Short Stories

***Given the unusual circumstances currently facing all events and their organizations, anyone planning to attend any program, gathering or competition should check in advance to make certain it will happen as scheduled.

From Sidewalks to Still Lifes
Artist Maggie Fickett took a loving brush to her adopted hometown of Greensboro in the 1980s,’90s and early 2000s. Now, for the first time, the public can see a trove of work that stayed in the Gate City after Fickett, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, moved back to her home state of Maine in 2014. Maggie Fickett: Living in Plein Air, opens late May at the Center for Visual Artists in the Greensboro Cultural Center (200 North Davie Street). Sweeping in scope, the exhibit and sale includes hundreds of original watercolors, as well as Fickett’s trademark pen-and-ink prints of local landmarks. Gallery goers also will recognize scenes from Jamestown, Burlington, Eden, Elkin, Winston-Salem, Seagrove, Raleigh, Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach, plus Virginia, Maine and Bermuda. The CVA will donate 60 percent of proceeds toward the care of Fickett, who is 89 and living in a memory-care center. greensboroart.org. — Maria Johnson

 

 

Life Cycles

The permanent residents of Green Hill Cemetery may be pushing daisies, but everything else in the 51-acre graveyard is coming up roses. Or rather, leafy greenness after this winter’s plentiful rains.

Learn more about clusters of oaks, pines, magnolias and more exotic species on a professionally led botanical tour at 2 p.m. on May 2 (rain date, May 3). If you’re interested in equal parts history and botany “lite,” the semi-annual “Plants and the Planted” Tour, which discusses some of Green Hill’s illustrious occupants, such as Lumsford Richardson and Julian Price will take place on May 9 and 10, at 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., respectively. Tours are $5 per person and start at the southernmost gate on Wharton Street, near Fisher Avenue. Info:  friendsofgreenhill.org.

 

 

Worth the Drive to Winston-Salem

Need to add a little pizzazz to your morning coffee? Consider Mississippian Eric Beavers’ playful mugs painted bright colors and etched with various patterns. Want to commune with nature — without leaving your closet? Perhaps a lovely, eco-printed scarf by Iowan’s Sharlene Bohr is the ticket. While Visual Index, situated in the Twin City’s Arts District (562 Trade Street, NW), emphasizes art fashioned by North Carolina hands, such as charming woodblock prints by Greensboro’s Mary Beth Boone of Purple Pumpkin Press, proprietor Toni Tronu prides herself in selling works by artists in all 50 states. “To my knowledge, I’m the only gallery in the country that can make this claim,” she says. So hop in your Chevrolet and quite literally see the USA  . . . just off Salem Parkway. Info: (336) 875-1674 or visualindex.co.

 

 

 

 

Waitt For It!

When researching and writing his field guide, Wildflowers of the Atlantic Southeast, Damon Waitt had a Herculean task: describing and illustrating 1,250 species frequently encountered in this lower quadrant of the United States. Director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill and biology prof at UNC, Waitt, as of this writing, is still scheduled to discuss his guide and on April 23 at Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden (215 South Main Street, Kernersville). To register: (336) 996-7888 or cienerbotanicalgarden.org.

 

 

 

 

 

Ogi Sez

by Ogi Overman

April has a lot going for it — flowers blooming, birds chirping, baseballs being tossed — but this year it’s living up to its reputation as “the cruelest month.” With fears of coronavirus raging, cancellations and postponements are multiplying faster than Easter bunnies. Guess I’ll have to wait for Mary Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin to come to the Carolina Theatre  . . . whenever. At press time, I was still waiting to hear if Patti LaBelle would grace the Tanger Center — which closed last month before it even opened. Till things are up and running again, there are always virtual concerts. Billboard.com offers up some suggestions, Sirius Xm and the Metropolitan Opera, too. Otherwise, I’ll take a cue from that viral video of quarantined Italians singing from their balconies and give a good yodel from my front porch. Hey, this could be more fun than the ice bucket challenge a few years ago!

Life’s Funny

Falling Back to Earth

When Plan B yields Grade A insight

 

By Maria Johnson

We rounded the bend in our kayaks, not expecting to see them perched there in the leathery green boughs of mangrove trees. Three large, brown pelicans. They watched us from a dozen feet above a cove called Soldier’s Hole.

Two of them sat as tall and still as concrete statues, their ascending necks tucked tight against descending heads and bills.

Between the two tall birds, a third one, folded flat, drowsed in branches on the sunny side of the inlet, a bank that caught the full warmth of February in Florida’s Tampa Bay.

We stopped paddling and let the current nudge us closer. The birds fixed us with the perfect white circles of their eyes. They didn’t flinch, even when we raised our cell phones to photograph them. We drifted underneath them.

“This is so cool,” I whispered.

“I know,” my husband rasped. Paddling away, we realized that although we’d seen brown pelicans in North Carolina, we’d never seen them roosting in the wild.

Bobbing on the open water?

Yes.

Planted on piers?

Yes.

Stationed on harbor spiles, surrounded by diesel fumes, and boats, and the din of waterside restaurants?

Yes.

