the oldest brewery in the United States, in Pottsville. So, when you are hoisting a Yuengling Lager on game day, the can or bottle you are drinking from will still list “Pottsville, PA” as the city of origin. And while anthracite coal fell out of favor after World War II, Yuengling is still the beer that makes Pottsville semi-famous.

Modern Pottsville is not an unpleasant place — even charming in an old-school kind of way. Like many aging coal mining towns, there are signs of decline, but Pottsville still has a busy main street with businesses, retail stores and small hoagie shops churning out cheesesteaks, “wit or wittout.” There is little crime. Families thrive. The Yuengling Brewery sits on the side of a hill and continues to be one of the little city’s focal points. And, posted right in the middle of the central business district, is a historical marker that tells the story of the beloved Maroons of the National Football League.

The Maroons got their name in 1924 when Doc Striegel asked Joe Zacko, a local sporting goods store owner, to supply 24 uniforms to upgrade the team’s look. When the order form asked what color he wanted the suits to be, the box was not populated. So, when the outfits arrived in maroon, the team had its name. No Miners, Rocks, Mountaineers, Brewers or anything else — they were the Pottsville Maroons.

Coming off the 1924 Anthracite League Championship, Dick Rauch, the player/coach, knew he had a diverse mixture of skilled players and rugged brawlers on his squad — a combination of good college performers and tough coal miners. But were they good enough to compete at the top tier of football? After all, this was the NFL, even if it was an embryonic NFL.

Many of the Maroon players were locals themselves and typically had second jobs. Some pushed heavy coal carts, others were surveyors or land men for coal companies. Some had professional careers in engineering and dentistry.

Coach Rauch was no joke. Besides being a football player and coach, the Penn State graduate was a noted ornithologist, an electrician, a steelworker and a graduate engineer. He spent his off seasons studying the nesting habits of various birds. He was an accomplished poet and later explored the Antarctic for the U.S. government, studying our frozen feathered friends at the bottom of the world. On the gridiron, he was the first professional football coach to institute daily practices and is credited with inventing the screen pass.

In the early days of the NFL, the building of a team roster was an informal process. Players were often selected from a pool of free agents, mostly on a regional basis, and from colleges close to the team’s base of operation. The wealthier teams could cast a somewhat wider net. There was no formal way of procuring players until 1936, when Philadelphia Eagles owner Bert Bell suggested, and the league unanimously accepted, a method that would become the NFL draft.

In the league’s inaugural draft, the University of Chicago’s Jay Berwanger, the Heisman Trophy winner, was the first pick, chosen by Bell’s Eagles. Instead of playing for Philadelphia, Berwanger opted out, choosing a more stable and safer career — he became a foam rubber salesman.

In their initial NFL season, the Maroons suited up Tony Latone, nicknamed the “Human Howitzer,” a bona fide star of the era. The Chicago Bears’ Red Grange, the “Galloping Ghost,” said of Latone, “For my money, he was the most football player I have ever seen.”

Latone, a player of Lithuanian descent, did not attend college and had worked in the nearby Pennsylvania coal mines beginning at age 11. He later said he was paid $125 for daytime games and $75 for night games, more than he made hauling coal by the ton. Many people regarded him as the most productive rusher during the decade of the ’20s. Bears owner George Halas once commented, “If Latone had gone to college and played college ball, he would certainly have been one of the greatest pro players of all time.”

Charlie Berry, an All-American at Lafayette College, an hour’s drive from Pottsville, played end for the Maroons and led the league in scoring on his way to being named All-Pro. Berry also caught for three major league baseball teams and was an umpire in Major League Baseball’s American League, as well as a head linesman in the NFL for more than 20 years, officiating 12 NFL championship games. In Major League Baseball, he umpired five complete World Series and five All Star Games. In fact, Berry umpired the World Series, officiated an NFL game and worked the College All-Star Game (a long defunct exhibition between college stars and the NFL champions), all in one year. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1980.

Walter French, a West Point grad who had a .303 lifetime batting average with Connie Mack’s world champion Philadelphia Athletics, was a late addition to the backfield for the Maroons and averaged 5.4 yards per carry during the 1925 season. Because of his mobility, French was the perfect complement for the bone-breaking Latone. After his dual careers in football and baseball were over in 1936, French returned to the U.S. Military Academy to coach baseball from 1937-1942. He was a Reserve officer in the Army and after World War II went on active duty with the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

It was clear Rauch had more than a random band of misfits.

