Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

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Hill Street, Lauren Hutton and . . . William Faulkner?

Returning to that dead-end boulevard of youth to unravel an unsolved mystery

By Billy Ingram

“A lot of modeling is how much crap you can take.”
— Lauren Hutton

Watching a recent CBS Sunday Morning segment on “the original supermodel,” Lauren Hutton, and her improbable path from poverty to becoming one of the most successful businesswomen in America triggered a memory buried in the smoldering rubble of my brainpan. I vaguely recalled that, in the 1970s, Hutton visited someone in Greensboro, but for what I didn’t have a clue.

Soon after word spread concerning my curiosity, I heard from an old friend, Jane Vaughan Teer, who invited me to the home she shares with her husband, John. Wouldn’t you know, the Teers reside on Hill Street. There, she related the curious story behind Hutton’s surreptitious visit to the Gate City, which happened at the very height of her phenomenal career.

You may recall my slightly salacious recollections of the two-block stretch of Hill Street in Latham Park where I grew up, published in O.Henry’s January 2025 issue. (You do collect ’em all, don’tcha?)

My conversation with the Teers began with their curiosity as to exactly where it was that Mrs. Bunn gunned down her hubby before fleeing to Florida with her paramour. And the address where our 80-year-old neighbor sunbathed au naturel. What I didn’t know, that Jane told me about, was the man who shot dead a teen peeping tom still resided across the street when they the Teers moved to Hill Street in 1978 and would randomly speak about it decades later.

The Teers were surprised to learn that the house next door to theirs once belonged to a couple and their two sons — one of the boys let it slip that their parents had filmed themselves making babies then showed it to them by way of explaining the birds and the bees (I’m running out of metaphors, folks). That whisper rapidly went viral, no tweets needed on this street for speedy promulgation. Soon after, that randy fam relocated. At one point, the Teers mentioned property assessments on Hill Street skyrocketing, a common concern of late. “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “After folks get a gander at this, the city will be forced to reassess.” But I digress. When wisps of 50-year-old reminiscence subsided, discussion turned to my memory’s mystery — why Lauren Hutton ventured to Greensboro.

“I had to give up my bedroom for her,” Jane, 27 at that time, recalls of Hutton’s overnight stay in their home at 2018 Pembroke Dr. that, by her best recollection, took place late summer 1974. “It was supposed to be a very quiet thing, no publicity, but Mama had to have a party . . . of course.” Mama being the indomitable Bee Vaughan, a tentpole presence in my life I equated with the Unsinkable Molly Brown. “Mama told Lauren, ‘We’re going to have a little cocktail party.’ Lauren said she wanted to take a nap first, so she goes back into my room to rest.”

As folks began arriving at the cocktail hour, Jane was enlisted to awaken Ms. Hutton who, remember, was one of New York and Europe’s most sought-after socialites. “Lauren said, ‘This early?!? I don’t guess anywhere else in the world they have cocktail hour at 5 o’clock!’”

If you weren’t around for the so-called Me Decade, it’s difficult to unpack the impact Hutton, a small-town girl from the South, had on the fashion world globally. In 1973, she signed the first exclusive contract in modeling history and the most lucrative at $250,000 a year for 20 days work (an almost $2 million payday today) as the fresh-scrubbed face of Revlon cosmetics. That was just six years after landing her first Vogue cover in 1966 at age 23.

“From the very beginning I wanted to see the world,” Hutton told the Today show in 2016 about why she left the South. “I heard that models made this enormous amount of money, ‘a dollar a minute,’ and I said, ‘I have to do that!’ And everybody laughed.” With a gap in her teeth, a “banana-shaped nose,” standing only 5-foot-7 (in heels), she possessed none of the qualities associated with 1960s glamor gals typified by Elizabeth Taylor’s cat-eyed Cleopatra caricature, Catherine Deneuve’s icy glare or Twiggy’s pixie-like androgyny.

Her preppy-chic visage was splashed across some two dozen major magazine covers by 1974. Hutton’s unspoiled, Gulf Coast-casual resting face best expressed what modern, independent women were thirsty for from fashionistas: allure without artificiality.

Just how glamorous was one of the world’s most photographed fashion icons? “She was regular, just plain folks,” Jane insists. That comes through in the photo reproduced here of Hutton taken alongside Bill “Hoot” Roane, the very fellow she came to town to see.

A longtime companion of Bee Vaughan’s after her husband passed, Hoot (a nickname bestowed in childhood) was blessed with a gift for gab that came in handy as a sales exec for WBIG Radio, popular as any of the station’s on-air personalities.

Hutton had come to Greensboro to query Hoot about his adolescent days in Oxford, Mississippi. Back then, Hoot was a close friend of Lawrence Bryan “Cut” Hutton, the father she never knew. “They were in a little gang together,” Jane explains about the pirate-themed crew Hoot and Cut hung with, their ship a treehouse fort for secreting cigarettes and liquor. “You can count on the fact that, however long [Hutton] was here, Hoot kept her entertained. She heard a lot about her father and about their close friendship with William Faulkner.”

The writer William Faulkner? “They were neighbors,” Jane comments casually. “Hoot used to give talks about him. Not about his writing but about neighborhood things, like Faulkner dating the school librarian.” Faulkner was around 20 years older than those boys. But then, as a youngster, I was friendly with older neighborhood folks, too.

