Tag: Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

Grindhouse Comes to Greensboro

Dick Clark’s descent upon the Carolina Theatre

By Billy Ingram

“I don’t make culture. I sell it.” — Dick Clark

My pal, Nathan Stringer, casually mentioned that his grandfather, Clint Stringer, was in a major 1960s motion picture that happened to be shot in Ramseur, between Greensboro and Asheboro, and it starred American Bandstand’s Dick Clark and country music legend Merle Haggard. Curiosity caused me to delve into what is a most bizarre story.

Ramseur holds a funky footnote in motion picture history, harkening back to 1939 when Lexington-based itinerate filmmaker H. Lee Waters positioned his silent 16mm camera downtown, for recording just plain folks scurrying around. All in all, Waters’ six-year-long effort chronicled over 250 Depression-era Southern communities, including our own fair city, in a series he called Movies of Local People.

Jump cut three decades forward to the summer of ’68, when Clark and Haggard made their acting debuts in Killers Three, a moonshine-fueled, hicksploitation flick filmed entirely in Ramseur (population then 1,200, maybe up to 2,000 today!), nearby Coleridge and Asheboro. Set in 1947, it’s a cinematic melee of rednecks, leathernecks, roughnecks and revenuers grinding gears at breakneck speeds, eating dust and chasing modified Mopars and Ford flatheads down backroads caked in Carolina clay.

Killers Three was produced and co-written for American International Pictures (AIP) by TV DJ Clark. With a budget of $400,000, Clark intentionally took the low road. “I saw Bonnie and Clyde before it became popular and told the writer [Michael Fisher], ‘Let’s go to work and do something like this right away.’” While originally conceived to be more bloodstained and murderous, Hollywood was taking considerable heat for promoting violent content causing producers to downshift a bit following the assassination of Robert Kennedy that summer.

Clark, euphemistically known in the ’60s as “America’s Oldest Teenager,” is just plain goofy in this misguided acting foray; bespectacled and sporting an ill-fitting pornstache, he delivers a stupefyingly monochromatic performance as Roger, an old Army buddy of the film’s protagonist, Johnny. In the leading role of Johnny (are all B-movie reprobates named Johnny?) is Robert Walker Jr., seen two years earlier as a raging teen with psionic powers in “Charlie X,” the second episode of Star Trek. Despite being the son of a Southern California movie star, Walker is surprisingly believable as a post-war Southerner.

Diane Varsi, a 1957 Academy-Award nominee for Peyton Place, plays Johnny’s love interest, Carol. She also starred in another 1968 AIP release, counterculture cult classic Wild in the Streets.

Cast against type, Haggard, former inmate and founding icon of Outlaw Country, portrays a heroic highway patrolman. Haggard wrote two tunes for this project. One of which is Mighty Merle’s signature anthem, “Mama Tried,” an autobiographical tale about turning 21 in prison despite a mother’s best efforts. “Mama Tried” became a smash pop and country single while Killers Three was in post-production.

Bruce Kessler was hired to direct on the basis of serving as second-unit director for Howard Hawks’ 1965 film, Red Line 7000. In that movie, he captured high-speed stock car paint-trading and cyclonic, fiery spinouts, his cameras trained on racing superstars Junior Johnson, A. J. Foyt and even Richard Petty steering his No. 43 ’64 Plymouth.

Dozens of residents in and around Ramseur were rounded up as supporting characters, like the tipsy blonde lady downing shots in a honky-tonk saloon and lamenting her ex: “I keep tryin’ to remember what he’s got that I don’t. And then I remember . . .”

The aforementioned Clint Stringer landed a plum role as corrupt Sheriff Homer Brown. Photographed leaning against one of two 1942 Chevrolet Fleetline Aerosedans destined to be flung forcefully off a bridge and into the Deep River’s muddy waters, Clint popped up in newspapers around the state, making him somewhat of a local celebrity already.

Edited with a tire iron yet beautifully lit and photographed, the movie comes across as a dead-end attempt at a low-rent Thunder Road. As a date night Drive-In attraction, however, Killers Three scores with boisterous bursts of action juxtaposed with romantic interludes for inciting car-lot canoodling. There’s an abundance of banjo plunking by The Strangers and a feature-length ballad performed by Haggard, serving as narration that peppers the indecipherable saltine-noir storyline.

What isn’t apparent, aside from hinted-at military service shenanigans, is what a cocksure country boy like Johnny finds attractive about a shifty, narcissistic city slicker like Roger, the kind of repressed personality who takes a gal out for a wilderness row-boat ride dressed like Niles Crane. Before long, women in Johnny’s orbit begin whispering. Loudly.

Five months after filming wrapped, Clark and his Tinsel Town contingent checked into the new Sheraton Motor Inn at South Elm and I-85, on Monday, November 11, one day before the Carolina Theatre’s world premiere of Killers Three. Normally, when Hollywood-types blow into town bringing snow along with them, that powder is measured in grams. This time, it was measured in inches. With rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning throughout the night, Greensboro awoke Tuesday to 4 inches of sleet and snow, leaving 20,000 homes without power.

Undeterred, Tuesday morning began with a press conference held at the Sheraton, followed by a catered affair for the media. Downtown that afternoon at 4:30, an aroma of roasting peanuts, room temperature taffy and faint wisps of patchouli permeating the air, a throng of Bandstand fans eagerly greeted Clark as he strode toward Sears’ record center. He flashed his collegiate Colgate smile and spent over an hour scrawling autographs across Killers Three soundtrack LPs.

Following that, cast members and dignitaries were feted at a pre-premiere barbecue-and-beer hoedown at Smith’s Ranch Motel on Battleground. At 7 p.m., attendees were transported to Greene Street, where arc lights strafed the skies and a musical pre-show was already underway outside the Carolina Theatre.