The Maroons were covered by the Pottsville Republican’s young reporter John Henry O’Hara, who would become a star in his own right, later joining the staff of The New Yorker and writing Butterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarra. When they took the field in Minersville Park, a 5,000-seat facility comparable to a modern-day high school stadium, most fans expected their spirited entrance — fueled by the brass of the local high school band — would be the only highlight of their NFL debut. They opened with what was essentially an exhibition game against a team from a Philly suburban neighborhood, Colwin-Darby, and won it, 48-0.

A week later, the time came for the NFL schedule to start, and there was a noticeable buzz about town. Maroons games were suddenly big events, and as one local put it, “They had taken on the significance of a heavyweight fight.” It was not unusual for Pottsville to draw 10,000 ecstatic fans, half the town’s population and double the capacity of Minersville Park.

The Maroons started their NFL slate with a resounding 28-0 victory over Buffalo, before dropping a sloppy and uninspired 6-0 decision to Providence in their second outing. It was not lost on coach Rauch that the team was one-dimensional and predictable. After adding the elusive French to the roster, Pottsville then shut out its next four opponents. They went into the game with the Frankford Yellow Jackets (forerunners to the Philadelphia Eagles) with a strong 5-1 record but lost ignobly to their natural rival from 100 miles south, 20-0. Rauch rallied his troops and the Maroons won their next seven games, including a 31-0 victory over Curley Lambeau’s legendary Green Bay Packers. During that run, they stunned the Yellow Jackets in a rematch, 49-0.

When the regular season ended, the teams with the two best records had not crossed paths. Realizing money had been left on the table, the arrogant and over-confident Chicago Cardinals challenged the Maroons to a season finale, which was immediately billed by the media as the league championship game. The Cardinals never dreamed they could lose. A throng of fans from eastern Pennsylvania accompanied the team to Chicago while others watched the progress on cardboard cut-outs parading across the stage in a Pottsville theater. The Chicago Tribune wrote, “In the face of a driving attack by the Eastern eleven, the Cardinals curled up and were smeared in the snow on the gridiron of Comiskey Park yesterday, 21-7.” The Maroons got off the train in Pottsville and were greeted by a large contingent of celebrating fans. The impossible had happened, and some members of the league apparently didn’t take it well.

As the coal dust cleared, Pottsville finished the league season 10-2-0, the NFL’s best record. As they celebrated their championship with two meaningless exhibition games to end the season (both of which they won), the word got around Pottsville that something was brewing — not at Yuengling but in the dusty NFL offices in Columbus, Ohio.

Playing with the Best author Lenny Wagner writes, “In November of 1925, after the game the Maroons had lost to the Frankford Yellow Jackets, a Philadelphia promoter by the name of Frank Schumann approached the teams proposing that the top NFL team play a post-season exhibition game against the Notre Dame All-Stars, which were led by the famous backfield known as the Four Horsemen. Presumably, the game would be played in Philadelphia. Both owners signed on for the game. Sheppard H. Royle, president of the Frankford franchise, assuming that the team to play Notre Dame would be his Yellow Jackets, never raised the issue of territory, or anything else. However, on November 29th, the Maroons turned the tables on Frankfort, pummeling them 49-0. After the Maroons beat the Cardinals the following week, in a post-season game arranged by the Chicago team, by a score of 21-7, they were declared the NFL champions and were in line to play Notre Dame at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. It was at that point that Royle made a protest to the league, which was backed by then-commissioner Joe Carr, and the other owners.”

What would happen following the Notre Dame game would be devastating to the Maroons and their faithful. The All-Stars comprised the bulk of Norwegian-born coach Knute Rockne’s unbeaten ’24 team famously nicknamed the “Four Horsemen and the Seven Mules,” considered by some to be the greatest college team ever assembled. The game was to be played at Shibe Park, later named Connie Mack Stadium, home of the Phillies and Athletics, and the birthplace of Philly’s legendary penchant for booing.