There was a small café in Oxford where, daily, Faulkner sorted through his mail. “Hoot had some kind of a job there,” John Teer recalls. The year was 1939 when Hoot was 22. “One morning Faulkner came in with all these magazines, letters and so forth. One of them was Time magazine with his picture on the cover.” Faulkner didn’t even open the magazine, couldn’t have cared less what they said about him in it, laughingly autographing the mag before handing it over to his pal.

“After Hoot’s father passed away, the family gathered down in Oxford,” John continues. “Somebody came in and said, ‘There’s an old man at the back door. He’s kind of sketchy looking, I don’t know . . .’ Hoot went to look and it was Mr. Faulkner. He’d come over with a fifth of [Four Roses] as a gift.”

It’s reassuring that Lauren Hutton reemerges frequently, her look being timeless. Only Princess Diana, and few others, have similarly embodied Hutton’s rarified air of vulnerable likability. Asked by Harper’s Bazaar in 2023 about regrets, Hutton replied: “I would give anything to meet my father, my real father. I didn’t ever get to meet him.” Whether or not her journey here provided meaningful insight or connection, she can’t say Greensboro didn’t give a Hoot.

Home Grown

HOME GROWN

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Riding Lessons

Complete with brakes and pads

By Cynthia Adams

There were two things I deeply envied as a child: having a bike of one’s own and being an adopted child.

The older boy next door had a bike that I mooched frequently. Marshall’s bike was too big for me. I could just manage by standing on the pedals. 

Meantime, my best friend, Judy, was living the good life as an adopted, only child. She had a girl’s bike, her own room and more books than she could ever read. She was doted upon but not quite spoiled. On the other hand, I was one of five kiddos — at least four more than our mother had bargained on. Sleepovers with Judy made me envy the luxury of privacy. At my house, somebody would always barge into the bathroom when I was using it. I shared a bed with a sister until I left for college.

Judy’s calm, amazing life made mine look like life in a zoo: noisy, crowded and every secret on public display. She also had Helen, a mother who knew everything worth knowing. A librarian who drove the bookmobile in the summer!

A fantasy took root. Privately, I grew convinced I was switched at birth. All signs pointed to this: Mama was a girly girl. I was a tomboy. She had never been in a fight at school; she scolded me when I arrived home sweaty and bloody-kneed after an incident with the class bully. She adored dolls. I ignored them, though an indifferent Santa brought yet another doll every Christmas.

Mama didn’t like exploring in the woods. She wasn’t into horses. Nor chocolate milk. She didn’t even like Butterfingers!

My life made no sense — unless there had been a mix-up at Union Memorial Hospital.

I probed Mama about the circumstances of my birth constantly. As she had told me since my earliest memory, she labored hard and long before giving birth. “Did you get to know any of the other mothers?” I asked probingly.

Were there other baby girls born on April 9? Was she awake when they brought me to her the first time?

“You’re mine, alright,” she would say, setting her mouth in a line.

Mama, who had loved something called “dramatic recitation” when she was a schoolgirl, repeated the hard labor story so many times and with such dramatic flair that I believed when I was very young she meant I was born on the night of April . . . as if she had been in the throes of suffering every day and night until my stubborn appearance. 

Marshall grudgingly lent me his bike one afternoon. Racing along a dirt path near our houses, I barely avoided a large rock by suddenly screeching to a stop, slamming down on the hard crossbar.

Once home, I realized I was bleeding. Rushing to my mother, I told her about how I’d hurt myself riding a boy’s bike and pleaded to be taken to the hospital. Mom rose up from reading True Romance magazine. She took me to her bathroom, presenting me with large bandages. “But I need to go to the hospital!” I protested. 

“No, you don’t,” she replied. “You will be doing this every month from now on.”  Then she returned to True Romance. Only weeks later would I realize how short-changed her answer had left me. But that was in the ’60s, when many mothers felt the less adolescents knew about reproduction, the better.

Was I a hemophiliac like the doomed Romanovs?

On the next sleepover at Judy’s house, I confided my puzzling illness.

The lower part of me, I told Judy, was permanently damaged. Prone to sudden bleeding. After my bike injury, Mama had warned me to always carry bandages.

Judy said this didn’t sound right. She wanted to seek answers from her mother.

She returned with Helen, whose face softened as I told her about the incident that had triggered my condition.

Helen took my hand. “It’s not an injury,” she reassured me. “It’s very natural.” She suggested Judy and I get a snack.

A smiling Helen was waiting with intriguing boxes labelled “The Invisible Woman” and “The Invisible Man.”

She pulled the anatomically correct dolls from their boxes and quietly explained reproduction. We both felt the importance of the moment, and she met our few questions with simple, clear answers. Helen used words like menses and did not pander.

I adored her with my whole heart.

However, none of this was especially heartening. The one truth Mama had shared was that my predicament was recurring.

When I returned home from the sleepover, I tested my knowledge with my 15-year-old sister, Sharon, who was six years older. She snorted. “Why are they telling you about the facts of life?” she demanded. “You’re just a snotty-nosed kid.”

I rolled my eyes at her ignorant self, and ran outside in search of Marshall’s bike. But the evening star had popped out over Marshall’s house, so too late to ride to the creek. I turned back; the smell of chicken frying in hot Crisco wafted through the screen door as I plopped unhappily onto the back porch to think. 

The unsolved mystery of my birth family continued.

Inside, no question about it, Mama was already cooking dinner for me and my supposed siblings.

