Tag: Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

A Storied Life

Peeking into the pages of 90-year-old Gerald Smith, self-proclaimed Cotton Mill Hillbilly

By Billy Ingram

“I never thought my cotton gin would change history.” – Eli Whitney

I have a shelf in my library devoted to books about growing up in and around the Gate City. That bookshelf just got a little more crowded with the recent addition of a brand new release, Cotton Mill Hillbilly, written by 90-year-old, first-time author Gerald A. Smith, a project he entered into reluctantly.

“My daughters were after me for about six months before I said I would do it,” Smith confesses. “They said, ‘We don’t know anything about your early life.’ They suggested very strongly that, if I valued my life and I wanted to keep eating, I should start writing.” It took him less than six months to complete 302 breezy pages. Raised in Siler City in the 1930s, population 1,775, not counting the livestock, Smith was “surprised it all came back to me once I started.”

Ever hear someone say, “We grew up poor but we didn’t know it?” Not in this telling. “My daddy was a drunk. You couldn’t depend on him for anything,” Smith explains. “We were really poor. We didn’t even have water in the house.” Well, that wasn’t entirely true during inclement weather. “When it rained we had buckets all over the floor. If you got up during the night you had to watch that you didn’t step in the buckets.”

As a youngster, his family had no means of transportation. So, one Saturday his older brother and father ventured out with $125 to buy an automobile. “And they came back on a Czechoslovakian made motorcycle,” Smith says. “That started my career on motorcycles.” Over his lifetime, “I’d have one right after the other and just keep upgrading,” eventually ending up with a top-of-the-line Triumph.

Siler City was the only world Gerald Smith knew as a young’un. “Greensboro was like going overseas, it was so far away,” he recalls. “My dream was to work at Hadley-Peoples, one of the biggest employers in town. I grew up in their mill houses for the first 16 years of my life.” In high school he took a mechanics position for Hadley-Peoples’ petticoat factory, where, some years later, he would meet his future wife, Esta. “It got so hot inside and they had no air conditioning. You could see the lint flying out the windows.” The labor was grueling, the benefits miniscule. “But you had to work somewhere,” says Smith, who earned around $40 a week at the mill. “My brother was at Western Electric in Greensboro and he was making $20 a week more than I was.”

At his sibling’s suggestion, in 1960, Smith went to work at Western Electric in the Pomona district, where “they manufactured top secret, future products. I remember a machine called a Hysteresis Loop. You put a piece of metal on the machine, it gives you a loop and you record the loop.” A couple of years later, an ad in the Greensboro Daily News for “technical minded people” at IBM caught his eye. After interviewing 125 people for one single position, IBM management told Smith they needed to meet his wife before committing.

“Esta was a housewife at the time. She’s beautiful and she knows all the etiquette and everything,” Smith recalls. “She was waiting at the door, greeted them, served refreshments and joined in the conversation. After an hour they got up and said, ‘We’ll make up our decision and let you know.’” As the two recruiters began exiting they stopped and enquired, ‘You still want the job, Gerald?’ I said, ‘More than ever.’ They said, ‘Well, you’re hired.’ They told me later they hired me because of Esta.” Settling in Greensboro — hard times a vanishing point in his motorbike’s rearview mirror — this country boy joined the ranks of the button-down corporate world. “I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t have any suits. I had to go in debt,” Smith says of his Mad Men-era uniform. Wherever he went, ranging out as far as Danville, Virginia, to repair IBM office products, “I had on my suit, crisp white shirt, the shoes had to be shined and you better look good.” Equipped with a proprietary set of tools tucked into a briefcase, employees at his destinations often mistook him for an executive or a doctor, so they routinely waved him through. “I’d go out to Cone Hospital and get right into the area where they kept the radium and isotopes and see all this stuff around and wonder whether this is gonna kill me or not.”

IBM instituted a robust suggestion program with a bonus of up to $50,000 for any employee who submitted a cost-cutting idea that was adopted by the company. “A lot of times we’d be running short of money and they’d present me with a suggestion award.” Smith won 21 of these bonuses before being promoted to field and distribution services manager, allowing him to retire in 1990 and devote more time to church activities.

Looking back, he wonders if maybe he had a bit too much time on his hands, like the time he discovered a baby bird lying on the ground after a windstorm. “This little bitty thing, he just cracked open the egg when he fell and the mother wasn’t there,” Smith says. “Different people said, ‘Feed him some egg yolk.’” Using an eyedropper, “I raised him from the egg to a bird old enough to fly.” He named the bird Nod (bonus points if you get the Andy Griffith Show reference, Wink, Wink). While strolling the neighborhood, Smith tied a string on one of the birdie’s legs and attached it to his baseball cap, using that hat’s bill as a launching pad in an effort to teach the fledgling to fly.

His walks with Nod got the neighbors talking, so much so that Channel 2 dispatched Arlo Lassen to document this Birdman of Hamilton Forest for the 6 p.m. news. Before Nod flew the coop for good, he made a final electrifying appearance: “One morning a telephone guy was coming out to do some work on the lines.” Smith was on the front porch waving to the repairman when Nod flew off a wire, landing on top of his head. “That repairman said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before!’”

In so short a space, there’s no way to do justice to the mischief and mayhem contained in this madcap memoir. I recommend you dive into Cotton Mill Hillbilly yourself, available where books are sold and on Amazon. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some savvy producer turns Smith’s story into a movie.

After 90 revolutions around the sun, despite his soulmate, Esta, passing away in 2010, Gerald Smith isn’t slowing down that much. “I got my driver’s license renewed a few weeks ago,” he tells me. “I thought maybe I’d have trouble taking the eye test. I really can’t see that good, so I spent a couple days memorizing eye charts.” Sure enough he passed and was even grandfathered in for a motorcycle license. He quips, “I might buy me a new Harley or something.” He’s joking, of course . . . at least I think he is. OH

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

Wandering Billy

On The Record

Any way you spin it, a documentary featuring Greensboro’s role in the Chitlin’ Circuit remains unfinished

By Billy Ingram

“Owning vinyl is like having a beautiful painting hanging in your living room. It’s something you can hold, pore over the lyrics and immerse yourself in the artwork.” – Steven Wilson

Just a short distance from the liquor store — er, the many exciting sights and attractions downtown Greensboro has to offer — is a set of concrete steps at 610 S. Spring Street, stubbornly clinging to relevance below a parking lot and a patch of grass destined for development.

In the ’50s and ’60s, this stairway to heavenly sounds led to what has been described as an inviting domicile fronted by two large maple trees, one of which still shades those steps. That’s where, during evenings and weekends off from his day job at the post office, longtime resident Edward Robbins began dabbling in music production and directing promotional television spots.

In the lo-fi world of the mid-’50s, this audiophile invested in the area’s only multitrack, high-fidelity Concertone stereophonic reel recorder when virtually every 45 and LP album in America was pressed in mono — and would be for years to come. Radio stations weren’t even equipped to play stereo discs in 1954 when Robbins Recording Studio was established in the back of his Spring Street home. The brand that touted “We Record Anything Worth Keeping” advertised not only futuristic technology, but also a grand piano and Hammond organ for backing tracks.