But there were few boos on that day. The exhibition was expected to draw a large crowd of more than 10,000, which it did. The Maroons won the game 9-6, behind former Penn State fullback, Barney Wentz, and an opportunistic defense. Charlie Berry kicked a field goal to give the Maroons a lead they never relinquished. The victory, along with exhibition wins over Colwyn-Darby and the Atlantic City Roses, made the Maroons overall season record 13-2-0.

Things came apart rather quickly after the Notre Dame game when the commissioner of the league, Joe Carr, a former sportswriter who some later called “the Father of Professional Football,” ruled that Pottsville had never gotten permission to play the game in Philly and was infringing on Frankford’s territorial rights, essentially playing an unauthorized exhibition game, even though there was no clear prohibition in any franchise agreement. Carr not only stripped away the NFL title and awarded it to the Chicago Cardinals, but also suspended the Maroons from the league entirely and fined them $500. In any event, the Chicago-St. Louis-Arizona Cardinals have the trophy in their case. And no number of protests, political maneuvers or prods have been able to pry it loose.

Some people believe the Cardinals — the oldest team in professional football, founded in 1898 — to this day carry a curse related to their stolen championship, but there are lots of takes on the subject.

“It’s just not right,” said Steelers owner Dan Rooney. “When you are talking about the birthplace of professional football, you are talking about Pennsylvania, you’re talking about the Maroons.”

Red Grange, one of the greatest players of all time, said, “The Pottsville Maroons were the most ferocious and respected players I ever faced. You know, I always thought the Maroons won the NFL championship in 1925. They were robbed.” He promoted the Maroon’s championship throughout his life.

The Maroons never got their day in court, much less a judgment in their favor. And the court of public opinion in a small coal mining town didn’t matter all that much to the elitist big city power brokers of the NFL.

Despite their championship run in 1925, and a respectable 1926 season, the Maroons never again amounted to much. Players moved on, and opposing teams got stronger. They relocated to Boston in 1929 and became the Boston Bulldogs before Depression-related financial pressure forced them out of business at the end of that season. In Boston, they played their games at Braves Field, where Warren Spahn started his career and Babe Ruth ended his. The Boston Bulldogs were the first of several franchises that attempted to set up shop in Boston, without success. Not until the Boston/New England Patriots pitched their tent in 1960 did a professional football team establish itself in New England.

According to his great niece, the Maroons’ colorful owner, Doc Striegel, died in 1969 in the bar of the Flamingo Hotel in Philadelphia, on his feet, pouring himself a drink. He was one day shy of his 84th birthday. Minersville Park is long gone with the King’s Village Shopping Center sitting on its former site along Route 901.

In 1925, the NFL was ruled by a czar in a small office in Ohio, influenced by powerful team owners. There was no way a bunch of coal miners from Pottsville was going to put an NFL Championship trophy in their building, if they even had a building.

The Maroons’ title was lost on a shaky technicality in what would become the biggest and most powerful league in one of the most popular sports on the planet. There were no controversial plays. No clandestine activities. No deflated balls. No ineligible players. It was more about money, greed and elitism.

The NFL may have given the trophy to Chicago — and the cursed and hapless Cardinals will likely never give it up — but as far as the city of Pottsville is concerned, the Maroons are still champions. Their beloved team won the 1925 NFL Championship on the field by virtue of having the best record in the National Football League. That much cannot be disputed and can never be taken away.

2025 Feature Marooned by the NFL

Age Has its Privileges

AGE HAS ITS PRIVELEGES

Age Has its Privileges

A surprise around every corner

By Deborah Salomon
Photographs by John Gessner

Looks can be deceiving: The white cottage set back from a street bordering Pinehurst village appears well-maintained but of modest size, featuring two bay windows but few exterior bells and whistles. Open the front door, though, and wow. To the left, parlor No. 1, with startling pewter-brownish walls, stark white woodwork and a sofa strewn with pillows in an abstract yellow print. To the right, parlor No. 2, morphed into an overflow bedroom. At 2,350 square feet, small this cottage is not.

Knotty pine original and reclaimed floorboards, randomly laid, brilliantly polished, add character and continuity throughout. Admire the carved mantels, heavy paneled doors and the 9-foot ceilings. There’s even a basement and an unfinished attic.

Built in 1896 by the Tufts family — simultaneously with the Carolina Hotel and Holly Inn — and enlarged tenderly through the years, it was one of a dozen homes intended for purchase or as long-term rentals. At various times it has been christened Eureka and Juniper.