Clark walked the red carpet alongside Tony York, the 5-year-old cast as Johnny and Carol’s love child. Despite his every line of dialogue being ineptly overdubbed, the preschooler was inexplicably signed to a five-year contract by Clark, who gushed, “If ever a star was born in North Carolina, it will be little Tony York.” Ava Gardner wasn’t available for comment.

The actual breakout star was none other than Clint Stringer, besieged by autograph seekers following the screening. “I’ll tell you something though,” he confessed to the crowd, “I sure didn’t think I looked that ugly and stupid.” Stringer was already well known to Greensboro residents as the “Ice Cream Man” who began peddling frozen treats down neighborhood streets in the 1950s, riding astride an Indian Motorcycle with a refrigerated sidecar.

The afterparty at the Sheraton wailed into the wee hours. Stringer and his wife, Josephine, freely imbibed at the open bar before returning to their home in Level Cross. He had professed a desire to pursue acting — he clearly had the talent — so AIP arranged for him and his wife to fly to Hollywood and explore that possibility. The couple got blotto the night before and missed their flight. In true Grindhouse fashion, during one of their frequent drunken brawls just a few years later Clint fatally found himself on the wrong end of Josephine’s ire/gun, according to Nathan.

In 1992, another feature, Children of the Corn: The Final Sacrifice, was filmed extensively in Ramseur and Coleridge, utilizing many of the same locations as Killers Three.

Despite being a close-knit textile town whose primary employer folded over six decades ago, one gets the feeling that photogenic Ramseur remains camera ready for her next closeup. To paraphrase Norma Desmond: It’s not the towns that got small, it’s the pictures! OH

Billy Ingram’s book about Greensboro, EYE ON GSO, is available wherever books are sold or pulped.

Wandering Billy

A Soulful Saturday and Sunday in September

Beat the heat at the John Coltrane International Jazz & Blues Festival

By Billy Ingram

“I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” — John Coltrane

The John Coltrane International Jazz & Blues Festival celebrates its 15th anniversary next month, though it’s been 20 years since festival founder and organizer Joe Williams arranged for a statue of Coltrane to be erected at High Point City Hall. A Philadelphia transplant, Williams was shocked to discover the peerless saxophonist-composer was a Furniture Capital native and resolved to rectify that slight. “I just couldn’t believe that I didn’t see pictures and [announcements] all over the place saying ‘Home of John Coltrane.’ He’s a real big deal all around the world.”

The jazz world went cold after Coltrane left the station in 1967 at age 40. He didn’t just play an instrument — he inhabited that sax, imbued it with his essence, became one with it, transcended from this earthly realm when astride it. Words as a means of describing Coltrane’s seductive musicality are lacking; no alphabetic assemblage can ever soar to such heavenly heights, his albums being the shortest distance between that tentative first kiss and soon to be disheveled bedsheets.

Williams’ yearly music festival bearing Coltrane’s name has attracted a roster of rhythmic royalty: Stanley Clarke, Snarky Puppy, Kenny G, George Duke and Blood, Sweat & Tears come to mind. This year’s lineup over the first September weekend is no exception. Here are a few highlights:

Born two years before his father’s death, Ravi Coltrane picked up his dad’s mantle, and a saxophone, to carve a successful career for himself as a highly sought-after, Grammy-nominated recording and touring artist. He’ll grace the festival stage for the third time this year. Another sax savant, Mike Phillips is stylistically a mash-up of the traditional jazz masters he studied — Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins — and the hard-edged, rhythmic energy of ’90s hip-hop. He was the first musician signed by Michael Jordan to the Nike Jordan Brand, and the only musician (and soloist) who toured with Michael Jackson, Prince and Stevie Wonder.

Equal parts sayin’ and sass, French chanteuse Cyrille Aimée blends vibrant Caribbean rhythmic undertones with more traditional jazz notes. Her accomplished combo applies fresh polish on a pleasing playlist peppered with snappy show tunes and 20th-century gems such as “Young At Heart,” “It’s a Good Day” and “La Vie en rose.” Don’t miss this one!

Recently completing a European tour, Victor Wooten and the Wooten Brothers have sent audiences swinging and swaying to their funky bluegrass infused beats since the 1960s. “On Sunday, they will hold a masterclass following Saturday’s concert,” Williams points out. It’s a rare opportunity to get up close and personal with Victor Wooten, Béla Fleck’s sideman who Rolling Stone readers voted one of the Top 10 Bass Players of All Time in 2011. “Bringing in that level of talent to not only teach but talk with people that have a love of the industry, who are trying to accomplish something. Last year I had Snarky Puppy for the first Masterclass. This time Victor Wooten came to mind and, with his brothers, you get the whole family.”

This year’s high point, if you will, might be singer-songwriter Ledisi, whose 2025 soulfully silky 12th album, The Crown, caresses the ear like those occasional dreamy LPs from the 1970s. Carefully crafted by way of unadorned arrangements focusing on that silky soulful voice, what emerges is a symphonious intimacy in the tradition of Janis Ian, Melissa Manchester, Roberta Flack, Nancy Wilson, Dorothy Moore and Marvin Gaye, minus that era’s de rigueur vocal histrionics. With the exception of Moore and Gaye, those artists never produced a flawless, pitch-perfect album on par with this one.

Ledisi’s first release on Verve Forecast in 2007 (“Lost and Found”), and subsequent saucy Newport Jazz Festival performance that same year, established this New Orleans-born crooner as a powerhouse entertainer who continues to blossom in unexpected directions within every lush garden she cultivates. Inspired by immortal song stylists that came before her, in 2021 Ledisi released a collection of songs made famous by Nina Simone (Ledisi Sings Nina), then, just last October, devoted an entire album (For Dinah) to the Queen of the Blues, Dinah Washington. Vocally, she more than equates herself with a sultry rendition of “What a Difference a Day Makes” and an exuberantly bubbly duet with Gregory Porter on “You’ve Got What it Takes.”