But tucked into the swampy wild?

No. 

This was different.

Awesome.

Awe-inspiring.

Why?

Maybe because we were on their turf, in a vast and wild place, Fort De Soto State Park, where we were just another mated pair passing through. As casual kayakers and even more casual birdwatchers, we’d stumbled into the park — a birdwatching mecca, with more than 330 species known to alight here — on a day when brisk wind and shriveled mercury made sunbathing impossible.

It was Plan B, a fallback that ended up being better than we could have imagined, for who doesn’t benefit from spending time close to nature, whether in your garden, in an urban park or in a 1,000-plus acre preserve? The opportunity is the same — to see and feel that you’re a part of nature.

Of her.

Not above her.

What happens to her, happens to you.

It was a wonderful, humbling feeling, one that swelled our hearts as we skimmed the hammered surface of the water. Farther down the watery finger, gangly black cormorants watched us from the tops of no-wake signs. Ospreys poked their white heads and hooked noses out of shallow stick-built nests atop telephone poles. A vibrant tricolored heron stared until we passed. A young yellow-crowned night heron, crouching on a low branch, peered at us from between leaves. A turkey buzzard, with its faded black feathers and wrinkled red head, glided with the somber bearing of an undertaker — a reminder that, in many ways, we are all passing through.

Gulls keened overhead.

All around us, fish breached and flopped in silvery flashes. Splish. Bubbles congregated on the surface. The sighs of turtles and manatees below?  In the clear shallows, red mangroves arched their prop roots down to the brackish water for a place to grab hold. Like flying buttresses on a Gothic church, they stabilize the mangroves and the estuary, providing cover for all manner of life — a true sanctuary, with flowers provided by oysters that cling to the roots in calcified bouquets.

We paddled on, wind at our backs.

More pelicans came into sight. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. They hunkered in the mangroves, rocking in the branches as the wind gusted. Many of them wore a cap of fuzzy gold, a tinge of color announcing that breeding season was near. They regarded us calmly, waiting as an audience might wait for a play to unfold on stage. What would we, the main characters, do next?

For 40 years, from 1970 to 2009, brown pelicans were on the Endangered Species list. The pesticide DDT had pretty much wiped them out. Once sprayed on crops, the chemical ran off into estuaries and collected in fish. When pelicans ate the fish, the chemical affected the birds’ eggs, making their shells too thin to be viable. Bald eagles suffered, too.

Then we — specifically the Environmental Protection Agency — banned DDT and limited the use of pesticides. As she always does, nature responded to the chance to right herself and restore balance. Slowly, the pelicans and eagles returned.

Having reached the open water of the bay, we spun our kayaks around and headed back to the outfitter. The sun had begun its slow fall to the water.  Fishermen appeared along the banks, casting nets and filaments from poles. It was feeding time. The pelicans, like prehistoric pterodactyls in silhouette, joined them, cruising, pausing, collapsing into nosedives. They surfaced quickly, tossing their heads back to take shots of mullet.

We took our time. Our paddles looped in the figure eights of infinity and we dug into the water, aware that we were moving against the wind.

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. She can be reached at
ohenrymaria@gmail.com

Featured Artist

“In the Beginning”, 2018, oil on canvas, 30 x 33 inches

Katy Mixon: Digging Deep

At first glance, Katy Mixon’s oil-on-panel, In the Beginning, part of GreenHill’s current NC Women Abstract Painters, resembles a mottled center of a sunflower, where its seeds are contained. But splotches of yellow in a lighter shade and the painting’s title are obvious allusions to the sun and the act of creating.

Mixon, who trained at Davidson College, UNC-Chapel hill and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, draws on the agricultural surroundings of her childhood. “My family is in farming,” says the South Carolina native. “It’s hard not to pay attention to the future of the planet.” And the similarities of planting and harvesting with creating works of art. Keenly aware of what Mixon calls a “studio eco system,” she explains how “one painting feeds into another.”

The themes of In the Beginning, echo in others such as Cloud Seed, and reveal quite literally, more depth than meets the eye. That mottled look of the “sunflower” is not just paint applied to a flat surface, but rather layers applied and then carved out, and re-applied with paint chips. Mixon is replicating the act of tilling the soil — and asking the viewer to consider the vagaries of the natural world. Sunlight helps plants  — such as sunflowers — grow. “But how do you relate to a heat wave?” the artist posits. Decide for yourself by taking a gander at Mixon’s works and those of four other artist on view through April 11. — Nancy Oakley  OH

Info: greenhillnc.org

Scuppernong Bookshelf

To the Hoop!

Celebrate the ACC tourneys with a full court literary press

 

Compiled by Brian Lampkin

March is always an exciting time in North Carolina, and while this year will probably find an absence of madness in Chapel Hill, there’s plenty here in Greensboro as the men’s and women’s ACC tournaments return. While you’re here, I highly recommend To the Hoop: Basketball and Contemporary Art at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, an exhibit which runs through June 7. There are even a few literary intersections during the exhibit’s run, as you’ll see below.