Robbins’ bread-and-butter was capturing church choir recitals and high school band performances, as well as recording local artists attempting to break into the music business. Just a few years later, 18-year-old Billy Crash Craddock laid down his first single, “Smacky-Mouth,” at Robbins’ for Greensboro’s Sky Castle label. Months later, the rockabilly crooner signed with Columbia Records. Also recorded there, the million-selling 45, “Radar Blues” by Coleman Wilson, released in 1960 on King Records.

A decade ago, Doug Klesch’s film project, Gate City Soul, got underway documenting the vibrant East Greensboro music scene with an emphasis on the Chitlin’ Circuit era. “I started realizing that there was this layer of stars and people that we hadn’t heard about,” Klesch tells me over coffee at the new Common Grounds downtown. “Nobody really seemed to have put it all together before.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, Robbins Recording Studio was only one of perhaps half a dozen or more recording studios and small-time record labels operating at any one time in Greensboro. “You go in, you pay your 40 bucks and you could record whatever you want,” Klesch says. Around 1960, Walt Copeland began recording and mastering out of his modest home at 4106 Peterson Avenue, relocating in 1964 to the WWll-era Overseas Replacement Depot district before becoming Crescent-City Sound Studios around 1969, located primarily at 1060 Gatewood Avenue.

“Robbins and Copeland were sort of the pioneers around here,” according to Klesch. “Crescent-City Sound, from what I’m told, was state of the art for that time, built on a floating floor. It wasn’t really as mom-and-pop as I would’ve imagined it to be in a market like Greensboro. These guys had a pretty nice little thing going.”

Greensboro R&B sensation and Carolina Beach Music Awards Hall-of-Famer Roy Roberts is one of the central characters in Klesch’s documentary. “Roberts is still alive and performing in his 80s,” he reports. “Bobby Williams — I think he’s still around — he had a band, Soul Central, that was playing a lot. George Bishop died shortly after I interviewed him in 2014.” In the 60s, Bishop corralled a bunch of A&T students working towards a music degree to form The Mighty Majors, who not only gigged around the East Greensboro scene and beyond, but also provided backup for big name touring acts. In the 1970s, Bishop owned a nightclub called The Command Post and later a record store, Mr. Entertainer, on Phillips Avenue.

Owned and engineered by David Lee Perkins, Tornado Records, located at 1712 Farrell Avenue, was one of the more prolific mid-1960s labels here, distributing primarily country and western, gospel, and bluegrass 45s by artists such as the South Mountain Boys, Dewey Ritter & the Panhandle Boys and The Caravans from Chicago. Although the label’s motto was “Another Tornado Hit,” their platters never really charted. Still, a handful have gained cult followings, like “Sensational New Discovery” by The Nomads, a psychedelic/garage rock combo out of Mt. Airy who released their second single, “Thoughts of a Madman,” through Tornado.

Walter Grady, a local impresario and independent music producer, launched several record labels throughout the 1970s, specializing in funk, soul and gospel recordings under the names Linco, Cobra, Graytom, Grayslak and Witch’s Brew. Produced by Slack Johnson, Electric Express recorded “It’s The Real Thing — Pt. I” at Crescent-City Sound for Linco. That instrumental track was quickly picked up by Atlantic Records’ subsidiary Cotillion for national and overseas distribution and spent four weeks on Billboard’s Top 100, peaking at No. 81 in August of 1971. “It was probably the biggest hit that came out of here as far as anything that went national. I want to say it was No. 13 or 14 on the Billboard R&B national chart,” Klesch says. He adds that the 1963 song, “Mockingbird, by Greensboro’s Inez and Charlie Fox, was, “probably the biggest national hit that wasn’t recorded here.” That tune was famously covered by Carly Simon and James Taylor 10 years later, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard pop singles chart.

Doug Klesch’s fascinating documentary remains incomplete but largely finished. Around 45 minutes of Gate City Soul can be found in three parts on YouTube. It’s the only comprehensive history of East Greensboro clubs and performers ever attempted, paused until someone can jump in to navigate the murky music rights legal maze. “I knew this from the beginning, but it became a reality the further I got into it,” Klesch says. “A lot of these recordings were bought up by companies whose business model is to sue anybody who samples them.”

Coincidentally, my buddy Jeremy Parker operates a recording studio out of his home where he lays down everything from punk to pop. It happens to be positioned just about a hundred feet from the steps that once led to Robbins Recording Studio, lo those many decades ago. A reminder that every generation has a potential to forge their own golden age.

In Passing . . .

I still haven’t fully come to grips with Natija Sierra Salem’s recent passing from complications due to a car accident that had occurred months earlier. Only 23 years old, tentatively blossoming into womanhood, she was one of those rare individuals who’d run up with a warm embrace whenever we bumped into each other, always thrilled to see me.

She was a tender ingénue with an arid sense of humor, eyes lit brightly, barely concealing a shadowy undertow. I say it often — and it’s true — the good die young, which speaks volumes as to why I’m still upright. There’ll never be another you, Salem. On that, everyone warmed by your smile can agree. I suppose one day life will begin to make sense, but it won’t be this day. OH

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

2023 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

A Musical Visionary

Tuning into Tyler Millard

By Billy Ingram

“Those who wish to sing always find a song.” — Author Unknown

There are few truly revelatory moments in life. Covering the nascent punk/post-punk music scene in East Los Angeles from 1980–83, witnessing teenage bands and young musicians like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Social Distortion, Minutemen, Fishbone and Perry Farrell thrashing through their earliest gigs was one of those moments for me. This week brought another revelation: discovering the music of Tyler Millard.

Singer/songwriter Tyler Millard didn’t pick up a guitar until he was 21. Admittedly, mostly by necessity when life threw him a curveball. And yet, in little over a decade, he’s produced some of the finest original compositions this region has seen since Rhiannon Giddens ascended into the multiple Grammy-winning heavens.

Hard to believe? Check out Tyler’s latest single dropping this month on Spotify, “Gold and Green,” a dreamy ballad lyrically reminiscent of Conor Oberst or David Bazan, sans their concussive bleakness. Those crooners’ caterwauling stands in stark contrast to Tyler, whose haunting harmony reverberates into the mind’s sacred soil reserved for your all-time favorites, as if his soothing assuredness has always existed inside your ears. It’s the fourth single from an album that will be released later this year.

On a recent Saturday night at One Thirteen Brewhouse + Rooftop Bar, I caught a performance by The Ghosts of Liberty, a tight three-piece band Tyler formed with his wife, Emma, joining him on vocals and father Richard Millard on keyboard. For these types of gigs, the combo mixes original tunes with twists on classics such as “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Tennessee Whiskey.” Elevated by Emma’s classically trained, velveteen voice and stunningly pristine vocal styling, their romantic, anthemic composition, “Sundown to Sunrise,” has racked up close to half-a-million listens on Spotify.

Tyler might actually have an advantage over other singer/songwriters, sonically at least, because he’s sightless — a slightly more accurate description than blind. He can still detect bright sources of light, but little else.