An aside: I once asked blues legend Johnny Otis (“Hand Jive”) about Dinah Washington since they were close. He told me about Ms. Washington taking Little Eva (“The Loco-motion”), a freshly-minted, 19-year-old pop star from coastal North Carolina, on a shopping excursion in Los Angeles. Washington was a notorious hard-partier, Otis told me, so he was reticent to allow innocent Eva to possibly be led astray but figured, what the heck, it’s just a couple of hours. When the two chart-toppers returned, Eva’s face, he said, was painted up like a hooker, decked out like a $2-tramp. As for Washington, she was laughing hysterically at Otis’ dismay.

With any luck, Ledisi might slip into Dinah Washington’s extensive songbook when she rarifies our air with melodic ardor on Sunday, September 6, at Oak Hollow Festival Park.

This is a prestige event for our sister city. “Not just for High Point, but for North Carolina,” Williams insists. “With audiences traveling from all over, from 25 different states, tons of people coming in from Charlotte, Raleigh, the mountain areas of North Carolina.” With five or six truly remarkable performances by seminal artists each day, “we try to keep the price very reasonable compared to what you get.”

Plus, a portion of festival proceeds goes to purchasing instruments for musically inclined youngsters who can’t afford them. The lucky recipients are selected based on written essay submissions. “Being in the music entertainment business and seeing young people from all walks of life, it’s their ticket, their way out,” Williams says. “If a child never gets an instrument, they can never go any further. That’s their starting point.” Williams often uses his industry connections to acquire otherwise prohibitively expensive or custom-made instruments for worthy budding musicians, and who knows? “Hopefully, they will develop into the next Coltrane.” Explore more at ColtraneJazzFest.com.

While I have you here . . .

Acclaimed theater and screen actor Shannon Cochran, Page High School Class of ’76 grad, is making her Broadway debut this month in Paranormal Activity, a suspenseful drama the L.A. Times calls “The year’s best staged production.” She’s no stranger to the horror genre, having already terrified moviegoers as Anna Morgan’s sinister spirit in The Ring and its creepy sequel. You may recall reading about Cochran in my April 2023 Wandering Billy column. But you knew that, dintcha?

“The response to this play is unlike anything I’ve ever done,” Ms. Cochran (she’s a Broadway star now!) told me before embarking for The Great White Way. “People just want to gather together in the dark, scream at what they know isn’t real but seems to be magic, laugh at each other for screaming, then clutch their date for dear life.” Enjoying boffo box office this year in four major cities, she reveals that Paranormal Activity consistently attracts masses that aren’t normally playgoers. “And that’s worth everything!” Could a Broadway run lead to Tony Awards next summer? Stay tuned . . . OH

Billy Ingram contributes weekly to O.Hey, an email newsletter companion to O.Henry magazine, and can be reached at: tvparty@bellsouth.net. And you can subscribe to O.Hey by visiting ohenrymag.com and clicking on the light blue box.

2026 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

How I Spent the Bicentennial Summer

Stirring up scandal in a sleepy Southern hamlet

By Billy Ingram

“A small town has as many eyes as a fly.” — Sonya Hartnett

As a 19-year-old in the summer of ’76, I landed a gig as an ensemble player in a new, outdoor drama, The Liberty Cart: A Duplin Story, written by Randolph Umberger. He’d penned another open-air theatrical production debuting that year, Strike at the Wind!, a Lumbee Indian pageant performed in Pembroke. Liberty Cart was set, both in story and in fact, in Kenansville (pop. 900 then, a bit less today), situated between here and the coast. Kenansville was an unassuming hamlet only accessible by traveling down two-lane roads before the I-40 extension was completed in the 1990s.

All of the 10 professional actors hired for Liberty Cart portrayed multiple roles with the exception of one. Tom Hull solely played Phenius Pickett, a wise, old, time-traveling pushcart peddler who wove together oft-told tales of Duplin County lore as seen through the prism of the Kenan family’s Revolutionary War experience and beyond, into war-torn South in 1864. The Kenan family’s claim to fame, so far as I can tell, is that they were fabulously wealthy, thanks to the oil and gas business. To this day, it’s a philanthropic surname splashed across multiple buildings on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

Having spent little time in small towns without high and low tides, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Certainly not strutting center stage into a bewildering psychodrama soon surreptitiously swirling around us.

In an art form rooted in North Carolina theatrical tradition, Tom Hull was already a bona fide outdoor-drama star, having portrayed the comical drunk Old Tom in Lost Colony for a decade. Tom, myself and a trio of other cast members bunked together in a three-bedroom house that I christened “Freedom Shack” due to its location directly next door to Liberty Hall, the Kenan family ancestral home, which played a central role in our production. It was the town’s one claim to fame, a historical tourist attraction then and now. Following a month of rigorous rehearsal, Liberty Cart opened on July 29. I was assigned five character parts, including the first boo-hiss villain, Henry McCulloch, a British fop seated atop a luxuriously appointed barge carried aloft by servants. I also played a shady land speculator there to stump for a tax stamp scheme steaming the colonies leading up to the Revolutionary War. The Richlands-Beaulaville Advertiser News described my performance as an “absurdly humorous interpretation of the King’s representative.” On the front page, no less. I wonder now how I was able to finish a single play. Constructed to last for years, those period costumes were woolen saunas in the brutally humid summer swelter.

During down time, Tom and I were home a lot, content to read away lazy afternoons. Tom, a New York City resident, was genuinely loving the change of scenery and relished serving as de-facto housemother, cooking meals most nights partly out of necessity. The lone restaurant in this no-stoplight town, the Tastee-Freez, had bug sprayers positioned above the dining room tables for spritzing insecticide into the air — RAID raining down on your cheeseburger and fries every few minutes.

There was a quaint little diner across Main Street from Freedom Shack, but it had closed recently, rumored to have been forced out of business because the proprietor was African American. I talked the guy into opening just for us at noon. So every day, this gentleman took our orders — pork chop sandwiches were a favorite — then strolled next door to the Piggly-Wiggly for what he needed to prepare our lunch while we howled with laughter watching The Gong Show on TV.

