In the 1980s, my Southern daddy introduced my new husband to boiled peanuts. Dad loved “goobers” in all forms but was especially fond of them if they were roasted or boiled.
Don popped one into his mouth, eager to please, despite the off-putting, dishwater gray, stewed peanut hulls dripping with saline wash. Don is from South Africa, where he likes to tell small children they eat bugs and worms, washed down with Rooibos tea. (FYI:Medicinal Rooibos tastes better than cod liver oil but worse than moonshine.)
So Don gamely chewed the peanut. “It certainly has texture,” he observed, if a little too brightly. A boarding school–educated man, my husband is nothing if not diplomatic.
Dad frowned. “Lord! You ate the shell!Spit it out and start over,” he instructed. Don spat and obediently shelled on the second try.
“That improves the taste considerably,” he said, looking much relieved.
Since then, Don hasn’t just embraced boiled peanuts, he has become a defender of the slimy little legume.
Whenever Don spots green peanuts for sale, he does a Snoopy dog happy dance. He doesn’t care what the cost; Don practically runs to the checkout counter. Overjoyed, he boiled up half a bushel this weekend. We stood together over a steaming pot, so eager to test the goobers we both burned our tongues but grinned anyhow.
“Remember when I didn’t know you were supposed to shell them?” Don almost always muses, shaking his head. After gorging ourselves, he sent me several facts gleaned from the Internet.
“Boiled peanuts have high anti-oxidant value!” he texted as I finished the Sunday paper.
“Good to know!” I yelled towards his office.
“In Ghana and Nigeria, boiled peanuts are eaten as street food,” he texted again. “They are also popular in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa, especially in Durban.”
Don’s brother lives in Bloemfontein, one of South Africa’s three capitals, which, by strangest coincidence, is a lot like High Point, and seven hours from Natal. Durban, three hours south of Natal on the east coast of South Africa, is a lot like Myrtle Beach to my eye.
“Wow!”I hollered back. I hate to text, thinking it’s silly when he is in the next room. Then, I imagined South Africans buying and munching boiled peanuts from street vendors, wondering what they did with the shells.
The next day, I called my colleague, gourmand and veteran food writer David Bailey.We talked Paul Theroux’s Deep South, and grumbled about how he didn’t really get the South.
“Read Dispatches from Pluto,” David advised, going on and on about Richard Grant’s rollicking good read on restoring a Mississippi plantation house. Then we talked boiled peanuts and I told him how Don discovered they were big stuff back home.
“Don must have had boiled peanuts in South Africa and forgot about it!” David chortled. “That’s wonderful,” he laughed.“It’s like okra!Boiled peanuts came from Africa! Full circle!”
Reinvigorated, Don keeps spreading the gospel of the virtues of boiled peanuts, but I could have spared him some trouble: Regional cuisine is a hard sell. It is next to impossible to get anyone who didn’t grow up Southern to even consider eating a green peanut, let alone one that has been boiled for hours in salt water.
It would be easier to convince a Yankee to try pickled pigs feet. Or eat liver mush or a fried baloney sandwich.
And most especially, unless in the throes of love, to persuade an expat to pop a salty boiled goober in the mouth and chew.OH
O.Henry frequent contributor Cynthia Adams solicits your favorite recipes for fried rabbit, okra, or even cooter. Yes, you read that correctly.
Technically speaking, it’s a different
world up there
By Clyde Edgerton
My parents were bornin 1902 and 1904 into homes without electricity. That kind of describes a starting point regarding my relationship to modern technology.
I remember an old Model T truck we kept in our backyard when I was a child. To start the engine, you inserted a crank into a hole below the radiator in the front grill. Then with the ignition turned on (after you’d primed the engine with the choke) you turned the crank until the engine started.
Our truck was equipped with a wooden trough across the back end of the truck bed — where the tailgate goes. At the end of the trough was a circular saw. You could jack up the back of the truck, place a saw-belt around a tire or axle, the belt would turn the saw, and you could cut firewood from logs.
My grandfather (born 1870) used to cutting wood with an ax, thought the contraption was unnecessary. Once, when he saw a neighbor cooking on a grill, he said, “We used to cook inside and go to the bathroom outside. Now they’re turning that around.”
After automobile electric windows, air conditioning and automatic transmissions came along in the ’40s and ’50s, my father and mother would have nothing to do with them (until the ’70s).
Now, on many days, I think about sitting by my father’s grave in Durham and having a conversation with him. He died in 1980.
“Daddy, how’s it going?” I would say.
“Nothing much happening on my end. How’s it going up there?”
“Right much happening on the technology end,” I’d say.
“I figured that might be coming. What about on the morality end?”
“Not much there . . . that seems to stay kind of constant. But on the technology part, I was just thinking about how when you bought a car for the family you always wanted the windows that were rolled up with a handle, no air conditioning and a straight transmission.”
“Oh yeah, I didn’t like the extras. But go ahead and feed me some new facts about technology, maybe politics, economics.”
“Let’s stay with technology,” I’d say. “No, wait a minute. On the politics: Do you remember Garland Fushee? The man who lived next to Tee Rawlings, service station?”
“Of course. How could anybody forget Garland Fushee?”
“Well, think about Garland being president,” I’d say.
“Garland Fushee?”
“Yes sir. Remember about how much Garland loved golf, and how much he would have loved to tweet about people he didn’t like?”
“Garland wasn’t a bird,” Daddy would say.
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry. Tweeting is something people do now. It’s connected in a roundabout way to technology. Connected to advances since the computer.”
“Computer? I remember that computer on campus at Chapel Hill back in 1971. Remember when we went in that building for a drink of water and you showed it to me. It filled up a room.”
“I do remember that. By the way, here in Wilmington, we buy water now — those who can afford it.”
“You buy water? What in the world?” Daddy would say.
