Wandering Billy

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Do You Hear What We Hear?

It’s all about knowing where to listen

By Billy Ingram

“Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.” ― Sarah Dessen

This Christmas Eve yule find me swinging and swaying on Summit Avenue when the world-renowned Sam Fribush Organ Trio unfurls their firehose of funky jazz gyrations at Flat Iron.

Fribush has proven to be a truly transcendent analog-tronic trouper luxuriating in that funky Philly sound of the ’60s and ’70s with no hint of nostalgia. Nimble fingers soulfully sweep across the keys of antiquated electric Hammond organs, manifesting sounds soaring with vibrant verve typified by Booker T. and the M.G.s’ Green Onions or Billy Preston’s organic tracks, “Outa-Space” and “Will It Go Round in Circles.” In my estimation, Sam Fribush promises to be the most exciting musical talent to surface from our city in this century. Back on American soil after touring Europe, this melodic maestro originally graced our pages in September 2024, you may remember.

Additionally, there’s an embarrassment of musical riches downtown this December at Flat Iron, a rousing roster of folk performers with deep Southern roots dabbling in a variety of genres. Fribush and company aren’t the only confirmed crowd-pleasers at Flat Iron delivering some sizzle to this time of tinsel and tensile kinfolk.

Originally an A&P grocery store in the late 1920s, the Flat Iron building was a derelict by 1997 prior to being done-over by developer Dawn Chaney, who told me, “It was boarded up when I bought it.” For a decade or so, The Flatiron (one word back then) served, and famously overserved, as a dive bar for day drinkers and clipped-winged nighthawks. After a dormant period, Common Grounds’ Dusty Keene resuscitated this space in spectacular fashion to become a live music venue in 2019. Josh King and his wife, Abby Spoon, took over three years ago.

Over a couple of decades, Josh King established himself as a distinguished, singularly gifted local singer-songwriter. When very few area bands were attracting national attention, King and cohorts scored successfully with House of Fools, formed in 2004 after a demo he and Matt Bowers recorded on the fly landed them a deal with California-based Drive-Thru Records. “They had some bigger pop-punk bands on the label and we weren’t that at all.” King confesses he reluctantly hopped on board. “We took the opportunity and ran with it and were able to do some cool stuff.”

That eponymously titled album’s reception, coupled with criss-crossing the country DIY style, resulted in Alternative Press magazine declaring House of Fools one of the “100 Bands You Need To Know in 2006.” Band lineup musical chairs and label leaving preceded House of Fools’ self-released second album in 2011, Versus the Beast. Subsequently, members have since migrated over to other projects.

As for owning a club, that was a concept confined to dinnertime discussions,“not something we actually thought would happen,” King admits somewhat sardonically. “The timing just sort of lined up.” A notion not so far-fetched, given his wife’s years of experience bartending, followed by a considerable career in mental health, both indispensable skills handy for handling honky-tonk habitués.

Small, intimate performance spaces like this, geared toward local and touring up-and-comers, constitute the core of any city’s musical milieu. Flat Iron is where our indie scene beats best. A few December bookings on my list to check off:

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Promoter Tim Coleman sponsors a night of full-throated folk on December 11, headlined by Bob Fleming and The Cambria Iron Co. One of my favorite singer-songwriters of all time, Fleming’s solo strumming of his punkish confessions caught my ear and eye a decade ago. He possessed a stage presence shrouded with uncharacteristic shyness, a charismatic reluctance belying his Bukowski-esque runes. Now content sharing the spotlight, Fleming is decidedly more relaxed, jaunty even, since settling in with his muse (my supposition, anyway), co-vocalist Dawn Williams, and three fellow travelers. He’s a vocal powerhouse, pouring forth electrified, country-fried, soulful Southern rock.

Raised in Appalachia, Cliff B Worsham opens the evening. A founding member of Asheville metalcore sensation Secret Lives of the Freemasons before launching RBTS WIN, his hip-hop-inspired melodies were once vaguely reminiscent of Elliot Smith. “Then he got sober,” Coleman confides about Worsham’s return to his folk-music roots, “and he’s been doing his Appalachian Americana thing for a couple of years now.” Sandwiched ’twixt those two will be Johnson City’s Jacob Danielsen-Moore, strumming the style of porch music Andy and Opie might be relaxin’ to until Aunt Bee gets wind of his lyrics and chases that stranger back into the hills. Through darkly personal and occasionally twisted scenarios, for the last several seasons, he’s enthralled audiences on the Old Gods of Appalachia tour. “He’s just authentic when it comes to his music,” Coleman rightly declares. “There’s an honesty to what he does that you can connect with.” He’s right.

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American Songwriter magazine proclaimed Greensboro’s own Abigail Dowd’s “eager vocals are accompanied by toe-tapping instrumentals that create a package of sonic warmth. It’s a friendly reminder that life’s blessings are happening in the here and now.” Dowd’s monthly Singer-Songwriter Series happens every third Tuesday, a fortuitous occasion for those interested in exploring the creative process by sitting in on conversations between working, folk-oriented tunesmiths.

King says Dowd, a self-described “song catcher,” is “bringing in artists she meets out on the road or at conferences. Top-notch talent, they’ll drive here just to do this with her.” Past participants include Dawn Landes (The Liberated Women’s Songbook), Ordinary Elephant, Demeanor, and Gold- and Platinum-record-selling artist Jason Adomo. On December 16, it will be Josh King joining Dowd on stage. “I was writing songs as soon as I learned my first two chords on guitar, in fourth grade,” says King. For an example of his resonate recordings, visit Youtube: Josh King’s Into the Blue.

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The aforementioned funktastic Sam Fribush arrives on December 23, chock full of Chuck Pinckney’s dynamic drum beats bolstering Will Darity’s spellbinding guitar flourishes, all three freestyle jazz masters. This triumphant triumvirate just returned after 16 packed performances barnstorming across 27 European and U.K. cities. Thanks to Vince Guaraldi, over the last 60 years, jazz has become sonorously synonymous with our holiday soundtrack, on par with Dean and Bing, so the lucky 100 or so attendees can expect a funk-infused feast casually wrapped in rapturous ribbons of radiant tonality. Tickets for this will sell faster than a 1999 Furby.

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This year, Flat Iron landed a grant from Live Music Society, a nonprofit providing support for smaller venues — “also giving North Carolina artists an opportunity to obtain free assets like a new bio, photo shoots, and live audio and video recording,” Spoon explains. Everything is produced on-site, “so they can do as many takes as they want and both of our engineers are really good at mixing.”

As for Josh King’s extracurricular activities, he recently hosted a House of Fools reunion and periodically jams with The Finns, a highly sought after wedding and corporate confab party band cultivating a sizable fan following.

On the flip side, despite an ideal location and enthusiastic following, that thin line between thriving and barely surviving is minuscule but crucial. Flat Iron would undoubtedly benefit from a benefactor with business bonafides. Leaping into the exciting, every once in a while profitable world of live music? Discuss over dinner.

For other events, visit flatirongso.com.

Wandering Billy

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Seas the Moment

Andy Zimmerman heads windward with a new documentary

By Billy Ingram

“That’s what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don’t tell her.” ― Michael Morpurgo

Andy Zimmerman has performed a Herculean feat in transforming the downtown area south of the railroad tracks around Elm Street. What was once a losing hand of forgotten, abandoned buildings languishing for untold decades is today a royal flush of vibrant hubs where you’ll now find SouthEnd Brewing, transform GSO, Fainting Goat Spirits and Forge Greensboro among other former eyesores he’s renovated elsewhere.

I met with Zimmerman to explore his latest effort on the largely unfinished but impressive second floor of yet another recovery mission, the original Blue Bell jeans plant on South Elm and Gate City Boulevard (rechristened Old Greensborough Gateway Center). The hat he’s wearing today is not that of downtown developer but executive producer. He’s been working on an upcoming documentary entitled Mavericks & Multihulls, a tribute to the multihull legends of seafaring, those amazing young men and their sailing machines.

