Tag: Feature

Home to Port

HOME TO PORT

Home to Port

A roving designer settles in High Point’s Emerywood

By Cassie Bustamante
Photographs by Bert VanderVeen

“How many times can one decorate and move?” asks Mark Abrams, co-owner of PORT 68, a home decor company based out of Chicago. He’s lived all over the States in his 62 years. As a young man in the mid-1980s, Abrams first visited the Furniture Capital of the World and had a sense of knowing he was going to one day call it home; friends told him he was insane. But he’s got the last laugh because “fast forward and here I am!” And, it turns out, his century-old Colonial in High Point’s historic Emerywood is the house this wandering spirit has lived in the longest. Perhaps this time he’ll pull his ship into harbor for good.

Born and raised in Demopolis, Ala., Abrams remained in the Yellowhammer State during college, initially planning to study architecture. “I realized real quick there’s a huge amount of math requirements,” he quips while petting his black-and-white cat, Freddie, perched in his lap. Instead, he graduated from the University of Alabama in 1985 with a degree in communication. At the time, the school didn’t allow double majors, so Abrams minored in fashion merchandising and design, considering a career as a retail buyer.

But, during his junior year of college, an internship with one of the largest design-marketing companies, Gear-Holdings, in New York City, shifted his trajectory. “Gear,” as Abrams refers to it, was co-founded and owned by a family friend, the late Raymond Waites, who also hailed from Demopolis. “I went to New York and it changed my life,” muses Abrams.

“It was like a big grad school,” he says, where he learned the ropes of both business and design as a Gear employee, eventually stepping into the role of visual director. “Because of Gear, and who I knew and what I was doing,” says Abrams, “I was published in every shelter magazine there was and on a few covers of books for my design work.” One of his first projects was a four-part publishing series with Better Homes & Gardens that wound up in a book. His work at Gear is what introduced him to High Point, where he set up a showroom for one of the company’s licensees.

Eventually, Abrams grew tired of grinding his gears. “I just worked and worked and worked and made no money.” What his bank account lacked in abundance, he made up for in a padded portfolio. Plus, Waites had introduced him to “the who’s who of the industry,” providing him with valuable connections. After a few years, he left Gear and jetted to Los Angeles, where new adventure awaited.

And ever since, he’s barely kept his feet in one spot for more than two years at a time. “I’ve moved 12 times cross-country,” he says. “I’ve lived in, let’s see, New York, L.A., Dallas, St. Louis, Kansas City, Greensboro — twice — New York again.” Plus, he adds, Ferndale, Washington, and, before High Point, Chicago.

In 2009, with industry veteran Michael Yip, Abrams co-founded PORT 68. Its mission? “Bringing home beautifully designed products from ports around the world to you.”

At the time, Abrams was living in Greensboro on Kemp Road. Before that, he’d been living just around the corner on Watauga in Hamilton Forest when a realtor knocked on his door and told him someone wanted to buy his house. Abrams, a sucker for flipping houses recalls, “I said, ‘As long as you can find me one in this neighborhood, that’s fine.’ And he did!”

But with the start of the company, Abrams relocated to Chicago, where PORT 68 has its headquarters. With showrooms in High Point, Atlanta and Dallas, the company decided to look for what Abrams calls a High Point “market house,” a place where the team could stay when they needed to be in the city. He called his pal, real estate agent Lee Kemp, and asked her to show him a house he had his eye on. Turns out, “it was way too much work.”

“I was just adding it up in my head and I am going no, no no.” But Kemp came through with another house that was being sold as an estate and was a stone’s throw away from the one he’d already seen. Abrams did a 15-minute walk through, made an offer he didn’t think they’d ever accept and hustled off to the airport.

As soon as he landed at O’Hare Airport, he got the call that the offer had been accepted. “I was like, ‘What!’” he recalls.

While he hadn’t planned on moving, after nine years of living in the Windy City, where “the snow would blow horizontally,” this warm-weather-loving Southerner had had enough. Abrams traveled often for work and was spending at least eight weeks a year in High Point as it was, and being in High Point would also put him within driving distance to the Atlanta showroom. Why not just move there?

After all, he says, High Point has a “very tight-knit design community” that you won’t find anywhere else, the sort of place where a close-knit group of industry friends can get together to “complain, discuss, egg each other on — all the things you need to talk about.”

During Market, the PORT 68 team infiltrates and makes his house their home base. “I call it the sorority house because people are all over the place and it’s kind of a wreck.” But, he adds, he always wants his guests to feel right at home. “My house is where you can put your drink anywhere and don’t worry about it, put your feet up anywhere and have a good time. I don’t live in fine antiques; I live in old things that I love and that’s kind of it.”

Of course, being in High Point also made it a little easier to get back to his hometown of Demopolis, where his aging parents still lived. About the time Abrams landed in High Point, his father had just begun battling Alzheimer’s. With his parents’ failing health, Abrams found himself traveling to Alabama every two to three weeks. Assuming the time would come, Abrams prepared his home for his mother to move in, readying the main-floor bedroom and handicap en-suite bathroom the previous owner added.

Sadly, he says, “That didn’t happen.” In 2022, his mother passed away, followed by his father in March of last year.

The bedding in that main-floor guest space was assembled originally with his mother in mind. A black-and-white duvet and bed pillows juxtaposed with playful, burnt-orange tiger “hide” throw pillows feature a “timeless” toile that was created by Gear in 1986. Fellow Demopolitan Waites wanted to craft the classic pattern with a hometown-homage twist. Using antique document fabric, Abrams says, they added “vine-and-olive people,” an homage to the French expatriates who founded Demopolis. For Abrams, the most exciting element is that the plantation-style house depicted on the toile fabric is historic Bluff Hall, which had been owned by Abrams’ grandfather before he sold it to the Marengo County Historical Society.

But the real kicker? “My mother turned down living in the house [Bluff Hall] because, she said, ‘I don’t want to live in an old barn,’” says Abrams with a chuckle. Judging by the toile design, Bluff Hall is far from being considered a barn.

These days, Abrams doesn’t travel back to Demopolis as much now that both parents are gone. “The estate is coming to an end so I feel a slight relief of just the physical driving back and forth.”

Making his house a home while running a business and taking care of his long-distance parents eventually took its toll on Abrams. In June 2024, he went into atrial fibrillation, abnormal rhythm of the heart, accruing the equivalent of “a weekend at the Ritz Carlton,” referring to his hospital bill. But, he says, “I am alive.” The cost was well worth it because “little High Point Hospital” was able to regulate his heart rhythm. And now, he says, it’s time for him to make himself a priority.

Abrams kept a few sentimental family pieces that he’s seamlessly blended into his design, such as a wooden box he’d given his father 30 years ago that now sits on the sofa table. While he describes his style as somewhat “eclectic” — a mix of tonal colors and metallics, texture, layers, and animal prints — he also says, “I am very calculating when designing.”

The living room, off of which sits a covered porch, is the prime example of his design ethos at play. A rich, streamlined velvet sofa faces two lush, armless chairs. A woven, natural rug anchors the space, layered with a smaller, vintage-style rug in the warm earth tones that reverberate throughout the home. In front of his windows, two white, carved-wood screens he found years ago at a Chicago antique shop — for an absolute steal — provide privacy.

Abrams has filled built-ins — stylishly and meaningfully — with books, decorative pieces and souvenirs, and, of course, PORT 68 mirrors. In front of one, three glass boxes display sentimental collections from his many travels to Vietnam, India, England and all across the globe. And, to top it off, a silver engraved vessel, “my baby cup.”

On the narrow strip of wall next to the built-ins Abrams points out a set of three steel, engraved bookplates found in Palio, Italy. “They’re all my initials.”

In the adjacent sitting room, a large, bright-orange Suzani tapestry picked up in Istanbul is stretched on a wooden frame, transforming it into a show-stopping work of art. Textiles are one of Abrams’ favorite souvenirs to purchase when abroad. “They don’t take up any room and they don’t break in your luggage,” he quips.

The Suzani, it turns out, hangs on a wall Abrams had hoped to knock down to create a spacious eat-in kitchen, but that turned out to be structurally impossible. Instead, he made small cosmetic changes, painting the kitchen and updating it with leftover wallpaper from a showroom. The paper, a neutral tan-and-white trellis design, is “Island House” by Madcap Cottage, a local High Point brand that is a PORT 68 licensee, along with iconic New York fabric house Scalamandré Maison and colonial classic Williamsburg.

Just off the kitchen is a 100-year-old original, a dark-wood butler’s pantry with glass-door uppers. Abrams has painted the wall behind it orange, echoing the color of his Suzani. “I wanted to gut this,” Abrams admits, noting that several drawers were not functioning, “but my business partner’s wife freaked out and she goes, ‘Do not take it out!’” His solution? He removed those drawers and added a wine refrigerator, which nestles in perfectly. And now, he appreciates the marriage of display piece and storage the cabinet offers. “I gotta put my mother’s junk somewhere,” he says with a laugh. “All the silver — lots of silver — I call it the burden of Southern silver” — a phrase he stole from Waites’ wife, Nancy, a fellow Southerner.

In the dining room, Abrams once again used wallpaper — a Thibaut metallic rafia in easy-to-remove vinyl — to refresh the space. Throughout the house, the plaster ceilings needed repair so he “wallpapered the ceiling so I didn’t have to deal with the cracks or the plaster.”

In the center of the dining room ceiling, a large-scale, traditional brass chandelier hangs, adorned by simple black shades, which, Abrams jokes, cost more than the fixture itself. “I bought my chandelier — my brass chandelier, which would be thousands of dollars if you bought it through Visual Comfort — 20 bucks at Habitat.”

He frequents the local Habitat for Humanity retail store because vendors regularly abandon showroom pieces there. Pro designer tip? “You just need to go. All. The. Time.”

In his primary bedroom upstairs, another Habitat find covers the entire wall behind his headboard. Unseen to the naked eye, Abrams notes that there are two off-centered windows hidden behind pleats of creamy, linen-wool fabric, a visual trick that allows him symmetry. The whole treatment, he says, cost him just around “100 bucks.”

A study in cool neutrals — black, gray, tan and chrome — his bedroom is a comparatively soothing and minimalistic space. The rug, a tan-and-white plaid “was custom made for me through my friends at Momeni.” In the corner, an easel features a sketch of the human form and, above a black settee, two large astronomical prints mimic the room’s colors.

“This is the contrast,” says Abrams, leading the way to a chocolate-black bedroom one door down. “I always like having one dark bedroom for guests because it’s cozy,” he says. Flanking the windows, black-and-white zebras leap across scarlet Scalamandré drapes.

Abrams gestures to the smaller furnishings in the space. “A lot of this stuff I’ve had forever, from house to house to house, and it just works when you buy classic things,” he says. Metal pedestals purchased 30–40 years ago from Charleston Forge display porcelain urns.

The last “bedroom” of the upstairs is smaller and the staircase to the attic lines the back wall. Abrams, who doesn’t need a fourth bedroom, turned it into his dressing room. The pièce de résistance is the open cabinet displaying what he calls “my trust fund” and perhaps this collector’s most expensive pieces, amassed over time. Again, he reiterates the importance of buying something classic and taking care of it, except this time he’s talking about his extensive shoe collection. “Luckily, your feet sizes don’t change. This may change,” he says as he pats his stomach, “but that doesn’t change.”

For now, Abrams says, the house is “all done over.” He’s repaired, repainted and wallpapered almost every surface. Of course, there’s still an old basketball slab in the backyard that he’s contemplated painting to resemble a pool, complete with a big, inflatable rubber duck. “But,” he says, “I don’t know if anybody would get my humor.”

At home, relaxing on his velvet sofa, Abrams reflects on his life. “All from a boy from a small town in Alabama,” he muses. “It’s been a crazy adventure.”

Is it time to call an end to the crazy adventure and plant permanent roots in High Point?

As if he hadn’t yet thought of it, he says, after a beat, “Well, yeah, maybe.”

Footsteps of the Fathers

FOOTSTEPS OF THE FATHERS

Descendants of the Greensboro Four support a legacy — and each other

By Ross Howell Jr.

This month, our Greensboro community observes the 65th anniversary of the 1960 February 1 sit-in at the downtown F. W. Woolworth’s “whites only” lunch counter.

There’s a parade in front of the old five-and-dime, now the International Civil Rights Center & Museum on Elm Street, dedicated on a bitterly cold morning in February 2010.

As is customary, a wreath is placed on the February One statue, also known as the A&T Four Monument, on the N.C. A&T campus. It memorializes in bronze the four freshman students — David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan) and Joseph McNeil — who, in 1960, walked from the A&T campus to downtown Greensboro and straight into Civil Rights history.