Let’s just call it a cottage with benefits, a dwelling that has aged like a fine cabernet.

Its current owners fit the mold of New Age Pinehurst retirees — youngish, athletic, well-traveled, sociable, adventurous, rushing home from pickleball to meet friends in the village for supper, maybe a concert.

Matt and Pat Ryan — he an attorney, she a nurse advocate — have at various stages lived in a five-story 1864 row house in Baltimore’s Old Town and in a New Jersey Tudor, with a winter getaway in Key West on the side.

With their two sons grown and retirement looming, they sought a primary residence somewhere reasonably warm and certainly fun, preferably a turnkey property needing only cosmetic work. Matt was traveling south on Amtrak in the early 2020s. He had played golf in Pinehurst but wasn’t familiar with its environs, or its possibilities. The train was delayed, so he looked around.

“I called Pat, said we should look here and asked her to fly down,” he says. They contacted a Realtor. When nothing in Southern Pines clicked they moved on to Pinehurst.

“Then this house pops up,’’ Pat recalls. “I fell in love with the location, with the magnolias. When I walked in I could feel the energy, the vibes.”

They purchased the cottage in May 2021. There was only one problem: It required a total update. Walls were moved, rooms repurposed. This wasn’t Pat’s first rodeo. Confidence and a good contractor make a difference. The project took about a year.

The new floor plan hops, skips and jumps in a delightful fashion, with areas connected by tiny corridors. Somehow they left intact three sunny alcoves for chatting with guests over coffee or something more exotic. One alcove, beside the stark black and white kitchen, is wallpapered in a deep maroon, densely patterned paper coordinating with an L-shaped upholstered settee, vaguely Eastern European, which hugs the wall. That stark black and white kitchen is softened by an exposed weathered brick chimney that adds contrast to the enormous Wolff gas range.

Nearby, a breezy pastel sunroom has a daybed for overflow. On the patio, in addition to the grill, stands a Carolina Cooker: a self-heating iron cauldron filled with boiling liquid where, Pat says, guests toss in crab legs, lobster, corn — all manner of edibles — then whack them open with heavy utensils when they’re done. Less dramatic entrees are served at a polished dining room table with matching chairs and china cabinet reminiscent of Sunday dinner circa-1950s.

Furnishings and art are derived from the couple’s previous residences. The word “eclectic” is insufficient to describe a décor where nothing quite matches but everything works together. “My purpose was to preserve and re-gentrify,” Pat says. To that, add a surprise around every corner.

Pat may be finished for now, but she’s already daydreaming about a staircase to the attic to accommodate younger family members. And there’s still plenty to do in the gardens.

But first let’s walk over to that new bistro in the village . . .

2025 Age Has its Privileges Feature

The Coffin

THE COFFIN

The Coffin

Fiction by Ray Bradbury

Illustration by Mariano Santillan

THERE WAS ANY AMOUNT of banging and hammering for a number of days; deliveries of metal parts and oddments which Mr. Charles Braling took into his little workshop with a feverish anxiety. He was a dying man; a badly dying man and he seemed to be in a great hurry between racking coughs and spittlings, to piece together one last invention.

“What are you doing?” inquired his younger brother, Richard Braling. He had listened with increasing difficulty and much curiosity for a number of days to that banging and rattling about, and now stuck his head through the work-room door.

“Go far far away and let me alone,” said Charles Braling, who was seventy, trembly and wet-lipped most of the time. He trembled nails into place and trembled a hammer down with a weak blow upon a large timber and then struck a small metal ribbon down into an intricate machine, and, all in all, was having a carnival of labor.

Richard looked on, bitter-eyed, for a long moment. There was a hatred between them. It had gone on for some years and now was neither any better or any worse for the fact that Charlie was dying. Richard was delighted to know of the impending death, if he thought of it at all. But all this busy fervor of his old brother’s stimulated him.

“Pray tell,” he said, not moving from the door.

“If you must know,” snarled old Charles, fitting in an odd thingumabob on the box before him. “I’ll be dead in another week and I’m — I’m building my own coffin!”

“A coffin, my dear Charlie. That doesn’t look like a coffin. A coffin isn’t that complex. Come on now, what are you up to?”

“I tell you it’s a coffin! An odd coffin, yes, but nevertheless,” the old man shivered his fingers around in the large box, “nevertheless a coffin!”