That’s not a non sequitur. The company Zimmerman founded and retired from before arriving in Greensboro a couple decades ago, Wilderness Systems, was a leader in the production and design of kayaks, “probably the No. 3 manufacturer in the world,” he notes. “Certainly No. 1 as it relates to brand. Between the companies that I owned and started, we made over a million kayaks.”

Under the WindRider label, Wilderness Systems fabricated more trimarans, a variation on the catamaran, than anyone anywhere. “The catamaran, as one of the designers likes to put it, is kind of a condo on the water — it’s commodious.”

“The trimaran has three hulls, the main hull, which is where you live,” Zimmerman points out for those who know little about watercrafts, aka me, “and then the two outriggers. You can call them training wheels,” making them faster and more stable than most other boats.

WindRider also manufactured hydrofoil sailboats, the cool, sleek models where the hull rises up out of the water at top speeds. “For me, it was a manufacturing accomplishment of a lifetime,” Zimmerman remarks about the difficulty of the build, which required some 800 components. The America’s Cup speedsters, he notes, “have trimmer ends, they’re doing 50 plus miles an hour in hydrofoils. The other boats we made money on, but the hydrofoil? No. It was the joy of creating.”

Questing for the creative is what led to his collaboration with Jim Brown, multihull sailing pioneer and high seas adventurer, as well as the impetus of this documentary. Mavericks & Multihulls chronicles the extraordinary lives of six sailing-world superstars, the aforementioned Brown, Woody Brown (no relation), Rudy Choy, Arthur Piver, James Wharram and Dick Newick.

Besides a shared connection with wind, waves and salty spray, Zimmerman points out that every one of the watermen spotlighted in this film was an extreme risk taker. “I met Jim [Brown] and was immediately attracted to his way of life,” he says. “Jim built a boat in his backyard. He took his two kids and his wife in Santa Cruz and said, ‘I don’t like the druggie scene here. I don’t like the Vietnam scene here. I wonder when the world’s going to blow up?’ And he said, ‘We’re getting on a boat.’” Brown and his family sailed the seas for three and a half years. “Went to Central America, South America and homeschooled his kids. Then came back when his wife said, ‘OK, I’m ready to get off the boat.’”

United Kingdom subject James Wharram was polyamorous, and some would call that alone off-the-charts bravery. “He’d have two, three women on his boat, they switched nights, they’d sleep together. This was back in the ’60s. Peace, love and waterbeds,” says Zimmerman. But the ultimate waterbed? “He turned people on to living on the water and adventure, traveling.”

While Wharram was all wild wanderlust — and just plain lust — Dick Newick was all about speed. “If he could take a pound out of the boat, he’d do it to make it go faster.”

Woody Brown, on the other hand, was a self proclaimed nature boy. “‘I want to be out in nature,’ he said,” quotes Zimmerman. “‘I don’t want motors, I want to sail.’” In that pursuit, he devised the first modern catamaran. “He reinvented the fin. He was a big surfer, too,” legendary, in fact. Living to the ripe age of 96, in his later years residing in Hawaii, Brown was a pioneer in chartering catamarans, taking groups of 40 or 50 people out on short oceanic sunset-viewing voyages.

Zimmerman recruited local filmmakers Michael Frierson and Kevin Wells, both with impressive documentary bona fides, to translate these stories to the big screen. To begin with, they conducted multiple interviews with Jim Brown, dating back to 2015. Many others who are passionate about sailing are featured, including Steve Callahan, who survived 76 days adrift in the Atlantic, and multihull designer and Mainer John Marples.

Frierson and Wells were busy editing when I spoke with them. “There’s an immense amount of footage shot by [Canadian cinematographer ] Scott Brown [again, no relation to Jim or Woody Brown]. That’s the primary source material from the current period,” Frierson says. In addition, Jim Brown contributed thousands of photographs along with 250 hours of footage he’d lensed over the decades.

The Mariners’ Museum and Park in Norfolk, the largest maritime museum in the country, made available their archives of motion-picture reels dating back to the dawn of the 20th century. “The footage is in every format known to man,” Wells notes. “Super 8, 16 mm film, DV cam video. So dealing with all the different resolutions has been challenging.”

Documentary filmmaking is like assembling pieces of a puzzle, or maintaining that fine line between devil and the deep blue sea, a rewarding yet daunting task crafting a narrative from random clips and pics shot by a multitude of unrelated individuals. “You’re finding the story out of all this,” Wells says about the challenging process to achieve an even keel. “You know there’s a story there — there’s probably a hundred stories there — but where is your focus? That part has been a lot of fun.”

What surprised Frierson and Wells most after diving into Mavericks & Multihulls (mavericksandmultihulls.com)? “That these guys were fairly accomplished carpenters,” Frierson replies. “They’re building their own boats and sailing them to Tahiti before GPS . . . The sense of self-reliance and guts that they had is just amazing.”

Wells concurs. “I think that’s representative of what a lot of these people think. They’re doing things, that to me, are extraordinary, but they think it’s very ordinary. Building these contraptions and sailing off with their family in the middle of the ocean is still crazy to me.”

“Jim Brown is 92. He lives life so large and he’s writing a book,” Zimmerman remarks with obvious admiration for the film’s unlikely leading man. “He just wants to stay busy and engaged in life. And I’m not sure I know anybody more engaged in life than Jim.” Legally blind now, Jim Brown can no longer navigate, but he’ll never fully surrender his life aquatic. With his own hands, no surprise, he’s constructed a tiny house on top of a trimaran, one manufactured by Zimmerman’s former company. “So he can keep his boat right there on the water at his house in Tidewater, VA. And he goes and stays in that when it’s not too hot or too cold.”

As for Zimmerman’s future, his mainsail is set for steering into the calm blue yonder. “I’ve got one big project left in me.” After that, his licked finger is in the wind. “I wouldn’t mind living on a boat. I’m a minimalist now. It goes back to the overwhelming sensation I had as a young man when I realized that freedom is actually available. I frickin’ love it!”

Wandering Billy

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Picture This

Mac Barnett’s illustrated children’s books draw on connections between generations

By Billy Ingram

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” 
— Marcel Proust

Is there a beloved storybook you fondly recall being read to you as a child? For me, it was Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt. Credited with being the very first interactive book, it offered tots a “touch and feel” experience in lieu of a narrative. Bound with white plastic ribbing, each turn of its pages reminded toddlers of everyday experiences, like feeling Daddy’s stubble (a schmear of sandpaper), inhaling the scent of wild flowers, playing peek-a-boo with a patch of cloth and patting an upright, bunny-shaped fluff of faux fur.

For lovers of children’s pictorial storybooks, there’s something really special happening this month. Out of 380 proposals submitted by cities around the nation, Greensboro was one of only five boroughs selected to host the Library of Congress’ National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Mac Barnett. The ninth to hold this title, he will be presenting Behold, The Picture Book! Let’s Celebrate Stories We Can Feel, Hear, and See, his tribute to the colorful legacy of children’s literature.

Barnett has authored 62 books for youngsters (he estimates) and has received two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Awards, three E.B. White Read Aloud Awards — the accolades go on and on. Now in its second season on Apple TV+, he’s the co-creator, with illustrator Jon Klassen, of Shape Island, an animated series based on their New York Times-bestselling graphic novels for toddlers, The Shapes Trilogy, cloud-seeding infantile imaginations while simultaneously encouraging critical-thinking skills.

Barnett’s The First Cat in Space series, in collaboration with illustrator Shawn Harris, is rendered in a sparkling, modern style with a subtle hat tip to comic artist Jack Kirby’s square-fingered, forced perspective. “Shawn and I have been friends since we were 6 years old,” the author reveals. “And now Shawn is one of the finest children’s illustrators working today. When I was a kid, I loved comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield.” Admittedly intimidated by the superhero genre, he says, “Shawn read all that stuff and he would explain to me a run of Spider-Man or what was happening to Superman and I would get it all filtered through him.” No dust on these jackets, infectiously fusing a Calvin-ism whimsy with 1980s Marvel super-heroic showmanship, the resulting outta-sight escapades of this far-out feline are what The New York Times proclaims “hilarious.”