“Long story,” I’d say. “It gets us over into economics, always connected to politics. Turns out our water problems are good for business.”
“How so?”
“Bottled-water business is looking up. And an upriver business releases chemicals into the water and a bunch of downriver businesses benefit: funeral homes, cremation services, pharmacies, hospitals, tombstone makers, florists.”
“Oh, I see. Hmmmm. Sounds like they’re finally backing off on regulations.”
“That’s the idea.”
“All in all, looks like I may have checked out at about the right time.”
“You could say that, Daddy. We’ll chat again in a few years. See how things are going.”
“Let’s do that, Son. See you then.”
And then I’d hop in my car and drive it back to Wilmington. In less than a decade it may be driving me. A lot of technology in a couple of lifetimes.OH
Clyde Edgerton is the author of 10 novels, a memoir and most recently, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW.
I have beenfortunate to publish three novels in the past five years, and I have been even more fortunate that my publisher has sponsored national book tours for each of my books. After the years it takes to write and publish a novel — much of that time spent in solitude and self-doubt — it is very rewarding to visit a bookstore, library or college campus and meet people who have read your work. I love hitting the road to answer questions, sign books and learn what readers are reading when they are not reading my books. When I first sat down to write my debut novel, I never imagined I would be so fortunate.
For my most recent tour in support of The Last Ballad, I spent almost two full months on the road, most of it alone. The wonderful time spent with readers is only a fraction of what you do when you are on book tour. The vast majority of your time is spent running through airports, eating fast food late at night, lying awake in hotel rooms, missing your family and wondering if — in the end — the grind of the road helps book sales. This essay is about how to survive those many long, lonely moments.
Here are a few steps you can take to overcome the perils of the book tour. I ask you to keep in mind that this is what has worked for me. Because of many factors, a book tour is not the same experience for everyone; this is based only on mine.
Gear: If you will be taking any flights longer than an hour, consider getting a neck pillow. Yes, they are awkward to pack and you will look silly carrying it through the airport, but nothing is more awkward or silly than your head lolling against your seatmate’s shoulder or your chin bouncing against your chest while you fight sleep in midair. A vacuum-sealed, stainless-steel thermos also comes in handy: It will keep water cool and coffee hot for hours while you travel. You may also want to invest in an extra phone charger with a long cord. Outlets in hotels are often located behind the headboard or bedside table, and a long cord makes it easy to charge your phone and use it as an alarm clock without moving furniture in your room. Finally, take a book, and make sure to take a book you actually want to read instead of a book you think you should be reading.
Airport: Always check your bag if your host or publisher is paying for your travel because book tours can be long, and a day off from lugging your luggage is a gift. Otherwise, find a carry-on bag that holds a lot of stuff and is easy to transport. After checking your bag, empty your pockets before security and put everything except your ID and boarding pass into one of the small, zippered compartments on your carry-on luggage. There is nothing more annoying than standing at security while people empty their pockets before going through the metal detector. The same people will hold up the line on the other side of security while spending even longer putting everything back into their pockets. Do not be that person. For the same reason, wear shoes that are easy to slip off and on, and go ahead and take your laptop out of your bag. If you find yourself holding up the security line for any reason, do not be cute about it. The security line is not an open mic. There is nothing cute or funny about wasting people’s time when they are rushing to catch a flight.
Food: Except for in a few cities, the food is irredeemably bad at most airports. There is no way around this. I have no suggestions to make about airport food except to avoid it if you can. Once you arrive at your destination, spend a few minutes scouting around online for good food that is nearby. When eating on the road, I walk a fine line between finding something convenient and fast while also wanting to have a distinct culinary experience. If I am in Austin I want to have the best barbecue. If I am in New Orleans I want to have the best gumbo. If I am in New England I want to have the best clam chowder. Keep in mind that “the best” does not always mean the “most famous.” Trust the people at the bookstore and hotel when it comes to food. They are locals. They know. There is also no judgment, at least not from me, for eating cheap pizza or a quick sandwich. You will often find yourself short on time, and settling on something simple is an easy way to make quick decisions. A book tour is not a vacation, and you cannot plan to eat like you are on vacation.
Hotel: I have a particular routine when I check into hotels. I like to feel settled, so if I am staying for more than one night I unpack the necessary clothes and place them in drawers, and then I put my shaving kit on the bathroom counter before stashing my luggage in the closet. Then I turn on the television (CNN or ESPN) and iron the shirts and pants I plan to wear. I always iron during leisure time because there is nothing more hectic than ironing as you are preparing to rush out to a bookstore or catch a taxi to the airport. Clothes unpacked and ironed, I unplug the alarm clock by the bed. If you do not do this you can plan on it going off at 5:00 a.m. and being unable to figure out how to stop it. Go ahead and unplug it and set the alarm on your cellphone. No outlets close to the bedside table? Thank goodness you have your extra-long cord for the charger. Are you a coffee drinker? Most hotels have in-room coffee makers with coffee available. Some hotels have free coffee in the lobby. No matter what the setup, avoid Styrofoam cups because coffee served in Styrofoam cups is an offense to humanity that cannot be forgiven. I know of a few writers who pack their favorite mugs along with fresh coffee and French presses. This is not a bad idea.
Family: I have traveled with my family, and I have traveled without my family. It is easier to travel without my family, especially if we are staying in one hotel room, but it is also very lonely. To offset said loneliness I will often FaceTime with my wife and our girls. This inevitably ends with one child or another wanting to hold the phone while the other child gets upset, which inevitably ends with the phone being dropped or hung up or repossessed by my wife. Everyone gets off the phone feeling a little sadder and more frustrated than before the call. Sometimes I find it better to have my wife text me photos of herself with our daughters, and she posts many of these on Instagram so I can flip through them before bed. But I always go to bed feeling a little sad. I often wonder if it would be easier and less frustrating just to hear their voices instead of seeing their faces.