Sometime during the observance, members of the Richmond, McCain, Khazan and McNeil families will gather for a meal and conversation, just as they have for years, thanks to the generosity of Dennis and Nancy Quaintance of Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants and Hotels.

“I’m so grateful,” says Frank McCain Jr., president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Greensboro. “Every year, Dennis and Nancy join us in a private dining room at their restaurant.”

“It’s a time for us to have fellowship together,” McCain Jr. adds. “It’s a wonderful thing. There are no newspaper photographers around, no television cameras — we can have real, family conversations.”

McCain Jr. stresses how closely the Richmond, McCain, Khazan and McNeil families are knit. “We’re like blood relatives,” he says. “Remember, our fathers were extremely close. They were best friends — all brilliant minds, strategic thinkers, passionate in their beliefs.”

“And they made sure that their children got to know each other well,” McCain Jr. adds. “The Greensboro Four’s children are connected, their grandchildren are connected, and it will always be that way,” he says.

McCain Jr. believes that the four A&T students understood early on that what they were about to do would not only become a proud legacy but also a burden of responsibility that would be challenging to bear.

Think of the four young men in the iconic photograph or the bronze statue.

On the left is David Richmond. He was the first to pass away — in 1990 at the age of 49. It was on his shoulders that celebrity seemed to rest most heavily.

Born and raised in Greensboro, a popular student-athlete at Dudley High School, Richmond entered A&T with a sense of purpose. But after the sit-in, he grew uncomfortable in the limelight. His studies suffered.

Because of his activism, many locals labeled him as a “troublemaker.”

Richmond left A&T and found work. But after repeated death threats, he moved away to a community in the North Carolina mountains. Later, he made the decision to return — Greensboro was home.

Wrestling with depression and alcohol, Richmond struggled to find a job.

“He had been blackballed,” McCain Jr. explains.

Despite the turmoil in his father’s life, David Richmond Jr. remembers him fondly.

“We would always get together with the families in February,” he says. “I remember Dad driving us to those events when I was little.”

Richmond Jr. attended Wake Forest University on a football scholarship — making ACC Player of the Week his freshman year and playing in the Tangerine Bowl.

He remembers classmates asking him if his father had something to do with the sit-ins in Greensboro.

“I told them yes,” Richmond Jr. says. “I was proud of what my dad had done.”

When a football teammate asked him to talk about his father in front of a class, he hesitated. He didn’t think he could do his father’s story justice.

“So I thought, why not get it straight from the horse’s mouth?” Richmond Jr. says.

He invited his father to speak and sat in the back of the classroom, listening along with everyone else.

“I learned so many things I’d never heard,” Richmond Jr. says.

He recalls thinking at the time, “Here I am, the same age my father was when he walked into Woolworth, and all I’m thinking about is when’s the next campus party.”

When his father died, Richmond Jr. felt lost.

“I wanted to represent him, but I’m not comfortable in front of crowds,” he says.

A big help to him was the tall figure next to his father in the historical photo and statue.

“Franklin McCain was my godfather,” Richmond Jr. continues. “We were always tight. I remember visiting him in Charlotte — we could sit down and talk about anything,” he adds.

With McCain’s encouragement, Richmond Jr. went on to represent his father at the dedication of the February One statue on the A&T campus, the official opening of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum and the recognition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

“I remember telling Frank Jr., someday he would have to step into his father’s place,” Richmond Jr. says.

He was right. Richmond’s godfather, Franklin McCain, passed away in 2014 at the age of 73.

McCain Jr. struggled with his father’s death, which, like Richmond’s, seemed to have come too early.

“When my father died, I could not have handled it as well as I did without the other families,” McCain Jr. says.

“They all came to town immediately, and I didn’t have to tell them what I needed them to do for me and my brothers,” he continues. “They knew what they needed to do.”

McCain and Richmond had been roommates their freshman year at A&T, and Khazan and McNeil lived in the same dormitory. When they discussed their frustrations and fears, they also talked about how to support each other.

When McCain Jr.’s father graduated from A&T and left Greensboro for Charlotte, his wife, a Bennett College alumna, had already found work in the city’s school system. But McCain couldn’t find a professional position at all.

“My father had moved away from Greensboro,” McCain Jr. says. “But he hadn’t moved far enough.”

Like his former roommate, Richmond, he’d been blackballed.

McCain took the only job he could — as a custodian with a chemical company in Charlotte.

“But as fate — or Divine Providence — would have it, he became the custodian in the C-suite, where all the senior executives, including the president, had offices,” McCain Jr. says. And from time to time, the president and the custodian would chat.

One day, the executive asked his father, “Franklin, have you ever thought about going to college? You’re very articulate, you’re a sharp guy.”

And his father replied, “Well, actually, I went to college. I have two degrees — in chemistry and biology.”

“Then why in the hell are you cleaning up the bathrooms?” the president asked.

“Because this is the only job I could get,” his father answered. “I tried to get a lab job here and they told me there weren’t any.”

McCain Jr. chuckles.

“Less than 10 days later, my father had a job in the lab,” he says.

“He worked for that company for 35 years,” McCain Jr. continues. “And when he retired, it was from his office in the C-suite.”

After his retirement, McCain often spoke at Charlotte high schools, encouraging teenagers to finish their academic work.

“My father lived long enough to meet all his grandchildren,” McCain Jr. says, “But he didn’t really get to see the fruits of his labor. We’ve been able to live the dream that he envisioned.”

McCain Jr. tells me his brother, Wendell, attended UNC as a Morehead Scholar and went on to become a Wall Street banker and venture capitalist. Wendell has a son who is a senior at Stanford and a younger son who’s attending Carolina — also as a Morehead Scholar.

“And my youngest brother has a child who is a senior at High Point University,” he says, “and his other child is a sixth grader.”

McCain Jr. goes on to say that his oldest daughter graduated from UNC and is the chief operating officer of a large snack food company in Miami, Florida. His son, Franklin III, is his grandfather’s namesake. Nicknamed “Mac,” he enjoyed a very successful collegiate football career at A&T and now plays in the NFL.

“I think that if my father were alive,” McCain Jr. says, “He would feel like — you know what? If he and those other three had not done what they did, maybe none of us would’ve had these opportunities.”

Next to the tallest figure in the February One monument — McCain stood 6-feet-2-inches and weighed more than 200 pounds — walks the smallest, Jibreel Khazan — who was said to weigh 130 pounds, soaking wet. But whatever Khazan lacked in size, he more than made up in eloquence and charisma.

Born Ezell Blair Jr. in Greensboro, where his father taught at Dudley High School and was active in the NAACP, Khazan graduated from A&T in 1965. Labeled a troublemaker like the others, he moved to New Bedford, Mass., joined the New England Islamic Center and changed his name.

Recently, a New Bedford public park was named for Khazan, honoring his years of dynamic community and youth group leadership.

Khazan, now 83, will be joining the family gathering this month in Greensboro.

Khazan’s son, Hozannah, lives in Atlanta, Ga., where he is a self-employed business telecom consultant. He tells me that he is regularly in touch with New Bedford family and friends.

Not long ago, he was on the phone with a buddy.

“Hey, I saw your dad out walking the other night,” his friend said. “It was 11 o’clock at night and it was snowing. I pulled over and offered him a ride, but he just kept going!”

“That’s him,” Hozannah laughs. “He’s still full of energy!”

Interested in computers since he was a teenager, Hozannah enrolled at A&T in 1989 and majored in industrial technology, a five-year program.

“I tell people I was born in Massachusetts, but North Carolina made me a man,” Hozannah says. “A&T was a real turning point for me.”

He tells me that, at times, his legacy felt overwhelming. But being able to talk with McCain Jr. was a big help.

“I made sure to be available to spend time with Hozannah because I had already lived what he was about to go through,” McCain Jr. says.

He told Hozannah not to make his college years stressful by trying to live up to people’s expectations. His father lived inside him and there was no changing that, McCain Jr. advised Hozannah, but he would have to find himself, find his own pathway in life.

“Because I was young, I was resentful,” Hozannah says. “But we’re like brothers. We don’t always agree, but we aren’t afraid to voice our opinions.”

Hozannah says that when he reached his 30s, he was better able to embrace his father’s legacy.

“I realized that I was representing a greater community,” he continues. “It’s a lot of responsibility, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

The figure striding next to Khazan is Joseph McNeil, who was born in Wilmington. Right after he graduated from a segregated high school, he moved with his family to New York City.

The next fall, he returned to North Carolina to enroll at A&T, where he joined ROTC. It was on his bus trip returning to campus from Christmas break — wearing his uniform — that he was refused service at a Greensboro hot dog stand.

For McNeil it was the final outrage. His fury was the call to action for his friends on February 1.

He would go on to graduate from A&T in 1963 with a degree in engineering physics and was commissioned as a second lieutenant is the U.S. Air Force. After service in Vietnam, he retired from active duty but continued in reserve service.

McNeil retired from the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a major general with numerous decorations. While a reservist, he also pursued a career in finance.

McNeil met his wife when he was stationed in South Dakota. She is Lakota — a direct descendant of chief Sitting Bull.

McNeil is 82 years old and is not expected to attend the family gathering this month. But his son will be there.

Joseph McNeil Jr. attended Sitting Bull College and lives with his family on the Standing Rock Reservation, Fort Yates, N.D. He is CEO of the area’s sustainable energy and community development organization.

A year ago this month, the North Dakota Monitor reported that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe was celebrating a multimillion-dollar electric vehicle charging network project in Fort Yates —administered by McNeil Jr.’s organization.

McNeil Jr. told the newspaper he was overjoyed to see a group of local middle school students attend the event because the new EV infrastructure represents a much larger generational transition to clean energy. In the article, he said, “I was able to relate to them how our culture is involved in renewable energy as we talk about our relationship to the Earth. That was really important.”

The legacy of the Greensboro Four is complex, and the walk four young men took on a cold February day has led their descendants down diverse paths.

When the International Civil Rights Center & Museum was dedicated, Joseph McNeil sat down for an interview.

“We were very ordinary people,” he said, “with very ordinary lives to live.”

But what is an ordinary life? What were the four A&T freshmen seeking?

“There are certain things that everybody wants,” Frank McCain Jr. says. “You want to be able to live a decent life. You want to have food for your family. You want to live in a place that’s peaceful and safe. You want your children to grow up and be whatever they want to be in life.”

Four young A&T men were determined to show themselves and their families the way. And what a journey it’s been. OH

For more information, visit the International Civil Rights Center & Museum website, sitinmovement.org. The center and museum, the restored site of the 1960 F. W. Woolworth Company sit-in, recently was named a National Historic Landmark, the highest recognition awarded by the National Park Service.

2025 Feature Footsteps of the Fathers

The House Next Door

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

The House Next Door

A hard-won dream is realized some 40 years later

By Cynthia Adams • Photographs by Amy Freeman

What happens when a house lover pines for the house next door? Ultimately, something wonderful.

While scouting business locations in the ’80s, Larry Richardson suddenly noticed an aristocratic house. A plummy one, as the Brits say. A grand Georgian Revival, the historic Stroud house featured rich architectural details, including Corinthian columns and pilasters, and tiled roof.

“I remember to this day driving down that street and looking at properties and seeing the house,” says Richardson. “And thinking that’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen! It’s as clear as yesterday.”

Unavailable, and for a small business owner, also unattainable.

So he did as he always did. He worked harder.

Richardson, who grew up near Burlington, has a work ethic that won’t quit, something he attributes to his grandmother in particular. “I wouldn’t take anything for the lessons of rural life,” he says.

“Everything that could be used was used. And reused.” She collected buttons in a jar, he remembers. Was resourceful in the way that Depression-era country people were. “Quilts,” he muses, “were really the first recycling.”

She taught him to value — and save — everything. And thrift worked in his favor. In the early days of his businesses, he was at the Super Flea each month, selling plants and cultivating customers for a nursery business that was growing faster than the hanging baskets and houseplants he sold by the truckload. He supplied plants for furniture showrooms in High Point each Market. He scoured estate sales every weekend to stock booths at three consignment shops.

Instead of the Georgian, in 1989, he snapped up the historic Hollowell house next door, named it “Seven Oaks” and spent 30 years making it a worthy neighbor to the object of his affection. He filled it with finds, sourcing furnishings far and wide. At 5,000 finished square feet after a top floor conversion, his fixer upper was nothing to sneeze at. The pièce de résistance? A stunning kitchen renovation (“Purveyors of Beauty,” Seasons, December 2020), he says, a dream realized.

Having transformed “the heart of the house,” Richardson declared that he and his partner, Clark Goodin, would never leave.

That was in 2020.