“But it would be easier to buy one.”

“Not one like this! You couldn’t buy one like this any place, ever. Oh, it’ll be a real fine coffin, all right.”

“You’re obviously lying.” Richard moved forward. “Why, that coffin is a good twelve feet long. Six feet longer than normal size!”

“Oh, yes?” The old man laughed quietly.

“And that transparent top; who ever heard of a coffin lid you can see through? What good is a transparent lid to a corpse?”

“Oh, just never you mind at all,” sang the old man heartily. “La!” And he went humming and hammering about the shop.

“This coffin is terribly thick,” shouted the young brother over the din. “Why, it must be over five feet thick; how utterly unnecessary!”

“I only wish I might live to patent this amazing coffin,” said old Charlie. “It would be a god-send to all the poor peoples of the world. Think how it would eliminate the expenses of most funerals. Oh, but, of course, you don’t know how it would do that, do you? How silly of me. Well, I shan’t tell you. If this coffin could be mass-produced — expensive at first, naturally — but then when you finally got them made in vast quantities, gah, but the money people would save.”

“To hell with you!” And the younger brother stormed out of the shop.

It had been an unpleasant life. Young Richard had always been such a bounder he never had two coins to clink together at one time; all of his money had come from old brother Charlie, who had the indecency to remind him of it at times. Richard spent many hours with his hobbies; he dearly loved piling up bottles with French wine labels, in the garden. “I like the way they glint,” he often said, sitting and sipping, sipping and sitting. He was the only man in the county who could hold the longest grey ash on a fifty cent cigar for the longest recorded time. And he knew how to hold his hands so his diamonds jangled in the light. But he had not bought the wine, the diamonds, the cigars — no! They were all gifts. He was never allowed to buy anything himself. It was always brought to him and given to him. He had to ask for everything, even writing paper. He considered himself quite a martyr to have put up with taking things from that rickety old brother for so long a time. Everything Charlie ever laid his hand to turned to money; everything Richard had ever tried in the way of a leisurely career had failed.

And now, here was this old mole of a Charlie whacking out a new invention which would probably bring Charlie additional specie long after his bones were slotted in the earth!

Well, two weeks passed.

One morning the old brother toddled upstairs and stole the insides out of the electric phonograph. Another morning he raided the gardener’s greenhouse. Still another time he received a delivery from a medical company. It was all young Richard could do to sit and hold his long grey cigar ash steady while these murmuring excursions took place.

“I’m finished!” cried old Charlie on the fourteenth morning, and dropped dead.

Richard finished out his cigar, and, without showing his inner excitement, he laid down his cigar with its fine long whitish ash, two inches long, a real record, and arose.

He walked to the window and watched the sunlight playfully glittering among the fat beetle-like champagne bottles in the garden.

He looked toward the top of the stairs where old dear brother Charlie lay peacefully sprawled against the banister. Then he walked to the phone and perfunctorily dialed a number.

“Hello, Green Lawn Mortuary? This is the Braling residence. Will you send around a wicker, please? Yes. For Brother Charlie. Yes. Thank you. Thank you.”

As the mortuary people were taking brother Charles out in their wicker they received instructions. “Ordinary casket,” said young Richard. “No funeral service. Put him in a pine coffin. He would have preferred it that way — simple. Good bye.”

“Now!” said Richard, rubbing his hands together. “We shall see about this ‘coffin’ built by dear Charlie. I do not suppose he will realize he is not being buried in his ‘special’ box. Ah.”

He entered the downstairs shop.

The coffin sat before some wide-flung French windows, the lid shut complete and neat, all put together like the fine innards of a Swiss watch. It was vast, and it rested upon a long long table with rollers beneath for easy maneuvering.

The coffin interior, as he peered through the glass lid, was six feet long. There must be a good three feet of false body at both head and foot of the coffin, then. Three feet at each end which, covered by secret panels that he must find some way of opening, might very well reveal — exactly what?

Money, of course. It would be just like Charlie to suck his riches into his grave with himself, leaving Richard with not a cent to buy a bottle with. The old bastard!

He raised the glass lid and felt about, but found no hidden buttons. There was a small sign studiously inked on white paper, thumbtacked to the side of the satin lined box. It said:

THE BRALING ECONOMY CASKET. Copyright, April, 1946.