Along with Tom, my Freedom Shack roommates were Roger Dale Jackson, Kevin Flanigan and David Elliott. With a thick head of red hair, Roger was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, intensely serious about acting as were the others. I really looked up to Kevin, incredibly effective in that outdoor setting as the handsome, smoldering young firebrand. Two seasons earlier he’d wowed audiences in a major role in Horn in the West. David was athletic, no affectations, and once brought along his Labrador retriever, who absconded with a roast we left marinating on the kitchen counter.

One of my best friends from college, “Sweet” Val McCaw, was also cast in Liberty Cart. Her dramatic moments are still talked about in Kenansville. No, really, especially her turn as Mammy Till chasing Yankees from Liberty Hall’s kitchen. Because of the time periods depicted, Val was relegated to playing domestics, which ultimately didn’t sit well with her, being a proud, independent, young Black woman.

Supporting players, dozens of all ages, were recruited from nearby Wilson, Warsaw, Rose Hill, Wallace and Beulaville. They were some of the nicest folks I’ve encountered in life, but I quickly became aware of awkward, sideways glances from shopkeepers and pickup trucks when Val and I meandered around the four or five local businesses that constituted a downtown. Unbeknownst to us, it was a downright scandal that the whitest teenager God ever blanched and a Black co-ed were flagrantly lollygagging around town together. A local mechanic having a fling with one of the actresses, their relationship consummated on the back steps of sacred Liberty Hall, informed us that townspeople routinely tracked us via their CB radios. Val was mortified . . . that anyone would consider for a moment that we were a couple!

Val had the last laugh, however. At a cast party meet-and-greet held in Freedom Shack’s backyard, with Kenansville’s hoi polloi in attendance, Val stepped from the house, screen door slapping shut behind her, and announced, “Billy, I left the jeans I borrowed from you yesterday on your bed.” Jaws dropped and eyes popped like beasts in a Tex Avery cartoon.

The only cast member with a car, I had deputies hugging the back bumper of my ’72 Dodge Dart Swinger while driving.

Discovering one morning that someone had sideswiped my Swinger, parked overnight on the street, naturally I attempted to file a report with the Sheriff for insurance purposes. Peering above mirrored sunglasses, fully reclining in his swivel chair like the stereotypical good ol’ boy with a badge in every Southern noir movie ever filmed, he blithely commented that he knew who was responsible but wasn’t going to do a damned thing about it. In the rural South of the ’70s, everyone knew their place; if not, it would be made plain to you at some point.

Whereabouts of most of the cast is a mystery. Roger Dale Jackson was seen in a dramatic role in a 1985 episode of AfterMASH, passing away in 2020. Tom Hull died in 2009. I wish I’d had a chance to talk with him again. Of all the cast members, we were the closest as he was the first openly gay person I ever met. Tom moved to Wilmington in the 1980s, where he had a stellar stage career, appearing in occasional movies like Raw Deal in 1986, a role that found him ruthlessly pummeled by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Pretty funny we both ended up working on that same project, myself as a West Coast movie poster artist for the film. Val McCaw married her high school sweetheart, William, enjoying the love of a warm and close-knit family in Colorado.

In a return visit to Kenansville a few years back, I discovered several changes. The town has an intersection with a stoplight now. Liberty Hall is even more of a tourist attraction today, but our beloved Freedom Shack was long ago demolished for additional parking. Liberty Cart closed in 1990 and the amphitheater is covered over in kudzu, but several locally owned restaurants thrive there today, including a soul food joint that residents rave about. OH

Born and raised in Greensboro, Billy Ingram moved to downtown in the 1990s after a career in Hollywood as a key member of the design team the ad world has dubbed, “The New York Yankees of Motion Picture Advertising.”

2026 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

To the Moon, Harry

How a seminal local computer science publication and illustrator rocketed a career

By Billy Ingram

Illustration by Harry Blair

(Caption: Original Harry Blair illustration for issue No. 46, March 1984, of Compute!)

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977

Just two years after mass-marketed personal computers were made possible by a game-changing microprocessor, Robert C. Lock founded Small System Services, the “Corner Computer Shop” on Spring Garden at Mendenhall, in 1979. That little shop of floppy discs served as Lock’s launching pad for arguably one of the most consequential and culturally influential magazines of the 20th century, Compute!, first catering to a decidedly minuscule demographic when it debuted in 1979 — devout computer geeks. The publication spawned a sprawling publishing empire before being sidelined a decade and a half later by the popularity of the very subject it was devoted to.

A UNCG chemistry and biochemistry professor at the time, Harvey Herman was writer and associate editor of Compute! starting with the very first issue. “The magazine was based really on the MOS Technology 6502 chip in a lot of the early computers, the single boards, ones that you could use right off the shelf,” he says. “There was a lot of useful stuff coming out of the magazine.” Every issue offered readers what the soon-to-be-popular publication called “type-ins,” custom-made programming codes to manually type into Ataris, apple ][, TRS-80 and Commodore PET models, cascading rows of seemingly random letters and numbers strung together that must be entered without error or the DIY software wouldn’t Do It, Yo.

Success was immediate and overwhelming. By issue No. 3 in March 1980, Compute!’s crew had grown from publisher-editor Lock and five unpaid stringers to dozens of contributors, columnists and support staff. Leaving the Spring Garden electronics store behind, magazine production was established in a stunning, two-story, gray stone manse on Bessemer and Magnolia. With the addition of spinoff mags and manuals, they began overflowing out of a former heavy-machinery manufacturing plant on Fulton Place and High Point Road (today’s Gate City Boulevard) a year later.