The two houses differed in style down to the brick color and roof — Seven Oaks was a Colonial Revival with sand-colored brick. The Stroud house, affectionately known as Hilltop, was larger. (Officially listed as the Stroud house on the National Register of Historic Place after original owners Bertha and Junius B. Stroud.) And, it had space to create a downstairs main bedroom suite — something that the original footprint of Seven Oaks did not.

Yet both houses had more than their Sunset Hills location in common — two-story garages complete with living quarters and full basements. Both were also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Since 1925, the century-old Stroud house has had few owners.

According to census data and city directories, after four years, the Strouds sold to Alice and John K. Voehringer, president of the textile concern Mock, Judson, Voehringer Company.

William Clement Boren Jr. and his wife, Ruth, owned the property from 1935–1940.

By 1941, Pearl and Charles Irvin, president of Elam Drug Company, had moved from their home at 900 North Eugene, becoming the home’s longest residents and raising sons Charles and David and daughter Doris there. The eldest son, Charles Jr., and his wife, Mary, acquired the house in the 1990s. Charles Jr. died in 2015, and Mary in 2019, leaving the house unoccupied.

Slowly, the grand house was emptied of years of family memorabilia.

Richardson debated and pondered. It would make a fabulous project. On occasion, despite his day jobs as a nursery owner and antique retailer, Richardson had flipped “at least four houses, maybe more,” converting worse-for-the-wear properties to stunners, carefully preserving architectural integrity. Mere blocks away, a skillful Arden Place flip practically sold before the paint was dry in 2016.

He was familiar with the home fixer-upper journey: Take a good house, one with fine bones and possibilities, in a great location, then modernize all systems, redo baths and kitchen, and finesse cosmetic updates. “Landscaping, of course,” he says.

Before leaving for work, he would glance next door, imagining the landscape possibilities at the Stroud house. (After all, plants were his longtime passion and career.) Time passed.

This was the opus — the house he studied every single day. The family agreed to give him first right of refusal — but it was a sobering, massive project.

Standing at their kitchen sink looking across the driveway, he and Goodin began seriously talking: This could be the ultimate flip. In his mind, Richardson could already see it restored to its former grandeur. It could again be the most beautiful house on a street lined with fine residences.

What he had never experienced, however, was a remodel that would take nearly five years to complete, thanks to a global health disaster and the chaos that ensued.

Nor could he anticipate that what began as admiration might deepen into love and a new opportunity to age in place.

Richardson and Goodin closed on Hilltop in the fall of 2020, soon after completing a dreamy kitchen of their own that was the culmination of years of collecting and saving.

The house next door was tired. Interiors that were au courant 30 years ago were no longer.

The previously redone kitchen would be gutted. The baths were 1925-era and had never been modernized. The house’s infrastructure had to be addressed from electrical and plumbing to central air and heating. “The only heat was an old boiler, and they had one air conditioner on the second floor,” Richardson recalls.

The Georgian’s ballroom filled the entire third floor. To claim that square footage as living area would require support beams and a stairway relocation, plus electrical, plumbing, heating and air systems.

As for the rest, it came into view as the house was stripped of the cosmetics. Out went pastels, mint green and maroon carpeting, floral valances and Venetian blinds, along with 1980-era floral wallpapers.

Fully emptied, a vision took form. Early on, Richardson chose a color palette then picked tiles. Then cabinetry for kitchen and bath, with plans to create the ultimate main closets. Relocated a door or two. Scheduled floor refinishing. Imagined architectural restorations and enhancements. He splurged on choices, fittings, new baths — the whole house aesthetic — before the tedium of scraping, caulking and painting both interior and exterior.

“Then we got into COVID.”

“It was awful, and had I known what I was going to face I would have passed. I would have run the other way. Even with people and workers I had relationships with, I couldn’t get any momentum. Things just languished,” he recalls.

Renovations were suddenly uppermost for those stuck at home, and workmen and supplies were in demand during a time of uncertainty and scarcity.

“Workers got sick with COVID, then their partners. Then their families. It went on and on. Worse yet, the supply chain drove up prices of everything that went into it. A two-by-four went to at least triple the price. Any budget you had was gone.”

Amidst the chaos that overtook the globe, both Richardson and Goodin had businesses to run. Owners of Plants & Answers’ two locations, Richardson oversees the Big Greenhouse on Spring Garden, and Goodin runs the floral business in downtown Greensboro.

Time dragged by and the work — on the largest renovation they’d ever undertaken — proceeded in hiccups.

They consoled themselves, knowing they still could flip the property and make a nice profit if they proceeded as planned. It was, at least, a project greatly simplified by living next door.

At the time, they were still thinking strictly in terms of a flip.

Fast forward a few years later? It would be late in 2024 — four years since purchasing — before they could see the project’s end in sight.

Renovations had not come easily.

Even now, things remain tough, Richardson explains. For example, the custom front storm door he ordered didn’t work and had to be redone. It rested on its side in the living room. But the creative vision worked.

“I [always] knew green would have to be a tie-in color,” Richardson says indicating the original green tiled sunporch that opens to the dining room. (There is a second sunporch at the rear of the house.)

Whereas pastels ruled in the old interiors, they were not going to survive in the new design. Green, however, would stay, replaced with supersaturated colors like Greenfield (Sherwin-Williams) and a bronze Benjamin Moore hue for the sunporch’s trim and casement windows.

The redone kitchen features yet another strong green, Sherwin-Williams Basil, as a unifying accent. In the breakfast area, he reused Sherwin-Williams Restrained Gold, a rich ochre tone from his former kitchen. He also installed a stained tongue-in-groove kitchen ceiling, and white quartz countertops.

A pot filler and porcelain farm sink were suggested by Goodin, who loves to cook. Richardson points out the natural light: “It’s fabulous.”

Master carpenter Marty Gentzel built the kitchen cabinetry, as well as other cabinetry, molding and architectural touches throughout the house. Gentzel, whose work is in high demand, could only begin full-time work on the house last September.

He previously worked on the renovated and newly created third floor baths last April, then tackled replacement shutters for the exterior ones that were ruined by age.

Gentzel created arched kitchen doorways, unifying the opened space that combines the breakfast and butler’s pantry area, while tying in existing archways at the front of the house. The previously squared off doorways showcase his favorite work in the house, custom arches painstakingly matched to existing trim work. “That was tricky,” he adds.

“When you do an arch, it opens up everything,” says Richardson. He felt they would be a wonderful flourish.

“This whole house, it’s a canvas all its own,” says Gentzel. “You care more than anyone I’ve seen,” he says, turning to Richardson.

“I’m almost done,” Gentzel says, having worked daily only months ago.

“No, you’re not,” Richardson quips, then grins. “I’ve got more projects for you.”

For the central, inner core of the house, Richardson used an aged white on the walls, describing “a creamy white, and trimmed in Dover White,” also used for trim throughout the home. For the formal rooms, “Livable Green and Ethereal White lent green undertones, tying the rooms together.”

Three years after the renovations began, Richardson had invested far more time and money than he had imagined. During a kitchen table conversation, Goodin hazarded an idea: Why not move into Hilltop themselves?

Richardson was amazed. He’d idly imagined keeping the house. But he hadn’t allowed himself to imagine actually living there.

Goodin pressed. They could complete the two planned bathroom renovations for Seven Oaks when empty and prepare it for sale. Hilltop would become their permanent home. “We could have a downstairs bedroom and age in place,” he argued.

Goodin made strong points. Why shouldn’t they benefit from all the work they’d poured into the restored home? Plus, they’d worked their entire lives. This was a fabulous home large enough to handle all their collections.

Privately, Richardson considered: Had it always seemed more than just a flip?

Had he stood in the grand foyer, staring at the sweepingly dramatic staircase and envisioned what he would do with the final interiors? Yes, he admittedly had.

The problem with doing flips, he admits ironically, is that he always wants to do the house as if he will live there.

Then Richardson laughs; he had been shopping in earnest for the house even before he and Goodin contemplated keeping Hilltop.

“I was going to do some light staging for it,” he explains. “I began to do it with opposing sofas in the living room. Something people would relate to. But I didn’t start buying furniture and rugs until Clark said, ‘I think we should move into the house.’”

Richardson immediately ramped up his search. He raked through estate sales across the state. Soon he was bidding on furnishings that were scale appropriate, and Venetian glassware and hand painted plates that would accent the dining room.

Stacks of artwork awaited hanging, including a painting by former Greensboro artist David Bass. A federal mirror found a place in the stunning living room.

“I looked for the right rug, and it was tough,” he says, pulling two chinoiserie chairs into the main living room to be used as accent chairs beside a side table. A new-to-him grandfather clock found a home.

“I already knew what I was going to do,” he says, scrolling through pictures on his phone of vintage acquisitions. He hung lighting found at estate sales and auctions. Period lighting for the dining room was purchased from the Dupont estate. The dining room’s central candelabra is a Versace design, one of only eight made.

Even as the furnishings awaited placement, Richardson’s eyes shone with the certainty of his vision — instinctive vision.

Richardson acquired 18th-century Irish mirrors for the living room, which is approximately 18’ x 30’ in dimension. It can swallow up a whole lot of furniture, he admits, but he wanted ample open space. A green chinoiserie secretary and a narrow Irish wake table, “useful for overflow dining,” are in the living room.

The hallway, whose new molding matches surrounding rooms, features Impressionistic paintings and serves as an art gallery. “There was no molding before, just plain walls,” says Richardson. Over 500 feet of molding, according to Gentzel, was replicated from the main level and added. “He redid this entire room,” Richardson says, indicating the family room, with a newly built in Baker cabinet he bought for $100.

An expanded downstairs bath is a step towards having the option of converting the den to a main bedroom.

But it is the powder room that had guests buzzing when Richardson and Goodin hosted their new home’s first event in November 2023, even with the house mostly empty and work still underway. (They sponsored a fundraiser last winter for a local animal rescue.)

The tiniest of all the rooms, it punches well over its weight. Artist Cheryl Lutens was commissioned to faux paint a chinoiserie bronze/gold design on the walls, so deftly done it rivals luxurious de Gournay hand-painted paper. The ceiling is gilded with gold leaf, lending depth and dimension. A guest called it “the jewel box.”

It nearly upstaged the central stairway — a “Federal style, sweeping staircase,” as Richardson describes Hilltop’s showstopper.

The expansive upstairs landing is large enough to serve as office space. The house, however, still in a state of flux between renovation and occupation, was like a theater set before the opening show. Furniture partially filled the landing, which served as a staging area.

The Irvins’ daughter, Doris, was in attendance for the fundraiser along with other family members, including eldest son, Mose Kiser and wife, Jean. She regaled guests with stories of her family home in its heyday. She chortled over how her mother unceremoniously goose-stepped an intruder, who had crawled through an upstairs bedroom window, out the front door.

The upstairs, neutralized and fully functional, sports essential yet invisible changes that consumed large chunks of the budget. Heating systems, reworked roofs and copper guttering were costly; built-ins cleverly conceal necessary ductwork.

Similar to downstairs, baths were either gutted or expanded where possible, and redone in sympathetic style to the originals. Two were added on the third floor.

The color palette upstairs is a noticeably calm, “restful gray,” Richardson says, which has further served to open the space.

The main upstairs bedroom has a French door providing access to a walk-out space — the same one where the intruder had hoisted himself up. “It’s beautiful at night here,” says Richardson. “You can watch the stars.”

It will overlook a garden he is planning, where, years ago, the Irvins created three holes for the children to learn golf, he explains.

Several French doors lead to walk-out exterior terraces upstairs, including on the front of the house directly over the entrance.

Most radically altered is the third floor. The former ballroom (pressed into service for Greensboro High School’s student prom) has been transformed into new bedrooms and baths. The unfinished oak floors now shine.

Richardson is pleased with the new iron staircase leading to the third floor with a gracefully curving handrail in a fanciful design called “the lamb’s tongue,” designed by craftsman Randy Valentine of Southside Iron Works.

“Randy said he’d never curved a piece [of iron] this thick. He was very proud of it.”

New stairs replaced narrow, cramped steps — once the sole access.

Richardson is especially fond of one of the new third-floor showers featuring a light-providing window.

He leads the way down three floors to the least changed space: the basement.

Here, the house seems to audibly breathe. He envisions a finished wine room. The whitewashed basement is mostly empty apart from a zinc-topped counter relocated from the kitchen.

Standing in the quiet, cool space, Richardson grows thoughtful, confessing it may seem odd to upsize when others nearing retirement do the opposite. Hilltop now has nearly 6,800 heated square feet. Here they can begin to “curate carefully and eliminate excess.”

“It’s an opportunity to thoughtfully place things.” He adds, “We can actually see our collections versus having them stuck away in closets and drawers.”

Can he envision living at Hilltop?

“I do,” he adds quietly. “But I was conflicted. Because I still love our old house.”