February 20: GEEZERBALL: North Carolina Basketball at its Eldest (Sort of a Memoir), by Richie Zweigenhaft (Half Court Press, $10). Guilford College psychology professor Zweigenhaft has been the “commissioner” for perhaps the longest continually operating pickup game in North Carolina: 45 years. The book examines why basketball has become so central to the lives of this aging group of men and the social dynamics at play that create an environment that allows for longevity while maintaining a vigorous competitive spirit. And don’t leave Richie alone behind the 3-point line! (Zweigenhaft will be a featured event as a part of To The Hoop on Thursday, March 12 at 6:30 p.m.).

March 3: The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season, by John Feinstein (Doubleday, $27.95).  Feinstein pulls back the curtain on college basketball’s lesser-known Cinderella stories — the smaller programs who no one expects to win, who have no chance of attracting the most coveted high school recruits, who rarely send their players on to the NBA. Feinstein follows a handful of players, coaches, and schools who dream, not of winning the NCAA tournament, but of making it past their first or second round games.

March 17: Dragon Hoops, by Gene Luen Yang (First Second, $24.99) Gene Luen Yang writes, and sometimes draws, comic books and graphic novels. American Born Chinese, his first graphic novel from First Second Books, was a National Book Award finalist, as well as the winner of the Printz Award and an Eisner Award. His two-volume graphic novel Boxers & Saints won the L.A. Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award Finalist. In 2016, he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Dragon Hoops chronicles the postseason hopes of the basketball team at the Oakland high school where Yang taught for 17 years.

March 17: Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports, by Yaron Weitzman (Grand Central, $28). When a group of private equity bigwigs purchased the Philadelphia 76ers in 2011, the team was both bad and boring. Attendance was down. So were ratings. The Sixers had an aging coach, an antiquated front office and a group of players that could best be described as mediocre. Enter Sam Hinkie — a man with a plan. The plan, dubbed “The Process,” seems to have worked. More than six years after handing Hinkie the keys, the Sixers have transformed into one of the most exciting teams in the NBA. They’ve emerged as a championship contender with a roster full of stars, none bigger than Cameroonian Joel Embiid, a captivating 7-footer known for both brutalizing opponents on the court and taunting them off of it.

March 31: Russell Westbrook: Style Drivers, by Russell Westbrook (Rizzoli, $55). For NBA-superstar-turned-style-icon Russell Westbrook, fashion is not just a spectator sport — it pushes boundaries, blurs lines and drives culture. This book is a celebration of Westbrook’s style on and off the court, and the creative people he admires and works with.

Other recent basketball books of interest: The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, by Howard Bryant (Beacon Press, $17); The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End, by Gary M. Pomerantz (Penguin, $18); All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Side, by Rus Bradburd (Lawrence Hill Books, $17.99).

And don’t miss The Falconer, by Dana Czapnik (Washington Square Press, $16). Street-smart 17-year-old Lucy Adler is often the only girl on the public basketball courts. As Lucy begins to question accepted notions of success, bristling against her own hunger for male approval, she is drawn into the world of a pair of provocative feminist artists living in what remains of New York’s Bohemia. Told with wit and pathos, The Falconer is at once a novel of ideas, a portrait of a time and place, and an ode to the obsessions of youth. In her critically acclaimed debut, Dana Czapnik captures the voice of an unforgettable modern literary heroine, a young woman in the first flush of freedom. Czapnik will appear at the Weatherspoon Art Museum on Thursday, April 2 at 6:30 p.m.  OH

Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books.

Simple Life

The Stuffed Potatoes

Sustaining power of wise friends — and a good lunch

 

By Jim Dodson

Two or three times a month, we meet for lunch at a quiet bar of a local restaurant.

We catch up on news and work, talk about books we are reading and swap tales about the adventurous lives of our wives, grown children and grandbabies. Sometimes it’s history and politics that dominate the conversation. More often than not we share thoughts on life, love and matters philosophical. In a nutshell, we attempt to solve most of the world’s problems in the span of time it approximately takes to consume a couple of stuffed baked potatoes.

That seems about right since the three of us always order the same items off the bar menu.  Joe and I routinely order fully loaded stuffed baked potatoes while our worldly friend Pat — who prefers to be called Patrick — gets a fancy club sandwich. There’s always one in every crowd.

Some time ago, I began calling our gathering The Stuffed Potatoes Lunch and Philosophy Club.

Spud Buds for short.

You see, we’ve known each other for more than half a century. Pat (as I call him) is my oldest pal; we grew up a block from each other and have spent years chasing golf balls and trout in each other’s company. Pat and Joe grew up attending the same Catholic church. But I got to know and like Joe in high school.

To look at us, you might think we’re just three old geezers telling war stories in a booth.

Technically speaking, I suppose we are “old” guys, though none of us thinks of ourselves that way in the slightest. 

We were born weeks apart in 1953 — Joe in January, me in February, Pat in March.

What a banner year it was: Dwight Eisenhower became president and the Korean War ended. Hillary — the mountaineer — reached the summit of Everest. Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England. Gas cost 20 cents per gallon. The first Corvette went on sale. Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Prize. From Here to Eternity was the top Hollywood movie. Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. Mickey Spillane was the king of crime fiction.