That’s when Fred D’Ignazio, already an accomplished author specializing in robotic programming in 1982 and living in Chapel Hill, began writing for Compute! “It was so exciting,” he says. “I really had the feeling this was going to take off.” However, in mainstream minds, computers were strictly sci-fi fodder: “Maybe others looked at you as a geek, but, inside, you knew you were smarter than everybody around you.” D’Ignazio reflects on his former editor, Lock: “He was kind of a visionary statesman- or chairman-of-the-board type person. Very thoughtful, very nice to me and encouraging. I was on the fringe, thinking of computers in much more of a futuristic and metaphorical sense. Like how do you introduce computers to children?” Yes, that was a radical concept in the early ’80s.

Beginning with issue No. 1, Compute!’s cover artist almost every month was O.Henry’s own illustrious illustrator, Harry Blair. “He’s my favorite cartoonist of all time!” D’Ignazio, who currently resides in Tucson, Arizona, hadn’t heard that name in decades. “Harry drew cartoons of me going off on my different journeys overseas with robots and computers. He was very whimsical.” One of those caricatures “was a bunch of robots chasing me across the globe, just very funny.”

Headquartered in a hangar-sized facility off of Wendover by 1983, Compute! cashed out to ABC Publishing for $18 million. A major redesign was undertaken five years later with cluttered (stock?) photo covers replacing Mr. Blair, whose coup de grace that January depicted a wintery mountain range awash in bluish hues, Big Tech logos crystalizing inside a starry sunset. A stark, frozen terrain devoid of humanity, a suffocating, frosty landscape offering no possibility of connectivity. Metaphorical?

In 1990, the enterprise was gobbled up by General Media, publisher of Penthouse and Omni, the latter consolidating editorial and production with Compute (now sans any “!”), here in Greensboro. Not long after, Compute was folded into, or buried beneath, internet behemoth AOL. Video killed the radio star.

The ’90s had arrived, bringing vastly more powerful processors and sophisticated, off-the-shelf software. Gone was that unprecedented level of kinship twixt a magazine and its subscribers by virtue of the communal coding experience, this pivotal technical and inspirational catalyst that had fed eager brainiacs for a decade. “Microsoft BASIC was just everywhere,” D’Ignazio points out about those intrepid early-’80s code tweakers. “There was no limit to the kind of programs you could create. That early, hands-on experience, combined with tapping into people’s imagination, especially young people, I think it really inspired a whole generation.”

I know that to be true.

I met with one such individual, Keir Davis, in his suite of offices tucked into Latham Park proper. Davis and a phalanx of prodigious programmers at the firm he founded in 2002, Xtern Software, alongside a team of behavioral psychologists from Northwestern University, developed the tools for enhancing interconnectivity between NASA Mission Control and the Artemis II manned voyage recently returned from the moon. Under the confines of Earth’s gravity, Xtern is involved in next-level web and mobile-focused customized software for all manner of industry — furniture makers, an A-list jewelry designer, a manufacturer of military boots, even UNCG, where Davis as well as many of his local workforce have earned degrees, his in computer science. Very high-level, diamond-edge innovation taking place right across from the tennis courts.

As a 10-year-old Pittsburgh (adjacent) youth, Davis was an avid consumer of Compute! “This was prior to my even knowing what Greensboro was.” He once copied those elongated lines of code into a 1982 Texas Instruments computer and recalls “looking at those great Harry Blair covers.” There are those who insist there are no coincidences, but, in the summer following eighth grade, Davis and his mother moved to the Gate City, where he attended a cartooning class at Weaver High taught by . . . I’ll let you guess.

Forty years later, Davis and his wife were out to dinner when they spotted none other than Harry Blair. “I talked to him and he remembered the class, but he didn’t remember doing this,” Davis says, presenting a superbly sketched caricature of himself as a 14 year old that hangs in his home today. “I showed it to him on my phone and Harry lost it. He was like, ‘I can’t believe you would’ve saved that.’ It was a throwaway for him, right? He can do this in his sleep, but to me it was really cool.” I’d bring up the whole “circle of life” concept and all of that but I might owe Disney a royalty.

Over the last half century, personal computers emerged from bit players to major supporting (or starring) roles in our everyday lives. From operating systems scarcely capable of rendering spreadsheets or simplistic, pixelated diversions like Pong and Pac-Man to generating unimaginably complex computations crucial for blasting astronauts into outer space and then returning them safely to terra firma.

And Harry Blair had it covered all along. OH

Billy Ingram’s TVparty! was first to stream videos from television shows over the internet and first to create web pages with text, pictures and embedded media.

2026 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

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

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

By Billy Ingram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2026 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

A Multi-Storied House

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

By Billy Ingram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good and faithful servant of God

Well done

Rest from thy loved employ

The Battle fought, the victory won

Enter thy Master’s joy.

2026 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

How Great Thy Art

Not all masterpieces come mounted in museums

By Billy Ingram

“How lovely is Thy dwelling place, O Lord, mighty God.” – Psalm 84:1

As president of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance beginning in 1919, Julian Price was renowned in Greensboro as a paragon of philanthropy. In the early 1940s, Price set up a meeting with Most Reverend Vincent S. Waters, Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh, to propose funding the design and construction of a praiseworthy home for the Catholic faithful. Price wasn’t Catholic, but his beloved wife, Ethel, was. Her death in 1943 inspired his desire for establishing a glorious sanctuary to serve as an enduring tribute to her memory.

As Price and His Excellency pored over photographs of revered tabernacles from around the country, they kept coming back to the stunning Gothic Revival edifice belonging to Our Lady of Refuge in Brooklyn. It wasn’t long before that house of worship’s architect, Henry V. Murphy, was commissioned by the Bishop.

Two cataclysmic events forestalled their efforts. First, the 1942 outbreak of World War II led to a severe shortage of raw materials. That was followed by Julian Price’s own untimely demise in an automobile mishap in 1946. With only $400,000 set aside for this ambitious undertaking, it fell to the Price siblings and others to raise additional funds for what sacral architectural experts agree is one of the most majestic sacred sites in the nation. In 1952, it was dedicated as Our Lady of Grace, the Ethel Clay Price Memorial.