State of Mind

STATE OF MIND

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The High Ground

Finding ways to thrive

By Tommy Tomlinson

Recently we spent a fine Saturday afternoon in Mount Pleasant. I should specify that it was the Mount Pleasant in North Carolina. It turns out there are dozens of Mount Pleasants all over the country, sometimes more than one in the same state. You can see the appeal. Names can be destiny. Name yourself Mount Pleasant and you’re halfway to pleasantness itself.

The “Mount” part is trickier. I grew up near a Mount Pleasant in south Georgia that was as flat as a shuffleboard table. The North Carolina version doesn’t exactly require hiking poles either. Then again, the Piedmont is known for puffing itself up when it comes to height. One of the reasons Charlotte calls its downtown “uptown” is that there’s a slight rise from the edge of the center city to the main intersection of Trade and Tryon streets. You might not even notice if you’re driving. But it is, technically, “up,” so “uptown” it is. And if Mount Pleasant, out on the eastern edge of Cabarrus County, sits on a patch of relative high ground . . . well, a mountain can be a state of mind.

It’s not far from where we live — less than an hour’s drive — but neither my wife, Alix, nor I had spent time there. Our loss. This time we made it there for a literary festival at the Mount Pleasant library, which is bright and clean and beautiful. It doubles as a rec center. Kids were out on the fields playing baseball, and there was a line at a food truck. It was a busy spot in a busy town.

Not all small towns are like that. You’ve probably taken the back roads through some towns where you wonder if you wandered into the zombie apocalypse. Small towns have been hit hard over the last 50 or 60 years by everything from interstate highways to chain stores to the slow death of local manufacturing. Sometimes all you see is a bunch of boarded-up buildings and a Dollar General. It can make more sense to move, either into the city or out to the country. Sometimes the worst place to be is in between.

But other small towns figure out ways to thrive. Mount Pleasant has a crisp little downtown, old houses in good shape, a distillery housed in an old prison. (They make a bourbon called Conviction.) We met a guy who researches town history, a woman who worked in PR all over the country, and a flock of librarians I would follow into the deep stacks anywhere. Every time we drive through a small town, my wife glances around at the houses and I can see her daydreaming. If Alix likes what she sees, sometimes she’ll say, “What would you think about buying a house and moving somewhere like here?”

She said that about Mount Pleasant.

I grew up in a midsized town — about 30,000 people — and got most of my perspective on small towns from watching TV. For the longest time I thought of small towns as being on either end of a wide range. One end was Mayberry, where almost nothing bad ever happened, except when Aunt Bee made pickles. The other end was Cabot Cove, Maine, where somebody got poisoned, stabbed or shot to death every damn week on Murder, She Wrote. (I still can’t believe nobody figured out that Jessica Fletcher was the most prolific serial killer in human history. None of that happened before she got to town!)

Modern life has flattened a lot of the differences between small towns and everywhere else. Streaming services bring the most obscure movies and shows to anyone with Wi-Fi. Worldwide delivery can put pretty much anything you want on your doorstep by tomorrow morning. A small town might not have a fancy ramen place, but Amazon can send you the ingredients and YouTube can show you the instructions.

The truth, though, is that small towns have never been that different than everywhere else. The settings might be different, but our hearts are the same: We all need to love and be loved, to find pursuits that fulfill us, to grieve when life hands us losses, to reach for something bigger than ourselves.

Those things are true no matter whether you live in a hamlet of 200 or a city of 2 million.

Every person is complicated and so every collection of people is more complicated still. It’s easy to write off a place for thinking or acting a certain way, but remember, that might be a majority, but it’s not a monolith. I’m not sure I could get a two-thirds vote in my own family on any subject except banana pudding. Our love for one another brings us together, but our differences are what makes life interesting.

It took me a long time to learn that you can make your own Mount Pleasant, wherever you are. You can just decide to live on higher ground. You can just decide to be decent to others. You can just decide to make a small town out of your friends and loved ones, even if you live in the middle of the city.

We are not likely to move to the actual Mount Pleasant, even though we enjoyed it. What we hope to do, though, is keep the little bits of it that we brought home with us — the warm feelings, the new friendships, the sense of discovery. I’m sitting here looking at a North Carolina map right now. I’ve been all over this state but there are so many places I still haven’t been. Time to gas up the car. 

State of Mind

STATE OF MIND

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Sweet Spot

A place to watch the world

By Tommy Tomlinson

Every year I mark it on the calendar when it arrives: porch season.

This year we got a dose in the middle of February. We always get a brief false spring right around then. You know winter is coming back for another round so you get outside while you can.

It was 74 degrees one day, 83 the next, and my wife and I took to the porch in the afternoons. The porch was one of the main reasons we bought this old house. It was built in 1929, ancient in a modern city of teardowns. When we got the place the porch was half caved in — it had a big crack in the concrete, running down the middle. We got it resurfaced, and over the last 22 years, and two sets of porch furniture, we’ve spent untold thousands of hours out here.

There are some neighbors we see only when we’re on the porch. They stop by and chat on their way to get a beer down the street, or just on their evening walk. Sometimes they come to browse the books in our Little Free Library. Not long after we put the library in, a young couple with a little girl would stop by a few times a week. An older neighbor noticed, found out the girl’s name, and started leaving books in there with notes for her. Then the couple discovered that the older woman had a dog and started leaving treats for the dog. I’m not sure that couple and that woman ever met. But those little gifts meant the world to them. And to us.