He takes stock, absorbing the rhythms of the house. A quiet lull before a brick mason arrives to discuss an outdoor water fountain, one Richardson found at an estate sale near the mountains.

“Listen, I never imagined we could have something so wonderful. But we’ve both worked hard for everything we have.”

As wonderful as a dream realized is, he later phones to share what he likes best about the beauty he wooed and won.

Forget the sweeping stair, grand entry and front rooms. He’s happiest with the everyday spaces. “The rooms at the back of the house. The kitchen. The sunporch.” Here, he and Clark read papers, drink coffee, share meals. Ordinary moments in a dream of a house.

He sighs happily. One day, too, he adds, “I’ll slow down.”

2025 Feature The House Next Door

Ushering In Love

USHERING IN LOVE

Two couples share their love for performing arts at the Tanger Center

By Cassie Bustamante

Photographs by Mark Wagoner

While sitting on the large concrete orbs in the LeBauer Park playground as our youngest son played with a pal, my husband, Chris, spied a silver-haired couple strolling by holding hands.

“Aaaaw, how cute,” he said. “That couple matches.”

“Of course, they match,” I replied. “They’re wearing their usher uniforms and are clearly on their way to work at the Tanger Center.” As soon as the words escaped my lips, I knew I had to know who these people were. What kind of couple, in their golden years, still hold hands and go to work together? I looked at Chris and wondered, could that be us one day?

I immediately reached out to the Tanger Center and learned that there was more than one gainfully employed couple who ushered in guests awaiting theatrical and musical entertainment.

The couple we spotted in the park, Allen and Anita Greenstein, will celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary later this year, and Dale and Starr Harrold just rounded their 50th year of marriage in 2024.

Inside the walls of the Tanger office, I sat down with both couples to learn more about them and also to try to crack the code to a long and happy marriage.

Allen & Anita Greenstein

Sixty-one years after the fact, Allen and Anita Greenstein easily recall falling in love with
one another.

“We met in a house plan. A house plan is a poor man’s fraternity,” says Anita, a 4-foot-8-inch spitfire of a woman. “I was supposed to meet another fellow and instead I met him.”

“And that was it,” says Allen.

“And that was it,” repeats Anita.

At the time, Allen was a senior attending The City College of New York and Anita was an undergrad at Pace Institute. Having grown up in New York, both regularly attended Broadway shows from a young age. “We dated and went to all the theaters,” says Anita.

But Allen quickly rattles off an exact date: Feb. 7, 1964, their first date. On a tight budget, Allen scraped his nickels and dimes together to take her to the movies that night, where they saw an Audrey Hepburn film. “I can’t remember exactly which one,” he says, “but I knew something was percolating at the time between us, which is why I remember the date.”

For 30 years after that, Allen gave Anita flowers one full week before Valentine’s Day. “And for 30 years, she said, ‘What’s this for?’ So I stopped.” His eyes crinkle in the corners as he stifles a giggle.

After they were married, on Aug. 14, 1965, Allen went on to earn his doctorate in clinical psychology.

“And I got a doctorate in keeping him happy. And I got a PHT,” quips Anita. “Putting hubby through.”

The Greensteins left New York behind for plain old York — in Pennsylvania — where Allen set up his psychology practice and they raised a family. For 36 years, Allen practiced there and even launched a large mental health program with Anita working by his side.

“She took care of the clerical staff, a lot of administrative stuff. I supervised all the professional staff,” says Allen. “She did her thing, I did mine.”

“We don’t do anything separate,” says Anita. A fact the couple is clearly proud of is that theirs was the first mental health facility to computerize for billing, record keeping and “things of that nature.”

While they left New York City behind, they took with them their shared passion for theatre. Anita became active in the York Little Theatre (now The Belmont Theatre), acting, dancing — which she preferred to acting — and even handling publicity. Allen recalls hitting the stage as well, playing Captain Hook in a Little Theatre production for children.

And, over the years, the couple has become convinced that live theater is good for a community’s mental health. How? “Let me get my speech ready,” Allen answers. “It’s usually a very positive experience and it’s great to go in and have your spirits lifted by the story, by the talent, by the music. It’s beautiful.”

After a moment of further consideration, he continues. “And even when the topic is not so bright and cheery, some of these things need to be discussed. It’s a great outlet for lifting your spirits or provoking some discussion.”

Eventually, Allen retired from his practice and the couple relocated to the Sunshine State, Florida. Their love for live theatre and stage shows once again followed them and they found their way to the Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce, Fla.

There, Anita thrived in a position as team lead, managing a crew of 42 people to cover a 1,200-seat theater.

“It was the graveyard of old singers,” Allen jokes.

Anita scoffs defensively.

“Well,” he admits, “Tony Bennet was there.”

And yet, the couple thoroughly enjoyed the many “old singers” that traveled through the theater, where they were able to interact with artists such as Kenny G, Debbie Reynolds, Joan Rivers and Howie Mandel, to name a few. Anita recalls having a serious heart-to-heart with Ms. Reynolds about osteoporosis.

But a real magic moment for Anita was having her photo taken with Air Supply’s Russell Hitchcock, whose arms are wrapped around her petite frame in the picture. Her entire face glows as she reminisces about that moment and sings: “Just when I thought I was over you, just when I thought I could stand on my own, oh baby, those memories come crashing through . . .”

But it was Willie Nelson who left a mark on both of them.

“You want to know a real good story?” asks Anita.

“Willie Nelson!” exclaims Allen. “We were Willie Nelson’s body guards.”

Anita proceeds to tell the story of how a crazed female fan came forward when it was autograph time and proceeded to climb on stage with Willie. As the Shakespeare line goes, “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” Anita got her down. “She pulled her off!” Allen says proudly of how his wife managed to get a woman much larger than herself off the stage.

As a thank you for her heroism, Willie gave Anita one of his signature bandanas, says Allen.

“A clean one,” she quips. “All the others were dirty.”

Despite the countless exciting interactions with celebrities, the Greensteins felt the call to Greensboro, where their daughter, Barbara, lived with her husband, UNCG Provost Alan Boyette, and their kids. They landed in the greener pastures of North Carolina in 2017 and soon got wind that a new theater was due to open in 2020.

Given their experience and charismatic personalities, the Greensteins were a natural fit to become ushers at the Steven Tanger Center for Performing Arts. Of course, the COVID pandemic delayed the scheduled opening, which was to happen on March 20, 2020, with the renowned Josh Groban. Instead of the theater opening its doors, the entire world shut down.

But a year-and-a-half later, when home-grown songbird Rhiannon Giddens performed the first show at Tanger on September 2, 2021, “We were there,” says Allen.

At Tanger, the two continue to share their passion for stage with guests. They love greeting guests as they arrive, getting them amped up for the show they’re about to see, and view their team of fellow ushers as family. According to Allen, the best part of his role is “to see the wonder in their face, that’s very sparkling.”

Looking back on almost 60 years of marriage, Anita says, “I still can’t believe it — it’s kind of amazing.” So, what’s the trick? “Because I love him,” Anita says simply.

While they don’t travel or get out as much as they used to, Allen says that what he loves most is “just being together and having a good time.”

Despite the countless celebrities they’ve interacted with, the stars in the Greensteins’ eyes still shine only for each other.

Dale & Starr Harrold

After 50 years of moving all over the Southeast and raising two daughters, Dale and Starr Harrold appreciate nothing more than spending time at home together. Sitting by their fireplace, each with a book in hand, they relax, “just being cozy and comfortable,” says Starr.

How about a date night out to dinner? Nope, the couple, now in their 70s, would rather be home. “I do the cooking, she does the cleaning,” says Dale.

As undergrads at Western Carolina University, Dale and Starr ran in the same circles. Before they even dated, Starr was taken by how Dale treated others. “He would be the first to say, ‘Can I get you something to drink? Can I get your coat?’” she recalls. “He was just marvelous.”

As many great love stories do, it all came down to one fateful night, when Starr’s friend, Pam, who was dating Tate, a fraternity brother of Dale’s, said that Tate was going to bring along a date for her. She had no idea who it was going to be, when in walked Dale.

“I found out later that he had dated everyone on the three stories of my dorm and I just happened to be last,” she says with a laugh. It turns out he’d saved the best for last.

“That was 1971, and here we are, folks,” she says in her soft-spoken manner.

Dale, two years ahead of Starr in school, says he stuck around for her, earning his MBA while she finished up her degree to later become a speech pathologist. Once they both graduated from their programs, they married in 1974 and then, “We moved together,” says Dale.

“All over,” adds Starr.

Up until his retirement in 2022, Dale worked as a banker and consultant for companies such as Self-Help Credit Union, C.J. Harris and Company, plus First Union National Bank and other commercial banks. His job took the Harrolds all over North Carolina and Florida and had them relocating every 18 months to three years. Starr got used to it, knowing that when Dale walked in the door and said, “Guess what?” it was time to pack again. The couple spent a total of 19 years in various Florida cities, where their two daughters were born.

To accommodate the many moves, Starr constantly landed new speech pathologist roles in hospitals, rehab centers, schools and even in-home healthcare. In one school, Dale notes, her office, which was a former laundry room, had a large hole in it. “I could tell you if it was raining or windy,” Starr quips.

Throughout all of those location changes, community theater became “a great family outlet,” says Starr. “We’ve been very fortunate because no matter where we lived, they had community theater.” And Starr was no stranger to the stage. She recalls a love of piano, singing and dancing that stretches as far back as the second grade, where she was the leader of a little kids’ band.

Dale, too, could hold his own as a performer. In fact, he once landed a leading role in a production of Bye Bye Birdie, portraying Harry MacAfee.

Like the Greensteins, the Harrolds have accumulated a heaping pile of hilarious theater moments over the years. For Dale, the one that stands out the most was during a Lumberton production of Fiddler on the Roof.

“Our Tevya,” he says, “when he said ‘Tradition!’ he stepped off the stage and went 10 feet down —”

“— into the pit!” Starr finishes the sentence.

“He was a retired command sergeant major from the paratroop,” Dale continues. “He broke a keyboard, but he knew how to roll.” The show went on, but for the following performances, a local mattress company laid down mattresses in the pit area — just in case.

When their own daughters were small, like their parents, they took a shine to musical theater and participated in a program called Broadway Babies that allowed them to travel and perform. “They even sang at Disneyworld,” says Dale.

Starr chimes in, “They used to open the season at Pinehurst.”

Their older daughter, also named Starr — “Starr Jr.” — remained passionate about the stage as she grew up and even considered studying theater at Duke. In the end, she opted for practicality and became a lawyer now living in Greensboro with her husband, also a lawyer, along with their two kids. But, just like Mom and Dad, she couldn’t stay away and landed a part-time role as usher at the Tanger Center. “She’s an original Tanger employee,” says Dale.

The couple’s younger daughter, Suzanne Bell, eventually shied away from the stage, even though, they say, she had the vocal chops for it. She also had the grades and now works remotely in Mebane for Johns Hopkins, “if that tells you anything,” says Dale proudly. “She does their human drug trials.”

Like Starr Jr., Suzanne has two children, including the Harrolds’ one and only granddaughter, Ruby. Starr’s hope for all of her grandkids? “I wish, wish, that they could develop the love [of theater] that we all have!”

It was their daughters and grandchildren that drew the Harrolds to make a home in Greensboro. Previously, after many years of moving, the couple settled for about 10 years in Starr’s hometown, Concord, so that Starr, an only child, could take care of her own mother as well as aunts and uncles who never had children. Once they were gone, Dale asked his wife, “What would you think about moving closer to the kids?”

After many years of moves, she was tired of reinventing herself professionally. “I said, ‘I’ll go if I can retire’ . . . and he said, ‘I think we can make that work,’” recalls Starr. In 2014, they made what they hope will be their last move.

And when the Tanger Center opened seven years later, the Harrolds immediately bought season tickets for the whole family. Each time they attended a performance, they noted how kind all of the employees were to them. “No matter how beautiful the site, no matter how terrific the performance is, it’s how you’re greeted that makes you feel good,” says Starr.

With Dale also retired, the couple answered the call when they saw that Tanger Center was hiring ushers. During her interview for the job, Starr recalls saying, “It’s OK if you accept one of us but not the other. We’re still going to be season ticket holders!”

Luckily, they didn’t have to face that dilemma and both were hired. And that kindness that they recall from when they were solely patrons? They pass it on. “That’s what brought us in and that’s what’s continued,” says Starr.

Plus, working there has provided an unexpected bonus. “It’s the most wonderful feeling in the world, like you belong, a true family,” says Starr of her fellow staff members. The Harrolds proudly say that they’ve become the mom and pop of their team. “In fact, we’re taking one of the ushers that we met here to have surgery Friday morning.”

“She just said that when she needs something, she always feels best with us,” adds Starr, her face glowing warmly as in tribute to her name.