For early readers eager for enigmatic entertainment, Barnett’s Brixton Brothers whodunnits serve as a mod nod to circa 1960s Hardy Boys mysteries. School Library Journal declares Brixton Brothers’ premiere volume, The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity, “one of the funniest and most promising series openers in years.” The author’s attraction to those juvenile novels written long ago is rooted in the macabre. “As a kid, I was terrified of being kidnapped,” he quips, “and the Hardy Boys get kidnapped like three times per book.”

Barnett was especially fascinated by the sleuthing siblings’ escape strategy after being tied up. “They would flex their muscles, the bad guys would leave the room; then, they would relax their muscles and the ropes would just fall to the ground,” he recalls. “And I was like, this is what I am going to do when I get kidnapped.” To test this technique, in second grade he convinced Harris to secure him with a jump rope using knots Harris had learned in the Boy Scouts. “I relaxed and, of course, the ropes just stayed there. And I realized the Hardy Boys worked out a lot harder than I did at age 7.” This eventually formed the genesis for his Brixton Brothers’ exploits “about a kid who tries and fails to be a Hardy Boy.”

There is unambiguous, statistical information that reading to children has a lifelong educational impact. “The picture book is one of the great American art forms,” Barnett insists. “And reading out loud to kids is an intergenerational, artistic experience — an adult and a kid coming together over artwork, experiencing it, having feelings about it, and then, hopefully, talking to each other about whether they like it, what they think it means.”

According to Barnett, the first illustrated storybook for kids was Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats in 1928. “There were books for children before that, primarily though, they were illustrated nursery rhymes, Bible stories, folk tales.” Gag pioneered the use of text and pictures in tandem to tell a story.

“The first book that I really remember living inside of was In the Night Kitchen.” Barnett discovered the absurdist dreamworld of Maurice Sendak as a youngster in the early 1980s. “It just made perfect sense to me. This is what it’s like inside my brain, that recognition of a kindred consciousness. And you read it as an adult and you’re like, this is such a wild experimental text.”

If offered the opportunity, I think just about anyone would write a children’s book. What advice can Barnett offer? “You’ve got to learn how picture books work,” he contends. “This is a way of telling stories in a very specific way. It’s easy to write a picture book, it’s very difficult to write a great picture book. And the first step is to learn the history of the art form to really understand how stories are told this way.”

Here’s an opportunity to do just that. The free event, Behold, The Picture Book! Let’s Celebrate Stories We Can Feel, Hear, and See, will be held at 10 a.m, Saturday, October 25, in N.C. A&T State University’s Harrison Auditorium. While he’s in the ’Boro for two days, Barnett will also host programs at area schools, where every student will receive one of his endlessly engaging picture books donated by Candlewick Press (as will the young ones attending the Harris Auditorium celebration, courtesy of Greensboro Bound).

“Greenboro just had an incredible proposal,” Barnett says about the selection process coordinated between The Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader, a literacy charity. “They were looking for communities with strong libraries and bookstores to make sure that these events were of value to the community. A big part of this is talking to adults about why kids’ books matter, why they are real literature and how to make sure that kids have good books to read.” He believes that, for Greensboro, “it’s just a great opportunity to talk to educators, families and even kids about the value of children’s literature in a young person’s life.”

Award-winning American (and sometimes) children’s author Emilie Buchwald (Gildaen: The Heroic Adventures of a Most Unusual Rabbit) once observed, “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” True, it’s never too soon to fold back colorful covers and expose spongy youngsters to worlds of wonder and limitless curiosity. Or just to pet the fluffy cartoon bunny.

For information about the free public event, visit greensborobound.com. Registration is strongly encouraged.

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The Right Puffs

All aboard for a goo-goo-googly good time

By Billy Ingram

Chalk it up to DNA?

Being born and raised in the Gate City undoubtedly fostered in me a lifelong love for trains, so christened by our proximity to a railway hub that, from 1851 until the present, has served as a vital artery mainlining material goods and shuttling fine folks from point A to point G. Low moaning emanating from nearby locomotive horns, in unison with an underlying soundtrack of discordant notes struck by squealing, steel wheels straining against their railings, invokes an elemental tonality closely associated, in my mind, with home.

In that spirit, I wandered over to one of the twice-weekly open houses at the Carolina Model Railroaders’ studio, located above downtown’s J. Douglas Galyon Depot. There, aficionados of miniature trains, whether teens or senior citizens, were engaged in laying tracks, assembling aesthetic surroundings and, with the turn of a dial, sending scale-model boxcars, carriages and cabooses speeding around their humble hamlets, surrounded by handmade houses and fake, plastic trees affixed to mossy, green plywood.

I first visited CMR, organized over a half-century ago, in 2016, when participants were simulating an Atlantic & Yadkin ride by rail from Greensboro to Winston-Salem, complete with familiar landmarks recreated with an impressive degree of accuracy. The current layout isn’t as elaborate, but the topography is in constant flux. It’s the journey, not the destination, that keeps everyone committed to continuing this all-American activity.

Brannon Carty is a young filmmaker I met recently who trained his documentarian lens on a different manner of miniature railroad, one criss-crossing the mythical island of Sodor, fluffy-clouded home to Thomas the Tank Engine: the stop-motion animated, toddler-oriented series touting morality tales that fuel youthful imaginations, wherever he whistles ’round the bend.

Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends made its United Kingdom debut in 1984 before crossing the pond in 1989, when it was integrated into PBS’ Shining Time Station, starring George Carlin. The show is based on a series of books that first appeared in the U.K. in 1945, written by Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry. Awdry’s idea was to entertain his son, Christopher, the Thomas tomes’ succeeding author. Currently, the television program is broadcast in over 121 countries and translated into over 20 languages, suggesting an undeniable universal appeal.

“My older brother was into it when I was a young kid,” Carty says, explaining his budding early-2000s tele-crush. “He grew out of it, I didn’t.” Internet forums fueled his fascination, first in elementary school, then chuffing along into later years. “I was talking to all these other people about Thomas and it kind of evolved into being this community, which is really huge.” Part of the allure, Carty believes, comes from playing with the TV tie-in train sets sold in stores. “It’s the perfect storm of merchandising,” he says, paired with the show’s unique production. “It was shot on 35 millimeter so it doesn’t look like any other kid show.”

Carty earned a bachelor of arts in media studies at UNCG. “2019 was my last year. I was doing an independent study with Professor Wells, who was into documentaries. He said, ‘Hey, do a doc over this semester and, that’s it, you graduate.’” Not sufficiently interested in anything sociopolitical or overly serious, Carty says, “I knew a bunch of adult Thomas fans — I am one. So, I filmed them.” After completing his 45-minute digital dissertation and graduating, Carty decided to continue filming his story. Railroading five fellow filmmakers into his roundhouse, he says, “We wrapped our last interview in 2022 and finished the edit in November 2023.”

Carty recently returned from London, where his Kickstarter-funded documentary, An Unlikely Fandom: The Impact of Thomas the Tank Engine, was screened at a Thomas festival. The film focuses on the peregrinations of a cadre of likable lost boys, newly found, whose one-track minds refuse to apply brakes to a fervent reverence gleaned in earliest childhood memories. That adorable choo-choo with the goo-goo-googly eyes chugging full steam ahead into their hearts. 

This local locomotion picture also tunnels into the making of the television series, featuring extensive interviews with key contributors — the music producer, prop master, animators, picture book author, even Britt Allcroft, the clever British woman who created the original 1984 Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends animated series. The assembled cast of characters are all clearly enchanted yet somewhat surprised by their grownup fans’ keen interest. Superbly shot, edited and paced by Carty and his crew, the film even landed Alec Baldwin, the American narrator for a few seasons.