Our mothers, bless their hearts  — suburban housewives of the 1950s — knew what they were doing giving us simple 1950s names like Joe, Pat and Jimmy, names that fit us like a pair of Buster Brown shoes, names from a Mickey Spillane novel or a Burt Lancaster movie.

I’m guessing nobody these days names their kid Joe, Pat or Jimmy. Not when you’ve got so many exotic choices like Brendan, Rupert or Hamish floating around in the Millennial baby pool. Just to be sure what I’m talking about, I looked up the most popular male names for millennial babies in 2020.

Michael, Christopher, Matthew and Joshua are actually the top Millennial male names for 2020. Daniel comes in fifth.

That’s four Biblical names shy of a Christian baseball team. With a starting lineup like that, you could almost write your own New Testament  — if Millennials bothered to go to church anymore.

Joe’s the only one of us who has achieved exalted granddad stature. He and wife Liz have two, in fact. One’s in Durham, the other, Asheville. They go see them all the time and who can blame them for that? If I had grandbabies somewhere within shouting distance I’d burn up the highway just to make a proud and happy fool of myself every dang weekend.

As of this month, we’ve all turned 67 years old. No applause necessary.

Truthfully, it’s rather amazing how quickly this happened. Once upon a time, 67 sounded positively ancient to our youthful ears — one bus stop shy of the boneyard, as Mickey Spillane might say.

The funny thing is, none of us feels at all ancient or even looks terribly old, according to our thoughtful wives and daughters. Then again, they might need new glasses.

With age, however, comes a number of often unadvertised benefits.

We’ve each buried family and friends, suffered setbacks and experienced comebacks, seen enough of life and sudden death — not to mention the drama of our own aging bodies — to know that bittersweet impermanence is what makes living fully so important and precious.  To laugh is to gain a taste of immortality.

Failed projects and busted business deals have taught us that there’s really no failure in this life — only reasons to get up, dust off our britches and try a different path. A new summit always awaits.

Our faith has been tested and found to be alive and kicking, after all these years.

We’ve learned that joy and optimism are spiritual rocket fuel, that divine mystery is real and the unseen world holds much more intriguing possibilities than anything we read about in the news, or watch on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon. 

Ditto the natural world of woods and fields and streams.

It’s no coincidence that we share a profound love of nature, drawing comfort and wisdom from its many lessons.

Joe, a forester by training, spends his days helping clients find and set aside wild lands for future generations to enjoy. He and Liz are dedicated wilderness hikers, walking encyclopedias of botany and flora, forever in search of new trails and unspoiled vistas when they’re not slipping off to see those beautiful grandbabies of theirs.

Pat is a top businessman whose real love is the spiritual solitude of remote trout streams and the joy of chasing a golf ball around the highlands of Scotland with his oldest pal. He’s also a skilled bird-hunter but these days shoots only clays with Joe some Wednesday afternoons.

Several years ago, Pat and Joe built a cabin on Pat’s land up in Meadows of Dan, Virginia. They set up cameras just to film any wildlife that happened by, cleared roads and got to know the locals. Since both are still working and have no plans to retire, that cabin became a way, as Joe puts it, “to reset our clocks — inside and out.” We take from nature, said Theodore Roethke, what we cannot see.

As for me — a veteran journalist and writer who is busier than ever and shares their view of the dreaded R-word  — I’m an “old” Eagle Scout, fly-fishing nut, bird-watcher and gardener who once spent six glorious weeks in the remote bush of South Africa with a trio of crazed plant hunters dodging black mambas and spitting cobras just to see the world’s smallest hyacinth and other exotic plants in the ancestral birthplace of the world’s flowers. The baboons, birds, springboks and elephants weren’t bad, either. I felt like a kid in a Rudyard Kipling tale.

At that time, I also lived in a house I built with my own hands, on a forested hill near the coast of Maine. I also rebuilt the stone walls of a long abandoned 18th-century farmstead and created a vast English garden in the woods that nobody but family, friends, the FedEx guy and local wildlife ever saw. My late Scots mother-in-law, cheeky women, suggested I name my woodland retreat “Slightly Off in the Woods.”

I called it my Holy Hill, my little piece of Heaven.

My two children grew up there watching the seasons come and go, learning to look and listen to the quiet voices of nature. Today, one is a documentary journalist living and working in the Middle East, the other a top copywriter and screenwriter in New York City. Both claim they carry the peace of that Holy Hill with them in their hearts, and I believe them. I do, too.

Maybe that’s what I love most about lunches with the Stuffed Potatoes.

At a time of life when a lot of men our age lose their curiosity and zest for living, spending their days grumbling about sports, politics or the weather, we take genuine pleasure in each other’s company, swapping tales of life’s natural ups and downs while sharing wisdom for the road ahead.

Joe has stories galore and the most infectious laugh you’ve ever heard. He was the fifth of nine kids, has 53 cousins and an uncle who became the voice of the American environmental movement. He’s always coming out with pearls of wisdom that I promptly write down. We call them “Joeisms.”