For me, the easiest part of book tour is standing in front of a group of readers and discussing my book. The hardest parts are being away from my family and the constant feeling that I am running late for the next thing, whether that thing is a flight, a reservation, an interview or ride.
But a book tour can also feature pleasant surprises that masquerade as disappointments. At the end of the most recent tour I was on the way home from out west when I missed a flight in Salt Lake City due to fog. It was noon, and the next flight that could get me home to Wilmington would not leave until midnight, and I would have to connect in Atlanta and would not arrive home until late the following morning. After getting my new tickets I had two options: sulk in the airport all day or go out and see something of Salt Lake City, a place I had never visited before.
I caught a cab into the city and had an incredible day. I visited the King’s English, one of the most iconic bookstores in the country. I had lunch and a beer at a local brewery. I visited the Mormon Temple downtown, and I ended the day with an impromptu decision to catch a Utah Jazz game before catching the train back to the airport.
It was an exhausting day that had begun with great disappointment, but it ended in joy and the certainty that despite how long I had been away and how far I was from North Carolina, I was headed back to my wife and children. I unzipped my backpack, removed my neck pillow, and settled in for the long flight(s) home.OH
Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington with his wife and their two daughters. His new novel The Last Ballad is available wherever books are sold.
We ambled past
a new storefront on South Elm Street, my pals and I, on a charity walk through downtown Greensboro.
The signs on the plate-glass windows said Crooked Tail Cat Cafe.
“What’s a cat cafe?” someone asked.
“I think you take your cat in there and play,” someone offered.
“Anyone can take a cat?”
“What if your cat isn’t friendly?”
“Do they serve food?”
“Yuck if they do, with cats around.”
We were engaging in a favorite pastime of individuals who have no clue: trying to come up with an answer by engaging a committee of individuals who have no clue.
The fact was, none of us knew what happened inside a cat cafe.
I made a mental note to find out. A few weeks later, I enlisted the help of a real investigative pro, my dear friend and former newspaper colleague Jerry Bledsoe.
You might remember that in 1970s and ’80s, before he became a best-selling author, Jerry informed and entertained the stuffing out of Greensboro with a thrice-weekly column.
You also might remember that one of his favorite subjects was cats. To wit, he made the fur fly by trashing cats and defending dogs. He regularly squared up against fellow News & Record columnist Jim Jenkins, who declared the superiority of cats and offered little consolation to canines.
The game was good for two or three columns, complete with reader feedback, every time they growled and spat at each other. Dog people chewed on Jim. Crazy cat ladies called and cussed Jerry. They confronted him in person.
“I’d be out eating, and some woman would come up and hiss in my ear,” Jerry recalls fondly.
In truth, Jerry didn’t hate cats. But he didn’t have one either.
Then something happened, something named Pookie, a beautiful Burmese cat who sauntered into the Bledsoe home and never left. Today, Pookie lives a pampered life, along with two other feline foundlings. They co-exist peacefully with an atomic-powered dog who was discovered, along with his littermates, in a dumpster. Another whiskered ward, a feral cat that lives nearby, survives thanks to Jerry’s faithful visits.
You heard it here first:Bledsoe, now 76, is a bona fide cat man, and a dog man, with well-bred nose for news. His forthcoming memoir, Do-Good Boy: An Unlikely Writer Confronts the Sixties and Other Indignities, covers the tumultuous first decade of his career, including his work for Esquire magazine.
But Bledsoe’s enchanted by small stories, too, so it didn’t take much convincing to arrange a meeting at Crooked Tail. It was a weekday afternoon and cat-lovin’ spaces were available, according the online reservation schedule, so we walked in. We paid the entry fee ($10 an hour per person), sanitized our hands (for the cats’ protection), and signed our waivers.
“Our cats are super friendly, but they do have teeth and claws,” explained employee Taylor Freeman.
She let us through a gate into the cat lounge, an airy, modern and noticeably non-smelly space, thanks to top-shelf cat litter and air purifiers.
She explained that all of the cats in the lounge — up to 10 at a time — come from the local adoption outfit Red Dog Farm, which spays, neuters, vaccinates and screens the candidates before sending them to live in the comfort of Crooked Tail until they find a new home.
Indeed, cafe owner Karen Stratman, who dumped the corporate life for her own business, has created one cool kitty orphanage after discovering the trend online in 2011.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” says Karen.
Crooked Tail is the first cat cafe in the state, though others are scheduled to open soon.
With its hardwood floors, modular seating, soft music, indirect lighting, pop art (see the picture of Kitty Gaga), and wall-mounted catwalks, the feeling is contemporary cathouse.
Occasionally, the room jingles and thumps with bursts of feline activity, but overall the vibe is chill.
When they’re not pouncing and tumbling, the residents doze in fleece-lined baskets, hollowed-out shells of old TVs and streamlined sofas draped with fuzzy throws.
Humans are welcome to pick up, pet and play with the cats — providing the cats are willing. As anyone who has lived with a little tiger knows, you can lead a cat to affection, but you can’t make it accept it.
Bored or ignored? Read a book (Does This Collar Make My Butt Look Big?), watch a TV that actually works (a flat-screen model is bolted to the rear wall) orslip through a door to the backroom cafe for a decent cup of joe. The health department won’t allow food to be prepared on-site, but you can buy pre-packaged drinks and snacks, including locally made baked goods, and enjoy them inside the cafe.
We happened to visit on a big day: The first shipments of beer and wine arrived in the cafe that afternoon, but, like most visitors, we were more interested in mousers than merlot.
We spent some quality time in a window seat with Stash, a 10-year-old gray tabby who let me smooth his spine. He rubbed against me before a flick of his tail said, “Enough.”
We met 7-month-old Bean, and his sidekick, 4-month-old Leo, who would be leaving together for a new home soon.