Allcroft especially comes across as a very sweet, ordinary lady who had the foresight to purchase Thomas’ television rights when no apparent market existed. While it took three years to complete that first season, it was a chance meeting at one of the recording sessions that led to Ringo Starr becoming the program’s original narrator. Also of interest is how divergent, yet alike, the TV version is compared to the 1940s series of books it was based on.

Carty, an avid hiker and climber who’s into fitness, admits that Thomas doesn’t gel well with his less passive pastimes. But “a love for old movies, that’s what led me down this path.” An Unlikely Fandom premiered in November 2023. “Go big or go home,” says Carty ruefully. “We all pulled together to premiere it in the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, which ended up costing so much money.” They flew in creator Britt Allcroft. “She was a little bit surprised that there were so many adult fans. I don’t think she expected it to be so normalized.”

The flying monkeys bestowing awards of excellence have yet to carry this one to heights it deserves, nor has a distributor picked it up yet. Carty, who also narrates the documentary, notes it’s still early. “We’ve just been sort of touring [the film] for the last couple years. I know The Guardian is about to do a piece on it, which we hope will get someone interested.”   

A theory posits that tots tuning into Thomas harbor a latent interest in model trains. Probably should’ve asked when I was down at the Depot watching those young-at-heart men putting their HOs through the paces I imagine Thomas feeling right at home clacking the tracks at Carolina Model Railroaders’ meetups. You may also; new members are welcome at cmrgreensboro.org.

Meanwhile, the erstwhile engine’s 80th Anniversary celebration will be pulling into nearby Spencer, when Day Out With Thomas: The Party Tour puff-puff-puffs up to the N.C. Transportation Museum, arriving September 26–28, then steaming into view again the very next weekend. It’s a genuine bargain at $30 a head, especially considering admission includes a ticket to ride the real Thomas the Tank Engine.

An Amtrak departure from GSO to Spencer will likely be a final opportunity for today’s young’uns to experience what catching a passenger train was like during the golden age of rail travel, to hear “All Aboard!” after entering our breath-taking, magnificently restored, 1927 Beaux-Arts-designed terminal, seemingly frozen in time. For now, anyway. Plans are afoot for the almost century-old Depot’s opulent lobby to be reimagined as a hip entertainment venue, for which I’m not on board.

Wandering Billy

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Justice Delayed…

Diving into the deep end of a 1950s-era poolside predicament

By Billy Ingram

“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.” — Russell Baker

Seventy years ago, in the summer of ’55, a paddling of people numbering in the thousands, swimming-trunked with towels shoulder-slung and slathered in Sea & Ski, descended en masse for the opening day of the newly minted Lindley Park municipal swimming pool. It wasn’t long, however, before that above ground complex began making waves, awash in a clash of cultures that seemed to fall on waterlogged city leaders’ ears.

It’s one of our city’s loveliest and most serene neighborhoods, but, beginning in 1902 before any homes were ever conceived of there, Lindley Park was originally an amusement park, complete with a sprawling lake, casino, dance pavilion, 1,000-seat vaudeville theater, miniature railroad, electric fountain and a cozy cafe. Live entertainment consisted of a trapeze act, a spunky monkey and a chatty parrot who likely ended up as a curiosity in the basement level of Silver’s 5–10¢ and $1.00 Store on South Elm and Washington.

The city’s first public park was named after J. Van Lindley, whose nearby 1,000-plus-acre nursery, established around 1850, was likely one of the largest in the world, with some 1.5 million plants under cultivation. Lindley lent 60 acres of the eastern end of his property to the Greensboro Electric Company with a proviso that they establish an entertainment destination there to coincide with the 1902 debut of the Gate City’s first mass transit system.

For less than a dime, commuters could trolley from North Elm downtown to the farthest western stop on Spring Garden Street, destined for the enchanted land of Lindley Park, where they could spend the day boating, swimming and tightrope gawking. Propelled along rails embedded into brick-lined streets and powered by overhead electrical wiring, a fleet of streetcars criss-crossed the city north to Sunset Drive, south down Asheboro Street (now MLK Drive), and both east and west on Market. 

After the amusement park closed in 1917, Lindley gifted that real estate and another parcel to the city with a caveat — that a spacious, refined community be established there, designed by preeminent Southern landscape architect Earl Sumner Draper, who was behind Charlotte’s Myers Park and High Point’s Emerywood, among other tony neighborhoods. The lake was reduced to a creek with landscaped banks, making it a 107-acre verdant centerpiece to surrounding homes, soon to be constructed in a wide array of architectural styles, favoring Craftsman and Colonial Revival.

Endeavoring to reintroduce recreation to Lindley Park in 1955, the city sunk $200,000 into a public swimming pool designed to accommodate up to 800 sun worshippers, with 10 wide lanes for competition swimming and a cutting-edge aquatic sport scoreboard. There was one other city-owned pool in Greensboro reserved for the Black community built in 1937, located at Windsor Recreation Center on Lee and Benbow streets. After two Black women, Dr. Ann Gist and Ms. J. Everett, were turned away from the Lindley facility in June of 1957, the NAACP petitioned the city to integrate the pools.

Council members and apparatchiks such as Parks and Recreation commissioner Dr. R. M. Taliaferro voiced opposition to any attempt to abrogate the Jim Crow status quo. Current in their minds was the wanton unrest that erupted just a few Junes ago when Atlanta and St. Louis incited white rioters after their swimming pools were integrated.

Facing a potential unruly undertow that city leaders were loath to be swallowed up by, their initial reaction was to nuke the pools, plow them under, before realizing that a legal loophole could serve as a flotation device. At that time, private entities were at liberty to discriminate indiscriminately, so it was resolved to offload these two chlorinated, all-of-a-sudden nuisances at auction, sold to the highest (like-minded) bidder, thereby surreptitiously preserving this pernicious practice. That brazen tactic triggered a preemptive lawsuit (Tonkins v. City of Greensboro) adjudicated downtown in the U.S. Middle District Court.

In May 1958, the court ruled in favor of the defendant but deferred dismissing the suit until 30 days after the sale of the pool “to give the plaintiffs an opportunity to show that the sale was not bona fide in the sense that there was collusion between the defendants and the successful bidder regarding the future use of the pool.” In other words, the plaintiff had a short window of time after the sale to prove it had actually been rigged by the city to enshrine segregation.

On June 3, 1958, J. Spencer Love purchased the “lake-sized” pool at Windsor Center, turning the operation over to David Morehead, executive secretary of the Hayes-Taylor YMCA. The Lindley Park aquatic center was acquired for $85,000 (only 3 years old, what a bargain!) by a hastily assembled coalition calling themselves Greensboro Pool Corporation, one of the organizers being none other than the aforementioned Dr. Taliaferro. No surprise, the Lindley pool would remain whites-only.

Did someone mention collusion? An appeal to Tonkins v. City of Greensboro was filed, one of the attorneys consulting on the case being future Supreme Court Justice and legendary Civil Rights leader Thurgood Marshall. Argued in January 1960, a ruling in March declared that the plaintiffs had not met their burden of proof. While recognizing that Taliaferro had openly opposed desegregating the property and was instrumental in setting up Greensboro Pool Corporation, the judge ruled, “he was a member of a nine-man commission, which serves in an advisory capacity only, legal authority [for the sale] being in the City Council of which he was not a member.”

In 1967, just as an expanding, yet-to-be-named, Wendover Avenue (a road that began as a wagon trail rut in 1753) was carving away some 25 acres of the district, the City of Greensboro reacquired the Lindley Park Pool, making it accessible to all. A year later, a new swimming pool replaced the three-decades-old hole at Windsor Center, which, today, is being reimagined as the Windsor Chavis Nocho Community Complex, a 65,000-square-foot facility with, among many other impressive amenities, a lap pool, lazy river and water slide.

Meanwhile, drowning under innumerable structural and mechanical quagmires, the Lindley Park Pool at 2914 Springwood Dr., now our city’s oldest, has been hung out to dry since 2023 but workers are resolute to rehydrate that concrete crate sometime this season.