Everybody has to be somewhere, he once observed about an a certain disagreeable fellow. I just don’t have to be there with him. 

Patrick is gifted with what the Irish call the craic  — an ancient Irish word that means he can talk to anyone and entertain them royally while he’s doing it. He’s a master at solving complex problems and has quietly done more things that help teenagers and homeless folks than anyone I know. He’s also the only guy I know who’s probably read more books than me, which is really saying something. At least he hasn’t started writing them — yet.

So we are three for lunch — the forester, the fisherman and the gardener.

A fictional Forrest Gump got famous for saying that his mother once said that life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you’ll get. I beg to disagree, believing a happy life is actually more like a gloriously stuffed baked potato because, the more you put in, the better it tastes.

My Spud Buds, I suspect, would agree — even if one of them prefers the club sandwich.

There’s always one in every crowd.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

The Creators

Man of Iron

How Raleigh’s bold investment in sculptor Jim Gallucci’s art led to a revitalization of the city’s urban center

By Wiley Cash
Photographs by Mallory Cash

In 2007, just as the world was spiraling toward financial ruin, Greensboro sculptor Jim Gallucci received the largest commission of his career. The city of Raleigh selected him to construct four light towers to sit on either corner of downtown’s City Plaza in an attempt to redefine the empty space in front of the old Civic Center.

“It started out as a $65,000 project,” Gallucci says. “We kept saying, ‘You know, guys, we can do more with this,’ and they said, ‘Really? You got any ideas?’ These towers were going to be 65 feet tall. The next thing you knew it turned into a $2.5 million project.”

However, as the reality of the global financial crisis set in, Gallucci was certain the project would be pulled; but leaders in Raleigh decided to move ahead. In the fall of 2009, City Plaza, complete with Gallucci’s four 65-foot light towers bedecked in steel oak leaves, opened to the public. City officials hoped the plaza would serve as a “public living room” that would host concerts and events while attracting organizations from around the country that were searching for event and reception space. The plaza project was part of the now completely revitalized area of Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street, and towering above all the new businesses, concertgoers and tourists are Jim Gallucci’s glowing behemoths.

Raleigh proved that an investment in the arts could lead an economic revitalization. Gallucci was not surprised that the city’s bet paid off. “The arts are always the catalyst,” he says. “We’re the stick in the stream. Next thing you know there’s a leaf that’s caught by the stick, and before long the stick has gathered an entire island around it.”

Jim Gallucci’s enormous studio — which he admits to thinking of less as a studio and more as a tool that assists in his art — sits just south of downtown Greensboro. Going off Gallucci’s own metaphor, his studio could be described as an island that has gathered things over the years: sculptures of dizzying heights and varying colors; scraps of metal from local salvage yards; beams from the World Trade Center; and people from around the state interested in anything from sculpture to metalworking to glassblowing to having a cup of coffee and chatting. This is exactly what Gallucci hoped this space would become after opening the studio in 2006, not only for him but for the collective community of local and statewide artists of which he is part.

***

Gallucci’s collective approach is quickly made apparent when you spend time discussing art with him; you will discover that he consistently speaks in the collective first person we.

“We’d been in the old Civil War rifle factory on East Washington in downtown Greensboro for 21 years,” he says. “There were holes in the ceiling. The floors weren’t strong enough to hold the sculptures we were making.” He smiles, takes a sip of his coffee. “We knew we needed four things from a studio: We needed plenty of space. We needed heat. We needed an office. And we needed a bridge crane.”

That checklist — especially plenty of space and the bridge crane — came in handy as the full lengths of the six-story Raleigh towers were being fabricated inside the studio. Gallucci had plenty of hands on deck as the towers were lifted by the bridge crane and prepared for transport.

You would not know it now, but there were times when Jim Gallucci felt more like that single stick in the stream than the island that would gather around it. As a working artist, he had spent years teaching at the college level, but that came to a halt in 1986, when the University of North Carolina Greensboro did not renew his teaching contract after nine years in the classroom. He had a decision to make: Should he and his family leave Greensboro in search of another teaching job, or should they stay in the community, where they had forged relationships for nearly a decade?

He and his wife made the conscious decision to stay. “We’d made a lot of friends,” he says. “We had a community. We knew a lot of people in the fabrication business, and we’d trade sculptures for steel. You don’t buy those relationships; you assemble them during your life.”

After leaving the classroom, Gallucci decided to put his faith in his local community, and he decided to keep his faith in his art. “I took unemployment for six months, and I called it my arts grant. I went in my studio every day like a worker at 8 a.m., and I’d work until 4 p.m. I worked every day in that studio, and we were able to trade for steel, and we made three good sculptures during that six months and tried to get into shows.

“Those three pieces we made? All of them were sold, and two of them ended up in Brisbane, Australia. I suddenly went from an unemployed art teacher to an international sculptor.”