With an impressive seam-face, granite exterior, Murphy’s creation reflects that old-world, French Gothic verticality, as was his style, married immaculately with Art Deco detailing. Above the main chapel doors is a life-sized stone diorama of Mary holding the Divine Child, flanked by praying angels. Tympana atop entrances also pay tribute to the Blessed Virgin. A tower rises from the rear, crowned by a graceful copper flèche pointing heavenward. The largest Catholic Church in North Carolina at that time, the chapel’s interior, fused with blanched brick, granite, maple and marble, is quite simply breathtaking.

After blueprints were approved, there was the matter of engaging an artist to create the 14 predominant stained glass windows Murphy made ample accommodations for. When asked for a recommendation, it’s believed the architect already had the perfect candidate in mind, Guido Nincheri, despite the fact that few people outside of Canada and Upstate New York had ever heard of him.

Educated in Italy and a deeply devoted Catholic, Nincheri discovered his love for stained glass after immigrating to Canada in 1914. Over a nearly 60 year career, he became recognized as the most prolific religious artist in North America, painting frescos across church ceilings and crafting stained glass masterworks for over 200 churches until his 1973 death. Pope Pius XI declared Nincheri the Catholic Church’s greatest renderer of religious motifs in 1933.

Inspired by Botticelli, Michelangelo and Art Nouveau, Nincheri’s stained glass tableaux become translucent rather than transparent, eschewing the predominant style preferred by American churches. This method allowed for unprecedented depths of detail: flowing folds of fabric, glints in eyes, luminescent sacred crowns, starry nights, cascading ribbons of hair, a radiant heart. The portrait soaring above Our Lady of Grace’s altar, one modeled after his own wife, is only slightly smaller than the artist’s largest glass masterpieces that reached as high as 25 feet.

In all, 30,000 separate stained-glass elements were delivered to the corner of West Market and Chapman streets. It took Nincheri’s representative from Belgium and a couple of local craftsmen two years to assemble everything on site.

As an example, Nincheri’s Virgin Most Prudent, illustrating The Parable of the Ten Virgins from Matthew 25:1–13, which recounts the five “wise” virgins surrounding Mary with lamps burning, awaiting her son’s resurrection. Below, the five “foolish” are asleep. “This is a true gem,” notes parish photographer Gilbert Kolosieke. “But it is hidden from the human eye at ground level. As one ascends the spiral stairs to sing God’s praise with the angels, Virgin Most Prudent is the first stained glass window at eye level with the organ loft. It is here that the Queen of Heaven offers you a warm greeting at Heaven’s Gate.”

Among these spirited renderings are potent portrayals of The Ark of the Covenant, Seat of Wisdom, Mother Inviolate and Refuge of Sinners, where, if you look closely, you may detect what was then a recently deceased despot with a familiar mustache begging for God’s forgiveness, a reminder that all are offered salvation through the Holy Spirit. (I read that somewhere . . .)

Parishioners got their first good gander at the grandeur that Murphy and Nincheri wrought during the first Mass, celebrated on July 13, 1952, and again the following September on the day of dedication attended by the architect and other dignitaries, in particular Archbishop Amleto Cicognani, the Vatican’s apostolic delegate to the U.S.

Admittedly, most of my knowledge concerning the Catholic Church comes from observing the papal peregrinations of Sister Bertrille and the less aerodynamically inclined nuns of Convent San Tanco. And working on the movie poster for Sister Act. But I recognize fine art when I see it.

Trouble is, it’s been almost 75 years since these intricate visions of divinity were installed, so there’s a pressing need for cleaning and refurbishment for their continued posterity.

The church has recruited a consultant to circumnavigate which approach will be most effective for the windows’ preservation — whether they will require painstaking removal before trucking them up north for restoration or whether the task can be accomplished leaving most everything in place. Either way, the cost involves lots of zeros.

Demand for divine intervention is greatly outpacing supply this season, so Rebekah Zomberg has stepped up as fundraising coordinator for the stained glass window restoration. The church is taking a grassroots approach, hosting an evening gala on April 11 at Starmount Country Club, with a goal of raising money for restoration and awareness of these historically and spiritually significant works of art. “We’re going to have music, heavy hors d’oeuvres, a carving station, cocktails, just a lovely evening for fellowship, Zomberg says.” Plus, you’ll have an opportunity to marvel at a slideshow of Nincheri’s manifestations of holy scripture, lit from above — a fragile congregation of tiny shards and brushstrokes collectively representing redemption and adoration. And the chance for assisting in the continued illumination of these ecclesiastical exaltations of eternal life and liturgy for future generations. For more info go to olgchurch.org or call the church office at 336 274-6520.

I don’t attend church that often anymore. I suppose you could say I’m a lapsed Presbyterian, but my sentiments track with what Nincheri’s biographer Mélanie Grondin once stated: “I’ll never look at a church the same way. Now, whenever I happen to enter a church, I walk around and take the time to look at the windows and art that adorn it, even if it wasn’t decorated by Nincheri.” To that I say, Amen!

2026 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

Greensboro Is Your Oyster

And The Pyrle aims to cultivate Elm Street

By Billy Ingram

“I regarded home as a place I left behind in order to come back to it afterward.” – Ernest Hemingway

Game-changing.

Will that jaundiced misnomer ever cease being bandied about when depicting every precious pearl newly strung to downtown Greensboro’s asymmetrical necklace? Fifty years ago that meant widening sidewalks to create a mall-like experience; truly a game-changer in that it caused retailers to hightail it elsewhere.

Equally emblematic yet undeniably more effective are 21st-century sparklers lit with optimistic expectations for jumpstarting the heart of a city: LeBauer and Center City Parks, the Downtown Greenway pedestrian path, a $22-million baseball stadium, free shuttle-bus rides and Lewis Street’s impressive redevelopments. A new hotel here, a refurbished dry cleaners serving shoyu there — I delight in them all.