“I’d always had bad vision. It just got a little bit worse every year,” Tyler explains. Majoring in mathematics at UNCW, he was 21 when “driving was starting to get scary for me already.” Forfeiting his driver’s license, he was ultimately diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa or RP for short. “Honestly, at the time, it was a little bit of a relief because I knew I shouldn’t be driving anymore.”

Finishing his degree and faced with an inability to compete in the sporting events he excelled in, Tyler picked up a guitar, meticulously teaching himself to play. “I wasn’t talented naturally, out of the box. It just never even occurred to me that music would be a part of my life.”

Pretty much every successful creative person I’ve ever encountered has found themselves at a crossroad leading a wholly unanticipated but gratifying future. “As I’ve moved through life, I’ve seen other people cope with mourning their expectations,” Tyler says. “I now recognize that’s kind of what I was going through at the time. You think your life’s going to be one way, then realize everything’s going to be very different.” Feeling fortunate in a way, he adds, “It wasn’t like I had some sort of an accident and lost my vision. I had time to kind of ease into the water.”

As luck would have it, college campuses are a hotbed of wannabe guitar heroes. “So there were tons of people to learn chords from,” Tyler recalls. He admits to being obsessed with mastering the instrument, saying “I think you kind of have to. There’s such a barrier of entry with a guitar. It literally hurts your fingers getting the guitar to become so familiar that it feels like part of your body.”

After an unsettling attempt at teaching high school, Tyler returned to UNCW for grad school in order to teach at the community college level. It was there that he got serious about writing music. “By the time those two years were up, my fate was sealed,” he recalls. “I’d played too much guitar and couldn’t go back. So I moved home to Oak Ridge where my dad lives.”

After earning his teaching certification, he switched gears and instead pulled together his first band. “I was still living at home, so I wasn’t concerned with money as much,” he tells me. The Tyler Millard Band found receptive audiences first in Wilmington, “where I got to see my old friends from college. And we played in Greensboro a bunch when Buckhead [at Plaza Shopping Center] was open.” In 2014, the group released an album, Carolina Blues, which harkens back to Carolina-inspired, shit-kickin’ Southern rock of the ’70s.

In 2018, Tyler’s proposal to his wife, Emma, came in the form of an exquisitely tender refrain he composed then serenaded her with. Together they recorded the song, entitled “Prologue,” with Doug Davis of The Plaids producing, credited to Em & Ty. A poignant, poetic melody sure to dampen dry eyes, “Prologue” is genuinely worthy of becoming a standard performed during every matrimonial party, as commonplace as “Wedding Song (There Is Love).”

By then, Tyler had abandoned the bar band concept for a more practical approach to making a living with music. You might say he did the math. “My dad and I play the wineries around here,” he says. “The economics of it are that the patrons are older and the owners are older, so everybody’s got more money.”

Occasionally joined by Emma, their first set is made up half of covers, half originals. “It takes a little bit of warming up just to get our voices sounding good and we also want to stay sharp on our own material,” Tyler says. “The second two sets are all bangers. We like to end really strong.”

Tyler sings while fingering an electric acoustic Fender Telecaster. Switching off on vocals, Emma strums her own acoustic six-string, forming the nucleus of The Ghosts of Liberty. “We put out three songs and did the whole Nashville thing — production, writing and everything,” recalls Tyler. For several days they hunkered down in Music City, collaborating with professional song stylists “who literally write 10 songs a week sometimes. We would sit in a room and they’d be like, ‘What do you wanna write about?’ Or, ‘Do you have any pieces you’ve been working on, a chunk of a song or anything?’ And we’d take it from there.”

No doubt, Tyler Millard and The Ghosts of Liberty will fast become yet another facet into what is evolving into a recognizable 21st century “Greensboro Sound” exemplified by Laura Jane Vincent, Josh Watson, Emily Stewart, Caleb Caudle, Tom Troyer and so many others. Although those musicians primarily root around in their respective and respectable country folk backyards, Tyler’s solo work is more rock-oriented.

“Another blind friend of mine from London taught me how to mix,” Tyler says. “Right now I’m laying down backing tracks, some drums and bass for us to play along with for bigger shows.” He tells me Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” is one of the tunes the band plans to cover “just because it’s kind of cool to turn it into a rock-and-roll and not a pop song.”

Down the road from his dad, Tyler and Emma currently reside in Oak Ridge with their 18-month old daughter, Clara, and Emmett, the dog. “She’s the best,” the proud father says of their baby girl. “All of a sudden she’ll be hugging my leg and I’ll have no warning that was gonna happen, you know? And that makes your day.” OH

For concert dates, go to tylermillard.com.

Billy Ingram’s first book (mostly) about Greensboro, Hamburger², is available as a free PDF at: tvparty.com/1-hamburger.html.

2023 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

As Seen on TV

Greensboro native Shannon Cochran returns from screen to stage

By Billy Ingram

“Many roads lead to Rome, it doesn’t matter which one you take, as long as you mean to get there and you keep walking.” — Author Unknown

Recently, I caught up with a former Page High School classmate, Shannon Cochran, who has appeared on an impressive number of the comedy and drama series you’ve likely watched over the last 30 years: NCIS, Fringe, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Law & Order, Modern Family . . . the list goes on and on. She emasculated George Costanza (“What’s wrong with you?!?”) in the seminal Seinfeld episode, “The Parking Space.” On the big screen, she was Senator Tal’aura in Star Trek: Nemesis; and best known, perhaps, for invoking nightmares as Anna Morgan’s sinister spirit in the horror classic, The Ring.

However, theater is Shannon’s true calling, primarily but not exclusively in Los Angeles and Chicago. In fact, she has been nominated no less than a dozen times for the Windy City’s prestigious Joseph Jefferson Equity Award for acting excellence, winning twice. This talented Greensboro gal has also brought home Obie and Theatre World Awards for a role she originated in the psycho-thriller, Bug, at London’s esteemed Gate Theatre.

Shannon made her original TV debut on my weekly, summer of ’75 Public Access comedy half-hour comedy show that boasted a budget of 23.5 cents. Can I spot talent or what?

Shannon contracted the acting virus — no vaccine anticipated — at Page in Louis Hrabovsky and Frank Holder’s whimsical (I can say it ’cause I saw it) 1975 production of West Side Story. “I was Anita,” Shannon recalls of her transcendent performance. “Funnily enough, for a skinny, 5-foot-10 Irish girl, I played Anita four times in my career before it became completely inappropriate for me to play a Puerto Rican.” Page’s music teacher, Sam Doyle, was the show’s choral director. “He was a huge influence on me,” Shannon recalls. “Fortunately I’ve been able to tell him that.”

As a teenager, this statuesque ingenue blitzed the stage in productions mounted by Youth Theater, and Barbara Britton and Carol Lindsay’s Livestock Players Musical Theatre, which was situated during the summer in a sprawling cattle barn on Burlington Road where, perhaps hours earlier, the spotlight shone more on cud than scenery chewers. “I did that for several years in high school,” Shannon says. “Those people introduced me to theater and were my first teachers.”

After a stint at Wake Forest University, then graduating Summa Cum Laude from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Shannon barnstormed the boards up and down the East Coast. “When the rights for A Chorus Line were released nationally, I came to Chicago to audition,” she says. At age 24, she landed that role, and then another immediately after. “I just fell in love with Chicago. Sometimes you land in a city and you know it’s the right place to be. I started working and never stopped.”