***

Gallucci’s sculptures began to pop up around Greensboro, then around the state, then around the country. He is perhaps best known for his gates and arches, especially the Millennium Gate in Greensboro’s Government Plaza, a project that found 17 artisans creating 106 icons that represent major figures, moments and movements from American history. The icons are affixed to the enormous arch and comprise the gate at its center. Viewers are able to both witness history and pass through it, and that interaction is vital to Gallucci’s vision.

“With gates, it’s easy to get into the art,” he says, “literally and figuratively. I try to get people to enter the work, to engage with it.”

Gallucci also gives people the opportunity to engage with their own artwork several times a year when he opens his studio to host a public iron pour. Hundreds of people show up in the early afternoon, many of them with small sand casts on which they will use any number of tools to etch a symbol or a name or an image that will then be cast in iron later in the day.

People come not only to pour iron, but to work with blacksmithing tools or to try their hand at glassblowing. Others come for the live music or the hot food that is served. The noise of the conversations and music and hammers rises into a pleasing din that fills the enormous studio space and pours outside, where men and women in masks and leather gloves and aprons are stoking the foundry and melting metal into what looks like bright orange lava. Jim Gallucci is there, talking to old friends, making new ones, offering words of encouragement to someone who is trying their hand at metal casting for the first time.

As the sky tips toward dusk, the scene is otherworldly. Sparks fly. Flames reach into the air. Metal is turned into liquid. The vague notions of creativity that people arrived with are slowly hardening into shape.

“Creativity happens when you experience something you’ve never experienced before,” Gallucci says. “The elements: the sand, the dirt, the heat; it’s almost primordial. People may not become iron casters after this, but that’s not the point. It’s igniting other things, inviting other ways to look at the world. That’s what art inspires.”

***

What does Jim Gallucci hope his art inspires? He thinks for a moment, the light from sparks and flames glinting in his safety glasses, which he wears casually, the way other people wear sunglasses or bifocals. “I hope I’m perpetuating ideas, goodwill, community, sense of purpose, reflection. If you’re doing that with a piece of art, you’re doing OK.”

No man is an island, right? Well, perhaps Jim Gallucci is.  OH

Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington with his wife and their two daughters. His latest novel, The Last Ballad, is available wherever books are sold.

March Almanac

Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer.

— Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

 

March is the blushing maiden, bright-eyed and smiling, her wild locks softly brushing your skin as she frolics past.

You knew she was coming. The birds have been singing her name for weeks. And yet her arrival has taken you by surprise. You, too, are blushing.

March is the blossoming redbud, soft light, a tapestry of pine needles, bark and grasses.

The nuthatch has crafted her nest, and like the pregnant doe, belly swollen with late winter pansies, a new energy is alive inside of you — a new innocence.

Pale pink blossoms adorn the saucer magnolia, but a tiny yellow flower has caught your eye.

Dandelion.

Simple, immaculate, glorious dandelion.

You see it as if through the eyes of a child, pluck it from the tender earth, tuck it snug behind your ear.

The birds are singing louder now. Ballads of clover, crocus, daffodil. And in the garden, each tiny blossom smiles back.

March has arrived and, with it, spring — as much in your heart as the outside world.

 

Dandelions don’t tell no lies. — Mick Jagger

Destination Dandelion

Sometimes, especially on dreamy March mornings, the gentle pull of adventure arrives.

On such mornings, you will wander for the sake of wandering, nectar-drunk as a hummingbird as the fragrance of spring blossoms swirls around you.

You might follow the warmth of the sun, or a sweet aroma, or the distant rapping of a woodpecker, any of which will guide you someplace new.

Then maybe, on some quiet woodland trail, you will discover a fluffy young dog.

He won’t look hungry. Or lost. And from the way he is looking at you, he seems to be inviting you farther down the path.

You’ll walk together, for a mile or so, before the path reveals a rolling field. This is when you’ll realize that, across the field, inside the cottage with the smoking chimney, someone might be wondering where their dog went.

And so you’ll walk him home.

Inside the cottage, which smells of rich and exotic spices, an elderly woman is cooking dal on the stovetop. Her husband thanks you for returning Houdini (he slipped the gate again), and invites you to stay for lunch.

“I’ve just gathered greens for the dandelion salad,” he tells you.

You can’t say no to that.

 

Dandelion Salad

All you need: dandelion greens, wild and tender. Wash thoroughly, then toss with whatever you’d like. Lemon juice, fresh dill, olive oil and pepper.

Glory of Spring

Goddess of Fertility Day is observed on Wednesday, March 18 — the day before official spring. Among the goddesses celebrated on this day, Aphrodite is by far the most widely known.

Born from the foam of the sea, it’s fitting that this goddess of love and blinding beauty be remembered at a time when tender green shoots and brilliant flowers seemingly appear out of nowhere. 

Historically, those seeking to conceive would make offerings to Aphrodite on this day — flowers, greenery, dessert wine, and triangle-shaped honey cakes.

Or, grow a garden in her honor.

Laugh in Flowers

The earth has softened. In the garden, sow seeds for spinach, radish, turnip and kale. Plant a Flower Day is celebrated on Thursday, March 12 — but why stop at just one? March is a good month for planting lilies, tulips and roses. And don’t forget landscaping beauties, like rock cress, sweet pea or — in celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day on March 17 — clover.