We lingered over 4-month-old tortoiseshell Nola, a frisky lass who’d also captured the
attention of High Point University sophomore Isabelle Germino.
It was Isabelle’s second time in. The first time, a couple of weeks earlier, she’d visited with a friend on a busy night, been put on a waiting list, went to catch dinner at a nearby restaurant and returned a couple of hours later for a one-hour kitty fix.
“They were all jumping around,” she said. “It was so much fun.”
Now, she was back with a camera, shooting video for a school project. Nola was getting a lot of screen time.
“I’m in love with this kitten,” she finally said to Freeman. “What’s the adoption process?”
Crooked Tail works, averaging more than two adoptions a week. It’s no surprise that the spry kittens like Nola go quickly, and the older cats wait.
Jerry and I settled on a sofa with 6-year-old Benji, an orange-and-white gent whose former family surrendered him because someone in the family developed an allergy to him. They did not part lightly. The family boxed his toys and food, and they wrote a letter to be opened only by the person who adopts him.
Curled in his soft doughnut bed, Benji showed little reaction as Jerry massaged his ears.
“He seems sad,” another woman observed.
She was right. You could feel it, and the one who felt it most keenly was the one who’d once made scratch by making fun of cats.
He leaned over and cooed into a velvety umber ear.
“You will find a new family,” he pledged. “You’ll get to know them, and you’ll like them. Yes, you will.”
Spoken like an old mewsman.OH
You can reach Maria Johnson at ohenrymaria@gmail.com. Find Crooked Tail at crookedtailcatcafe.com or 336-550-4024.
Greensboro statuary began life at Carolina Bronze Sculpture
By Jim Moriarty
Dressed like Marty McFly paying a nocturnal visit on his adolescent father in Back to the Future, Brian Brown and Jackson Jennings shuffle along in their silver coats and hoods with plastic face shields, carrying 270 pounds of molten bronze as if it were the industrial version of Cleopatra’s golden litter. As they tip the glowing bucket, orange metal flows like lava into the gray-white ceramic casts wired in place in a steel pan on the cement floor. This is how Ronald Reagan got to the Capitol rotunda.
Carolina Bronze Sculpture, hidden down a gravel drive past Maple Springs Baptist Church on the other side of I-73 from Seagrove’s famous potteries, may be the foremost artists’ foundry in the eastern United States. Certainly it’s the one most often used by Chas Fagan, the Charlotte artist whose statue of Reagan resides in the people’s house in Washington, D.C.
The foundry is the life’s work of Ed Walker, 62, a quiet, unassuming man with a quick smile and a knack for noodling on an industrial scale. Walker is a sculptor, too. His Firefighter Memorial in Wilmington, North Carolina, incorporating a piece of I-beam from the South Tower of the World Trade Center, was completed in 2013, and he hopes to have the recently announced Richard Petty Tribute Park with multiple sculptures completed in time to celebrate Petty’s 80th birthday on July 2. One of Walker’s large abstracts is on its way to Charleston, South Carolina, on loan for a year’s exhibition.
“Ed’s a rare combination of a complete artist’s eye mixed with an absolute engineer’s brain,” says Fagan. “He’s the kind of guy who can solve any problem — and every project has a list of them. Nothing fazes him.”
Take Fagan’s sculpture The Spirit of Mecklenburg, a bronze of Captain James Jack on horseback, the centerpiece of a fountain in Uptown Charlotte. “The design was not easy,” says Fagan of the 1 1/2 life-size bronze. “I had the thing leaning and he’s at full speed so the horse’s feet are not on the ground exactly. Engineers had to be involved, at least two of them, maybe three. We’re all standing around this big clay horse and a question popped up on something pretty important. Everyone pipes in, pipes in, pipes in. Eventually Ed offers his opinion in his normal, subdued, quiet manner. Then the discussion goes on and on and on, the whole day. Magically, everything circled around all the way back to exactly what Ed had said. I just smiled.”
Walker grew up in Burlington, living in the same house — three down from the city park — until he graduated from Walter M. Williams High School and went to East Carolina University. His father, Raleigh, was a WWII veteran who developed a hair-cutting sideline to his motor pool duties in the 5th Army Air Corps. “There was a picture he showed me of this barbershop tent, and Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill were standing out in front of it. They’d just gotten a shave and a haircut by him, and he was on the edge of the photo.” The same shears kept Ed’s head trimmed, too.
At 9 feet, James Barnhill’s Minerva (2003), towers over UNCG’s campus.
Walker was drafted by art early on. He turned pro when he was in first grade. “Back then kids didn’t have money, at least not in my neighborhood,” he says. “My mom and dad (Lillie and Raleigh, who both worked in the textile mills) thought that ice cream was something you get on Friday for being good all week.” Others got it more frequently. Walker started drawing characters taken from classroom stories using crayons on brown paper hand towels, then trading them for ice cream money. Goldilocks. The Three Bears. Not exactly Perseus with the Head of Medusa but, heck, it was just first grade. Soon, he was coming home with more money than he left with in the morning. “My mom questioned me about it. The next day I had to go to the principal’s office and was told that under no circumstances could I be selling something on school grounds.”
Sculpture reared its head at ECU. “I took my first sculpture appreciation class with Bob Edmisten. Had my first little bronze casting from that class. They pushed everybody to explore. You could use or do anything. I fell in love with that. Started learning how to weld and cast and carve, the kind of range of things you could do.” In addition to getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Walker met his wife, Melissa, another art major, also from Burlington.
“We knew each other in high school,” says Melissa.
“She was in the good student end,” says Ed. “I was in the back with all the problem people.” The old art building at ECU was near the student center. She was going out. He was going in. They were pushing on the same door in different directions. By their senior year they were married.