Simple to operate. Can be used again and again by morticians and families with an eye to the future.

Richard snorted thinly. Who did Charlie think he was fooling?

There was more writing:

DIRECTIONS: SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN.

What a fool thing to say. Put body in coffin! Naturally! How else would one go about it? He peered intently and finished out the directions:

SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN—AND MUSIC WILL START.

“It can’t be —” Richard gaped at the sign. “Don’t tell me all this work has been for a —” He went to the open door of the shop, walked out upon the tiled terrace and called to the gardener in his green-house. “Rogers!” The gardener stuck his head out. “What time is it?” asked Richard. “Twelve o’clock, sir,” replied Rogers.

“Well, at twelve fifteen, you come up here and check to see if everything is all right, Rogers,” said Richard.

“Yes, sir,” said the gardener. Richard turned and went back into the shop. “We’ll find out —” he said, quietly.

There would be no harm in lying in the box, testing it. He noticed small ventilating holes in the sides. Even if the lid were closed down there’d be air. And Rogers would be up in a moment or two. SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN-AND MUSIC WILL START. Really, how naïve of old Charlie! Richard hoisted himself up.

He was like a man getting into a bath-tub. He felt naked and watched over. He put one shiny shoe into the coffin and crooked his knee and eased himself up and made some little remark to nobody in particular, then he put in his other knee and foot and crouched there, as if undecided about the temperature of the bath-water. Edging himself about, chuckling softly, he lay down, pretending to himself (for it was fun pretending) that he was dead, that people were dropping tears on him, that candles were fuming and illuminating and that the world was stopped in mid-stride because of his passing. He put on a long pale expression, shut his eyes, holding back the laughter in himself behind pressed, quivering lips. He folded his hands and decided they felt waxen and cold.

Whirr. Spung! Something whispered inside the box-wall. Spung!

The lid slammed down on him!

From outside, if one had just come into the room, one would have imagined a wild man was kicking, pounding, blathering, and shrieking inside a closet! There was a sound of a body dancing and cavorting. There was a thudding of flesh and fists. There was a squeaking and a kind of wind from a frightened man’s lungs. There was a rustling like paper and a shrilling as of many pipes simultaneously played. Then there was a real fine scream. Then — silence.

Richard Braling lay in the coffin and relaxed. He let loose all his muscles. He began to chuckle. The smell of the box was not unpleasant. Through the little perforations he drew more than enough air to live on, comfortably. He need only push gently up with his hands, with none of this kicking and screaming and the lid would open. One must be calm. He flexed his arms.

The lid was locked.

Well, still there was no danger. Rogers would be up in a minute or two. There was nothing to fear.

The music began to play.

It seemed to come from somewhere inside the head of the coffin. It was green music. Organ music, very slow and melancholy, typical of Gothic arches and long black tapers. It smelled of earth and whispers. It echoed high between stone walls. It was so sad that one almost cried listening to it. It was music of potted plants and crimson and blue stained glass windows. It was late sun at twilight and a cold wind blowing. It was a dawn with only fog and a far away fog-horn moaning.

“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, you old fool you! So this is your odd coffin!” Tears of laughter welled into Richard’s eyes. Nothing more than a coffin which plays its own dirge. Oh, my sainted Grandma!”

He lay and listened critically, for it was beautiful music and there was nothing he could do until Rogers came up and let him out. His eyes roved aimlessly, his fingers tapped soft little rhythms on the satin cushions. He crossed his legs idly. Through the glass lid he saw sunlight shooting through the French windows, dust particles dancing on it. It was a lovely blue day.

The sermon began.

The organ music quieted and a gentle voice said:

“We are gathered together, those who loved and those who knew the deceased, to give him our homage and our due —”

“Charlie, bless you, that’s your voice!” Richard was delighted. “A mechanical funeral, by God. Organ music and lecture. And Charlie giving his own oration for himself!”

The soft voice said, “We who knew and loved him are grieved at the passing of —”

“What was that?” Richard raised himself, startled. He didn’t quite believe what he had heard. He repeated it to himself just the way he had heard it:

“We who knew and loved him are grieved at the passing of Richard Braling.”

That’s what the voice had said.

“Richard Braling,” said the man in the coffin. “Why, I’m Richard Braling.

