Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
— Remembering “the blackest white man in Greensboro.” Hat tip to YES! Weekly for having mined the memory of the remarkable Hal Sieber even as he fell further and further from the public eye.
— Sharyn McCrumb visits Wilkes County, finds “Wuthering Heights.”
— Update: The eBayer selling that Confederate veterans badge voided auction results after learning it was a fake.
“Roger’s long torturous season [1961, in which he hit a record 61 homers] was over…He had committed to a traveling, postseason home-run-derby exhibition that also featured Harmon Killebrew and Jim Gentile…. He had a miserable experience. Again, the press was at the heart of his problems. Gentile recalls:
” ‘We went to Wilson, Raleigh-Durham, Greensboro and a couple of other places…. After spending a whole season being given a hard time by hostile reporters in New York, having a bunch of new writers on his back was tough for him. He told them, “If I had known that you were going to ask me the same old questions, I would have brought a tape with me.”
” ‘In Wilson we had a real nice crowd, but then what Roger said wound up in the papers and it cut us down a little. They didn’t write anything nice about us after that ….
” ‘Poor Roger couldn’t go anywhere. He’d step out of the hotel and people were chasing him… I thought of Roger when I saw what happened to the Beatles.’ ”
— From “Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero” by Tom Clavin and Danny Peary (2010)
Maris died in 1985. Killebrew, whose only minor league experience came with the Charlotte Hornets in 1956, died last week. Gentile, 76, lives in Edmond, Okla.
— Egyptian billionaire once washed dishes at Raleigh pizzeria.
— Still relying on MSM for your latest UFO sightings?
— Jim Schlosser returns to action with tour of Greensboro’s “ghost signs.”
— Dairi-O, R.I.P.
— If Western North Carolina was so big on Unionism, why weren’t its legislators?
— 18th century “stone” dollhouse from defunct Old Salem Toy Museum blows away auction estimate.
— I hadn’t realized that Pearl Fryar, the topiary wizard (and movie star) of Bishopville, S.C., had such extensive roots in Clinton and Durham. And he’s appearing Jan. 29 in Greenville.
— “Site of the nation’s first student lunch counter sit-ins”: Baltimore?
— Making the case for “a Rutherford Platt Hayes Day in Asheville.”
— J.B. Rhine, father of the “decline effect”?
— Amy Sedaris says no thanks to North Carolina turkey feathers.
— Before the Stevens Center was the Stevens Center….
— Discovery Channel sees a Whiteville man about a log.
— Baba Ram Dass: My son, the Greensboro capitalist.
— Gastonia native “strengthens her already credible claim to the title of best living American writer.”
— Greensboro praised (?) as “that true American anomaly – a place where there seem to be more people writing serious books than reading them.”
— Much to applaud, per usual, about Mary Chapin Carpenter‘s country-and-Eastern show last night in Charlotte. “I Am a Town,” her tribute to the sad two-lane from D.C. to the Outer Banks, always moves me. Also notable: on bass guitar, Chapel Hill’s ubiquitous Don Dixon.
— Turnstiles yet to whirl dervishly at new museums in Charlotte and Greensboro.
— Am I the only one left unenlightened by this compare-and-contrast of addled Gainesville preacher and martyred Gastonia striker?
— Theme of Sunday’s L.A. Times syndicated crossword puzzle: “The Long and Short of It — A long E sound in familiar phrases is changed to a short I sound and clued wackily.” 61 across calls for 21 letters meaning “Black gooey knolls near Charlotte”…. Get it?