Cast in 2008, Nathanael Greene, by James Barnhill, oversees the roundabout in downtown Greensboro.
The first stop after graduation was Grand Forks, North Dakota. If you’ve been to North Dakota, you know there are months and months of harsh winter followed by, say, Tuesday, which is followed by more winter. The University of North Dakota was interested in setting up an art foundry and offered a full stipend to the person who could do it. Walker had helped Edmiston put together the one at ECU’s then-new Jenkins Fine Arts Center. The professor recommended the student. North Dakota sent the Walkers a telegram — your grandfather’s instant messaging. Be here in two weeks. They were.
“They had a new building and a bunch of equipment in crates,” says Walker. “Figure it out. Set it up.” Walker’s art history professor at UND was Jackie McElroy, better known today by the pseudonym Nora Barker, a writer of cozy mysteries, who reinforced his belief that you could figure out how to do just about anything if you wanted to badly enough. It became a recurring theme.
Chased out of North Dakota with a master’s degree and a case of frostbite, the Walkers found themselves back in North Carolina trying to land teaching jobs. After traveling to a conference, essentially a job fair, in New Orleans, Ed and a friend, Barry Bailey, made a pact. If they didn’t have jobs in a year, they’d move to New Orleans. They didn’t and they did.
The Walkers arrived on July 3rd, dead broke. They slept on the floor of the apartment of a friend of their friend, Barry. “We had no job to go to, no food, no money,” says Walker. The next day at a Fourth of July block party, he picked up some carpentry work building a Catholic church. It lasted the rest of the steamy Louisiana summer. The couple attended art openings, went to galleries, met people. Walker got a gig as a bartender at a private party thrown by a local sculptor, Lin Emery. “At the end of the thing, she gave us a tour of her home and her studio,” says Walker. A creator of high-end kinetic sculptures, Emery mentioned she’d just lost her fabricator and was swamped with jobs that needed doing. “Do you know anybody who knows how to weld aluminum?” she asked. “Well, I can,” said Walker. He’d never done it before.
At 6 inches tall, Blind Justice at the Alamance County Courthouse is one of Ed Walker’s 11 whimsical sculptures of Arty the Mouse scattered throughout downtown Graham.
With a weekend to learn how to TIG (tungsten inert gas) weld, a professor friend introduced him to a guy in the maintenance department at Loyola University who offered to help. Walker showed up for work on Monday. “I did not confide to her that I lied my way into the job until about eight months later,” he says. He worked in Emery’s studio until — with Emery’s help — he was able to mix and match enough bits and pieces of teaching jobs to laissez les bon temps rouler. Part time at Loyola. Part time at Delgado Community College. Part time at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Part time at Tulane University. Then, finally, a full-time job teaching sculpture at Tulane. “I had eight students,” Walker says of his first year. “In five years it went from eight students to 101 and eight sculpture majors.” But, as it turned out, Walker was more interested in sculpture than Tulane was.
The Walkers had purchased a single shotgun house with 12-foot ceilings built in 1876 in the Ninth Ward, east of the French Quarter, two blocks from the Industrial Canal that would fail when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Ed created his own little foundry in the side yard. When he wasn’t tenured by Tulane in ’87, his little foundry became his business, initially casting bronze pieces for his students who suddenly had no place to complete their projects. By the fall of ’89, Melissa and their children, Sage and Nathan, moved back to North Carolina when Melissa got a job teaching art in Randolph County. Ed followed six months later. He fired up the foundry again in a building on North Fayetteville Street in Asheboro. In ’94 they bought 55 acres outside of Seagrove with a mobile home on the back corner. Carolina Bronze had a permanent place to live, one that they’re expanding to include what is, essentially, an outdoor gallery for large sculpture. It already has nearly 20 pieces in it, only a few of which are Walker’s. “We’re just getting going on it,” he says. “It’s not just to look at sculpture but to shop for it. It’s going to be a community park, too.”
Since moving to its current location in ’95, the foundry has produced works of art for hundreds of sculptors, the best known of whom is probably Fagan. “He is a person I know will be in the history books one day,” says Walker. “He’s done so many notable people.”
Fagan shares Walker’s penchant for figuring things out. He’s a 1988 graduate of Yale who majored in, of all things, Soviet studies. He took a couple of painting classes while he was in New Haven, and it turned out he had the one thing you can neither invent nor hide, talent. He says his work at the moment is mostly historical in nature. “I’m looking at a life-size seated James Madison. He’s in a 4-foot by 7-foot canvas,” says Fagan. While that commission was private, he had previously been hired by the White House Historical Association to paint all 45 U.S. Presidents. He did the portrait of Mother Teresa that was mounted on a mural and displayed during her sainthood canonization by Pope Francis. His sculptures include the Bush presidents, George H.W. and George W., shown together, and George H.W. alone; several versions of Reagan for Washington, D.C., London and Reagan National Airport; Ronald and Nancy Reagan for his presidential library; Saint John Paul II for the shrine in Washington, D.C.; and Neil Armstrong for Purdue University. The piece currently being produced at Carolina Bronze is a sculpture of Bob McNair, the owner of the NFL’s Houston Texans.
Fagan’s start in sculpture was, in its way, as unusual as studying Russia to master oil painting. While he was at the White House working on Barbara Bush’s portrait, he was asked if he could do a sculpture of George H.W., too. Sure, he said. Fagan had never done one before. Now the path to many of his finished pieces passes through Carolina Bronze.
“In this place I think we created a really nice marriage of modern technology and old school techniques that have been around for thousands of years,” says Walker.
Once a sculpture is approved and the project is on, an artist like Fagan will deliver a clay maquette, roughly a 2-foot version of the piece, to Walker. “From that Ed would determine how difficult it would be to make,” says Fagan. “I’m sure in his mind he’s planning out every major chess move along the way, because they are chess moves.”