Just this morning, I ventured out, hoping to uncover the one remaining remnant from Lindley Park’s initial 15 years as our nascent township’s sideshow. Not shy about wandering around, behind a hilltop home on Masonic Drive, I discovered a dollhouse-like, wooden women’s cabana with dual French doors that once sat lakeside.

Bracketing the neighborhood entryways off Spring Garden are matching stone monuments. Characterized by obelisks boldly asserting themselves where the amusement park’s mammoth arched gateways were positioned on either side of the lake, they were installed in 1924, when Earl Sumner Draper’s master plan was nearing completion. Over a century later, those monuments still warmly welcome visitors and residents alike to a shady little lady known as Lindley Park.

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Who Killed TV’s Superman?

A chance encounter may have revealed the answer

By Billy Ingram

“In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”

— Andy Warhol

Life’s stopwatch began ticking off my 15-minute strut across its proscenium in 2002, upon the release of my first book, TVparty! Television’s Untold Tales, a look at classic TV shows produced during that medium’s messy adolescence. In January of 2003, my publisher had positioned me at The Hollywood Show, a twice-yearly weekend event in North Hollywood, where former 1960s child actors such as Butch Patrick (Eddie Munster) and Jody Whittaker (Family Affair) as well as assorted soap opera and ’80s sitcom luminaries gathered to meet fans and sign autographs.

There was only one celebrity in attendance I was interested in meeting, so I made a beeline to Noel Neill. One of TV’s first single, working “gals,” thanks to afternoon reruns of The Adventures of Superman throughout the ’60s, Noel Neill’s portrayal of that “pesky reporter from the Daily Planet,” Lois Lane, became enshrined in Boomer minds, legendary like Lucy and Ethel. I presented her with my book, opened to the sordid story surrounding the death of George Reeves, who portrayed her Superman in the television series. Illustrated with a screen capture of her star-crossed co-star, Neill gazed at the photo wistfully for a moment then sighed softy, “Oh, George . . .”

Months later, I was confronted with a possible answer to one of Tinsel Town’s most enduring mysteries: Was George Reeves’ death a suicide or murder?

Almost every aspect and detail of the following story is contradicted by someone or other so buckle up: At 1:15 a.m. on June 16, 1959, Reeves, his fiancé, Lenore (Leonore) Lemmon, and two guests were drinking heavily at the actor’s home before he went upstairs to sleep. Moments later, the partiers told police a shot rang out and Reeves was dead, sprawled on his bed naked with a bullet hole through his right temple. Faster than a speeding bullet, Reeves’ death was ruled a suicide.

Lemmon offered no explanation as to why police weren’t called until around 45 minutes after the incident. Following an autopsy, LAPD Chief Parker stated he “was satisfied with the verdict” of suicide. So, why were two detectives still rummaging around in Reeves’ bedroom looking for yet more bullet holes? The two they found embedded in the wall were explained away by Lemmon as earlier recklessness on her and Reeves’ part. And Lemmon had fled to New York, never to return.

Exactly how many stray slugs were dislodged from that room is anyone’s guess, but Noel Neill once revealed, “I had a friend whose husband was later hired to repair the drywall in George’s bedroom. He said the place was riddled with bullet holes.”

Lemmon’s account (one of them, anyway) proved perplexing: After a night of drinking with Reeves and others, she was alone downstairs when, around 1 a.m., two tipsy guests arrived. Their revelry prompted Reeves to awaken and storm angrily downstairs. After everyone apologized, Reeves returned to his bedroom. That’s when Lemmon maintains that she quipped, “He’s going upstairs to shoot himself . . . he’s opening the drawer to get the gun.” When the shot was heard, Lemmon remarked casually, “See there, I told you; he’s shot himself.” Subsequently, she told police she was “only kidding” and, years later, claimed none of that happened.

No secret, Reeves was depressed about being typecast in 1959, but, in recent weeks, he’d signed on for a movie in Spain. Plus, Kellogg’s had secured him, with a hefty raise, for another season of The Adventures of Superman in 1960, even agreeing to let him direct several episodes.

If not suicide, who would want George Reeves dead? He’d recently ended a seven-year affair with Toni Mannix, the wife of Eddie Mannix, a very powerful MGM executive known as “The Fixer,” whose mob and political ties could disappear any problem. Toni had purchased Reeves’ house, car and clothes for him, and was left devastated when their relationship came to a halt in 1958. Lemmon claimed the jilted lover was ringing up Reeves repeatedly, day and night, for months before his death. Had Eddie Mannix ordered a hit to avenge his wife? He certainly could have and was considered the most likely suspect, excluding suicide.

Reportedly, one of those guests that night confessed to a close friend that, after the shooting, Lemmon ran from upstairs saying, “Tell them I was down here, tell them I was down here!” A neighbor approaching Reeves’ front door that fateful hour hesitated when, observing through a window, he saw the couple engaging in a heated argument moments before hearing a single gunshot.

I discovered this just a few weeks ago. In 2021, Lee Saylor published, Wild Woman: Lenore Lemmon, extrapolating from two 1989 phone interviews he conducted with Lemmon mere months before her death. Through impressive research, the portrait he paints of the socialite after Reeves’ death was of a woman who returned to nightclubbing before becoming a reclusive alcoholic.

This portrayal was significant because it corroborated a backstory told to me in 2003, again in Los Angeles when I was promoting TVparty!, this time at Bookstar in Studio City. Regaling an audience with stories from the anthology, I noticed, from the corner of my eye, a woman feigning interest in whatever publications she was picking over but clearly intently listening after I began speaking about Reeves’ demise.

The bookworms dispersed and an attractive woman in her 30s, with a “black sheep of the family but still in somewhat good graces” vibe, emerged from the stacks. “I knew Lenore Lemmon in New York,” she told me. “I used to stay up late nights drinking in her penthouse, listening to her talk.” As I recall, she told me that her family lived in the same building as Ms. Lemmon and, over time, the young woman gained Lemmon’s confidence and ultimately became a drinking buddy.

She related to me that Lemmon had become a recluse, burying disappointments beneath bottles of bourbon and cartons of cigarettes. During one or more of their midnight meanderings, Lemmon confessed to being responsible for George Reeves’ death, but never elaborated. This person only approached me because she happened to be in the shop and heard me talking about her one-time acquaintance.

Very convincing, but could I believe her? It wasn’t common knowledge in 2003 that Lemmon had spent a decade or so in an alcoholic haze prior to passing. Saylor’s book depicts the Lemmon described to me in that bookstore encounter.

Mystery solved? Hardly. Without knowing the identity of the woman I met at Bookstar, there’s no way to verify her (or my) tale of Lemmon’s late-night, late-in-life confession. I’m convinced the unidentified woman would have gone public if she was attempting to insert herself into this narrative. Nor am I; a more opportune time to reveal a story like this would have been in 2003 when I began writing and appearing on shows for VH1.

Great Caesar’s ghost! Yet another ultimately unsatisfying layer of intrigue surrounding one of Hollywood’s most enduring mysteries. On the other hand, applying Occam’s Razor, naturally Lenore Lemmon would be the most likely culprit, considering that, in the comics, Clark/Supes was plagued in myriad ways by individuals with double “L” initials: Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lori Lemaris, Lex Luthor. Lady Luck, it seems, was not on his side.

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Filmmaking on the Frontlines

And screenwriting in a Greensboro bar

By Billy Ingram

“I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.” — Alfred Hitchcock

Hunched slightly over in the darkened outer reaches of Corner Bar on Spring Garden, writer, producer and director Phil Blattenberger is pecking away at finessing his latest screenplay. Forbes anointed him as “Cinema’s Every Man” and says he “is reshaping the industry in his working-class image.” Launched from Greensboro, this young filmmaker managed to wrap two acclaimed feature films in the last two years alone. His 2024 release, Laws of Man, stars Jacob Keohane (Halloween Kills), Jackson Rathbone (Twilight), Dermot Mulroney (My Best Friend’s Wedding), Keith Carradine (Nashville) and Harvey Keitel (Reservoir Dogs).