In the late-1980s, she began making three-month-long excursions into Los Angeles for pilot season before returning to the Windy City. She did that for about five years, then, as demand for TV spots increased, moved to Los Angeles around 1995.

Distinct differences exist performing for the stage as opposed to television and movies, where you arrive on set, character established. “I love the rehearsal period where you’re stumbling around, trying to figure things out,” says Shannon. Also missing for her is that visceral audience reaction theater affords. “In TV and film there’s lots of sitting around and waiting. At times it just seems more technical than anything else, but the money is obscene compared to what you make onstage.”

In Los Angeles, an actor can endlessly guest-star on TV shows, never get typecast, make piles of money, and still be available for theater gigs. “That’s kind of what happened,” Shannon says. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the greatest thing.’ I did probably 50 or 60 commercials in my 20s and 30s.”

In The Ring, no one stroked a mane more menacingly than Shannon, depicting a malevolent matriarch who comforts a vulnerable child by bagging her head before chucking her into the well. “I had a great, great time because I got to wear waist-length hair extensions for a month,” she says. “It was thicker than a horse’s tail. People stopped and stared at me wherever I went.”

On television, you might recognize her as Pam’s raven-haired mom on The Office. “I got so much feedback from that,” Shannon tells me. “They decided to do another storyline with Pam’s mom, but I was on the road so Linda Purl replaced me.”

Shannon was particularly impressed working alongside Patrick Stewart, who directed the Star Trek: Next Generation episode for which she was cast. On day one, “He gathered all the actors together to talk about the scenes, like they were [individual] acting scenes. And I thought, ‘Somebody pinch me!’” That’s highly unusual on a television production, but, “People that come from the theater have a kind of humility because they did the same thing we all did, going into a barn and putting on shows.”

She made a guest appearance at her first Star Trek convention last summer: “I got to be a Klingon on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I’ve never felt so powerful in my life. And I met my husband on the set.” She was seen on two episodes of that series, but “had never been to a convention. The people were so great and they also wanted a picture from The Office or from Seinfeld, my first Hollywood job.”

Portraying Barbara Fordham in the touring company of Tracy Letts’ Tony Award-winning melodrama, August: Osage County, led to brawling under the lights with Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons. “She’s known for being irascible,” Shannon confesses of her choleric costar. “A great actress who did a very, very believable job, but she was not pleasant to tour with and not nice to most of the cast. So we all kind of rallied around each other. A wonderful show to be a part of but I cannot bring myself to compliment Estelle Parsons’ personality.”

Shannon’s dream role? “The one I’m playing now, which I also got to play seven years ago, Regina in The Little Foxes, one of the great roles of the theater. It’s a mature actress’s dream. A Little Night Music is probably my favorite musical, but Regina is my favorite role.” This may surprise you but the theater isn’t all curtain calls and stage door Johnnies. The night before we spoke, Shannon broke a finger onstage, requiring emergency surgery.

Her undoubtedly proud mother resides in Greensboro. While she visits every two or three months, Shannon Cochran is not likely to return to the Gate City to live. “I’m sure I could fall back in love with Greensboro. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to bigger city environments. San Francisco [where for almost 2 years she demolished audiences in Harry Potter and The Cursed Child], Los Angeles, Chicago, I’ll probably always live adjacent to one of those cities.”

So, no more shows between cattle auctions? OH

Billy Ingram’s new book about Greensboro, EYE on GSO, is available wherever books are sold or pulped. Shannon Cochran’s hauntingly beautiful rendition of “Send in the Clowns” from a Writer’s Theatre performance of A Little Night Music can be found on YouTube.

2023 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

Grab Your Popcorn

A locally produced WWII film hits the big screen

By Billy Ingram

“Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath.” — Oscar Levant

Our fair city has been a hotbed of independent filmmaking over the last quarter century or so. Recently, perhaps inevitably, a number of locally produced motion pictures have been attracting worldwide audiences. With the wide release of Condor’s Nest in January, one cadre of Greensboro-based filmmakers, Lost Galleon Films, has burst onto the Hollywood landscape in a big way with a rollicking, star-studded revenge flick set in 1950s South America focused around a search for Nazi war criminals.

While writer/director Phil Blattenberger grew up hither and yon, he’s considered Greensboro home for more than two decades now. “So yeah, I’m a local filmmaker if you wanna call it that, kind of by default,” he tells me. “I grew up on all the ’80s pastiche.” His favorite films as a youngster were those blockbuster, so-called popcorn flicks that didn’t take themselves too seriously. “Obviously all the classic Indiana Jones and Back to the Future movies.”

In Blattenberger’s latest motion picture, Condor’s Nest, a German Colonel played by Arnold Vosloo (Imhotep in The Mummy) sadistically executes an American bomber crew during WWII. Ten years later, the commander of that doomed mission travels to South America to exact revenge and, in the process, uncovers a sinister plot to ignite a Fourth Reich to finish what Hitler had only just begun.

It’s a fact that thousands of high ranking Nazis fled Germany after the fall of the Third Reich, establishing new lives and new identities in South America. It’s been convincingly posited that Hitler and Eva Braun lived out their lives in Argentina.

“It’s a really rich narrative that’s not been touched on, surprisingly,” Blattenberger says of what he proudly calls his own popcorn flick. “The type of film that your older brother brought you to when you were 13 and not supposed to see R-rated movies, and you sat in the theater with a bag of popcorn and just watched a bunch of Nazis get their asses kicked. Nazi ass-kicking movies do extremely well globally and have a grand appeal.”

Condor’s Nest is a motion picture shot on a grand scale, including constructing an 85-foot-long, 80-year-old historic aircraft. It serves as a major set piece for the opening scenes, which take place alongside a little farmhouse in Eastern France. “We built a full scale crashed B-17 bomber down to the centimeter in terms of engineering,” Blattenberger notes. “Museums donated original pieces from B-17s to really build this thing out.”

Making a motion picture of this caliber means there are thousands of moving parts and, if any one of them doesn’t look right, the whole thing falls apart. “We were amazed the first time actually looking at scenes through the monitor on the day we were shooting,” Blattenberger says. “All right, smoke’s pouring out the engines — these things look like real engines. We have car chases and explosions, some really high production value elements that are so easy to fall flat if you don’t have the crew that can put it together right. In fact, those elements became some of the strongest points in the film.”

Name actors invariably help to sell films, giving it more commercial cache globally. “Obviously Nazis are bad,” Blattenberger says, chuckling. “It’s been done so many times. What you don’t want to do is just get the stereotypical Nazi with an evil laugh. We wanted to find somebody with gravitas who was going to bring a bit of nuance to the role, in the sense that his character was internally justifying his own horrible actions, actually making him the good guy in his own head. And we knocked it out with Arnold Vosloo who went toe-to-toe as the villain in Blood Diamond up against Leonardo DiCaprio.”

