But still no green-light for ‘It’s Hash Browns’?

Back before newsroom budgets so discouraged serendipity, I happened onto Stan Woodward and his quirky documentary “It’s Grits” (both will appear Wednesday evening at Wilson Library).

This was in 1979, after “It’s Grits” had unspooled at the Museum of Modern Art (good eye, MOMA!), but before it went national on PBS.

Though reared in Spartanburg and living in Columbia, Woodward had only recently come to see the glory that is grits. “It was invisible, like crickets,” he said. “You don’t hear them until somebody mentions them, and then you hear them all the time…. I accidentally hit a taproot of American culture.”

And of course I can’t resist firing up the old Ngram Viewer to address (though surely not to settle) this most eternal of questions.