“I was in grad school at UNCG” recalls Blattenberger. A baby step back in 2017 is what prompted this improbable journey. “As a fun little side project, I wrote a Vietnam War movie. I’m going to shoot this thing in the woods of North Carolina with my buddies to get investors involved.” As it turns out, he raised enough money behind it to ship production overseas to Cambodia. The result was Point Man, an unflinching deep dive into racial tensions during the Vietnam War, racking up nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Director at the Sydney Indie Film Festival, ultimately winning Best Film among other accolades. Sony secured DVD-distribution rights for the 2018 wartime drama.

His second feature, Condor’s Nest, came out a full five years later, and was more ambitious. A WWII adventure about a downed American B-17 bomber crew thwarting Nazis, it stars a platoon of familiar pros including Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy), Michael Ironside (Starship Troopers), Academy Award-nominee Bruce Davison (X-Men, 1923) and Jorge Garcia (Lost). While some scenes were filmed in South America (doubling for Germany), most of the production was shot in North Carolina, including right here in town, even a day lensing at the former Cellar Anton’s site, underneath what is now Havana Phil’s. I’m told it looked exactly as it did when the last meal was served there some four decades earlier. (I wrote about that project in my March 2023 column: ohenrymag.com/wandering-billy-76.)

Blattenberger set sights even higher for his follow up, the aforementioned Laws of Man. “Next step up is a bigger budget, bigger names,” he says about an explosive period piece pitting a suited duo of 1960s-era U.S. Marshalls manhunting a fleeing fugitive. “If we’re going to justify that expense, we’ve got to have the soft money. So we set up shop in New Mexico.” That decision was made primarily due to the state’s generous financial incentives for filmmakers, i.e. soft money. “All of the Condor’s Nest financiers came in so we got Keith Carradine — the first time I’ve worked with an Academy Award winner.” Laws of Man scored Best Film at the Tangier Film Festival in 2024.

“Jacob Keohane, who starred in my first two movies, plays the lead in Laws of Man, just a phenomenal guy.” Blattenberger met the actor while working as a bartender prior to filming Point Man. “His audition came across, I watched the tape and I was like, ‘Where the hell do I know that guy?’ I realized he was DJ Jake the Snake at Club Fifth Season, my first bartending gig in its final days, circa 2009.”

Blattenberger’s fourth feature, Ascendant, is likely to lift off as you’re reading this, but the financing landscape in 2025 is a great deal more fraught than it was even just a couple of years ago.

He characterizes current conditions as the biggest crisis the motion picture industry has faced since the advent of television. “Distributors have chopped their minimum guarantees because they overspent, basically.” Recall that onslaught of intriguing new TV series and big budget pictures bombarding us on streaming platforms beginning around five years ago (thanks to COVID)? Notice how that practice has cooled considerably? Turns out there was some illogic behind that. Amazon, Hulu and Netflix leveraged — and blew through — billions of dollars developing jaw-dropping content with maximum star power, believing that newbies like Peacock and Paramount+ would wither away in their wake, leaving just a few players dominating digital media.

“It just didn’t happen,” says Blattenberger. Posting billions in losses, streamers reversed course, eschewing new acquisitions. “They stopped buying the indie films that hit Cannes and then Toronto. Nobody is getting post-theatrical deals.” The (new) old paradigm was that a movie would have an initial run, get picked up by a top-tier streamer for three months, followed by a Hulu run, then a Tubi exclusive and a cable deal. “That used to be the waterfall.”

I find that comforting, in a perverse way, knowing the movie business hasn’t changed significantly since I walked away 30 years ago. The bobbleheads tucked into top floors are still running things with reckless fecklessness.

As preeminent entertainment essayist and film historian Peter Biskind once wrote, “ . . . the independents who are really passionate always find a way to make their films.” Embracing this unprecedented distribution dynamic, for his next production, Blattenberger set aside an elaborate concept, which was already in the works, in favor of a more scaled-down approach.

“Because B-budget action thrillers require huge names, you’ve got to make your money back on a $1.5 million budget,” argues the auteur. “The exception has always been horror — I hate the word ‘horror,’ so I’m going to call it a psychological thriller — that lets you bring in a genre star who costs you pennies on the dollar compared to your A-listers. Horror turns out a hundred times at the box office what you could possibly expect with low-budget action.”

In pre-production when we spoke, Ascendant is centered around a doomsday cult no doubt up to devilish dealings while on a retreat in Eastern North Carolina. “You’ve got to make your location interesting if you’re going to hold an audience hostage for 90 minutes in what’s effectively a single location. You’ve got to go for broke on the design.” What will be a creepy encampment situated inside what is effectively a 3-acre crop circle is being constructed from the ground up in Rocky Mount. Blattenberger is no Cecil B. DeMille on an elevated perch barking orders through a megaphone. “I’m out there with dirty hands, picking splinters out of my fingers, building sets,” he says of his activity earlier in the week.

“Film it and they will come” may not sound like a solid marketing strategy to a banker or lawyer, but it’s business as usual for indies and major releases alike. When a long shot does hit the mark — take Blair Witch Project, for instance — the money spigot sprays in all directions. “I’m in a weird position where I’m over halfway financed, but, in my experience, once you attach a name, that’s when people really start throwing cash in.” As luck would have it, he’s just signed Rob Zombie collaborator Richard Brake (The Munsters), who also appeared in Laws of Man.

“As producer, all of my pre-production work can be done from a laptop.” As such, Phil Blattenberger has discovered what other local creatives have: You can go Hollywood without living the nightmare. “I sit here in this exact chair at this exact corner at Corner Bar and do half my work. This is effectively my office at this point. I can shoot in Cambodia or New Mexico or Rocky Mount, but, until I need to be on set actually building or directing, I can center myself in a place like Greensboro, North Carolina.” 

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The Patriots Are Coming

Pursed lips and drum licks put the Greene in Greensboro

By Billy Ingram

“I have to prosecute a war with almost insurmountable difficulties. I cannot contemplate my own situation without the greatest degree of anxiety.” — Nathanael Greene before the Battle of Guilford Courthouse

One hundred and thirty-eight years ago, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park was consecrated on 50 untended acres purchased for $700 by Judge David Schenck. It has since expanded into what is now a 250-acre homage to those resolute Patriots who fought and died on March 15, 1781, in a pivotal exchange of cannonballs, lead balls and bayonets, reassuring America’s forthcoming victory in the Revolutionary War.

Ever hear that phrase, “We lost the battle but won the war?” The Battle of Guilford Courthouse is a perfect example. While the British effectively defeated General Nathanael Greene’s Continental Army, in doing so, the Red Coats were left so depleted that Greene’s dogged nemesis, British General Charles Cornwallis, had no choice but to, after another ill-fated fracas, surrender to George Washington at Yorktown.

To commemorate that crucial turning point in our nation’s founding, the Guilford Courthouse Fife & Drum Corps was formed 28 years ago by park ranger Stephen Ware, in part to provide a historical soundtrack for increasingly popular Revolutionary War reenactments. While Ware retired in 2019 and Mike Nelson now leads the group, I met up with Chip Cook, a member since 2021, wondering what inspired his and others’ participation in such an anachronistic undertaking.

“If you travel in the northeast — in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts — every little town has a fife and drum corps,” which Cook likens to the lure of joining a community band and the Boy Scouts at the same time. “So there are adults and kids involved in it.” There are currently about 10 active members of GCFDC but new recruits are encouraged. “We have members as young as 15, folks from all walks of life. A couple of members from the 82nd Airborne [Division] Band recently joined and they love to perform with us occasionally.”

A drum and fife corps was strategically imperative in times of war before radio messaging. “The commanders depended upon the music not for comfort, although that was helpful, too, but for communication,” Cook explains. When the call went out to, for instance, assemble the unit, or begin marching, reposition a column, prepare to fire or even retreat, the drum and fife corps transmitted those orders by way of melodic themes, known as duty calls, that troops were trained to recognize. On a clear day, they could be heard up to a mile away.