Michael Ironside appears as a Russian agent. He’s been in dozens of movies like Starship Troopers and Total Recall, and was featured in Top Gun. “We pulled in Twilight star Jackson Rathbone to play a really seedy character,” Blattenberger says. “He shows up about halfway through the movie and turns into one of the big third-act villains.” Cast as Heinrich Himmler is James Urbaniak (Robert Crumb in American Splendor). “He had never spoken a word of German in his life,” Blattenberger says of Urbaniak’s performance. “He had to learn his entire role in German, doesn’t speak a word of English in the entire movie. We cast Academy Award nominee Bruce Davison (Longtime Companion). He did his whole scene in German.”

Key setups with these actors were filmed in and around the Julian Price House, a Tudor-revival estate that looks as if it could exist anywhere in the world, most improbably in Greensboro. “That’s actually the Condor’s Nest,” Blattenberger notes. “The titular location for this film that’s supposed to be set in the mountains of Bolivia.”

Lost star Jorge Garcia portrays a turncoat bartender in Buenos Aires spying for both the Russians and Germans. The basement of Havana Phil’s Cigar Company, for some four decades known as Cellar Anton’s, one of the city’s most revered dining rooms, served as his bar. “We shot our big wide establishing shots in South America,” Blattenberger explains, “selling the idea that you’re in another continent, so we could jump in the movie to the interior of a bar that’s on a different continent. Greensboro was a great location for that.”

“The real guy to talk about is Jacob Keohane,” Blattenberger says of his lead actor. “He’s been active on the East Coast theater circuit for years. He had a major role in Halloween Kills that came out last year. The guy’s absolutely brilliant.”

This locally produced picture proves there’s no need to lower expectations just because a film isn’t made in Hollywood. No less than Paramount Pictures picked up the distribution rights for a dozen or so major cities including New York and Los Angeles, and the movie is available on streaming platforms as you read this.

I can tell you first hand, there is no other experience in life comparable to working on a movie set. The writer/director agrees: “Running around with a crew of 30 or 40, there’s a mania and an energy to it, a coordinated chaos. It’s addictive. It’s something that you latch onto and, man, you just wanna keep making movies, you know?”

As for Phil Blattenberger and Lost Galleon Films’ next project, “We’re officially in pre-production on Without Consequence, a crime thriller set in the American West in the early 1960s, shooting in New Mexico this October or November. We’ll pull a few familiar faces from Condor’s Nest on it and there will probably be a scene or two shot in Greensboro.” OH

In another of life’s moments reminding us just how old we are, Billy Ingram actually worked on the posters and trailers for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Back to the Future 2 and 3.

2023 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

12 Cent Dreams

Remembering a local legend in ink

By Billy Ingram

“Comic books helped me to define myself and my world in a way that made both far less frightening. I honestly cannot imagine how I would have navigated my way through childhood without them.” — Bradford W. Wright

Wright’s not wrong. As a young comic book collector, one of my fave artists was Murphy Anderson. His fluid brushwork bestowed an air of sophistication few artists of that genre possessed. I was surprised to learn, years later, that Anderson was born and raised in Greensboro before moving to New York to work for DC Comics.

Murphy C. Anderson Jr. recognized early on the transformative power that words commingling with pictures could have on the imagination. As a youngster in the 1930s, he’d spend hours lying on the living room floor of his North Spring Street home poring over the comic pages of local papers and, on Sundays, the New York Journal-American, which allowed him to follow the adventures of The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and his favorite strip, the scientifically forward-looking Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Amy Hitchcock, a former classmate, says, “At Central Junior High there were two boys that sat together all the time and they drew in their notebooks all the time. My impression of Murphy was that he was withdrawn, quiet and always did his own thing, but he was pleasant.” Later, Anderson and Greensboro newspaper legend Irwin Smallwood would become co-editors of Greensboro Senior (now Grimsley) High School’s newspaper.

A college dropout facing certain military service in 1944, Anderson borrowed $100 from his skeptical father to make the rounds of New York City’s funny book publishers. Unknowingly, he was marching into what has become known as the Golden Age of Comics, so christened because sales were so astronomical, upwards of 6 million copies per title.

Anderson landed a gig illustrating for Planet Comics, whose main selling point seemed to be the undulating breasts belonging to whichever curvaceous blond was being snatched up by salivating bug-eyed monsters that month. He continued slinging ink for Fiction House while serving two years in the Navy, stationed in Chicago, where he met his soon-to-be wife, Helen. Completing his military stint in 1946, he happened upon a notice from the National Newspaper Service in search of an artist for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Anderson took over daily art chores in 1947. “I grew up on Buck, it was a dream come true,” he related decades later.

Anderson left Buck Rogers in 1949 just as the golden age of comics was drawing to a close. He and his bride made their way to Greensboro, where, during the day, he served as office manager for his father’s fledgling business, the Blue Bird Cab Company.

Before long, Anderson was once again canvassing the concrete jungle. Julius Schwartz, editor for National Periodical Publications’ (as DC Comics was known in 1951) new line of science fiction comics, recognized Anderson’s work as compositionally superior to and more finely rendered than many of the company’s slickest artists. Schwartz met with him and sent him home with a script to illustrate.

Schwartz allowed Anderson, now with children and not ready to give up his Carolina roots, to mail his contributions in from Greensboro, an unheard of arrangement. Still trafficking for Blue Bird Cab, Anderson spent his nights conjuring up compelling covers populated with pointy-eared giants capturing fighter jets in butterfly nets, radioscopic weirdos from other dimensions invading and terrifying the tourists, and genetically superior gorillas confounding the laws of man and nature. Stories were then written around his phantasmagorical scenarios.

The family relocated to New York in 1960 in order for Anderson to work full-time for DC, a company undergoing an unexpected resurgence. On a whim four years earlier, editor Julius Schwartz had re-imagined one of the brand’s dead-as-a-doornail superheroes from the 1940s, The Flash. With this act, the Silver Age of Comics was born. Anderson’s meticulous flourishes defined DC Comics’ house style of the ’60s and early ’70s — so much that Schwartz preferred to have him inking others’ pencilled art, most notably Carmine Infantino (Adam Strange, Batman) and Gil Kane (The Atom, Green Lantern).

Meanwhile, years of poorly drawn short stories with Batman, Robin, Batwoman and Ace the Bathound confronting bulbous-bodied aliens and overcoming silly transformations (“Batman Becomes Batbaby!”) led to sales so dismal that cancellation of the entire Batman line was all but certain. Schwartz was yanked off the sci-fi comics in 1964 and given six months to save the bat-franchise. The result was a monthly onslaught of playfully gripping covers sketched by Infantino, the best of which were inked by Anderson, re-introducing The Joker, Riddler, Catwoman and Batgirl to a new generation. By 1966, business was booming when the Batman TV show sent DC’s sales into hyperdrive.

When Schwartz rebooted Superman in 1970, Anderson was teamed with Curt Swan. So meshed were their styles that the duo took to crediting their art as “Swanderson.” Then, in 1972, the Greensboro native’s dynamic portrayal of Wonder Woman graced the first issue of Ms., becoming one of the most striking and culturally significant magazine covers of that decade.

