Tag: jeremy markovich

Credit for moon flag not easily determined

“Former workers at the Burlington Industrial Fabrics’ Plant in Rhodhiss and Glen Raven Fabrics in Burnsville recall with pride bulletin board postings at the time saying their plants had woven the nylon fabric…. Company newsletters make similar claims. Glen Raven includes the claim on its website today. The welcome sign at the edge of Rhodhiss proclaims ‘US Moon Flags Woven Here,’ and the town logo features an astronaut planting a U.S. flag.

“There is no way to prove exactly which company wove the fabric, manufactured the flag or sold it to NASA. That’s exactly the way NASA wanted it, to avoid a commercial product being advertised as being used by astronauts – or, as one NASA official put it, ‘We didn’t want another Tang.'”

— From “A little piece of North Carolina on the Moon, maybe” by Tony Rice at WRAL (July 16, 2019)

Nobody has taken a more ambitious swing at the subject than Jeremy Markovich.

A fine line — a mighty fine line, they realized

“At first, the trial was, as murder cases go, pretty straightforward. William Hall and Andrew Bryson were friends in their early 20s who lived near each other in the mountains north of Murphy. When the moonshine still that the two of them used went missing, they blamed each other. Then Hall, accompanied by a friend, John Dockery, hunted down Bryson. And on a warm summer day in July 1892, way up on a ridge, they confronted each other. Hall raised his Winchester rifle and shot Bryson dead.

“Hall and Dockery found themselves some good lawyers who brought up an interesting point. The ridge, it turned out, formed the state line between North Carolina and Tennessee….”

— From “How a Tar Heel Moonshiner Got Away with Murder (in 1892)” by Jeremy Markovich in Our State