David Hagan, a sculptor himself who works mostly in granite and marble, will produce a 360 degree scan of the piece, a process that takes about a day. That digital information is fed into a machine that cuts pieces of industrial foam to be assembled into a rough version of the sculpture at its eventual scale. “It’s at that point that I come in with clay and sculpt away,” says Fagan. “You’re at your final size and it’s a fairly close version of what you had, which may or may not be a good thing. What looks so great at a small scale may end up being not so great. You can have awful proportion things wrong. The foam that’s used is a wonderful structural foam that you can slice with a blade. For me, you can sculpt that stuff.” The eventual layer of clay on the foam varies according to the artist’s desire.
Several intermediate steps eventually yield a wax version of the sculpture, except in pieces. “For the artist, you gotta go back in and play with that piece — or the piece of your piece — the head or a hand or an arm or something,” says Fagan. “They’re all designed or cut based on where Ed, foreseeing the chess moves, figured out what’s going to pour and how. The maximum size of the mold is dictated by the maximum size of the pour. Those are your limitations, so you have to break up the piece into those portions.”
Solid bars of wax, sprues, are added to the wax pieces to allow for the passage of molten bronze and the escape of gases. A wax funnel is put in place. Everything is covered in what becomes a hard ceramic coating. That’s heated to around 1,100 degrees. The wax melts away. Brown, who has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from UNCG and whose own bronze sculpture of a mother ocelot and kittens will go on display at the North Carolina Zoo this year, slags the impurities off the top of the molten bronze. It’s poured at roughly 2,100 degrees. “I found that I enjoyed the more physical aspect of working with sculpture as opposed to doing drawings or paintings,” says Brown.
After everything has cooled and the ceramic is broken away, the pieces need to be welded together to reform the full sculpture. “The weld marks on the metal, you have to fake to look like clay,” says Fagan. The artist oversees that, as well. “The bronze shrinks but not always at the exact same percentage. There are always adjustments.” The last step is applying the patina, one of a variety of chemical surface coatings, done at Carolina Bronze by Neil King. Different patinas are chosen for different reasons: if the piece is to be displayed in the elements; if it will be touched frequently; and so on. “For someone like the artist who is very visual, it’s hard to imagine what the end result is going to be when you see the process. It will just look completely different in the middle than it will at the end. It’s an absolute art,” says Fagan. When it’s finished, no one knows the structural strengths and weaknesses of the sculpture better than Walker. They crate it like swaddling an infant, put it in traction, and then ship it off.
In a digital world where so many things seem to have the lifespan of magician’s flash paper, a foundry is a world of gritty timelessness. “Because we do a lot of historical things here,” says Walker, “we get to make permanent snapshots of points in time.” At the end of the day, whether they’ve poured brass bases for miniaturized busts of Gen.George Marshall or pieces of a torso for a presidential library, the kiln and furnace go cold. Like any other small factory, the doors are locked and everyone goes home. Except for Walker. These are the hours he gets to spend alone shaping a bas relief of Richard Petty’s greatest hits. As George McFly said to Marty when his first novel, A Match Made in Space, arrived, “Like I’ve always told you, you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”OH
Jim Moriarty is senior editor of O.Henry’s sister publication PineStraw located in Southern Pines, and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.
Embrace the dead of winter January’s weighty releases
Compiled by Brian Lampkin
Itís here.The big dark. Streetlights struggle to life at 5:30 p.m.; cold descends as the daylight slips off into the black ice of night. Time to read. Time to read something that feels like the drear, deadening silence of January. Luckily for you, new releases this January contain plenty of options to really sink into your seasonal affective disorder.
January 2:The Wolves of Winter, by Tyrell Johnson (Scribner, $26). Forget the old days. Forget summer. Forget warmth. Forget anything that doesn’t help you survive in the endless white wilderness beyond the edges of a fallen world. The Wolves of Winter is a captivating tale of humanity pushed beyond its breaking point, of family and bonds of love forged when everything is lost, and of a heroic young woman who crosses a frozen landscape to find her destiny.
January 2:Darkness, Sing Me a Song: A Holland Taylor Mystery, by David Housewright (Minotaur Books, $25.99). Caught in the dark tangle of a twisted family and haunted by his own past, Taylor finds that the truth is both elusive and dangerous. Housewright has won the Edgar Award for his first Holland Taylor crime novel (Penance) and is the three-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award for his crime fiction.
January 2:A Map of the Dark,by Karen Ellis (Mulholland Books, $26).Author Alison Gaylen says this book is “one of the most compelling psychological thrillers I’ve read in a long time, A Map of the Dark grabs you from the very first page and does not loosen its grip. I read this book in a day — I simply could not put it down —but I will be thinking about it for much longer.”
January 9: Winter, by Ali Smith (Pantheon, $25.99). Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone. Smith is the author of Hotel World and The Accidental, which were both short-listed for The Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to Be Both won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Autumn was short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
January 16:The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica,by Laurie Gwen Shapiro (Simon & Schuster, $26). From the grimy streets of New York’s Lower East Side to the rowdy dance halls of sultry Francophone Tahiti, all the way to Antarctica’s blinding white and deadly freeze, Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s The Stowaway takes you on the unforgettable voyage of a gutsy young stowaway who became an international celebrity, a mascot for an up-by-your bootstraps age.
January 23: Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — And the Unexpected Solutions,Johann Hari (Bloomsbury, $28).“Through a breathtaking journey across the world, Johann Hari exposes us to extraordinary people and concepts that will change the way we see depression forever. It is a brave, moving, brilliant, simple and earth-shattering book that must be read by everyone and anyone who is longing for a life of meaning and connection.” — Eve Ensler
January 23: Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town’s Secret to Happiness and Excellence,by Karen Crouse (Simon & Schuster, $25). Norwich, a charming Vermont town of roughly 3,000 residents, has sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past 30 years — and three times that athlete has returned with a medal. How does Norwich do it? To answer this question, New York Times reporter Karen Crouse moved to Vermont, immersing herself in the lives of Norwich Olympians past and present.