While downtown nightclubs light up late nights, there are scant advantages for nearby businesses. Tanger has been a boon, but its positioning at downtown’s outer edge results in attendees transacting predominantly with municipal parking decks. Sauntering southward on Elm reveals vacated storefronts with restaurants rarely slammed. I’ve witnessed first-hand downtown’s glacial evolution from a zip code to be avoided three decades ago into an uneven periphery, one that is populated with pulsating pockets of genuine excitement tucked in and around a central business district seemingly adrift, lacking a metaphorical pair of jeans, if you will, to stitch those pockets onto.

A seismic shift in that dynamic is all but assured as The Pyrle emerges from its makeshift shell later this month, a 1,000-person-capacity music venue and event space at 232 South Elm, just south of Crafted The Art of the Taco. Its mission? To cauterize that chasm currently preventing performers with audiences too zaftig for Ziggy’s from gigging here but lacking in fannies needed to pack Tanger’s 3,000 seats or top off the Coliseum’s 23,000-capacity arena.

The Pyrle (named for Pyrle Gibson in honor of her contributions to our local arts scene) is a total and consummate reimagining of a palatial, dearly-departed department store built almost a century ago for Montgomery Ward; a four-story monument to 20th-century merchandizing that was, for decades, a darkened abyss until Triad Stage stoked some semblance of life into its cavernous maw beginning in 1999 and lasting through 2023’s le scandale. Over the last year, the entire 35,000-square-foot interior was gutted then reanimated, arising not only as a rarified, state-of-the-art performance platform, but also encompassing staging areas for community events and even two unrelated office spaces.

Durant Bell is one of five active investors in this high-stakes venture. “I grew up in Greensboro, went away for school, lived in D.C. for about four years and then moved back about 20 years ago,” he says. In fact, all of The Pyrle’s principal players are longtime Gate City residents and/or boomerangs such as general manager Dominick Amendum, who attended Greensboro College then “moved away, had the first stage of my career before returning about six years ago. I jumped on board with these guys in March of 2024.” One keen interest all of these principals have in common? “We love music,” Bell insists. “One of the great connectors amongst us was finding ourselves going to a lot of shows outside of Greensboro.” And, they thought, why not bring those shows here?

Lacking a mid-plex like The Pyrle has resulted in indie, post-punk, R&B and EDM fans making weekend exoduses, sometimes hours long, just to see their favorite acts. The Pyrle partnered with The Knitting Factory, a well-established national talent broker. What that means is that Greensboro will become a logical stop for touring bands. “Coming from Richmond to Wilmington to Asheville, we can pick up a lot of these regional bands that are already on that pathway,” says Amendum. “So we got really excited about this opportunity to be a catalyst for Elm Street and for the city.”

Let’s face it, a vibrant live-music culture is one major reason Durham is booming, yet Greensboro, despite numerous well-intentioned pavings, remains perpetually tethered to the proverbial starting gate. “To have a healthy music ecosystem,” Bell claps back, “you need a continuum of venue sizes so that you’re attracting artists at all different [levels].” Initially, The Pyrle will mount around two shows a week, ramping up to a goal of about 150 shows a year. “Officially, we are a genre agnostic,” Amendum adds. “We’re going to try a lot of everything over these first couple of years.”

Those in the know can snag tickets to four free February shows (visit thepyrle.com/events). Then, after Americana singer-songwriter Anders Osborne closes out the month, early bookings continue to reflect that refreshingly eclectic POV — reggae royalty The Wailers, country crooner Ricky Skaggs and alt-rockers Silversun Pickups, for instance. Sprinkled throughout are North Carolina-rooted headliners such as Southern pop-rockers The Connells and the so-called “most underappreciated band on the face of the planet” Watchhouse. Plus, hop over to catch the tantalizing twang of Chatham Rabbits with Holler Choir opening.

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What impact will this have for the mother lode of unparalleled creative artists undergirding our scattershot music scene? Amendum’s answer is encouraging: “That’s a big thing on my radar right now, how we bring the community onto our stage. Whether it’s monthly showcases featuring two or three local bands or as openers for some of these national acts.”

VIP sections, cozy alcoves and aerie overhangs provide for a surprisingly intimate setting with no bad sight lines. “There’s not another venue like this in the Southeast,” says Bell, who even queried touring acts for what amenities they’d like, then implemented those suggestions. “When you look at the hospitality suite we have for artists, people’s minds are going to be blown. The Knitting Factory, who manage venues all over the country, were here last week and they were like, ‘No other venue has an LED screen this size.’ In five years, they will all have them, but we’re on the cutting edge.”

Planning to be open six days a week, The Pyrle’s polish is its cosmopolitan cocktail lounge at the entrance, lacquered in leather and wood grain. “We’re going to do a bar differently than your typical music venue,” Bell says. “People can go back out to the bar and enjoy basking in the afterglow of that awesome show they just saw. Maybe the band is feeling frisky and wants to come down from the green room and have a drink.” Ambient screens are tuned to the stage during performances, but on non-show nights, says Amendum, “I love the idea of an ’80s MTV music video night on Tuesdays or maybe Wednesday nights they’re playing some live show that was taped at Red Rock.”

Won’t be long before word gets around, up and down I-85 and 40, that Greensboro’s got game (for a change).

2026 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

This Girl Is On Fire

Kennedy Caughell brings heat to Hell’s

By Billy Ingram

“The road is there. It will always be there. You just have to decide when to take it.” ― Chris Humphrey

It’s becoming increasingly commonplace for leading actors in the Tanger Center’s Broadway Series productions to have significant local community connections. In November 2024, UNCG graduate D. Jerome infused heart and soul into The Wiz’s Tin Man and, earlier last year, Elon University alum Fergie Philippe proved roaringly romantic in Beauty and the Beast’s mane role.