That kindness that initially drew Starr to Dale seems to be the couples’ modus operandi — and the secret to a long and loving marriage, according to Starr. “It’s him. It’s truly all him. He is probably the kindest person . . . the reason that we’re doing well is 99 percent because of him.” And, she adds, through all of their own tribulations — including frequent relocations and taking care of ailing family — he has remained steadfast and calm.

“I think you’re understating yourself here,” Dale counters.

“It’s just been a good partnership,” Dale continues. “We each bring different skill sets and sometimes different perspectives to the same issue. She has a whole skill set that I lack, so we complement each other.”

If we were to draw a Venn diagram with their individual skills, the overlap would be in warmth and generosity.

“To get to be a part of Tanger,” says Starr, “it’s been one of those cherry-on-top scenarios of things you’ve done in your life.” And if you’re lucky enough to be welcomed into the Tanger Center by the Harrolds, it will surely be the cherry-on-top of your theatrical experience.

2025 Feature Ushering In Love

Why Does No One Look Like Me?

How Tobe, the first book respectfully published for Black children, came to be

By Billy Ingram

A little more than 85 years ago, Greensboro played a pivotal role in the creation of a groundbreaking children’s storybook written expressly for African Americans. In an era during the 1930s when insulting stereotypes and vulgar characterizations pervaded almost every facet of American pop culture, Tobe was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1939.

Up until then, there were few publications that provided Black youth with identifiable role models, with one notable exception: The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine edited by W.E.B. Du Bois that was published from January 1920 through December 1921. Black youngsters simply didn’t have any storybooks depicting Black characters.

The impetus for Tobe came after a white Chapel Hill elementary schoolteacher, Stella Gentry Sharpe, was asked by one of her Black students, “Why does no one in my books look like me?” In 1936, she set out to write a children’s book geared toward African American kids. Basing the text on the experiences of a young boy and his family who were farming on land rented from her husband, Sharpe snapped photos to illustrate the stories herself. “A little book for the enjoyment of other children” is how she described her project.

Over the next two years or so, Sharpe dropped in on her subjects, the McCauley family, almost daily. “The children knew I was writing a book about the games we were playing and the things we were doing,” she wrote about the experience. “But I don’t think they realized it was going to be a real book.” The name Tobe she conjured up, but otherwise Sharpe used the actual first names of the McCauley kids in her script.

The finished manuscript presents a series of relatable tales about day-to-day life on a farm, seen through the eyes of 6-year-old Tobe. The reader sees him wading in a brook, going to school, attending church and helping with harvesting crops, along with his two sets of twin siblings, two older sisters and a brother. Also featured in the book are his mother and father, plus a cat named Tom, Boss the dog, a pet goat, baby chicks and his extended family’s horses and assorted livestock.

A representative storyline:

Riding In a Tire:

Big Boy, Little Boy, and I are too big to ride in a tire.

William says that it makes him dizzy, but Rufus likes to ride in a tire.

He gets in the tire and we roll it in a smooth place.

If we go over bumps, it hurts his head.

Rufus says, “Everything stands on its head when I ride in a tire!”

I wish I could ride in a tire. I want to see trees and houses standing on their heads.

Sharpe used standard storytelling found in children’s fiction, whether it be Curious George or Goodnight Moon.

Her book was quickly acquired in 1936 by W. T. Couch, director of University of North Carolina Press, whose 14-year tenure had not been without controversy. He’d been known to push through publications expressing “unorthodox” views about the South related to race, religion and economics. In 1927, he edited a book of folk sketches with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green (The Lost Colony) that read in part, “as the white man fails the negro fails and as the negro rises the white man rises.” That phrase sparked an emergency meeting of the University’s board of directors to consider recalling the book for reprinting with a less contentious intro. The board changed its mind when informed the hardcover was already in the hands of reviewers.

Couch was pleased with the narrative of Tobe, but decided the accompanying photography wasn’t up to the press’s standards. In 1938, he approached photographer Charles A. Farrell, a Piedmont resident he recently signed for a volume devoted to North Carolina coastal fishermen.

Farrell and his wife, Anne, had moved to Greensboro back in 1923, buying The Art Shop, which, then a camera and art supply business, he relocated in 1930 to where Lincoln Financial’s downtown entrance is today. (Founded in 1899, The Art Shop is still thriving in its current location on West Market Street.) Farrell was also employed as Greensboro Daily News’ first professional photographer.

When, in the spring of 1938, Couch asked Farrell to lens images for, “a supplementary reader for negro and white schools,” it occurred to Farrell that a family he was familiar with, Arthur and Priscilla Garner and their offspring, would make ideal subjects for Tobe. After all, they lived in the small African American farming community of Goshen, about 10 minutes down Randleman Road, just outside of (then) Greensboro city limits. Goshen was renowned in The Gate City for being home to the Red Wings, an all-Black semipro baseball team who slugged it out Monday nights at World War Memorial Stadium, facing Negro Major League franchises when they were cruising through town.

After sample photos of the Garner family and their surroundings were submitted for approval, the publisher agreed wholeheartedly with Farrell’s choice. With a proposed retail price of $1.00 (about $22 in today’s money), the photographer would be compensated $3.00 per published print plus 2% of the wholesale price for each book, with another 8% going to the author. In private, Couch confided to Farrell that he was willing “against the advice of his board of directors” to risk the loss of $2,000–3,000 (around $65,000 in today’s currency) to mount this project, as a social experiment, if necessary, “and as a gesture toward interracial good feeling.”

This was a leap in more ways than one. Juvenile storybooks had been predominantly — if not exclusively — illustrated with colorful graphics, so its format of text paired with black-and-white photos was highly unusual, possibly unprecedented. Photoshoots for Tobe began in June 1938 and continued through that October.

Farrell’s approach was meticulous, with each setup offering the publisher choices featuring subtle variations in stance and demeanor. For instance, unpublished images of the mother and father reading in front of a radio, a familiar tableau in 1930s advertisements and magazine covers, demonstrates how the photographer positioned his subjects in various ways in front of two distinctly different radio consoles. The parents’ focus alternated between holding reading material or knitting in their hands while their faces held far-away gazes, the kind that came over folks listening to The Shadow or The Jack Benny Program.

With most of the happenings in Tobe taking place outdoors, it was crucial for Farrell to have his foreground subjects sharply focused with a background in recess, a method known as the bokeh effect (aka your phone camera’s “portrait mode”). This was achieved using a large format Graflex Speed Graphic. Considered by many to be America’s first and last great camera, it had two shutters and a maximum exposure speed of 1/1,000 second. Capable of rendering greater detail than 35mm film, that same apparatus was employed to snap the flag being raised at Iwo Jima in 1945 and Irving Klaw’s pinup pics of Bettie Page a decade later.

For Tobe, Farrell introduced through his photos a typical middle-class, agrarian existence — by post-Depression era standards, anyway — portraying a Black family whose lifestyle was comparable to white farmers; albeit a parity confined within the boundaries of these images.

Told through unencumbered stagings in varying shades of grey, Farrell’s vicarious aperture provides readers with an unwritten understanding of what real kids got up to in that era. No artifice, ego or self-consciousness is evident on the faces of these common folk, fully engaged in innocent pursuits and seemingly unaware of the lens or of any potential for posterity. One somewhat complex storyline (for this genre anyway) had the title character standing up to a bully, portrayed by one of the neighbor kids:

I put the tin box in my pocket
Then I went to the mail box.
The big boy was there.
He came near me.
Then I took the lid off my tin box.
I said, “Please don’t make me throw this pepper. It is not good for the eyes.”
He put his hands over his eyes.
Then he ran as fast as he could.
He ran and ran.
I do not know how far he went, but he never came back.

Holiday celebrations in particular impart some fascinating perspectives. For Halloween, as was the practice of the day, the brothers fashion grotesque masks out of old sacks and scraps. Later, when Mother is asked why Santa arrived with their gifts a day early on Christmas Eve via a ’36 Ford Coupe rather than down the chimney, she replies, “Next year he may come in an airplane!”

While fully immersed in this project in 1938, Farrell came across a newly-released children’s storybook that was outwardly very much like Tobe in concept and execution. Illustrated with photographs, The Flop-Eared Hound by white author Ellis Credle relates the story of a Black Southern boy living in a ramshackle shack “underneath a honey-pod tree” with his sharecropping “Mammy” and “Pappy.” In the book, little Shadrack Meshack Abednego Jones, who answered to the nickname Boot-jack, forms a friendship with a mischievous, spotted stray pup. Despite the unfortunate monikers and problematic nomenclature, the publication was uncharacteristically respectful; every individual spoke perfect English, as opposed to the Black characters in, say, Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 book, Gone with the Wind, and the story concludes with a beaming Boot-jack, in his handsome sailor’s outfit, attending the circus, where a clown presents him with a Mickey Mouse balloon.

With a degree of apprehension that their efforts would be perceived as an imitation of The Flop-Eared Hound, Farrell immediately brought this to the attention of Couch. Couch took this under advisement.

After photography was completed, editor Alice T. Paine at UNC Press was placed in charge of guiding Tobe to completion alongside designer Andor Braun. “As you will see,” Paine wrote to Farrell in March 1939 after production wrapped up, “the type and spacing have been designed to make the book as easy reading for children as possible. This also differentiates it from The Flop-Eared Hound, which has a different type and spacing.”

Farrell offered several suggestions concerning what order the stories in Tobe should appear, almost all of which were heeded. The only reservation anyone involved had was concerning the book’s ending. “It is true the book really does not have a conclusion,” conceded Paine before its May 1939 publication, but, she reasoned, “there are worse things than stopping when you were through.”

The book was very well received by the press and libraries around the country. With an initial print run of 4,200 copies, reception was so enthusiastic, especially in the South, that UNC Press expressed a hope that the book might potentially sell 10,000 copies. That prompted the press to take out a prominent ad in Publisher’s Weekly and provide financial subsidies for booksellers wishing to advertise Tobe in newspapers.

By March 1941, Tobe had sold over 11,000 copies, earning Farrell a total of $83.97 in royalty payments. In June of that year, Farrell and Sharpe were contacted by a Greensboro law firm on behalf of Arthur Garner, who felt his family deserved a cut of the profits from the book they’d posed for and devoted so much time to.

Farrell’s reply came in the form of a letter to Mrs. Garner. “After two years,” he wrote, “the University Press has just barely paid the cost of publishing the book and has no returns for the many expenses connected with the editing and designing.” Pointing out their collective intention was never to make money but to create a book that nonwhite children could take pride in, he stated, “The feeling between white people and colored people all over America is better, without a doubt, because you and your children have been publicly presented as natural and normal parts of American society.”

Talk of a lawsuit faded, but, in a fit of anger that initially ensued, Farrell’s correspondence reads as less than charitable in his assessment of the Garners and African Americans in general, referring to Arthur in stereotypically demeaning terms such as “shiftless” and “unintelligent,” while grousing to Couch, “I’ll admit having a dark brown taste in my mouth today.”

In 1941, Sharpe approached New York City-based Grossett & Dunlap about the possibility of a sequel, Tobe at Eight. Based on the favorable publicity and relatively strong sales the initial book generated, the publishing firm accepted her offer, eagerly contacting Charles Farrell about beginning photography as soon as possible while the Garner kids were still the right age. Sharpe, however, never submitted a manuscript. By the summer of 1945, around 21,000 copies of Tobe were in circulation with an additional print run of 15,000 being prepped.

It’s true, Tobe didn’t significantly alter the landscape when it came to children’s literature. Author Jane Dabney Shackelford unabashedly used it as a template of sorts when she wrote her 1944 storybook, My Happy Days, featuring a suburban African American family.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t until 1962 that another major children’s book revolving around a child of color would be released. A Caldecott Medal winner, The Snowy Day by white author Ezra Jack Keats depicts a Brooklyn boy’s delight in waking up to a wintery wonderland. It became a cross-cultural bestseller, in part because the text never mentions race — the kid just happens to be Black.

Despite measurable progress in civil rights during the 1960s, that pernicious minstrel show and Stepin Fetchit imagery was so ingrained in American culture that, when the first Black character was introduced in the comic strip Dennis the Menace in 1970, he was depicted with bug eyes and pigmentation so dark you couldn’t discern where the face ended and the hairline began. He grinned too broadly through thick, white lips. Indignation and protestations were immediate and forcefully expressed around the country. Newspaper editors, who should have known better when they saw the drawing to begin with, were strong-armed into publishing abject apologies. The clueless cartoonist himself couldn’t fathom what the controversy could possibly be all about.