A year or two ago, a waterlogged branch fell off our oak tree in a storm and knocked out the library. We had it rebuilt. You can’t let go of a thing that gives you a story like that.

The porch is our party line, our message board, the place we catch up on news and gossip. It’s where we learn who moved out and who moved in, who got sick and who’s doing better. We have watched children grow from here, and watched other neighbors age.

This winter was a hard one. We had an ice storm one weekend and 11 inches of snow the next. Other parts of the state got it even worse. We got lucky at our house — the power never went out and the pipes didn’t freeze. But man, a winter storm in the South can be lonely. We went entire days without seeing another soul. My wife is from Wisconsin and cheerfully tells stories about having to shovel the driveway every hour when they had one of their regular blizzards. Some people down here — mostly transplants — take to the snow like golden retrievers. The rest of us just hunker.

A week or so after the last snow melted, I saw the shoots of one of our daffodils poking through the dirt. And I knew porch weather was coming.

I have spent some time over the years developing a theory about why the South is believed to be, let’s say, more eccentric than other parts of the country. I call it the Crazy Aunt Theory. In colder places, if you have a crazy aunt, you can just stick her in the attic. But our summers are too hot for that. So we put our crazy aunts on the porch where they can talk to God and everybody.

The porch takes us back to those looser, closer times. You don’t have to text anybody from the porch. You don’t need to look up their socials to see what they’ve been doing. They are voice and flesh, standing right in front of you, having real conversations. Sometimes, if somebody has a few minutes, they’ll come up on the porch and actually sit with us. Crazy, right? Spending time together, in person? And we will sit there with glasses of sweet tea, or possibly bourbon, and talk about — well, maybe, nothing. Some days nothing is the best thing to talk about.

And sometimes we are silent because there is so much to see.

There’s a movie from the ’90s called Smoke that features a character named Augie who runs a little tobacco shop in Brooklyn. Every morning at 8, he takes a single photo of the street corner outside. One of the other characters thinks this is the dumbest thing he’s ever heard . . . until he looks through an album of Augie’s photos. Slowly he notices the little differences, the way the light changes, the weather, the people walking through the frame. He is deeply moved.

That’s the way I think about our porch.

In my mind, I can flip through the album and watch the magnolia on the corner bloom and fade. I can see the wrens who show up every year to build a nest under one of the eaves, making a warm space for their babies: first eggs, then hatchlings, then gone. I can see the lizards who slink out from under the house to sun themselves on the warm concrete. I can turn around the camera and see Alix sitting next to me. We who moved here in our 40s and are now in our 60s and hope to still be around in our 80s.

That second warm day in February, two bluebirds floated into the branches of the ornamental cherry tree in our front yard. Our neighborhood is full of cardinals and robins and swallows. Hawks watch over us from the tops of the trees, and owls call to one another at night. But we don’t get many bluebirds. They felt like a promise. The hard winter was coming to an end. Soon it would be porch season for real. We could live out here again — not virtually, not digitally, but through the rich and beautiful panorama of real life.

Pleasures of Life

PLEASURES OF LIFE

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Changing the World

One poem at a time

By Josephus III

There I was, nervous, excited, dressed in a Carolina-blue, sheer top, looking like the African Tooth Fairy. My first hours in Nairobi and I’m already on stage, closing a dance performance at the 10th Annual Kenya International Theatre Festival with a choreographer from London. How did I get there? Community is the short answer. And poetry, because, for me, Poetry is Life and it continues to open doors into rooms that were too big for me to even fathom.

You see, 20 years ago I worked on a project with the Community Theatre of Greensboro, which, at the time, was being run by Mitchel Sommers. Together, we fused hip hop and poetry into Schoolhouse Rock, remixed some classics and toured Guilford County Schools with a little “Conjunction, Junction, what’s your function.”

Fast forward several years and Mitchel is retired, vacationing in Nairobi, where he happens to connect with people who run this festival. So, when they mention they are looking for a U.S. poet, guess who he recommends? You guessed it, me! Josephus III, Greensboro’s first poet laureate and the author of Poetry is Life, my book about how poetry is all around us, permeating everyday life, from hip hop and R&B to the rhythmic pattern of what comes out of our mouths.

I jump at the chance to share my art on a global stage.

The plan is for Poetry is Life to be performed as a one-man show. Plus, I’ll teach a master class on “The Beautiful Struggle” and perform at closing ceremonies.

As I move from day one to day two, still in transit, the idea of Nairobi keeps me on my toes; anticipation keeps my mind and body tingling like I have Spidey senses. Finally, I touch down, grab my bag and as my prearranged transportation makes its way to the hotel, the streets are alive with people — hugging, smiling, living. There is a cow in the median. I take it all in, my senses vibrant. I am in awe — poetry continues to provide and prove to me its power.

By the time I arrive, the festival has been drumming for a week, like heartbeats and Sasquatch feet, and I am the new kid on the block. I breakfast with thespians and creatives from Botswana, Zimbabwe, France, Switzerland and all over the planet — a community a world away. Plate full of sausages, potatoes and an omelet, plus a glass of mango juice in my hand, I “Greensboro Grub,” code for how I meet, greet and eat my way through this Olympic village for art and culture.