One of Broadway’s brightest luminaries, Kennedy Caughell, 35, former Oklahoma farm gal who’s become another incendiary lit locally, alights into town next month in New York’s hottest property, Hell’s Kitchen. In its very first season, Hip-hop hitmaker Alicia Keys’ semi-biographical coming-of-age musical garnered an astonishing 13 Tony Award nominations and was a boffo box-office smash from day one.

Caughell’s portrayal of Jersey, emotionally embattled matriarch of the Keys-inspired character Ali’s family, is reaping rave reviews. In Chicago: “A powerful portrayal by Kennedy Caughell;” in Cleveland: “Caughell impresses again and again in big, emotionally impactful moments and with powerhouse vocal efforts;” in Pittsburgh: “The woman can belt! She crushes every musical number, especially ‘Pawn It All.’” You get the idea.

Her cruise across The Great White Way began, oddly enough, on Broadway. “My mom brought both me and my sister to New York,” Caughell recalls about her elementary school epiphany. “Annie was playing on Broadway at the time. Mom says I turned to her at intermission and said, ‘I could do that!’” Coincidence that her first professional acting job at 8-and-a-half years old was hamming it up in Annie? Starting in a supporting role, she soon took the lead. (This would kick off a recurring pattern.)

When consideration for college came, Caughell selected Elon University. “It was on the list of top 10 musical theater programs in the country,” she explains. “My mom and I visited to audition and I just fell in love with the place. It was so beautiful.” Situated between Greensboro and Burlington, Elon is known for exemplary acting, dancing and vocal training. “I feel like I really got a good ‘triple-threat’ training there. They encourage originality because that’s really what gets you hired as leads in the business, what makes you unique.”

Class of ’12 grad Caughell says, “I had a job before I even left college.” Discovered by Jillian Samini, she was cast as the jilted pregnant girlfriend Heather, one of the three female leads in the international Broadway tour of Billie Joe Armstrong’s and Michael Mayer’s American Idiot, which expands on the storyline delineated in the Green Day album of the same name. “I remember graduating, then, the next day, I was on a plane [to the United Kingdom] headed to the first day of rehearsal.” Her solo was a zippy, angst-free arrangement of “Dearly Beloved.” American Idiot’s Ireland/UK tour culminated after four months at London’s HMV Hammersmith Apollo, leading into the show’s second stateside run, which ended in the summer of 2013.

No rest for the wicked, you say? The next year, Caughell was swept into the twisted world of Wicked, broomsticking across the nation for two years as a member of the ensemble while understudying that wickedest of witches, Elphaba. “I would love to return to Wicked and play a full stint as Elphaba one day,” Caughell says.

In 2016, she made her Broadway debut in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 alongside two other Broadway neophytes, Denée Benton and Josh Groban, understudying two supporting characters that she eventually stepped into. Following the folding of that show, she pirouetted into Broadway’s Beautiful: The Carole King Musical in February 2018 as King’s childhood friend, Betty, while at the same time understudying three roles, including the titular star.

During rehearsals, Caughell became acquainted with King. “An example of yes, you can meet your heroes and they exceed your expectations,” she says of the Grammy Hall-of-Famer who wrote or co-wrote 118 hit songs. “She walks in and lights up a room and everyone just feels peaceful and joyful around her.” In 2019, she hit the road with Beautiful, occasionally called on to channel Carole King under the spotlight. Her fave number? “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” natch.

All About Eve aside, it’s exceedingly rare for understudies to emerge from the wings and assume the leading role for the run of a major show. “When they asked me to take over on the road, how could I say no?” Crooning Carole King’s compositions is an absolute joy for her. “Her style is very set and driven like a glockenspiel. It all sits in a really warm part of my voice.” Don’t you just love the way performers speak?

Broadway’s bright lights beckoned again in 2022 for Paradise Square, a star-crossed production that, despite an impressive 10 Tony nominations, resulted in a truncated time on the boards beset by backstage back-stabbery and a recorded but unreleased original cast soundtrack.

Which brings us to the present, where, in the role of Hell’s Kitchen’s Jersey, Caughell portrays an overly-protective single mother raising a street-level prodigy navigating life in a turbulent mid-1990s New York City. “She loves her daughter fiercely — she works two jobs so that she can give her a better life.” Caughell says of her character, who is overwhelmed by conflicts and consequences related to “what happens when love goes out of alignment and leans toward controlling. And what it means to be a mother and learn to let Ali grow up.”

From tech rehearsals through opening nights and beyond, writer/producer Alicia Keys was very much present in mounting both the Broadway and touring companies. “She had a big hand in casting each and every one of us,” Caughell points out. “It’s very evident how much heart and connection she feels to this show and it’s so wonderful to have somebody like her at the helm, just leading with grace and peace.” Keys is known to surreptitiously slip into seats along the tour route, even offering notes afterward, “but that’s a good thing, right? She’s really good at steering us in the right direction.”

Again succumbing to that siren call of the open road, Caughell says, “I’m missing a lot of family events with my niece and nephew right now. There’s a lot we sacrifice that people don’t realize.” Remaining centered and in peak form is a priority. “You’re kind of in an isolated bubble where everyone has to find their own pathway.” Of former Elon classmate and rising Broadway star Fergie Philippe, wheels up under similar circumstances, she says, “We text on a regular basis — he’s a wonderful human being.”

While Caughell loves exploring new cities, there’s the delight that comes from reengaging with familiar faces in faraway places. Edging closer to the Triad, she says, “I’m looking forward to seeing all of my professors and visiting the campus at Elon. It’s been years since I’ve had time to come back and visit, so I’m excited.”

Granted, it’s a hard knock life nightly for her tempest-tossed character in Hell’s Kitchen, but, for Kennedy Caughell herself, the sun’ll come out tomorrow… in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Greenville, Durham and, on February 24, in Greensboro prior to opening night at Tanger, where no doubt she’ll shine like the top of the Chrysler Building.

2026 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

WANDERING BILLY

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

2025 Department Wandering Billy