“There was a gentleman’s agreement that you didn’t shoot the musicians. They were considered noncombatants on the field,” Cook explains, noting that the corps might be leading the procession early on but well before the muskets plumed and bullets flew, drummers and fifers, made up mostly of old men and young boys, were repositioned to the rear of the fray.  (After a musician reached the age of 17 they were expected to join in the fighting.)

To quickly identify and assemble instrumentalists when their service was required, “they traditionally wore opposite colors from their infantry regiment, so we wear a red coat with blue trim,” Cook says.

On the 244th anniversary of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse this last March a reenactment took place at Country Park, kicked off with members of the Tryon Palace Fife and Drum Corps as well as Cook’s ensemble. Set against a backdrop of soldiers and horses echoing an impending clashing of combatants, it was an impressive performance, considering the vast repertoire of duty calls memorized and executed in unison with crystal clarity.

“A lot of folks think this is run by the National Park Service. It’s not,” Cook tells me about these annual time tunnelings back to 1781. “It’s an arrangement with the City of Greensboro and the different groups that have participated in these reenactments for many, many years.” A surreal sight, tented encampments erected alongside the lake where, tucked into the woods above, reenactors on both sides would bivouac overnight. “They have a little market in the middle, which is kind of funny because you go through there and everyone’s dressed [for the period] and you pull out your debit card to pay, very much an anachronism there.”

Last summer, the Guilford Courthouse Fife & Drum Corps opened for a performance of Horn in the West, the decades-long running Revolutionary War outdoor drama centered around the exploits of Daniel Boone, on a night when one of the Frontiersman’s descendants was sitting in the audience. In January, they spent a weekend demonstrating their specialized skills at Cowpens National Battlefield in South Carolina. This month, our fluted troupe is bound for Colonial Williamsburg’s Drummer’s Call, a celebration of 18th-century military music also featuring an assemblage of groups from Yorktown, Northern Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “We’re all volunteers, so we’re spending our own money to do this,” Cook notes. The Corp also participates in grave-marking ceremonies with the Sons of the American Revolution, “and we’ll be in High Point for their Memorial Day event this year.”

Chip Cook himself is a descendant of a Revolutionary War light infantry soldier, Jacob Idol, who resided in Davidson County when he enlisted in 1781. Captured by Tories and remanded to the British at Guilford Courthouse, he escaped following that conflagration, then took part in routing the so-called loyalist Tories at Raft Swamp in Robeson County, the last battle of the war fought in the state of North Carolina.

A century later, no one in 1887 Greensborough had any definitive recollection as to exactly where that decisive Revolutionary War conflict happened when Judge David Schenck began mapping and snapping up the first 50 acres of forest and untamed underbrush. He relied on hand-scrawled maps and written recollections to pinpoint the precise location where warfare waged 106 years earlier. The nonprofit Guilford Battleground Company Schenck founded to oversee the project, one that continues fostering his vision today, gifted the by-then cultivated park to the federal government in 1917. The organization then continued over the decades to purchase and donate adjoining properties as they became available, greatly expanding this verdant sanctuary that pumps millions of dollars into our economy.

In hindsight, Schenck should have acquired a lot more land than he did. Although it’s possible that Cornwallis’ attempt to smother democracy in its cradle potentially spilled over into Country Park’s footprint, just in the last few years historians have discovered that major skirmishes took place where the Brassfield Shopping Center parking lot sits. Alas, you won’t get that tract for $10 or $20 an acre like you could in 1887.

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Playing the Market

For over 30 years, Ron C. Curlee II has stretched his artistic limits

By Billy Ingram

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” — Ronald Reagan

In 1994, Ron C. Curlee II was the first intriguingly talented individual I met in our fair city after relocating mere days before from Los Angeles. I’d wandered into Babylon, an infamous rave club located on South Elm in the long-dead heart of downtown Greensboro. Babylon was notorious for shoveling underaged kids through its doors. For all I knew, Ron may have fallen into that category.

As it happens, that den of iniquity was sponsoring an art opening of Ron’s Crimes Against Nature series — enormous canvases featuring, for the era, bold, lurid and graphic imagery of exactly what the work’s title suggests. We instantly hit it off and, since then, it has always been a pleasure in those too rare instances when our divergent paths cross; laughter is always sure to follow, sparked by his gregarious personality, somehow both serious and fun.

I marvel that today Ron remains on the cutting edge, a key component of his career being his three decades participating in the High Point Market as a painter of extraordinarily original abstracts, as well as a designer and merchandiser.

Accomplished in both art and design, his career has had an internal reach. In addition to dozens of local shows and commissions, his artwork has been featured in most of the well-known furniture showrooms, including Highland House, Harden, Francesco Molon, Excelsior, Century, Hickory Hill and Drexel Heritage.

This area has grown significantly since the mid-1990s, when the impact that Market made all across the Triad was seismic. Families back then were renting out their homes to attendees for $1,500 a week, due to lack of available hotel rooms. Venturing out to dinner, even in Greensboro, became a challenge during those two-week periods, the nicer restaurants being predictably overbooked. On those occasions when I would dine out with my parents during April and October Market, generally at some out-of-the-way steakhouse such as Jordan’s on Church Street, we’d amuse ourselves by observing nearby tables where sales reps were expense accounting the night away with obvious ladies of the evening who flocked from near and far to service this influx of out-of-towners.

Ron grew up in Lenoir and attended the University of Georgia’s studies abroad program, where he studied painting in Italy. But it was actually the lure of the Market that brought him to Greensboro in the 1990s. I recently caught up with him in his richly appointed, downtown Greensboro home-studio duplex (thestudioandgallery.square.site) to look back on some of his more colorful experiences at High Point Market.

Following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Paul Burrell, her former butler and one-time footman for Queen Elizabeth II, began licensing his name for various upscale goods that included furniture. “I was director of visual merchandising for an upholstery company that paid to use Burrell’s name,” Ron tells me. “So we made up all the stories behind his collection that was [supposedly] based on his travels with Princess Diana.”

This was following the “uppity” butler’s trial for stealing various personal items from the beloved Princess and after Prince Harry publicly accused him of “milking” his mother’s death in Burrell’s scandalous book, A Royal Duty. “I traveled around England with him,” Ron recalls. “People either loved him because they wanted to know about Princess Diana or they despised him because he had risen above his station. So it was very awkward.” At gallery openings and tea parties, Burrell would regale audiences with stories about how Diana’s boys would sit on chairs like the one on display or the way Princess Diana would relax on a sofa resembling that model. “And we wrote all of that for him.”

On one occasion, while imbibing a bit heavily on a rather empty stomach, Ron recalls, “I may have told [Burrell] that he was just the front man who didn’t know anything, that I was doing everything while he was getting all the credit.” The next morning, he says, “They told me Paul didn’t have anything to say and just up and left.” Not long after, Ron got wind that Burrell was talking with a friend in New York who was getting him drunk and secretly recording their conversation about the Queen and Princess Margaret, then selling it to a tabloid for a million dollars. “And I was like, why didn’t I think of that?!?”

Ron has also rubbed elbows with Hollywood royalty and recalls a furniture collection introduced at Market that he thought was immediately fabulous and very successful. “The Humphrey Bogart Collection from Thomasville,” he replies. “I have pieces from that line in my living room. It was like Old Hollywood, a little deco with lots of unique woods, veneers and different applications. A mixture of skins and veneers like shagreen shark skin, tiger-eye maple, zebra wood.” Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s son, Stephen, had input into the designs and made an appearance in 2002 at the presentation party.

Was there a ruinous collection he was saddled with showcasing that was an absolute disaster? “At Fine Furniture Design, they’re no longer in the United States,” Ron says with a laugh. “They were high end and introduced a collection that was entirely covered in mirrors. They had a mirrored poster bed, entertainment cabinet, occasional end tables, cocktail tables and a dining table that sat 12.” Ron was flabbergasted. “I was just like, what the hell is this? It was so ostentatious, so over the top and it didn’t sell.” Upon reflection, the manufacturer blamed Ron for the line’s failure. “I was told that I didn’t paint the rooms the right color, I didn’t do the right presentation. I was thinking, my accessories should have been razor blades and straws!”