The first person I meet, Michael from London, invites me to have a seat at his table. Conversation, like poetry, flows and I learn that the dance show he’s been choreographing, Trickster, is happening that very evening. His eyes light up when he hears I am a poet. “There is a poem in the end of our piece,” he says. “We were going to project it on the screen to close the show, but we would love if you could read it.” I’ve only known him for 10 minutes and now he wants me to help close a show that he’s been prepping for a week? When in Rome — or shall I say Nairobi . . .

So here I stand in my blue, see-through top, looking like an African Tooth Fairy adorned with tribal face paint and purpose and passion and, above all else, poetry, surrounded by community filled with a feeling of fellowship with others, cultivating creativity and culture for a common cause on a stage in Nairobi, Kenya, changing the world one poem at a time.

And as the dance comes to an end and the stage lights fade, these are the words I speak:

So here’s the moral for the rich and the poor

For the ones who search and for those hearts that have already found the truth

The trickster never sleeps, he watches every move

He’s wicked and he’s strong

He’s magical and fast

But spirits from the ancestors may gather from the past to free your soul

And gently guide you back into your own

Have faith and courage friend,

You are not alone.

Birdwatch

BIRDWATCH

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Harbingers of Spring

Return of the swooping swallows

By Susan Campbell

As the days lengthen and the air begins to warm, many of us look forward to the return of migrant songbirds. Dozens of species that breed here spend their winters far to the south, and dozens more spend time feeding here as they migrate to summer haunts in New England and points farther north. Of these, the first to return in central North Carolina are the swallows. In early April, it’s possible to see six different species: barn, rough-winged, tree, bank and cliff, as well as the more familiar purple martin. And since swallows move in mixed flocks at this time of year, encountering three or four kinds in close proximity is not unusual.

Swallows are almost exclusively insectivorous and are built to catch their prey on the wing. They have strong pointed wings and forked tails, which allow for excellent aerial maneuverability. Except for adult male martins, they are all dark on top and light colored below. But each species has a characteristic flight pattern that can be used to identify it even if field marks cannot be discerned. Modern field guides include descriptions of the patterns — where a species flies and how it flies (the combination of flapping and soaring) are unique. This is very helpful, since swallows spend most of their time on the wing and tend to be quite high in the air, so plumage is difficult, if not impossible, to see.

Without a doubt, the best place to find swallows is around water, where insects are most abundant during the warmer months. If one is lucky and there is a snag or wire adjacent to a wet area, the birds may be perched at close range, which should make for ideal viewing conditions. Except for purple martins, sexes are identical. To the human eye, male and female size, coloration and behavior are the same. However, you may be able to pick out the drabber plumage of a juvenile in late summer if you have a pair of binoculars — and a good bit of patience.

Purple martins are the largest of the group and have the darkest feathering. Adult males are a distinctive bluish-black. Females and second-year males have some blue feathering on the back and head but are mainly a dingy gray. Juveniles will be a paler gray with little or no blue feathers in late summer.

Barn swallows have a dark-bluish back, orange face and yellowish underparts. They also have a deeply forked tail. Given this superior rudder, they are capable of low and erratic flight, scooping up insects close to water level or over large grassy expanses such as horse pastures or golf course fairways.

By comparison, rough-winged swallows are stocky and brown above, whitish below with a drab, buffy throat. They spend a lot of time soaring high in the air and, therefore, have a more squared-off tail.

Bank, tree and cliff swallows are less likely to be encountered in central North Carolina. All three have less distinct plumage and short, forked tails. Bank swallows, which may be found in the western part of the state, have light brown backs, thinner wings and quick wing beats. Tree swallows have dark-green backs, broad, long wings and more direct flight behavior with less wheeling involved. Increasingly, they can be found using tree cavities or nest boxes near large bodies of water in the northern Piedmont. And they are quite common in the coastal plain. Cliff swallows, which resemble barn swallows with a short tail and a pale rump patch, fly more deliberately, with slightly slower, more powerful strokes. They favor the protection of overhangs associated with man-made structures such as bridges and overpasses to affix their unique mud nests. Interestingly, for reasons we are not sure of, cliffs are being found in more locations across the state each season.

Although these little birds are well-engineered for flight, they are not known for their song. In fact, their vocalizations consist of short raspy or mechanical calls. Nevertheless, swallows can be quite noisy, whether they are migrating as a flock or in pairs defending a breeding territory. Try to remember to listen and look up this spring; you might just spot some fancy fliers.

Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

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A Multi-Storied House

If these walls could talk . . . occasionally, they do

By Billy Ingram

“How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start, when memory plays an old tune on the heart!” – Eliza Cook

Rarely do time, temperature and opportunity coalesce to create conditions rife for recapturing carefree memories of sunshiny, youthful afternoons. In this instance, it’s an unplanned springtime saunter through Fisher Park — a frequent footpath in my teenage meanderings when hoofing it from Latham Park to First Presbyterian or onward Downtown, sketchbook and graphite at hand for rendering fascinations like that bulbous Weeping Willow billowing at the entrance (long since withered away), those cobblestone arches crossing creeks, masonry stairways and hardwood hickory trees.

Only once did I attempt drawing any of the surrounding houses, and that was 106 Fisher Park Circle, a majestic, two-story Neoclassical Revival with inviting slate steps that lead to a grand portico canopied by a tympanum accented with a whimsical lunette window that, even then, I suspected had witnessed its share of illustrious people and familial felicity. This graceful home is a centerpiece of Greensboro’s very first residential development, one that broke ground in the 1890s then grew exponentially throughout the Roaring ’20s.