In a twist not unlike those found in the comics, it was Anderson’s one time schoolmate Amy Hitchcock’s son, John, who organized Greensboro’s first major comic convention in 1983, featuring Murphy Anderson as a guest of honor. “Murphy was here in 1985 when Jack Kirby was here,” John Hitchcock (owner of Parts Unknown: The Comic Book Store) says, a significant moment since the only controversy in Anderson’s career came when he was asked to redraw Kirby’s Superman faces to more closely conform to the DC style. “[Anderson and Kirby] were in the kitchen of my apartment when Murphy went up and apologized to Jack. He was always embarrassed that he had to change his artwork because he had so much respect for Kirby. Jack went out of his way to thank him and say, ‘Murphy, that’s OK. That’s the way business was back then. I have no ill will,’ and they shook hands. That shows you what a great guy Murphy was — it bothered him all those years.”

Murphy C. Anderson Jr., universally respected as both draftsman and gentleman, passed away in 2015 at the age of 89. He left behind his wife of 67 years, Helen, two daughters, a son, grandkids and an indelible impression on millions of thrill-seeking comic book lovers everywhere. OH

Billy Ingram still has comic books he purchased from a spinner rack located next to the back entrance of Woolworth’s downtown.

2023 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

Bett-ing on a Bright Future

A young Broadway star shines his humble light

By Billy [Eye] Ingram

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts” — Jaques from Shakespeare’s As You Like It

I’m having lunch at one of my fave holes-in-the-wall, Bernie’s Bar-B-Que, with former Mrs. North Carolina and one-time cheerleader/choreographer for the Carolina Panthers Dana Caulder Zimmer Bett and her son Brody. Brody is a veteran of two of the most successful Broadway touring shows in recent years and is currently performing in network television and movie productions. Brody, who already has a couple thousand Instagram followers, sang the National Anthem at Bank of America Stadium to 50,000 cheering fans in August of 2021 when the Panthers squared off against the Buffalo Bills. This might not be considered all that remarkable until you factor in that Brody Bett turns 13 years old this month.

Mentioned in previous columns, Bernie’s Bar-B-Que has the tastiest Lexington style barbecue and the most sumptuously sweet hushpuppies in town. Also on the menu is one of Dana’s guilty pleasures, Salisbury steak smothered in gravy, which she is thoroughly enjoying. While diving into our meals we talk about Brody’s astonishing journey, one that began with a startling discovery.

“We bought him a keyboard and I literally could hear him at 4 and 5 years old picking out notes on the piano,” Dana Bett tells me. “One night I heard him playing ‘Superstition’ by Stevie Wonder. I thought it was an accident, that he just happened to hit those notes by chance. And I said, ‘Can you do that again?’ And he did it again. He had just heard the song one time.”

When Brody turned 6 years old, he began performing in Community Theatre of Greensboro productions, developing his musical “vocal-abulary” portraying, among other characters, the Grand Duke in Cinderella Kids. One of the theater mothers told Dana that Brody might be a perfect candidate for a New York casting call being held for an upcoming Broadway touring company of Finding Neverland.

Based on the Academy Award winning motion picture, Finding Neverland explores the relationship between playwright J.M. Barrie and the family that inspired his creation, Peter Pan. “My mom had literally no idea [how casting works],” Brody tells me. “She just said, ‘OK, I’m gonna send a song to the guy.’”

Until the last decade or so, if you wanted to be in the business of show, you needed to reside in New York for theater or Los Angeles for television and movies. Thanks to readily available video technology, auditions today are recorded at home by the performer, then uploaded to a server.

Dana submitted her son’s demo, which impressed the casting agent. He responded with one of the tunes and some sides (scenes) from the Broadway musical for Brody to record and submit. After a few days, they were told the youngster had made it to the finals. “The other boys at the finals had to travel to New York two and three times to get that far,” Dana says, still amazed. “And I thought, this was just meant to be.”

Two weeks after flying to New York for an in-person audition, at the ripe old age of 9 years old in 2018, Brody Bett landed the juvenile lead, Jack/Michael, in Finding Neverland’s multimillion dollar Broadway touring company. He smiles broadly recalling, “My mom literally burst into tears.”

Following a few weeks of rehearsal in the Big Apple, mother and son were crossing the country with Brody singing, dancing and being hoisted into the air on wires in front of audiences numbering into the thousands each night.

Any time a performer is under a certain age, the role is doubled up, meaning two actors are cast in the same part. “Sometimes I was on standby and the other guy would be performing because they have to watch our hours.” Dana, who was home-schooling Brody, was careful to comply with the child-labor laws of each state they were in. In New York and California, for instance, her home-schooling was supervised by tutors that were traveling with the troupe.

“We had only one ‘layoff’ in the entire tour,” Brody says, “which means we only got to go home for one week in the entire 10 months.” As the tour came to an end, having touched down in 102 cities, Brody scored an agent in New York. After repeated runs between Greensboro and Manhattan, Brody found himself vying for the role of Charlie Bucket in another Broadway touring production, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

There were 500 potential Charlies at that first audition. “We were like, whoa!” Dana says. “But he’s so easygoing. He’s not competitive. He’ll do an audition and never ask again. It doesn’t matter how big the job is.”

After barreling through three rounds of tryouts, producers narrowed the field down to five young actors. “You knew they were picking two because they always have a backup,” Brody says about being one of those five. “That’s when it got really real.”

And so it was that Dana found herself crisscrossing the nation with Brody portraying the titular character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Embarking on a six-month run in January of 2020, the tour was abruptly cut short when COVID hit and the duo returned to their home in New Irving Park. Without missing a beat, Brody’s agent began putting him up for parts in animated TV shows as well as other voice-over projects, a notoriously difficult field to break into.

Because of the need for confidentiality in the entertainment industry, more often than not, Dana and Brody generally have no idea when and where one of his creations might be utilized. Dana recalls how early on he was asked to record a little jingle. “And it was the weirdest song.” A year later, an unexpected residual check arrived. “We looked at it and it said: Hunters. I looked it up — that’s an Al Pacino show on Amazon Prime.”

He’s auditioned for movies in which Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler and Kevin James were cast. Currently he’s the singing voice of Gil on Nick Jr.’s Bubble Guppies, Ron on Nickelodeon’s Anna & Friends, and Pando on Netflix’s Spirit Rangers. “He’s Rocky on PAW Patrol,” Dana says. “Not on the show but in the Nintendo video games. We have no idea where this stuff ends up. We just happened to see a post where this little boy was talking about how awesome Rocky was on this PAW Patrol: Grand Prix game. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh Brody, that’s your voice!’”

When producers needed a vocal match for the iconic cartoon aardvark Arthur for a special project, they turned to Brody. A bit more challenging, he was asked to vocalize Kakeru on an already completed Japanese Anime series, Kotaro Lives Alone, for Netflix. “That was a dubbing job,” Brody notes, “which is totally different. I literally had to mimic the mouths because they animated the words in Japanese.”

Besides acting and singing, Brody loves making music with whatever is at hand. (He owns over 45 instruments.) Adept at almost anything he picks up, he mainly plays piano, guitar, drums and ukulele. Pipe organ is his absolute favorite.