A slip of the tongue, naturally. Merely a slip. Charlie had meant to say “Charles” Braling. Certainly. Yes. Of course. Yes. Certainly. Yes. Naturally. Yes.

“Richard was a fine man,” said the voice, talking on. “We shall see no finer in our time.”

“My name again!”

Richard began to move about uneasily in the coffin.

Why didn’t Rogers come?

It was hardly a mistake, using that name twice. Richard Braling. Richard Braling. We are gathered here. We shall miss — We are grieved. No finer man. No finer in our time. We are gathered here. The deceased. Richard Braling. Richard Braling.

Whirrrr. Spung!

Flowers! Six dozen bright blue, red, yellow, sun-brilliant flowers leaped up from behind the coffin on concealed springs!

The sweet odor of fresh cut flowers filled the coffin. The flowers swayed gently before his amazed vision, tapping silently on the glass lid. Others sprang up until the coffin was banked with petals and color and sweet odors. Gardenias and dahlias and daffodils, trembling and shining.

“Rogers!”

The sermon continued.

“Richard Braling, in his life, was a connoisseur of great and good things —” The music sighed, rose and fell, distantly.

“Richard Braling savored of life, as one savors of a rare wine, holding it upon the lips —”

A small panel in the side of the box flipped open. A swift bright metal arm snatched out. A needle stabbed Richard in the thorax, not very deeply. He screamed. The needle shot him full of a colored liquor before he could seize it. Then it popped back into a receptacle and the panel snapped shut.

“Rogers!”

A growing numbness. Suddenly he could not move his fingers or his arms or turn his head. His legs were cold and limp.

“Richard Braling loved beautiful things. Music. Flowers,” said the voice.

“Rogers!”

This time he did not scream it. He could only think it. His tongue was motionless in his anaesthetized mouth.

Another panel opened. Metal forceps issued forth on steel arms. His left wrist was pierced by a huge sucking needle.

His blood was being drained from his body.

He heard a little pump working somewhere.

“Richard Braling will be missed among us —”

The organ sobbed and murmured.

The flowers looked down upon him, nodding their bright-petalled heads.

Six candles, black and slender, rose up out of hidden receptacles, and stood behind the flowers, flickering and glowing.

Another pump started to work. While his blood drained out one side of his body, his right wrist was punctured, held, a needle shoved into it, and the second pump began to force formaldehyde into him.

Pump, pause, pump, pause, pump, pause, pump, pause.

The coffin moved.

A small motor popped and chugged. The room drifted by on either side of him. Little wheels revolved. No pallbearers were necessary. The flowers swayed as the casket moved gently out upon the terrace under a blue clear sky.

Pump, pause. Pump, pause.

“Richard Braling will be missed —”

Sweet soft music.

Pump, pause.

“Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last —” Singing.

“Braling, the gourmet —”

“Ah, at last I have the secret of it all —”

Staring, staring, his eyes egg-blind, at the little card out of the corners of his eyes: The Braling Economy Casket . . .

DIRECTIONS: SIMPLY PLACE BODY IN COFFIN—AND MUSIC WILL START.

A tree swung by overhead. The coffin rolled gently through the garden, behind some bushes, carrying the voice and the music with it.

“Now it is the time when we must consign this part of this man to the earth —”

Little shining spades leaped out of the sides of the casket.

They began to dig.

He saw the spades toss up dirt. The coffin settled. Bumped, settled, dug, bumped and settled, dug, bumped and settled again.

Pulse, pause, pulse, pause. Pump, pause, pulse, pump, pause.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust —”

The flowers shook and jolted. The box was deep. The music played.

The last thing Richard Braling saw was the spading arms of the Braling Economy Casket reaching up and pulling the hole in after it.

“Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling, Richard Braling . . . “

The record was stuck.

Nobody minded. Nobody was listening.

2025 Feature The Coffin

California Goes Carolina

CALIFORNIA GOES CAROLINA

California Goes Carolina

With charm, art and a dash of fun

By Deborah Salomon

Photographs by John Gessner

Some houses come with their own histories. Others conform to their residents’ tastes and lifestyles. A very few built by builders or interior designers for personal occupancy showcase materials and expertise. This one began with a sad event, then blossomed into a happy ending.