January 30: The Winter Station, by Jody Shields (Little Brown, $27). Set in the year 1910: People are mysteriously dying at an alarming rate in the Russian-ruled city of Kharbin, a major railway outpost in Northern China. Strangely, some of the dead bodies vanish before they can be identified. Based on a true story that has been lost to history and set during the last days of imperial Russia, The Winter Station is a richly textured and brilliant novel about mortality, fear and love.
But if you really want to dig deep, to go underground where depression crosses over into derangement, there’s this frightening descent into conspiratorial madness:
January 2:Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon, by Paul Maguire & Troy Anderson (Faithwords, $24). Trumpocalypse explores the enigmatic prophecies and “biblical codes” involving Trump, and asks whether God raised up President Trump as a fearless leader to guide America and the free world through a series of major crises as the biblical end-time narrative unfolds, as many people with prophetic gifts are predicting, and shows why everyday Americans and evangelicals have rallied around Trump as their last hope of saving America and averting the horrors of the Apocalypse.OH
Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books.
A former bookmobile rolls again . . . as a bookstore on wheels
By Maria Johnson
It’s a bookmobile with one big difference: The books on this bus are for sale, and because they’re secondhand — gleaned from yard sales, library sales, church sales and donations — customers can pick up Pulitzer Prize winners — or pocket guides — for pennies.
Boomerang Bookshop: Nomad Chapter is the V-8-powered dream of owner Crckt (pronounced Cricket) Leggett, who decided as a child that he was tired of people mispronouncing his given name, Diarra, so he customized his mom’s nickname for him by dropping the vowels.
“I figured, it’s a nickname; I can spell it how I want to,” he says.
His mom, Lois, now a retired librarian, gave him something else: a love of reading, which he literally has mobilized with Boomerang.
You’ll find Leggett aboard his food-for-thought truck on most Saturday mornings at The Corner Market, at the crossing of Elam and Walker avenues in Latham Park.
On Thursday evenings in spring through fall, he’s at the Grove Street People’s Market, not far from his home in the Glenwood community.
He spices his itinerary with other stops. Last month, he piloted his 23-foot biblio-craft downtown for the monthly First Friday celebration. The next morning, he rolled into a holiday bazaar at Hope Academy on Florida Street. He popped up a canopy outside the bus and set out some of his wares: a plastic crate full of paperback classics penned by Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, E.M. Forster, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sophocles, Anne Frank, Harper Lee and others.
A hand-lettered sign made the deal clear: “Mass Market Paperbacks, $.50–3.00. That’s Cheap, Son.”
A few feet away, a cardboard box once filled with Smithfield Hams held more books priced up to 50 cents.
A metal rack propped up volumes including W.E.B DuBois: A Reader, All New Square Foot Gardening, Martial Arts Home Training, Buddhism for Dummies, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights and The Lost Files of Nancy Drew.
Inside the neat, stylish bus, hundreds more books lined the walls. The works were organized according to genre, as you would find in any bookstore.
Bios, Letters and Memoirs
All Things North Carolina.
U.S. History.
World History.
Women’s and Gender Studies.
Literature and Fiction.
Gardening.
Leggett also stocks ’zines — independent, low-budget magazines — on a broad variety of topics. He carries books suited for children, but unlike the kiddie-fied bookmobiles of yore, Boomerang aims primarily at adults and established young readers.
“I’m more interested in fostering the reading habits of young people who are reading for amusement already,” Leggett says.
The mobile bookstore was his wife’s idea. They were sitting on their front porch one night, and Crckt was bemoaning what he regarded as a lost opportunity: a chance to buy the used bookstore where he worked, the now defunct-Empire Books on Spring Garden Street.
No stranger to the ways of the page, he’d had also worked at Edward McKay Used Books & More (now McKay’s) and at a pop-up bookshop on Gate City Boulevard.
He wanted his own used bookstore but couldn’t afford a traditional space.
“You should start a food truck, but for books,” suggested Elizabeth Leggett, who teaches English as a second language at Kiser Middle School.
“That’s just insane enough, it might work,” said Crckt.
A few weeks later, he typed “bookmobile” into Craigslist and got a hit: a Thomas Built bookmobile, made in High Point in 1988. The double-door bus— one portal fore, one aft — originally was used by the Chapel Hill public library. Later, it served as the mobile headquarters for an auction business.
The couple forked over $9,000 for the bus, and Leggett, who works full-time for the Forsyth County Public Library, dived into rehabbing the bus on weekends and evenings. On the interior, he added shelving. He decoupaged the ceiling with pages torn from books. He painted the exterior gray and added an eye-catching red-and-yellow logo with the help of his friend, graphic artist Lisa Sussman.
Inspired by the feral child in Leggett’s favorite movie, Road Warrior, the emblem shows a kid wielding a boomerang, reflecting the idea that books on the bus are circling back for another life.
The Leggetts launched Boomerang in May 2017. Leggett was comfortable behind the wheel. At his regular job, he drives the Web on Wheels, a bus that takes Internet access to preschool and after-school programs in Forsyth County.
“I jokingly refer to myself as a bookmobilist,” he says.
Leggett also sells books online, at biblio.com, under the Boomerang name, but his walk-in customers lay hands on ink and paper. With only 91 square feet of space, he curates the selections carefully.
“I like to keep the fiction of a high literary content, but I also like to represent voices that are underrepresented in the literary world, be it women, people of color or queer folk. I try to highlight social justice, camaraderie and diversity,” he says.
Business is steady. If he rings up $60 in sales over a four-hour period, he’s happy. He hopes to reach people who might be intimidated by regular bookstores or who don’t have enough money to shop for new titles. Most of his books cost $4 to $7.