To accommodate future gigs, Dana and her husband are constructing a fully-equipped recording studio on their property. “When Disney says, ‘OK, you’re doing voiceover work this day from 9 until 4,’ they’ve got a lot of people involved.” Dana recalls a moment of panic before one of those morning assignments: “We get up and we hear a leaf blower next door — oh my gosh what are we gonna do? We can’t just say, ‘Hey Disney, somebody’s doing yard work or whatever.’” She convinced the workers to hold off on their motorized mayhem. “Having the studio is going be helpful. That’s why we’re double walling and doing heavy insulation.”

In a diner like Bernie’s Bar-B-Que, which has existed in its present location since 1950, any hint of arrogance would be glaringly obvious. Although I anticipated some degree of pretension, I detect absolutely no conceit from Brody, just the opposite. There’s not even a hint of the arrogance one would expect from someone less centered like, for instance, myself at that age. My ego would have dwarfed the sun!

It’s tempting to imagine Dana being a Mama Rose type. Instead, she treads that finely undefined line between protective mama bear and proud parent. “He can do whatever he wants,” she says of Brody’s future. “Actually, he said a couple of years ago that he might like to be a dentist. I was like, ‘That’d be a great career to have. That’s fine with me. Find something that makes you happy.’”

For the time being, “I’d like to keep doing what I’m doing right now,” Brody tells me. “Just keep spreading joy, making music and bringing smiles to people’s faces.” As for returning to the road, he auditioned for a show just the other day but, “I mean, I liked doing it at first, but then again I just love being home.” OH

Brody Bett can be found online at: youtube.com/channel/UCUD8r2MdPWlq7exRsHH25yg and on Instagram: @brodybett

Billy Ingram is a former Hollywood movie poster artist and the author of six books, including his latest, EYE on GSO, a collection of stories (mostly about Greensboro) available where books are sold or burnt.

2023 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

The Island of Misfired Toys

Naughty or nice, you didn’t want to wake up to these gifts on Christmas Day!

By Billy [Eye] Ingram

One of our family Christmas traditions was all of us showing off those predictably lousy presents from various older relatives, probably the most revolting being a used baby changing pad my sister-in-law was horrified to unwrap. On the other hand, there were gifts that young and old alike eagerly anticipated Santa would deliver. Careful what you wish for: More than a few turned out to be potentially catastrophic, lethal even.

Gilbert Chemistry Experiment Lab

Gilbert Chemistry Experiment Lab No. 12006. Photograph Courtesy of Science History Institute

I thought the Gilbert Chemistry Experiment Lab my older cousin received in 1965 was the coolest thing ever, most likely purchased from Charlie Plummer at Friendly Center’s Fleet-Plummer Hardware where they always stocked a gloriously lavish toy selection over the holidays. Even the illustrated metal box was boss looking, depicting two hearty boys, younger and older brothers one surmises, exploring a better life through chemistry. Inside that compact, clasped canister was a row of test tubes, scales and two walls of minute glass jars filled with powdery substances with exotic names like calcium oxide, cobalt chloride and sodium ferrocyanide, a less toxic cyanide — all together a dizzying array of potions and poisons. There was even sodium carbonate, basically Alka-Seltzer, for mother after she realizes the potential chemical weaponry her offspring might be scheming to unleash upon the neighborhood. Come to think about it, has anyone seen little Fluffy lately? That noxious apparatus was lots safer and saner than its predecessor. In 1950, parents would have ventured out to Harry and Faye Rimsky’s Tiny Town Toyland on South Elm to locate A.C. Gilbert Company’s U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, aka “The Most Dangerous Toy in History.” A mad scientist’s dream come true, it came with a Geiger counter; a spinthariscope for observing decaying atoms; a Cloud Chamber assembly; alpha, beta and gamma sources of radiation in addition to four vials of actual radioactive uranium ore; plus an instruction booklet where Mandrake the Magician explains how science works. All the contaminates and gaseous emissions a glowing boy needs to make the family home go poof!

Jarts

Sold at Sears on Eugene Street in the late-1960s, Jarts was a set of 1½ foot tall, aerodynamic, metal, pointy darts, the kind you would throw in a bar, only many, many times larger. When I was about 12 years old, the jolly one brought us a box of these lawn darts. Did we javelin those heavy, spiked missiles at each other threateningly or use them as weapons against neighborhood kids? Of course we did. Judge if you must, but dodging lawn darts made us more resilient to life’s slings and arrows.

Clackers

One of the most dangerous devices ever to hit the toy market, Clackers were made right here in Greensboro in a small factory on Smyres Place in the early-1970s. An immediate sensation, the inevitable risk of injury was just one of the reasons they flew off the shelves. Clackers consisted of two dense, colorful acrylic balls connected by a small rope on a stick, allowing kids to “clack” them together by moving their hand up and down vigorously and with precision. The idea was to slap those globes together above and below your hand, making the loudest possible noise. When you eventually missed, those rock-hard balls rocketed into your wrist and knuckles, resulting in bruised and occasionally cracked bones. Ironically, the better you were at this rhythmic hand jive, the more dangerous it became. Wear and tear on those synthetic globes caused clackers to crack, sending shards flying in all directions, leading to a marring little Christmas for more than a few youngsters.

1972 Ford Pinto

Can you imagine anything more exciting than a brand new car in the driveway, wrapped in a pretty red bow, making it a December to Remember? Not if the year was 1972 and the automobile was a Ford Pinto, known for bursting into flames whenever they were rear ended. Twenty-seven drivers were roasted alive and numerous others seriously injured any time the gas tank was struck. Pintos built in Canada had an inexpensive part attached to the gas tank that prevented this very problem. It’s a mystery why the automaker didn’t similarly upgrade its American-built models. A friend of our family owned a ’72 Pinto, purchased from Bob Dunn Ford on Murrow Boulevard, that was plowed into from behind but he somehow spared a fiery demise. He happened to be pulling out of the gas station after a fill-up so there was no oxygen in the tank to allow for combustion.

Mr. Coffee Machine

Also in 1972, TV commercials starring Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio introduced America to the Mr. Coffee Machine, a tremendous leap forward for brewing java at home. An electronic marvel of glass and plastic replaced the simplistic percolators folks had used since the days of old. But with progress came growing pains, and by growing pains we’re talking family homes going up in flames. In the 1970s and ’80s, there were major Mr. Coffee recalls due to the devices being a fire hazard. As late as a decade ago, Mr. Coffee was again recalled for spewing hot grounds and scalding water on users. Even today, coffeemakers in general are considered one of the most dangerous kitchen appliances. Yet another reason Starbucks is a multibillion dollar business.

Easy-Bake Oven

Thanks to Warren’s Toyland at Lawndale Shopping Center in 1968, our neighbor, Toot King, discovered an Easy-Bake Oven under the tree, 5 years after the toy debuted. Given the technology of the time, it seemed a pretty safe operation. Two 100-watt bulbs cooked itty-bitty cakes. The biggest drawback was that the itty-bitty mixes cost as much as the real thing. In 2006, a new Easy-Bake Oven design was introduced that made January headlines with kids getting their itty-bitty fingers and hands trapped inside the baking chamber, leading to dozens of second and third degree burns.