On the brighter side, that was two full years after Charles Schulz introduced the world to the imminently respectable Franklin in Peanuts. It’s telling that Schulz threatened to end Peanuts, the most popular strip in America, which ended up earning him millions of dollars, if editors whited-out Franklin’s shading lines as many Southern papers were requesting to do. They feared that showing multiracial kids attending school together would inspire a subscriber freakout. It didn’t.

In 2019, UNC Press published Tobe: A Critical Edition: New Views on a Children’s Classic. Besides reprinting the book itself, there are exhaustive essays penned by Dr. Benjamin Filene covering, in great detail, every aspect of the book. It’s a deep dive into its history and cultural impact.

“It’s a timely topic in a certain way,” Dr. Filene tells me. “Even though the book is obviously old and dated in many respects, it raises questions about race and children’s representation that are very current. I think people are fascinated — I was, too — by the quasi-documentary aspect to it, which is unusual for a children’s book nowadays.” While the book was never intended to be a documentary, “and you certainly can’t just treat it straightforwardly as a documentary source, it’s an unusual resource that gives us a one of kind glimpse into the past.”

In his research leading up to a traveling exhibition, which coincided with Tobe’s 75th anniversary in 2014, Dr. Filene made contact with some of the former Garner children. “I think they were a little puzzled at first,” he recalls. “Why? Who was I? Was I tracking them down? But they remembered the book for sure and there was a lot of pride in being represented in a published book.” For the Garners, the book serves as a snapshot of one childhood summer and fall, but, also, Filene says, “a window into a very close-knit rural life that they had grown out of as they lived their adult life, a glimpse into daily life for an African American community that really is not that well documented in other respects or in other ways.”

Tobe himself, Charles Garner, returned to Goshen for the 75th-anniversary celebration. “He was pleased to remember it,” Dr. Filene says about reminiscing with Garner. “But he said explicitly that this book had not changed his life in any way and that was the main thing that he carried with him through his adult life.”

Active with the Hillsborough Historical Society, Stella Gentry Sharpe lived out her life as a schoolmarm before writing a 1947 short story titled “Tobe and the Coon” and an obscure children’s book, Tildy, which featured an African American theme and was published in 1965. She was 86 when she died in 1978.

Farrell’s anticipated collection of essays and images focused on coastal fishing communities, sensitively photographed and developed, was never completed. Judging from a multitude of vibrant, revelatory images (donated to the State Archives of North Carolina) from those four years spent exploring Cedar Island, Mann’s Harbor and other hard-scrabble seafood harvesting villages that were populated heavily by people of color, Farrell was a masterful chronicler of North Carolina enclaves that were going otherwise unobserved by the contemporary outside world.

A potentially iconic career was tragically cut short by an unspecified mental illness exacerbated by a so-called “ice pick lobotomy” (transorbital lobotomy). Performed on Farrell by a Greensboro doctor in 1948, it left him cognitively impaired and creatively neutered. (Sometimes performed with an actual ice pick, that procedure was employed frequently on women exhibiting an independent streak or men struggling with same sex attractions.) In 1977, Farrell passed away at Greensboro’s Friends Homes at the age of 83.

Lacking a prolific portfolio doesn’t diminish the inherent charm, artistry and insight Charles A. Farrell infused into his body of work. He held an unwavering commitment to capturing moments of verity with black-and-white clarity. His dedication can be traced back to an imaginary boy named Tobe, whose personality emerged vividly via the framing of an unassuming visionary. And it was all made possible by an unlikely publisher in the Deep South who was convinced that a more equitable world could be forged, albeit in some minute way, through unvarnished portraiture reflecting basic human dignity and universality.

2025 Feature Why Does No One Look Like Me

Look to the Skies

LOOK TO THE SKIES

Look to the Skies

Shooting stars, sunrises and celestial wonder

Photographs and Story by Lynn Donovan

Lynn Donovan has been shooting for O.Henry magazine since its 2011 launch. A Greensboro native, she loves to travel the world with her faithful companions — her husband, Dan, and her cameras — capturing wildlife, landscapes and everything in between. In addition to O.Henry shoots, she adds concerts, theatre events, festivals and other happenings to her repertoire. Capturing life through her lens and sharing the images with others is what makes her click!

Above us there is a huge ever-changing canvas of sky. If you look

up you may be rewarded with phenomenal sights. Here are some of my observations over the years of gazing upward with my camera.

The sun greets me every morning with its light and warmth, and, as a photographer, an endless number of stunning possibilities. Even on cloudy days, the filtered light creates a dreamy softness to everything it falls on. I love watching the daybreak. No two sunrises are the same, but all fill my lenses with vivid colors and intensity, creating magic.

Without rainstorms, the sun would not be able to dazzle us with those radiant arcs of color across the sky, aka rainbows. Storms offer an opportunity to catch unique clouds filled with rain that replenishes the Earth. Clouds, storms and lightning can make the skies a photographer’s dream. When conditions are right, entire clouds glow with an eerie internal light or throw out bolts of lightning that can set the entire sky ablaze.

At the end of each day, the sun dips below the horizon and the golden hour — beloved among photographers for its soft diffused light — begins. For a brief period, the skies and clouds reflect the dying day’s warm colors and the entire sky glows. Many of my suppers have gone cold or been eaten late while standing outside, basking in the dusk.

The sun and moon take turns eclipsing each other. From partial to total, they are something to watch as they attempt to block each other’s light. During a solar eclipse, the moon passes between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow on Earth, partially or totally blocking the sunlight. For a total solar eclipse, the sun’s corona is briefly visible. At totality, an eerie, dusky darkness occurs — the temperature drops, birds stop singing and crickets chirp. A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth passes between the moon, in its full phase, and the sun, dimming the light falling on the moon, sometimes giving it a red glow.

It’s often hard for me to stay indoors after dark given the incredible displays revealed long after the sun has set. The skies are filled with wonder that begs to be observed. The largest object visible from Earth is our moon, waxing and waning, filling the sky with its almost constant glow. Full, crescent, new and everywhere in between, the moon can even be observed during daylight. It also can create moonbows, which are just like rainbows, but created by the light of the moon through water mists. Our lives are filled with poetry, song and prose dedicated to this beautiful rock.

The moon is hung upon a blanket of stars. If you leave the lights of the city behind, you will be able to see an entire canopy of twinkling stars above your head. And if you stay in the dark long enough, just like a camera’s long exposure, your eyes will adapt to witness the magnitude of starry light. Really dark skies reward observers with the Milky Way, stretching across the sky, reminding us of what a small part we each play in this magnificent universe.

If you are lucky and extremely patient, the way photographers have to learn to be, you will be rewarded with meteors streaking across the star field. Every year, several meteor showers rain across the sky. And if you are really lucky and observant, you may catch a comet. Over the last few decades, several bright comets have streaked through the heavens, many visible to the naked eye. Maybe one day I will graduate to shooting through a telescope!

One of the most elusive light shows happens when the Earth’s magnetosphere is disturbed by the sun’s solar wind, causing aurora borealis, or northern lights. They range from a faint glow to arcs across the sky to dancing curtains in colors of red, green, blue to yellow and pink. While I’ve traveled all the way to Alaska, Iceland and Norway to experience their splashy shows of color, the solar flares are sometimes so strong that we can catch them as far south as North Carolina — which happened twice in 2024. Sometimes, all you have to do is step into your own backyard, look up and focus!

2025 Feature Look to the Skies

The Disheveled Prepster

THE DISHEVELED PREPSTER

The Disheveled Prepster

A Page High School alumni moonlights as a fashion designer

By Cassie Bustamante • Photographs By Anna Peeples

By day, Greensboro native Matt Healy works in HR for Ecolab, a global player in water treatment and other technologies aimed at protecting people. After work, he can be found hauling his kids to baseball games or basketball practice with his wife, Sarah, or coaching their soccer team. But when the office has been locked up for the day and the two boys tucked into bed, visions of bold, patterned dresses dance in his head.

Even as a preschooler in the early-’80s, Healy colored liberally on his clothes. His parents, worrying that something might be wrong, took him to see a child psychologist. The diagnosis? Their healthy, young child was simply telling them, “I have my own style.”

“My personal style has been pretty bold,” Healy says, then looks down at his black polo shirt and gray twill pants and chuckles. “This was just a very-exhausted-on-Monday look.”

By contrast, his brand’s instagram feed (@augustus_roark)features images of models wearing colorful bohemian skirts paired with vintage-style T-shirts — or patterned patchwork dresses — bringing to mind vintage vinyl album covers.

“I’ve always described the Augustus Roark brand, the look of it, as like a prep-school Deadhead or like the guy who listens to Joy Division at a fraternity party,” says Healy. “You’re in the scene, but you’re pushing it a little bit.”

While music inspires the Augustus Roark aesthetic, the company’s name was drawn from literature. “Augustus” pulls from the Lonesome Dove character, Augustus McCrae, and “Roark” from Howard Roark, the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s philosophical novel, The Fountainhead. These two characters, says Healy, were both individualistic but heroic and went against the societal grain. “It sort of symbolizes, ‘Be an individual. Be who you want to be. Follow your own North Star.’”

Inspiration wasn’t far afield. His own father, though in finance, has always stretched the boundaries of the latest fashion. “He is always way better dressed than me,” says Healy. “He’s pretty bold.”

Of course, he’s quick to add that his mother, who “sold clothes for a time with her sister,” has also been an influence. “I don’t want to discredit my mom — she’s very fashionable,” he says, “but my dad is kind of the one that really has an eye for it.”

Though you might say that Healy’s fashion design career began with those original scribbles on his childhood garments, he admits that he didn’t take the leap into it until his mid-20s, a few years after earning a degree in history from UNC Chapel Hill.

While his mind is always swirling with designs, he started simply — with T-shirts. “The T-shirt was always just an entry point for me.”

But the T-shirt business has remained strong and steady. Some of his pieces can be found in shops across the Carolinas, California, Colorado, Texas, Tennessee and D.C. In fact, if you attended the 2024 N.C. Folk Festival, you perhaps perused or even purchased one of Healy’s designs — a bold graphic in red, purple, pink and blue with white block lettering on a navy background. With music often serving up style inspiration, Healy says it was “a natural fit.”

From his bootstrap and T-shirt beginnings, Healy segued into collared shirts and hats, followed by rugby shirts, and officially launched Augustus Roark in 2007.

His rugby shirt designs caught the eye of fellow UNC Tar Heel Alexander Julian, whose own father, Maurice S. Julian, opened Chapel Hill boutique Julian’s in 1942. Julian, known for designing the teal-and-purple Charlotte Hornets’ uniforms as well as Carolina argyle, met Healy as “kind of a mentor, kind of a family friend.”

Julian saw something special in Healy’s designs and asked him about creating rugby shirts for his own brand at the time. “I am so naive, I didn’t even realize he was asking me that until later!” Healy recalls with a laugh.

While Julian’s style might be described as preppy, akin to Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, “disheveled preppy” is the look Healy portrays. He also seems heavily influenced, especially in his women’s designs, by the hippie movement. Think flowing shifts, Indian and near-Eastern fabrics, often sheer, and plunging necklines.

“People say I remind them of James Spader all the time, especially when I was younger and trimmer,” he says. “The Brat Pack, you can’t beat that.” Healy wasn’t even born until 1980 and was just a child when Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald and their crew graced movie screens across America.

Yet, he’s a self-described old soul whose style icons include several from the 1950s through 1980s: Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Brigitte Bardot and “maybe a dash of River Phoenix.”

After four years of peddling tees, Healy was finally ready to make the leap into women’s fashion. “It took so long to figure out how to get fabric,” says Healy, who sources a lot of his textiles from India, Italy, Peru and Mexico. “And how to find a pattern maker.”

For a couple of years, Healy searched the world over for a pattern maker, and — lo and behold — she was in his backyard all along, right here in Greensboro. Cassidy Burel, who has her own line of couture gowns, freelances for Augustus Roark as both pattern maker and model. While both are designers, each comes at it from different angles. Healy’s jumping off point is always the bold fabric. “I am very driven by color combinations.”

And Cassidy? “She is the total opposite,” he says. “She comes at it from a shape. She likes very minimalistic — white or one color.” While their aesthetic is completely different, their working relationship produces bold results. Often, after completing a piece for Augustus Roark, “She will say, ‘I never thought this would work, but it does.’”

The first dress ever designed by Healy was named “the Sarah,” a maxi-dress with ruffled shoulders, a wide V-neckline and a long side slit in a white fabric that features emerald-green dragons, butterflies, birds and vines with pink berries. Healy insists that it was “absolutely 100 percent” designed with his greatest supporter and influence in mind, his wife. Sarah, who works as the director of strategic marketing and communications at Canterbury School, met Healy right around the time Augustus Roark was officially launching and can often be found wearing her husband’s creations. Born and raised in Western Massachusetts, Sarah’s New England “hipster prepster” vibes echo throughout his designs.