First Class

How the Page Pirates got their swagger

By Billy Ingram

In 1958, three seemingly unrelated events would lead to unforeseen inevitabilities, all but assuring that life in America would never again be the same — the nation’s first satellite was blasted into orbit, credit cards were test marketed in one small city and an obscure Texas Instruments’ engineer developed the first microchip. But, as far as teenagers around here went, they were under the thrall of Kookie’s comb and Wham-O Hula Hoops.

An assembly was held at Aycock Junior High in the spring of 1958 during which ninth graders were asked to come up with a mascot for Greensboro’s brand-new Walter Hines Page High, the school where most of those students would be attending in the fall.

Ironically to this day, it remains something of a mystery why the school was named for Walter Hines Page. The student body came up with “Page Pirates.” Perhaps apropos when one considers that, in addition to that enormous lake to the north of the property, just beyond the trees in front of campus sat another large body of water where Sherwood Country Club and Fountain Manor are today. Surrounded on all sides by lagoons and tall pines, Page High School was essentially an island unto itself.

On Thursday, September 4, 1958, around 500 students along with 30 teachers and administrators began a scholastic journey that continues to this day. A ready-to-go opening with varsity football, junior and varsity basketball, wrestling, cheerleaders, majorettes, band, along with girls speedball and basketball teams. Extracurricular activities included Junior Engineers, Hi-Y, Civitans, and Junior Optimists. Page was the first school in North Carolina history to earn accreditation in its first academic year.

Casual school day attire for men consisted of Madder-Tone shirts, polished cotton slacks and penny loafers. Male students were no longer required to wear coats and ties on a daily basis but it was still de rigueur for picture days. In a photo of the first senior class walking toward the camera, some subversive beatnik in the front row has no tie on, clad in a windbreaker instead of a sport coat. That guy’s cruisin’ for a bruisin’!

Co-eds strolled the halls in Kerrybrooke car coats, pullover sweaters, sensible blouses with Peter Pan collars, pleated calf-length dresses, with nylon stockings tucked into E-Jays saddle shoes or black ballerina flats. Single strand of petite pearls optional. Slacks? You’d be sent home to change into something more ladylike.

In Mrs. Luther’s Family Life class, students were subjected to educational films instructing kids on how to navigate the boundaries of a polite society, with titles like How to Say No: Moral Maturity, The Bottle and the Throttle and Duck and Cover (“when an atomic bomb explodes”).

Page’s Cafeteria was up and running on day one but students with wheels peeled out at lunchtime for Alpat or the snack shop inside the GI 1200 store, both on Bessemer. State Street Grill was closest to campus. No fast food chains, the city’s first McDonald’s on Summit was a year away from opening.

On Thursdays after school, cool cats and kittens pointed their jalopies toward WFMY’s studios to make the scene on the RC Dance Party, airing live at 5:30 p.m. Sponsored by Royal Crown Cola, Twisting teens gyrated to the sounds of The Big Bopper, Teresa Brewer, Ricky Nelson, and The Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley. Like endsville, man!

Changing out of school clothes, that’s when girls slipped into their pedal pushers, Blue Bell Jeanie capri pants and tight, pink cashmere sweaters (“Daaaad . . . all the kids dress like this!”). Date nights began with a fellow in his Sunday best appearing at the door, gotta chat up the old man before escorting his dish for a night on the town in his ’55 T-bird meatgrinder.

Daddy-os and dolls burned rubber to the edge of town at night for curb service at the Boar and Castle, a ‘Flake Shake’ with two straws at Monroe’s, making goo-goo eyes over a “Bucket Full” of spaghetti for only a buck at McClure’s Sky Castle, or catching — not necessarily watching — a double feature at the South Drive-In Theatre where guys hoped to engage in some Back Seat Bingo (“Hey baby, I’m layin’ it down but you’re not pickin’ it up!”).

With no athletic field to speak of, Pirate home games were played on the football field at Greensboro High School, soon to be renamed Grimsley. Taking to the gridiron on the Friday night after school started, it was a blowout, Fair Grove whipping Page 14-0. Next week was even worse, 21-0 in favor of Mebane. Finishing the 1958 season 2-8, it wasn’t until 1960 that Pirates and Whirlies squared off against each other, sparking a never-ending rivalry.

Yes, 1958 may have been an inauspicious beginning to the proud Page Pirates dynasty but at least a dozen athletic stars went on to impressive professional careers including Michael Brooks (Chargers, Cowboys), Lamont Burns (Jets, Eagles, Redskins), Lee Rouson (Giants, Browns), and Mo Spencer (Cardinals, Saints) who all played for the NFL. Former professional basketball player Danny Manning is currently head coach of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons.

The most famous Page alumnus would have to be pro tennis great John Isner, who twice reached the quarterfinals at the US Open, and physician turned actor Ken Jeong (Knocked Up, The Hangover).