Randy Boyd, an interior designer based in California’s Laguna Beach and Palm Springs, had been friends with Joyce Reehling, a New York-based TV, film and stage actress, for more than 30 years. Joyce and her husband, Tony Elms, retired to Pinehurst in 2008, where their contributions to the arts community have been significant. When Tony died in 2024, Randy visited Pinehurst to support Joyce. He and partner Mark Stine, liked what they saw: a pretty little town filled with interesting people involved in worthwhile activities. Some but not all were retirees. They were looking to relocate and saw much to like beyond Pinehurst’s reputation for golf.

“We fell in love with the village, the charm, the people,” Randy says.

Finding the right living space was a major factor, given Randy’s profession, which he planned to continue pursuing. The shoemaker’s children, after all, mustn’t go barefoot. He and Mark shared similar tastes. Neither pined for historic Pinehurst properties, a good thing since most Old Town Taras and Georgians are spoken for. Better a bright, breezy Camelot that Randy could transform with ideas gained as an antique dealer, the kind who scours France and sends back shipping containers full of fascinating stuff.

How about two handsome armoires, one shelved for shoes, a rustic pine grandmother clock and statuesque lamp bases? But all the right stuff is just the beginning. Randy nods “yes” when asked if hanging photos and paintings isn’t an art itself: height, layout, subjects, frames. He measures and draws, then mocks up on the floor. Originality counts, like a bedroom wall hung with portraits of men, likely 19th century, with facial hair and pensive expressions.

“The guy in the middle reminds me of Poirot,” Randy says. “He makes me smile.”

Another bedroom pays homage to Randy’s mother and grandmother, their nearly life-sized portraits dominating intersecting walls. Color, even white, adds excitement, like the filmy white “veils” hanging off tall bedposts; the overstuffed quilt where two big dogs sleep; blankets woven with multi-colored threads; a chair upholstered in lime green, others covered in line drawings of rabbits on a white background — all different, all unusual, related only by their unpredictability.

Both bathrooms required gutting. One returned papered in rich jewel-toned leaf shapes, the other in staccato black and white.

Variety, tempered by surprise, rules. Art, formal or not-so, needs an airy, well-lit display venue. At 2,300 square feet, this semi-detached brick unit with 13-foot salon ceilings, an eyebrow front door and British-themed neighborhood signage fit the couple’s furnishings. Mature trees, a reprieve from longleaf pines, manicured boxwoods and weathered brick exteriors give a settled appearance, while two walled terraces anchored by olive oil jug planters expand entertaining space.

Randy and Mark purchased the unit, hired a contractor, rented an air B&B for the duration and got to work. The project took less than a year. They, along with their two pups, moved in May, along with Randy’s business, Thurston Boyd Interior Design.

Each room showcases several pieces or a collection. In the living room, Lucite shelves hold bright Chinese roof tiles in the form of warriors protecting the property. In ancient times, quality of workmanship symbolized wealth and social status. Balancing their artistry, a contemporary sofa and simple painted wood coffee table face the proscenium opening into the dining room, where four paintings (by Mark’s niece) of flowers in vases suggest, in brilliance and style, Van Gogh sunflowers or a mixed bouquet by Cézanne. Hung against wallpaper that wriggles with life, they are anything but “still.” A massive, intricately carved desk, perhaps Asian, offsets the colors, as does a gathering of spider-webby landscape prints.

The kitchen, small but efficient, locates the gas range top on a center island. Almost bare countertops and blue-grayish cupboards impart Shaker plainness interrupted only by a collection of whimsical ceramic pitchers aligned on a pantry shelf. A sideboard with a built-in frontal wine rack resides here.

Opposite the kitchen is a dining area — a touch more formal than a breakfast nook — that opens out onto a patio, where a life-sized alligator, carved from wood, lurks among the planters. Throughout, carpet and tile were replaced by stained hardwood, knotty and laid randomly.

Nothing here blares California, but nothing screams Old Pinehurst, either — the house lacks a name or a resident ghost. It blends practicality with charm, fine art with a dash of fun, all the trademarks of “Pinehurst Now,” where wine-tastings, farmers markets, walking tours, pickleball and food festivals fill out calendars.

“People are so friendly,” Mark says. “It’s like we’ve lived here for years.”

2025 California Goes Carolina Feature

Tag: Feature

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California Goes Carolina

With charm, art and a dash of fun