Currently, most Augustus Roark dresses are one-offs or come in a single size run, which Healy says is “cool” because, if you own one, you’ve got a unique piece. But his goal is to be able to sell a fully running women’s line. Healy recalls his mentor, Julian, telling him that designing woman’s fashion was more fun because you could be really innovative. “He always wanted to do it, but he never took the leap,” he adds.

Healy hopes, like Julian’s own father did for him, to leave somewhat of a legacy for his two sons, just 9 and 12 now. “Gucci didn’t become Gucci until 40 years into Gucci,” he says, explaining that the brand didn’t explode into the iconic company it is today until generations later. Healy chuckles, “I am in no way, shape or form suggesting that I am like these brands,” but he’d love to see his kids run with it into the future one day. But for now, while Augustus Roark is still in his hands, he says, “I still have so much I want to do.”

At present, this full-time employee, dad and husband is happy with what he’s been able to accomplish as a simple fashion-designing moonlighter. “I created something out of nothing and that is what I am most proud of. And I am proud that it still exists.”

Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if someone like, say, Gwyneth Paltrow, would don one of his dresses. Rob Lowe, he adds, would be incredible, too. And who knows? You might even spy an Augustus Roark booth — or his T-shirt designs — at the 2025 N.C. Folk Fest.

“You’ll always look back and regret it if you didn’t try,” says Healy. “That’s what Augustus Roark symbolizes — be who you want to be.”

2025 Feature The Disheveled Prepster

A Cottage by the College

A COTTAGE BY THE COLLEGE

A Cottage by the College

Jane Green, neighborhood happiness broker

By Cynthia Adams • Photographs by Amy Freeman

I was outside yesterday working in the yard, and a young girl came by and said, ‘I love your house so much! I stop and look at it every day. I hope one day to have a house just like this,’” says Jane Green, who squeezed a small house on an incredibly tiny lot in the historic College Hill neighborhood. She also squeezed in an inordinate amount of happiness in the process.

“I have met so many nice young people living here. I felt, ‘Wow. That’s such a nice thing to say,’” she says, smiling widely as her eyes fill.

With a well-trafficked sidewalk bustling with passing UNCG students, Jane frequently enjoys porch time, befriending neighbors — even those happening by whom she may never know.

During the summer, a bubble machine installed on the front yard telegraphs Jane’s contagious happiness. A riot of flowers tumbles from planters and tin buckets; pale lavender petunias, lavender and herbs prevail.

By fall, pansies replace petunias, planted in abundance and the porch, an outdoor living room complete with hanging lanterns, table and chairs, rocker and cheerful swing, is dressed according to the season. It is Jane’s favorite place to be.

She has triumphantly brokered joy into her life. Like the pansies she admires, Jane blooms where she is planted. Resilient little pansies recover “even when frozen in a block of ice. Don’t give up on them!”

She sometimes looks back as she is leaving home, to reassure herself it is all real.

“That it’s still there,” Jane says wonderingly.

The best stories often start with serendipity. In the Greens’ case, unseen hands helped them along the way from the time they relocated to Greensboro from New Jersey in order to be closer to their adult children and their growing families.

Yet a shadow eclipsed the Greens’ sunny home last year when Richard succumbed to a debilitating illness four year after creating their pared-to-perfection cottage. Long married, Jane has spent the past year recalibrating, adjusting to life on her own.

As a couple, meals were a communal time. She missed that deeply when freshly bereaved. It was over dinners that the Greens processed the events of their lives.

“You talk about the day. The kids. You’re there.”

Naturally slender, she forced herself to eat after losing her husband.

“You know, the first time I had to sit and eat alone, that was hard for me. I’d never thought about that. That took a lot of getting used to,” acknowledges Jane.

“So, I ate outside [on the porch] and it made me feel better. For several weeks I did that. Kids were going by, they knew me, and I was able to get over that.”

There is a wistful pause. Even so, Jane remains the optimist on the block, a consequence of a close-knit family and actively cultivating a sense of belonging. More than a few longevity experts say such a sense of community is an essential ingredient of a healthful life.

“Your friends are important.” But so are neighbors, she explains.

Instinctually, Jane grins. “I like it just where I am,” she says, gesturing towards the front yard as students pass a white picket fence, part of the house’s charm initiative.

“The only part that bothers me is that they move on . . .” she adds wistfully. “But you get new ones,” she reminds herself. Despite loss, Jane persists, offsetting what might have been consuming loneliness.

Such boundless enthusiasm has made Jane a self-appointed booster for College Hill, downtown Greensboro, the Tanger Center, the City of Greensboro (especially City planner Mike Cowhig) and the students at UNCG.

Notably, too, her positive thinking seems to manifest good things.

Long before the Greens built their dream house, Jane kept a picture of a cottage torn from a Montgomery Ward catalog for future reference. She loved the simple, vintage charm. To her mind, it appeared cozy, friendly and welcoming.

Longing eventually inspired Jane and Richard to build their future Greensboro home in a historic district, where the lots were smaller and better suited to the cottage proportions.

They considered rehabbing other properties. But the Greens ultimately hoped to find an economical, buildable lot within Greensboro.

A lot that had been donated to the College Hill Neighborhood Association languished. College Hill resident Dan Curry, a member of its board and with long experience with Housing and Community Development, thought it could be viable. It was largely viewed as unbuildable, he acknowledges.

Even some city officials doubted it was sufficiently large enough to build. Yet Curry thought it could be done.

Empty and littered with refuse, 3,500-square-feet of land was once the entrance to a foundry. It had slowly devolved into an eyesore.

Curry and Cowhig, who worked with historic districts, arrived at a solution that would check several boxes and pacify residents who complained about the problematic lot. It would require coordinating a new build with various factions.

Both men believed the right project could be slipped onto the lot (called “infill”) and restore the 1800s historic streetscape to a more congruent, appropriate reality. “They [the Greens] had to overcome so many obstacles to make it happen,” says Cowhig, and it took two years to resolve.

But it would have to be just the right-sized house.

Not too big, not too small — a Goldilocks fit.

Yet even the Greens’ first look at the lot was singularly unfavorable.

Jane says bluntly, “It was a garbage pit.” But the Greens understood that the lot might be just large enough for their downsized house, minus a private driveway. (Egress would be via an existing driveway to a UNCG-owned building behind the lot used by the drama department for prop building.)

Long accustomed to 2,500 square feet, the Greens planned a 950-square-foot build. Jane stresses that it was less than 1,000 square feet of living space “without the porch.” The porch, which they insisted upon, was crucial to expanding their living space and the desired cottage look.

“I love a front porch,” Jane repeats, adding a happy sigh. With additional guidance from Summerfield contractor Gary Silverstein, the newbie build would appear right at home among historic homes more than a century older.

Cowhig assured all involved the cottage would meet local standards and fit with neighboring homes.

While the Greens rented a home for 10 months in High Point, their daughter, Nicole, who lived in nearby Sunset Hills, helped them strategize and downsize in anticipation of the new cottage.

They spent months going through a lifetime of stored possessions they had brought to North Carolina. Nudged by Nicole, they winnowed out extraneous possessions, and she arranged a tag sale. (The $600 proceeds would eventually pay for a small shed behind the new house.)

Silverstein had to work under less-than-ideal circumstances. The lot was on a busy street, close to UNCG. Construction workers had limited street parking as they ferried materials to the tiny site.

He went the extra mile, attending the planning board meetings before he even knew he had the job, Jane adds. Silverstein also took care of the cumbersome permitting requirements.

With tight building parameters, he had to improvise, using a crane in order to raise the roof rafters, reassuring watchful neighbors that their adjacent homes would be unscathed.

There was no room for error.

“He was wonderful, here working all the time.”

Silverstein completed the Greens’ new home on October 31, 2018.

A beaming Jane adds, “He was on budget!”

Naturally, budget mattered to the active retirees, who opted to work part time jobs. Richard worked nights as a security guard downtown, freeing days to pursue his lifelong passion for black-and-white street photography. Jane was hired by Our Lady of Grace, working with young school children. Both thrived.

Six years later, much has changed at the Greens’ residence.

O.Henry photographer Bert VanderVeen, whose studio is nearby, had befriended Richard, admiring his striking black-and-white photography.

He proposed having Richard’s first posthumous show and a reception in his honor at the studio, selling prints to benefit charity.

The reception filled with college-age young people who knew Richard and Jane. The students bought almost all of Richard’s works and paid homage to their friend, who was a generation apart — or more — in age.

With the new year, Jane takes stock. While she admits there have been some difficulties without her partner of oh-so-many years, her much loved neighborhood has helped Jane remain contentedly in the home she and Richard built together.

Their mutual adaptability became a key factor in coping with transition and the inevitability of change.

“As you grow older, I think you have to choose a place where there’s activity,” she advises over a coffee on Tate Street, an easy walking distance from her cottage.

“Sure, you hear the fire engines, but after a while, you don’t even notice that stuff. I like being in a city. And I love being in a college town,” says Jane. “One day, I won’t be able to drive, but I can walk!”

She adds that as wonderful as she finds being in a lively place with access to downtown, being stuck “in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere” would have held little appeal.

“You need to be around people, especially now that I’m by myself.”

***

Furthering her commitment to the neighborhood, Jane maintains a Little Free Library. The replica of her cottage is stocked with books for anyone wandering by. Which reminds her: It presently needs restocking. “When I get really low, my daughter gets online and gets donations.”

The library box serves as another way to meet people, she says, brightening. “They come to put books in and they talk to me.” During the pandemic, she filled the box with canned goods rather than books to help financially strapped students. They profusely thanked her, Jane says, her eyes welling with tears.

With her coffee cup drained, Jane glances at her watch. She’s going apple picking with her grandchildren and daughter in law. Flats of multicolored pansies await on the porch.

Pansies, she says admiringly, are cheerful flowers, who lift their faces to the sun.

Jane plants them every year; this year will be no different.

With that done, she’s planning for gingerbread trim below the eaves to punch up the cottage’s curb appeal. “Don’t you think that will look nice?” she asks.

While attending a San Francisco wedding last summer, she and Nicole visited the landmark “painted ladies” for the first time and were charmed by the row of colorful historic homes.

Jane returned to College Hill, energized, ready to punch things up. “More yellow? Or more purple?” she asks, scrutinizing the two colors painted onto sample trim.

Tweaking her already effusive, exceedingly happy home once again, Jane is happily absorbed.

“Do you like the yellow?” she asks hopefully. “I do.”

2025 A Cottage by the College Feature

Gimme Some Sugar!

GIMME SOME SUGAR!

Gimme Some Sugar!

Sweet holiday treats to swap or gift

Photos and recipes by Jasmine Comer

’Tis the season for merry-baking! We asked our resident food columnist, Jasmine Comer, to whip up a few culinary cookie delights suitable for gifting neighbors or swapping with friends. Inside our little box o’ goodies, you’ll find three delectable treats.

Chocolate chip cookies are for basic bakers. Kick yours up a notch by making brown butter chocolate chunk cookies. No one needs to know about the pound of butter you burned on your way to achieving toasted-golden perfection.

Sweet, spicy and nutty. Could be a charming dating app profile. Could be white chocolate pecan cinnamon cookies.

American novelist Henry Miller once said, “Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.” He clearly hadn’t had one of these classic sugar cookies. A bellyful of these will have you caroling and spreading good cheer in no time.

And — just for you — we volunteered as taste-tester and can assure you these cookies are so good that you’ll wanna keep ‘em for yourself.

Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk

Makes 12-13 cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons salted butter, divided

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup cane sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup plus 1 tablespoon unbleached all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cornstarch

5 ounces dark chocolate, chopped

Directions

Brown the butter: place the half cup of butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. After the butter melts, stir it continuously, over the heat. After about 5 minutes, the butter will start foaming and browning in the bottom of the saucepan. At this point it should smell nutty and fragrant. Continue to stir until the butter reaches a dark, golden brown color, being careful not to burn it. Burnt brown butter tastes bitter.

Transfer the butter to a bowl and stir in the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter. This adds some of the moisture back into the butter that evaporated while browning it. Let the butter cool completely.

Whisk in the brown sugar and cane sugar until combined. Then whisk in the egg and vanilla.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and cornstarch. Fold this mixture into the butter and sugar mixture, followed by the chopped chocolate.

Scoop dough into balls (about 2 tablespoons) and refrigerate overnight or up to 48 hours.

When ready to bake: Preheat oven to 350F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place the cookies on the sheet 2-3 inches apart. Bake for 11-12 minutes or until golden brown around the edges. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for about 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool.

Classic Sugar

Makes 10-11 cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup salted butter, melted and cooled

3/4 cup cane sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon cornstarch

Directions

In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar until combined. Whisk in the egg and vanilla extract.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder and cornstarch.