Never underestimate the underdog, our landlocked Pirates continue to thrive on their veritable island of imagination, opportunity and individual visions for the future. Isn’t that the ginchiest?  OH

Billy Ingram attended Page High from 1971–74. He went on to a career in Hollywood as a movie poster artist and is the author of five books including Hamburger², a book (mostly) about Greensboro.

The Omnivorous Reader

Mystery of the Hunley

What killed the Confederacy’s submariners?

 

By Stephen E. Smith

With an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Civil War—related titles published in the last 155 years, you might wonder if there’s anything left to write about. But science and technology have offered new methods of verifying the previously unverifiable, no matter how esoteric or insignificant the subject might be.

An April entry into the Civil War marketplace is Rachel Lance’s In the Waves: My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine. This 315-page semi-technical analysis of a single black-powder detonation that changed naval warfare forever should be of interest to anyone living in the Carolinas, taking place, by and large, at Duke University, and concerning an artifact that has, in recent years, attracted thousands of tourists to the city of Charleston.

Lance is a biomedical engineer and blast-injury researcher at Duke. She spent several years as an engineer developing specialized underwater equipment for the Navy and was working toward her Ph.D. when she took on, at the insistence of her dissertation advisor, the mysterious demise of the H.L. Hunley’s crew.

Any Civil War enthusiast (let’s dispense with the pejorative term “buff”; many Civil War readers are serious historians) will be happy to tell you that the Hunley was an experimental submarine developed by the Confederacy in hopes that it would break the Union blockade, and that it might have succeeded except that it disappeared along with the USS Housatonic, the first warship sunk by a submersible craft, and remained cloaked in mystery until 1995, when it was located 4 miles offshore in 30 feet of water. The sub was raised from the bottom in 2000 and has since become Charleston’s most popular attraction.

For those unfamiliar with the details of the Hunley’s story, Lance supplies a history of early submersibles and details the little sub’s short life, including the circumstances surrounding the first two Hunley crews, who perished when mechanical problems arose during testing. Even H.L. Hunley, the sub’s inventor, died when he accidently depressed the bow planes when surfacing following a test dive. After each sinking, the sub was raised and put back into service, even when it required that the bloated bodies of the dead be dismembered to facilitate removal, a decidedly unpleasant task relegated to slave labor.

For many years, it was assumed the Hunley had survived its attack on the Housatonic — it was reported that the crew signaled success by flashing a blue light — but there was no satisfactory explanation as to why the boat did not return to fight another day. Survivors of the Housatonic testified to seeing the Hunley shortly after the explosion, but no further evidence as to the fate of the sub and its crew was offered at the time.

Lance’s study focuses on the crew’s cause of death. Archaeologists found all eight men slumped at their stations in the submarine. Seven men were seated at the propeller crank, and the remains of the boat’s captain, Lt. George Dixon, were discovered in the forward conning tower. None showed signs of skeletal trauma, and there was no indication that the crew had attempted to escape the sinking craft. A careful examination of the boat’s skin revealed that the explosion had not breached its hull.

Since Lance is a blast-injury expert, readers might assume that she was seeking confirmation that the crew was killed by the shock wave from detonation of the Hunley’s torpedo, and not from suffocation or drowning. In fact, Southern newspapers speculated shortly after the sub’s disappearance that such a wave had sunk the little boat, and knowledgeable observers at the time of the sub’s testing warned that the Hunley would likely fall victim to its own torpedo, which was suspended on the end of a spar extending from the bow of the boat.

Lance’s objective was to prove beyond all doubt that a blast wave killed the Hunley’s crew, and In the Waves is a narrative history of her quest to gather evidence to that effect and to procure, in the process, her Ph.D. To do this she constructed a miniature Hunley-like craft (the CSS Tiny), procured black powder of the sort available during the Civil War, constructed a miniature facsimile of the torpedo, and conducted extensive testing in an appropriate body of water. Instruments to measure the true force of the blast had to be obtained from the Navy and made to function correctly under circumstances that were anything but ideal.

The development of testing criteria consumes most of Lance’s book, at times growing a trifle tedious and dauntingly technical. Failed test follows failed test, subjecting the reader to the same level of frustration suffered by Lance and her team of researchers. But she wisely couches much of the technical information in understandable terms and refers more punctilious readers to the open-access journal PLOs One. “This is a descriptive version of the math and physics,” she writes in a footnote, “and was written to be understandable for the general reader. It does not, therefore, go into all the complex details necessary to justify and complete the scientific analysis.”

While working to replicate the explosive force of the Hunley’s torpedo, Lance reveals the intriguing story of George Washington Rains. Born in Craven County, North Carolina, Rains almost singlehandedly supplied the Confederacy with black powder and torpedo technology. Southern soldiers may have run short of food and clothing, but they were never without powder and shot, a fact that no doubt prolonged the slaughter and destruction occasioned by the war.

In the Waves’ entertainment value is mostly a matter of scientific revelation. As a narrative it is made less successful by the inclusion of unnecessary details regarding the author’s personal life, and the occasional irrelevant sidebar and annoying digression. Is it worth reading? Certainly. If you have an abiding interest in Civil War history, you’ll no doubt find a place for In the Waves in your already overburdened bookshelves.  OH

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