He also hopes to draw curious passers-by such as Adam Hubert, a 23-year-old teaching fellow at Hope Academy, a private Christian school.
Hubert was attending the school’s holiday bazaar when he boarded the bus to look around. He was surprised to find a copy of the recently published Invisible Man, Got The Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education.
Hubert read the book last year, and he was struck by how author Mychal Denzel Smith challenged readers to examine their own prejudices.
“It changed my perspective on life,” said Hubert, as he applied the educators’ discount (“I know what they’re up against,” says Leggett) and paid $12 for two books, The Mis-Education of the Negro, a 1933 volume by Carter G. Woodson and, Latinos, a Biography of the People, a 1992 work by Earl Shorris.
“Working with Latinos here, I realized I don’t know much about their culture,” he said.
Leggett hopes to own a bricks-and-mortar Boomerang some day, but first he wants to expand the reach of his bus, adding more stops to his schedule. He carries on a tradition that goes back farther than the motorized models.
Over the windshield, he has pasted a quote from Parnassus on Wheels, a 1917 novel about a bookstore on a horse-drawn wagon:
“Books, the truest friends of man, fill this rolling caravan.”OH
Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com. Contact Boomerang at boomerangbookseller@gmail.com or go to the shop’s Facebook page.
A mystery photo from the past and the passing of two Tate Street icons
By Billy Eye
“I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.” — Leonardo da Vinci
Thereís aphotograph on my living room wall that I love. But I never gave it a hard look until my sister pointed out that the background had been painted over. She’d been told there was a little girl in the picture who had been painted out. I had no idea who the gentleman in the photo was, or how old the picture was, so that gave me the perfect excuse to visit with Bill and Anna Heroy, the Old Photo Specialists at 320 South Elm. These are the go-to guys who can reconstruct your family photographs, return them to pristine condition. They’re tops in the field, none better in the country.
Bill was able to work his magic on the print, pointing out the high silver content that dates it to before 1940. He also noted this was a blow-up from a much smaller photo, and it appears there was no little girl in this picture after all. So the mystery continues but at least it narrows my search for who this natty gent might be.
Bill and I lamented that everything is assumed to be so simple today when it’s done via computer. One keystroke, a filter gets applied, everything fixed in seconds, right? That’s not possible for the meticulous photo restoration Bill has become famous for. The Heroys have been talking about retiring for some time so I suggest, if there’s a family heirloom you want to pass down that needs extreme retouching, you should act quickly.
***
A Tate Street legend since the ’60s passed away not long ago. Two actually. As noted in last month’s issue of O.Henry, Jim Clark, a towering inspiration to generations of writers, left this world — and a devastating loss to this city it is.
Then there was the very embodiment of stubborn nonconformity, Harry Wilton Perkins Jr., known to everyone in these parts as Electro, who was 70 years old at the time of his passing. A celebration of his life was held at College Hill Sundries where the one comment I heard repeated over and over was, “Electro was the first person I ever met on Tate Street.”
“Electro never met a stranger, he talked to everybody,” Louanne Hicks shared with me. “He was outgoing, fun, entertaining and he was going to do what he was going to do. And that’s it. Period.” Defiantly scruffy, at least when I encountered him, Electro played blues guitar and Dobro for numerous bands, jamming in 1988 on an album with Rich Lerner, whose weekly radio program on WQFS is essential listening. I saw Electro perform at New York Pizza several years ago. An exceptional musician, he was scheduled to play the Tate Street Festival last year but was too ill to go on stage. (Sadly, that long-standing festival is no more.)
A disparate collection of music makers, writers and artists turned up out to say good-bye to this multigenerational icon, including a gal I hadn’t seen in 15 years, Lucy Waldrup, well-known and universally loved as the youthfully cheerful waitress at Boba House when it first opened in 2000. Still as chipper as ever, and as lovely, Lucy was the first person I wanted to see in 2002 after spending a year in London. When I inquired about her whereabouts I was told, “She moved to Asheville yesterday.” Darn the luck.
Ultimately I managed to catch up with Lucy and recently discovered the memory of Electro she holds closest to her heart:
“This was 2001, Facebook wasn’t a thing yet so you couldn’t just know when it was someone’s birthday. One afternoon I came into College Hill at 3 o’clock, it’s my birthday, I want a drink, and [bartender] Pam says, ‘Lucy, you’ve got a card.’ I open it up, it was a birthday card from Electro and it said, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, Iceland is beautiful, but not as beautiful as you.’ We had talked about Iceland but I don’t think Electro and I ever talked about my birthday or anything about birthdays. He was the only person that year who knew it was my birthday.”
And this, from my pal John Lamb, currently teaching English in Hanoi:
“Rest in peace, old friend. Thanks for all of the great conversations about history, life, your adventures, and music over coffee at Tate Street Coffee or beers at College Hill and the Exchange all of those years ago. Thanks for giving a young metalhead/punk rocker a real love and appreciation for the blues and mostly thank you for being one of my first friends in the town that I lived in the longest of my adult life and still refer to as my hometown if anyone asks. I hope you get a chance to meet some of the legends you liked to talk about all of those years ago now and catch up with some of the folks you met along the way.”
***
Finally, best wishes and speedy recovery to Teresa Staley, the only person you’ll ever meet who’s been in the same room with The Old Rebel and Joan Crawford, as I recounted in last year’s May issue of this magazine. Loyal friend and true supporter of local over-and-underground music, for years she’s been hosting summer house parties featuring the finest musicians this city has to offer, no hyperbole there. You haven’t arrived as an artist until you’ve played one of Teresa’s musicfests.OH
Billy Eye is at a loss as to what to write here that doesn’t sound too self-deprecating. If he’s bragging, it’s because his life really is that awesome.