If every picture is worth a thousand words, then, surely, every vintage home has potential to inspire an entire novel. In theory, one could select randomly any period property and undoubtedly uncover countless intriguing untold — or untoward — tales, walls eagerly awaiting listening ears. That recent midday wandering into wistfulness led to wondering: Why not honor 106 Fisher Park Circle for this “novel” experiment?

Knowing little more than that 106 had been dubbed “R. D. Douglas House,” I began researching in my own library of local lore. Tucked into unread recesses was a nondescript paperback inscribed to my mother on her birthday in 2005 entitled The Best 90 Years of My Life, written and self-published two years earlier by Robert Dick Douglas Jr. Born in 1912, the author’s chronicle commences with recollections of growing up with his three siblings at . . . 106 Fisher Park Circle. In his opening paragraph, Douglas Jr. describes the stately five-bedroom manor his parents had built back in 1906: “The house was high above the street and had four large cement two-story columns in the front. On the north side of the house was a concrete driveway leading from the street up the hill to a red wooden barn at the back of the lot.”

That barn originally housed a horse that pulled the family’s four-wheeled carriage. Before long, the Douglases were motoring in touring cars (with Eisenglass curtains, no less) east down North Park Drive to arrive at 480 Church St., where the children’s great-grandmother lived in the estate known as Dunleith. The striking three-story mansion had been built around 1858 by her husband, N.C. Supreme Court Justice Robert P. Dick. One of the nation’s earliest examples of Italianate architecture, it was briefly requisitioned for Union Headquarters as the Civil War drew to a close. Descending into disrepair, that elegant dwelling was demolished in the late 1960s. More recently, the former Aycock neighborhood was renamed Dunleath (close enough, right?) in its honor.

In the 1910s, public transportation was incredibly convenient for citizens of the newly-named Gate City. “We had electric trolleys running on rails in the street and getting electric power from overhead trolley wires,” Douglas Jr. writes. “Streetcars ran from downtown out North Elm Street to about where Wendover crosses now. Later, they went all the way out to Sunset Drive where you could walk to the Greensboro Country Club.”

Douglas Jr.’s youth revolved around the single Catholic Church in town, St. Benedict, within easy walking distance. “Father Vincent was a great golfer and a member of the Greensboro Country Club,” he writes. “I think a lot of anti-Catholic prejudice was dispelled by his charm and golfing ability.” The Parish’s Sunday School was taught by the Sisters of Charity, who established St. Leo’s, Greensboro’s first hospital in 1906.

As an Eagle Scout, Douglas Jr. spent a summer hunting big game alongside Serengeti natives, about which he wrote a book, Three Boy Scouts in Africa: On Safari with Martin Johnson, published by Putman. He followed that up with a second memoir published one year later in 1929 about bear hunting on Kodiak Island, A Boy Scout in the Grizzly Country. He later returned to Alaska, exploring steaming volcanos, graduated Georgetown Law School and, by 1941, was rounding up Axis collaborators as an FBI agent. In 1945, he resettled with his wife and toddler son in Greensboro to specialize in labor law. Multiple cases he argued were heard before the Supreme Court. Douglas Jr. passed away in 2015 at age 103, remarkable in itself. The Best 90 Years of My Life was republished in 2007 by Vantage Press but remains elusive to locate.

In 1936, 106 Fisher Park Circle welcomed Dr. Luther L. Gobbel, the same year he was appointed president of Greensboro College, where, two years later, he presided over the school’s centennial commencement. My mother was an undergrad there during his tenure, her 1945 sophomore yearbook fronted by an appropriately placid portrait of Gobbel as an archetypical, armchair-seated academic doyen projecting an air of professorial steadfastness.

Gobbel relocated around 1941, when this Fisher Park landmark was purchased by Dr. Samuel F. Ravenel, founder of one of North Carolina’s first pediatric practices in 1925, positioned on the third floor of the Jefferson Standard Building.

In 1948, Ravenel rallied city leaders to raise $100,000 (roughly $1,350,000 today) in just 12 days. The funds were needed to convert a former rec hall on the recently-vacated Army Air Corps base, located off Bessemer, into an emergency, M.A.S.H.-like triage infirmary where he and new associate, Dr. Jean McAlister (pioneer female physician), risked their lives combating — and promptly conquering — a polio outbreak crippling Guilford County’s children by the hundreds.

“Dr. Jean” was our beloved family pediatrician in the ’60s. When she was away, it was Dr. Ravenel’s stethoscope pressed to our chests in their modest, rectangular office suite on East Northwood Street (improbably still standing among Cone’s expansions). What those well-healed patients’ parents likely didn’t know was that Dr. Ravenel spent spare hours at Children’s Home Society charitably attending to some 9,000 infants that would otherwise have gone untreated. Revered across every community, his 51-year devotion to the health and wellbeing of Greensboro’s most vulnerable ended tragically with a 1976 car accident.

A mere three chapters in, if we do indeed have elements necessary for an intriguing historical novel, it’s going to need a satisfying wrap-up. Turns out my old pal, Bill Baites, along with Stephen Dull, restored this gem to shine anew while residing there in the 2000s, undertaking a million-dollar renovation recognized with a Preservation Greensboro Award for excellence in 2006. I had no idea! 