Fold the flour mixture into the sugar and butter mixture.

Scoop dough into balls (about 2 tablespoons) and refrigerate overnight or up to 48 hours.

Pro Tip:

Flour brands make a difference. I use King Arthur All Purpose Flour. Using a different flour brand may yield different results due to how flours are milled. When measuring your flour, make sure it is loosely packed. Scoop it from the bag or container and level it off gently with the back of a butter knife. Do not pack the flour down. Too much flour makes cookies dry and fluffy. These cookies should be tender and moist.

White Chocolate Pecan Cinnamon

Makes 13-14 cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup cold salted butter, cubed

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup cane sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup plus 1 tablespoon unbleached all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon cornstarch

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/3 cup oats

1/4 cup toffee

1/3 cup pecans

3.5 ounces white chocolate, chopped

Directions

Using a stand mixer or hand mixer, blend the butter, brown sugar and cane sugar until combined. This may take about 7-8 minutes. Stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl every 2-3 minutes.

Blend in the egg and vanilla extract.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cornstarch and cinnamon.

Add the flour mixture to the butter and sugar mixture and blend just until combined, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Blend in the oats, toffee, pecans and white chocolate just until combined.

Scoop dough into balls (about 2 tablespoons) and refrigerate overnight or up to 48 hours.

2024 Feature Gimme Some Sugar

The Sweet Life of Lindsay Emery

THE SWEET LIFE OF LINDSAY EMERY

The Sweet Life of Lindsay Emery

On Suite One Studio and hand-making a life full of everyday beauty

By Cynthia Adams

At 38, Lindsay Emery has managed enviable successes, despite a once-in-a-century pandemic and all which that entailed for a small business. Above all, she learned to pivot and nimbly found her mark.

When Emery first launched Suite One Studio in 2009, her delicately embellished, airily romantic, handmade ceramics swiftly gained national press: Bon Appètit, Elle Decor, Food & Wine, and Coastal Living. She made the September 2014 cover of Better Homes & Gardens and, in 2015, House Beautiful spotlighted the “soft, irregular” porcelains.

“Bowls are thrown on a potter’s wheel, and platters and plates are rolled out by hand,” House Beautiful wrote. “Emery washes each in colors that fire into watery glazes” sold as one-off pieces online.

That year, Better Homes & Gardens named Emery a “Rising Stylemaker,” before she ranked 34th among Country Living’s 100 most creative people three years later (hailing her work as “the next wave of pottery.”)

You might guess — wrongly — that the brand’s name was drawn from an address. Suite One Studio was inspired by Emery’s student waitressing days, when a favorite customer dubbed her “sweet one.”

Which made her smile. And Emery smiles easily and often, especially now when discussing her spouse, Kim Cannan, their nearly 2-year-old toddler, Lydia — or Suite One, which she calls her “first baby.”

“The day before she was born, I was loading a glaze firing.” Heavily pregnant, she kept to her work amidst their pre-holiday busy season. “Twenty-six hours later, baby!”

Whereas most North Carolina pottery is primarily utilitarian, Suite One Studio’s wares differ from the familiar. They are painterly — Emery was first a painter — possessing a delicate softness, punctuated by pastel shades and light touches of gold, a contrast to the earth-toned sturdiness of most Seagrove pottery.

“I love florals, and the blue-and-white, traditional palette for porcelain done in a modern way.” Emery’s designs echo a nostalgic beauty that works well with heirloom pieces, she says.

She describes a “near reverence” gathering around her great-grandmother and great-aunt’s table. “They spent hours cooking and then serving everything ‘just so.’”

Those family meals felt intentional and important. “When I design and create tableware, I’m reaching for a similar feeling.”

Her theme, “time at the table,” whether with pottery or, now, painting, signifies the underrated, “small moments of everyday beauty.”

Her creative odyssey took a surprise turn when she was a student at Guilford College, where she met Cannan, who was also studying psychology and art.

“Ceramics was not my intended path. I planned to paint, and then I planned to do art history.”

Adapting to Guilford College’s offerings, Emery fell in love with pottery, making more pots than she knew what to do with. “I started gifting them to friends and family, and then I started selling them online on Etsy.”

Surprised by sales of a “squat little mug set,” she added trays and platters to her Etsy shop.

“People were getting more comfortable buying online. Etsy was doing more advertising. I started to get exposure in areas I would never have gotten exposure.”

Food bloggers “found my work on Etsy and started buying plates, platters and bowls. It gave me a sense of what people were attracted to . . . I was finding my way.”

Not a techie by nature, Emery’s strength is in recognizing trends. “I think that served me really well.” Soon able to live comfortably from online sales, Cannan joined the company, coordinating operations.

By 2011, Instagram offered yet another social media avenue. Emery jumped in as an early adopter, developing more extensive relationships with food bloggers and up-and-coming influencers, allowing her business to spread via digital word of mouth. Collaborations came with online retailers Chairish and Anthropologie. Working with Chairish, she styled her feminine pastel pieces with vintage tableware to help collector’s “rethink vintage pieces.”

“Platters, trays, serving bowls are almost always accent pieces mixed with items they [customers] inherited,” Emery says.

She designed wine glasses for her website, having studied glass blowing earlier in Norfolk, Va. Working with glassblowers in Star, N.C., “I was able to bring ideas in glass to life,” later featured in magazines and at Chairish.

When Anthropologie dispatched a team of stylists and photographers to Greensboro, Emery had only just moved. The creatives were somewhat surprised by her modest garage studio.

She designed a series of mugs for Anthropologie (laughing at the irony, given she dislikes making mugs), with the retailer handling mass production. A “watercolor-inspired” collection, Mimra, was sold at selected Nordstrom stores in partnership with Anthropologie Home.

Pressures mounted along with success.

Bon Appètit commissioned an oversized platter for a photo shoot in its December 2018–January 2019 issue, with only six days to produce. “Which meant freehand carving the form,” she says. Emery managed.

Eventually, British stores carried Suite One Studio housewares. Commercial success demanded more staff producing hundreds of pieces monthly. By 2018, Suite One Studio moved into a 1,200-square-foot studio with two huge kilns. Running high production, Cannan handled the back side of the studio and the couple eyed expansion.

Emery’s relationship with Anthropologie continued for a few years, leading to other possibilities. What seemed like success on the outside, Emery says, didn’t feel like it. Social media had created a hungry beast, even throughout COVID. Keeping up with the demand “felt like a really hard pivot.”

Potters. Weavers. Printmakers. All face an endless demand to produce, Emery says. “You want more. The more you can make, the more you can market and sell. And streamline. And the more orders you can fill.”

Ultimately, Emery decided against creating a small factory, sticking with small-batch production.

“I had to close [my studio]”, she adds. “I changed the trajectory of my business from being focused on volume and production to being focused on self-fulfillment, creativity.”

“I wanted to do less and love the work more. That’s when I made the shift. For things that look successful now, there were things I had to give up,” says Emery.

Anthropologie was surprised by how small her business was versus her large brand recognition.

“How are you making this work?” its team members asked.

She spun off complementary businesses, consulting and teaching fellow artists the art of social media.

During 2018, Emery and fellow artist Allie Dattilio cofounded The Studio Source. Their online program taught artists “how to build their dream online art careers.”

“We ran it for six years. It has been a place for online learning for artists, who are starting to grow their online services. Support, training, everything they needed to know. Photography, marketing, collection releases,” she says.

Over 1,100 artists went through The Studio Source. Many left unfulfilling work places to start six-figure creative businesses. Then, Emery stopped doing that, too.

“I don’t like feeling stuck.”

She loved working one-on-one with artists. And being a painter working on actual canvases, something she had stepped away from due to her work with ceramics. She missed it. And having a child was life-changing. So, she pivoted again.

On a late summer morning, Emery stands among metal racks in her home studio stacked with various pieces awaiting painting, glazing and firing.

All of which, from the raw clay to those final, shimmery plates, platters, vases, pitchers and vessels, are created and finished by hand.

What does Emery’s family eat on daily?

“My plates,” she answers. “I like basics. A lot of the stuff I kept for myself is simple, white porcelain. I have some pink. Sometimes with a gold rim, but usually just plain.” She likes the heft of her plates — their conformation. “I find them comfortable in the hand,” she says. “They feel nice.”

Not too heavy, not too thin.

Just white.

Lydia, playing on the floor, calls, “Mama.”

For nine years, Cannan worked alongside Emery as “the one behind the scenes — keeping things organized and on track.”

Cannan was also Lydia’s primary caregiver during the day until recently accepting a position with the City of Greensboro.

There are still adjustments to their new dynamic. “Slowing down my business and closing my other business has been a huge decision, but I can feel in my gut there’ll be other opportunity to hit the gas.”

She smiles. Lydia is at the core of that decision. The secret to her success, she reflects, “is I had a great support system behind the scene,” meaning Cannan.

Lydia swings a broom among the stacks of porcelains, but her mom never flinches.

“This is what I want to be doing,” she says, “and it’s such a short time that she is little.” Emery wants to model running a business to her daughter too.

“I had the banana bread going, and my baby was napping, and an interview going,” she says happily, “and I like that! That’s what I’ve always wanted with my business, for it to fit into my life.”

The business has been adapted to fit her life, she adds proudly.

Lydia cries, “Draw . . . draw!”

Emery finds paper and pencil. Her daughter happily draws.

She tells a story about a friend relocating to the Triad after years of being apart. Helping her unpack, Emery spotted items she had made. In that moment, she understood how, despite years of separation, she was a part of her friend’s dinner parties and memories, “through pieces I made, objects we take for granted.”

When she sees her friends using sometimes completely forgotten work, she is moved. “But they remember, and I think, ‘Ah, I made that!’”

From a young age, Emery’s own parents supported her love of art, which she wants to do for her child. “The human condition, I think we’re wired to create things, but fear gets in the way, and insecurity.”

A plane goes over. Lydia pauses. Watches, then speaks.

Emery interprets her daughter’s baby-talk as saying “art.”

“I love now having someone mentor me,” Emery says, standing near an easel.

Having spent 15 years working three-dimensionally, Emery worried her painting skills “had gone dormant.” Putting brush to ceramics is not the same as painting on canvas.

Before Lydia’s birth, she signed up for a painting class with artist and teacher Kelly Oakes throughout the 2021 COVID surge. Now, the two artists share a studio in a former factory, now the Eno Arts Mill in Hillsborough. A vaulted ceiling, pale walls and a tall window provide light, even on a gray day.

Artworks line the walls and Emery’s still lifes wait on an easel.

Figs. Peaches. Soft colors and vivid fruits find their way into Emery’s feminine, color-saturated works. Occasionally, her ceramics are part of the composition.

Even the fruits have a story. Mango was Lydia’s first solid food. “At 9 months, Lydia decided they were her favorite food.”

Looking back on leaving with a friend to attend a 2023 Better Homes & Gardens influencer event, Emery winces at the memory of leaving 10-month-old Lydia at home for the first time. While away, she noticed a piece of blue fabric.

It symbolically figures into a painting. Interestingly, their studio is in a former cloth factory, she mentions.

The red fabric in another painting is an apron specifically worn for a Southern Living feature at an editor’s request.

“I was the first artist to get a studio here,” says Oakes about the industrial building, “and then less than a week later COVID hit.” Until pandemic restrictions relaxed, she could only use the studio if isolating alone. She values Emery’s creative company.

“Kelly has been so supportive of my motherhood dream, too,” she says, as the toddler plays at their feet on the polished wooden floor.

Katie Murray, executive director of the Orange County Arts Commission, has since opened offices there, too. During First Friday events each month, artists open their studios to the public.

“It has become a real known event since we first started,” says Oakes, who teaches classes, accepts art commissions and does portraiture since retiring from art education.

“I do think if you’re doing anything creative, you have to think if you want to monetize it; you have to develop a plan for that. If you don’t want to, and are just learning about it to deepen your own creative life, then that is fine,” Emery says as Oakes offers Lydia a toy. “But find a mentor if you can.”

“She has this exceptional brain,” Oakes says about Emery, adding that she is equally left- and right-brain, a rarity.

As Cannan pursues her new career, Emery occasionally brings Lydia with her to Hillsborough.

You work toward having art fit into your life.

“You don’t stretch your life to fit your art,” Emery repeats. Her art now conforms to fit her life.

It is her mantra; a wife, mother and artist’s North Star.

***

Keep up with Lindsay on her new substack, Courage & Creativity (Lindsayemery.substack.com). Thanks to the Thompson family for allowing us to shoot in their bright and beautiful kitchen, recently remodeled by Triad Flooring & Bath (triadflooringandbath.com).

2024 Feature The Sweet Life of Lindsay Emery