Collections are generally only offered for a year or so and then quietly disappear. “They can last longer but Market is fashion driven,” Ron points out. “Everybody wants something new. So you may add a few pieces and continue a collection for a couple seasons, maybe a year and a half or two years. But you want to be fashion forward.” To that end, designers tend to lean into Pantone’s Color of the Year — in 2025, it’s Mocha Mouse. “So buyers are looking at mocha fabrics; yarns will be dyed that, too. Last year it was Peach Fuzz.”

Both during and outside of Market, folks generally approach Ron when they’re looking for artwork to complete a room. “I’m known for large abstracts, so I can build up to 10 feet by 10 feet,” he says. “At Market, they’re not going to offer something custom. It’s going to be what’s on the wall and buyers will order 10 of them or whatever. But all of my creations are going to be original and custom.”

For the next few weeks, it’s once more into the breach for Ron C. Curlee II: “So I’ll merchandise several showrooms and then, when they’re completed, I head to the Suites at Market Square and put my own showroom together to sell my artwork.” He’s been showing at Market Square for about four years now. “Sometimes I have other artists or product designers in my space but I’m not going to sell a container full of merchandise. A lot of my clients are designers, so they’ll come to market, see what I have and what I’ve done and then commission artwork in specific sizes, specific colors. Seeing me at Market is a reminder that I’m still here.”

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Drawn to The Gate City

Comics come to life in unexpected places

By Billy Ingram

“I don’t have inspiration. I only have ideas. Ideas and deadlines.” — Stan Lee

Buried inside an otherwise ordinary office plaza on Cornwallis Drive, tucked twixt dental practices, LLCs and LLPs, sits the Fungeon, a collab for writers and illustrators, several of whom have long associations with many of Marvel Comics’ best-selling titles.

An assault on the senses, this fancave is where pop-culture ephemera from the last seven decades bedazzles every square inch. A tidal wave of childhood memorabilia washes over you — an impossible number of Batman and other superhero figurines, an autographed photo of Dy-no-mite Jimmie “JJ” Walker, breakfast food mascot dolls, a Pee-wee Herman marionette, Star Wars collectables, VHS tapes, movie posters, a full-sized early-80s Galaxian arcade game, even a bright red Wham-O Monster Magnet with “life-time magnet” fists. I half expected the Kool-Aid Man to come bursting through the wall.

I’m there to meet with Chris Giarrusso, a former New Yorker and comic book creator who was drawn to the incandescent glow and nearly imperceptible excitement of The Gate City in 2017. Now, he shares a fantasy factory with four other creatives. There’s Jody Merriman, known as “Ol Grumpy” on social media. Giarrusso describes him as “a real burly, tough guy who you wouldn’t expect to be drawing pictures.”Randy Green is an acclaimed comic artist, best known for Tomb Raider and Emma Frost. His family owned Green’s Supper Club locally. Illustrator Marshall Lakes has his own comic line. And lastly, former Marvel and DC editor Brian “Smitty” Smith is co-creator of the New York Times-bestselling graphic novel The Stuff of Legend as well as writer/artist of the adorable Pea, Bee, & Jay children’s book series from HarperCollins.

Giarrusso is one of those lucky, talented individuals who has managed to forge a career in the comics. “When I was in college,” the Syracuse native told me, “I read about the internship program at Marvel in Wizard magazine.” He applied in 1997 and was accepted. “So for a summer, I was an intern there. That’s really the big game-changer, just getting the foot in the door and people getting to feel comfortable around you, that you’re not some crazy person. I guess they’re always afraid that the intern’s going to be some whack-job type.”

In 1998, Giarrusso was hired by Marvel’s production department, scanning artwork for Photoshop tweaking. “But I also liked to draw,” he says. “So I would show people my cartoons every chance I got. I was cartoon riffing on what was happening in the office or whatever.” Shades of Marvel’s superhero satirist extraordinaire Marie Severin. Eventually, the editor of “Bullpen Bulletins,” a feature in every Marvel publication, gave Giarrusso space for a monthly comic strip. “The editor said, ‘Yeah, OK, less work for me to fill up a page.’”

Almost by necessity, he created a line-up of cuddly, kid-sized Marvel heroes characterized by big heads and bulbous boots, whose comical interactions were drawn-up in standard newspaper strip format. “Because the panels were so small, it’s easier to draw little kids,” he says about the origin, if you will, of Mini Marvels. “You can actually squeeze them in better into the panels. And just the idea of them being kids was kind of already a built-in gimmick.” A devotee of Charles Schulz, Giarrusso quips, “I wanted to do Peanuts but with little Marvel characters.”

The little strip that could caught on. After about a year, “I pitched the idea for a longer story to Smitty before he went up the ladder. He was an assistant editor when I got hired as a production guy. I put a proposal together, handed it to him and then he pushed it through.” The result? The emergence of, quite possibly, the freshest, most original talent the genre has seen this century, effortlessly capturing the rhythmic essence that makes for great comics.

Undoubtedly, that’s why Marvel continually repackages Giarrusso’s back catalog. Mini Marvels: Hulk Smash was released in December and one reviewer raved that this book “will remind you why comics are fun, and if given to a new fan, this could be their gateway into comics.” Mini Marvels: Spidey-Sense unfolds with a genuinely funny tale about paperboy Spidey’s fractious battles against a peevish Green Goblin while innocently attempting to deliver the Daily Bugle to his arch enemy’s house. Giarrusso rendered the pint-sized Spider-Man with an exuberance and fluidity reminiscent of co-creator Steve Ditko’s earliest web-slinger sagas.

Beginning in 2009, Giarrusso’s own original high flying tyke-in-tights, G-Man, flew into view in three graphic novels published by Image Comics, followed by The G-Man Super Journal: Awesome Origins, an illustrated-prose hardcover from Andrews McMeel, who also publish definitive collections of Peanuts dailies (and Calvin & Hobbes, another influence, I suspect). A series crying out to be animated, G-Man’s universe is populated by a multifarious cast of characters rivaling that of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, fused with the innocence of early-1960s Legion of Superheroes. Nominated for a Harvey Award in 2014, G-Man: Coming Home was selected as Favorite Adventure Graphic Novel by Kids’ Comics Revolution.

“Fifteen years ago or so, when Mini Marvels was having a moment, Acme Comics invited me for a signing,” Giarrusso explains about his initial sojourns South, previous to his relocation to Greensboro eight years ago. “It became kind of routine to come for every Free Comic Book Day. I got to know the area and the community and the people here.” Graphic artists and writers can easily work remotely and are often required to. In that regard, our fair city makes for a comfortable launching pad. “At one point, Smitty came down and he set up the [Fungeon] studio. A couple years later, I followed and just inserted myself into the framework that he created here.”

Giarrusso has been particularly productive of late. While working on Pea, Bee, & Jay, Smith sold HarperCollins on a series for middle graders that Giarrusso illustrates, Officer Clawson: Lobster Cop, which features the undersea adventures of a mystery-solving crustacean. A new Mini Marvels story appeared in October 2024, then Giarrusso created four visually arresting variant covers for the 2025 X-Men/Uncanny X-Men crossover event. Alongside February’s incendiary image fronting his Eddie Brock Carnage #1 variant, these edgier renderings reveal an artist whose style is evolving, assuming a more dynamic, unflinching underpinning without sacrificing any inherent adolescent charm.

Ironic? In the bowels of a nondescript office complex, cleaved from a patch of woods where as a 9-year-old I happily retreated reading DCs with Go-Go Checks purchased from a drug store around the corner, there exists a grotto where creative individuals are weaving dreams into four-color fantasies and captivating children’s lit that is destined to ignite imaginations for generations to come.