Then again, many casual readers crave conclusions couched in cloying profundity. The epitaph engraved on Dr. Jean McAlister’s monument at Green Hill Cemetery could decisively serve as a suitable swan song for those selfless souls once resting their heads at 106 Fisher Park Circle:

Good and faithful servant of God

Well done

Rest from thy loved employ

The Battle fought, the victory won

Enter thy Master’s joy.

Simple Life

SIMPLE LIFE

Home
Department

Garden Reborn

And just maybe, ready for prime time

By Jim Dodson

On a warm and dry afternoon last October, as I mulched and watered my front yard’s 35 parched azaleas in the middle of the most punishing drought in memory, a shiny, white Volvo eased into my driveway.

A pair of well-dressed women emerged.

They introduced themselves as Candy Gessner and Lorraine Neill, committee members from the Greensboro Council of Garden Clubs. They had something to discuss.

For an instant, I wondered what crime against nature I might have unwittingly committed. Unnecessary strain on municipal water supplies? Had neighbors complained about my loud (and entirely inappropriate) oaths issued at a rainless sky?

Instead, Candy smiled and reached for my grubby hand.

“We understand you have a lovely garden,” she said. “We’ve come hoping to view it and ask if you would be interested in having your garden featured on the 2026 garden tour in June.”

Between us, they could have knocked me over with a packet of Burpee seeds. In my time on this Earth, I’ve built three ambitious landscape gardens and never given a passing thought that somebody might wish to see them. Especially a lot of serious gardening somebodies.

My first garden was built on a heavily forested hilltop in Maine, a classic New England woodland garden created on the remains of a vanished  19th-century farm that my cheeky Scottish mother-in-law nicknamed “Slightly Off in the Woods.” It was the perfect name because the only people who ever saw it were the FedEx guy and tourists who’d taken a wrong turn onto our dirt road.

“Nice layout,” the FedEx guy once remarked with a smirk. “But why build a garden like this that nobody will ever see?”

“Because I see it,” I said. “It keeps me sane in a crazy world.”

He thought I was joking. But any serious gardener will tell you that time spent in their garden is a cure for whatever ails the spirit. Most of us, in fact, never imagine that others will desire to see our gardens. We create them for us. The closest we can get to playing God, as a famous English gardener named Mirabel Osler once said to me.

My second garden belonged to a cute little cottage in Pinehurst that my wife, Wendy, and I rented in hopes of eventually buying. The previous owner had been an elderly gardener who let his 2-acre garden run amok. I spent a year cutting back overgrown azalea bushes and battling wicked wisteria vines and even recovered a “lost” serpentine brick fence that had been swallowed whole by English ivy. I also built a beautiful wooden fence around the fully restored garden — just in time for disaster to hit.

The week we planned to officially buy the place, the kitchen floor collapsed, and we discovered that black mold was running like a medieval plague through the walls and floors. We moved out that same afternoon. At least the garden looked fantastic. 

Finally, there is the garden where the women from the garden council and I stood on that afternoon. It is, without question, my final garden and, therefore, a serious labor of love.

A decade ago, we moved back to my hometown, taking possession of a charming mid-century bungalow that the Corry family built in 1951. I grew up two doors away from this lovely old house and always admired it. Al and Merle Corry were my parents’ best friends. Their grown children were thrilled when they learned that a pair of Dodsons would be their childhood home’s second owners.

And so, we set off to fully restore the property.

As Wendy got to work on the interior, I confronted “Miss Merle’s” long-neglected garden. It took a year of weekends just to clear dying trees and dead shrubs from the front yard before I could turn my attention to the backyard so wildly overgrown, I nicknamed it “The Lost Kingdom.”

Over the next decade, neighbors and friends got used to the sight of me getting gloriously dirty every weekend, rain or shine — digging holes, building beds, hauling in new soil and manure, eventually planting a dozen flowering trees in the front yard alone, with banks of hydrangeas and 30-plus azalea bushes, inspired by a former neighbor who did the same during my childhood years.

In due course, our “east” garden became a flowering space with a tiered stone pathway and lush beds that are home to autumn sage, Mexican sunflowers, purple salvia, society garlic, Mexican petunias, Gerbera daisies and red-hot pokers. Knock Out and old-garden rose varieties preside over a trio of butterfly bushes that monarchs swarm upon on late-summer days.

In the former Lost Kingdom out back, I built an Asian-themed shade garden that’s home to nine Japanese maples, scores of autumn ferns and monster-sized hosta plants (I imported from my Maine garden). The final touch was a stone pathway that winds through this tranquil, hidden space, though only I and our three dogs have ever followed it.

Which brings me back to the lovely women from the council.

I thanked them for considering my garden for their June tour but pointed out that drought had taken an alarming toll. Moreover, mine was still a young garden, a mere decade old. It needed time to heal and find its way.

“Another year perhaps?” I suggested.

They wouldn’t hear of it. “Everyone’s garden has been beaten up,” Candy reminded me. “But come spring, they always bounce back like a miracle. Yours will, too.”

So now, friends, April is here and I’m a man in constant motion, fussing, fixing, weeding, mulching, trimming, planting new things and getting gloriously dirty. A garden, of course, is never finished. There is always something to do, to change, to add or subtract, or simply fix. Nature abides no slackers.

Nothing could make me happier than to welcome folks to my reborn garden come June 6-7.

Don’t mind my grubby hands, though. A gardener’s job is never done. 

Tea Leaf Astrologer

TEA LEAF ASTROLOGER

Home
Department

Aries

(March 21 – April 19)

This month, you’re giving theatrical bravado — and we’re lapping it up. Mars in your sign from April 9 through mid-May is the energy shot you didn’t need but surely won’t squander. Just don’t move so fast you miss a stellar career opportunity that aligns with yourlong-term goals. A friendly tip: Passion and impulse aren’t always synonymous. Now, channel your inner Freddie Mercury and watch the world respond.

Tea leaf  “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

Taste as you go.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

Double the recipe. 

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Best not to overextend yourself. 

Leo (July 23 – August 22)

Slow down and proceed with wonder.

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)  

Go waffles-for-dinner wild. 

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Check the expiration date. 

Scorpio (October 23 – November 21)

Try changing the lens. 

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

Two words: flameless candles. 

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

It’s time to turn the compost. 

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

Read the room, Darling. 

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

Schedule the oil change. 

Chaos Theory

CHAOS THEORY

Home
Department

Why DIY today what you can DIY tomorrow?

Ceilings and other unfinished projects

By Cassie Bustamante

When it comes to house projects, my husband, Chris, and I have an unspoken motto: Why do today what you can put off until right before you need to sell your home?

Just before we moved to Greensboro, our project procrastination caught up with us. I kneel atop a 5-foot-tall, mint-green, vintage shelving unit in our kitchen, my neck craned toward the ceiling I’m painting. Tiny, white droplets fleck my dark-brown hair. Nearby, Chris feeds our infant son, Wilder, stuffing lukewarm spoonfuls of mushy, Gerber oatmeal with a touch of homemade applesauce into the little guy’s hungry, gummy, baby-bird maw.

In our house, painting is a tag-team endeavor. Chris is the roller, while I am the cutter-inner. After many years spent creating content for my DIY blog — mostly paint projects — and refinishing furniture for my vintage-furniture storefront, I’ve got a steady hand, one that requires no blue tape. Chris, on the other hand, is more like a bull in a paint-your-own-pottery shop — not so good with the details but great with the brute force required for rolling. So, as soon as I swipe paint on the last of the kitchen ceiling edges, I hop down and swap places with him. He douses a roller in white paint while I take over with Wilder.

“Why do we do this to ourselves?” I say, exasperated. “All of these projects we let pile up over the seven years we’ve lived here and now we’re cramming them into seven weeks!” Light fixtures to replace, countertops to update, a half-dead maple tree along the driveway to chop down and, obviously, ceilings to paint.

“And, you know,” says Chris, “none of these projects are that bad. It’s the getting them all done in rapid succession that’s killer.” He pauses and I can practically read the thought bubble that’s forming over his head. “Let’s not do this in our next house.”

I nod enthusiastically. “Let’s get things done over time so that we can actually enjoy the results of our own blood, sweat and tears,” I say, rubbing 6-month-old Wilder’s button nose with my own. “That’s right, Mommy and Daddy are not going to procrastinate in our new house!”

A couple short months later, we say goodbye to that home and its freshly-painted ceilings, and make our way to Greensboro, where a 1966 Starmount Forest ranch home waits for us. Sure, it needs some updating, but it ticks so many of our boxes as a family of five — four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a great location.

The kitchen, however, is never going to work for us. While I am a huge fan of reusing what you can, the original cabinetry only allows space for a 24-inch oven. A baking sheet full of dino-shaped chicken nuggets? Forget it. And I can stop fantasizing about hosting Thanksgiving with an oven like that. So, just months after moving in, we hire a contractor to renovate our kitchen, updating it with new cabinetry, new flooring and fixtures, a hammered-brass sink from locally-owned Thompson Traders, and, of course, new appliances, including a gorgeous, white-and-gold, 30-inch Café oven.

As the renovation crawls closer to its completion many months later, I tell the contractor, “We’ll take care of all the painting.” We just want our house back — no more workers tromping around, no more plastic sheeting, no more construction dust. “Trust me, we can handle that part.”

“OK, if you’re sure,” he says.

“Oh, I’m sure.”

Once the contractor and his accoutrements have quite literally left the building, we spend a weekend coating the walls in white. I give the new built-in banquette and molding a touch of easy-to-clean sheen with semigloss in the same shade. And it looks fresh and finished — as long as you don’t look up. “We’ll save the ceiling for next weekend,” I say to Chris as I scrub my brush clean. “I’m too tired to think about it right now.”

Approximately 150 weekends — or three years — later, our ceiling finally has its moment with paint. While we’ve grown so tired of looking at the dull, drab ceiling in its primed state, apparently we haven’t been tired enough to actually push up our sleeves and do it ourselves. Nope, the first thing we do when I go back to work full-time is hire out the work. All I have to do is select the color: Sherwin Williams’ Romance at 75% saturation, a lovely, warm shade of blush. No argument from Chris, who’s just happy to have it done.

Well, almost done. You see, the painters arrive on a sweltering July day and our AC is working overtime. The two vents in the kitchen ceiling are dripping with condensation, making it impossible for paint to stick to them.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell the concerned painter as he shows me the issue. “We can easily get to it when the weather cools this fall.”

It’s been almost four years and, as I sit at my kitchen banquette writing, I steal an upwards glance at the vent closest to me, stark white against the soft-pink ceiling. Really, how hard could it be to just slap some paint on it when I’m done writing? Not hard at all, but we’re not ready to list our home anytime soon.