Aqua Dots

In 2007, Toys “R” Us on High Point Road sold Aqua Dots, candy-colored beads that could be arranged in any pattern and, when wet, fused together to create a necklace or a bracelet. They were swallowable and laced with gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), aka the “date rape drug.” One shudders to think how many parents reading this now are thinking, “You mean I could be sedating my overexcited brats on Christmas Day and they took that of the market?!?”

A gift you do want this season (no joke): As I write this, local singer-songwriter Caleb Caudle is No. 1 on the Alternative Country Specialty Music chart with his album, Forsythia, that he describes as “somewhere where gospel, folk, country, blues, all that stuff lives together.” Rolling Stone raves about Forsythia saying, “There’s something very comforting about listening to it, but not in a cheap or obvious way. It’s more hard-won.” It’s an exquisitely produced album that resonates. I didn’t grow up listening to music like this, yet Caudle’s melodies sound like home. Available on the usual music platforms such as Spotify and Amazon. OH

Billy Ingram is O.G. — Original Greensboro. His latest book, EYE on GSO, is a collection of stories (mostly) about Greensboro originally published in O.Henry and other publications. A great gift idea, available where books are sold and on Amazon.

2022 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

Saved by the Belles

The women who saved Blandwood from becoming history

By Billy [Eye] Ingram

“Home wasn’t built in a day.”
— Jane Sherwood Ace

On a morning in 1966, bulldozers were poised to raze a bloated antediluvian structure on a prime block of downtown Greensboro real estate. The building, leaking and collapsing, sat perched on a hill in one of the last residential neighborhoods in the shadow of the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Building. For almost 70 years, this compound served as a lonely outpost for the Keeley Institute, a live-in rehabilitation center where drunks and drug addicts were promised “That New Freedom” after weeks of four-times-daily injections of bichloride of gold, laced with alcohol, strychnine, apomorphine and willow bark.

With downtown bursting at the seams, an expansion of businesses to the west was only natural. Kroger had its eye on the lot under the Keeley Institute, so a crew was dispatched to clear the land. And they would have, had socialites Anita Schenck and her mother, Mary Lyon Leak Caine, not stood between the heavy machinery and that sacred place steeped in ceremony, where the Civil War came to an end in North Carolina, a once stately manor they knew as Blandwood.

Fellow Garden Club member Virginia Zenke, who with her husband, Henry, was inducted into the International Interior Design Association’s Hall of Fame in 2002, had a nagging suspicion Blandwood Mansion’s architect had to have been someone of prominence. As a trend-setting decorator of the ’60s, she had an acute eye for style. Perhaps if a pedigree could be proven, there might be more of an interest in saving the estate. Peering from black-framed round glasses, pencil protruding from her thick dark hair, she pored through books and reference materials attempting to solve the mystery of who designed Blandwood.

That moment of Zen(ke) came in 1966, when Virginia discovered the architect was none other than Alexander Jackson Davis, America’s leading designer of country houses, known locally for our gentrified State Capitol. He also left his mark on UNC Chapel Hill, where the playfully austere facades of Old East and Old West dormitories and the four-columned roman splendor of the Playmakers Theatre are nothing less than iconic. All of his creations were lavished in the Italianate and Greek Revival genres he was famous for. His designs for Blandwood are preserved in no less than the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This was a home like no other in America. Reminiscent of a Tuscan villa, it featured two large parlors with garden-view bay windows on either side of an imposing three-story tower made inviting by three enormous archways that circumambulate the front porch. Completed in 1846, it’s the oldest building on an original foundation in the city, one of the first towered Italianate villas in the nation and the earliest surviving example.

With Blandwood’s important historical lineage confirmed, the ladies who lunched became the ladies who launched. Bulldozer stoppin’ grandma Mary Lyon Leak Caine called to order the first meeting of the Greensboro Preservation Society on October 31, 1966, to foster, “a respect and reverence for the past by preserving landmarks in Greensboro including streets, public buildings, churches, houses, parks, trees or any existing examples of culturally, historical and architectural value to the city, state and nation.” No budget, only a zeal to identify cultural touchstones that needed safeguarding, they quickly came to the realization, however, that if Blandwood was to be saved, they’d have to do it themselves.

First efforts were strictly DIY. Green Thumb Garden Club members came wielding pruning shears. Along with Greensboro Jaycees and Thomas Tree Service, they tidied up the one block area, unearthing varieties of gingko, Japanese lacquer, linden, box elder, white pines, oak, maple and mulberry trees. On March 13, 1967, the state’s First Lady, Mrs. Dan K. Moore, was given a tour of the dilapidated Blandwood before heading to a luncheon a block away at the home of Otto Zenke, who partnered with his brother Henry to found an interior-decorating firm that gained an international reputation.

Modern architect Edward Lowenstein, known for the Greensboro Public Library (1964) and YMCA (1971) buildings as well as homes in Irving Park and Starmount, was enlisted to oversee one of the first modern-age adapted reuses of an American historic property.

Seemingly forgotten on the part of the public was any knowledge of the historical significance attached to this former residence of Governor John Motley Morehead. The only governor of the state to hail from Greensboro proper, Morehead was an early champion of the railroad at a crucial time in its development. He also championed a public education system that included the disabled, women and slaves, a concept many considered heretical.

“The Father of Modern North Carolina” had one eye focused firmly on the future. In 1854, as first president of the North Carolina Railroad, he undertook an aggressive expansion of what he called “the tree of life,” connecting every corner of the state to the wider world. As a result, a delicate “City of Flowers” morphed into the “Gate City,” defined by a robust rail system that, not coincidentally, utilized Greensboro as its hub.

As talk of secession grew louder in 1861, Morehead was a Peace Convention delegate, hoping to avoid war with the north. After hostilities broke out, though, he did serve in the Confederate Congress and entertained officers as they marched headstrong to Richmond, then again when they returned in retreat. At war’s end, Greensboro served as a decommissioning depot with Union officials occupying all of the nicest homes. Morehead’s daughter, Letitia Morehead Walker, referred to Blandwood’s 1865 houseguest, Major General Jacob Dolson Cox, as, “a most courteous and elegant man” who, nonetheless, forced her to witness what for her was a macabre sight, a triumphant parade of occupying forces.

After John Motley Morehead passed away in 1866, his daughter, Emma Victoria, and her husband, General Julius A. Gray, became lord and lady of the manor. He had been the commander-in-chief of North Carolina’s repelling forces during the War of 1812. When the British invaders heard his regiment was in their path, they decided to come to terms rather than face this fearsome foe. Gray initiated the successful effort to preserve the site of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, saved Greensboro College and founded the Greater Greensboro Chamber of Commerce. Gray died in 1891, his service held at West Market Methodist Church. Five years later Blandwood was deeded to the Keeley Institute.

Guilford College bought the property in 1965 along with Arnold Schiffman, who took over Schiffman’s Jewelers from his father, Simon. They put forth a proposal to save the estate. Former mayor Robert Frazier had appealed to legislators for years, but this shady lady was not an obvious candidate for a long term relationship, her very uniqueness a turn-off. No white column décolletage or proper Southern brickwork? Besides, wasn’t that the joint shooting up addicts with weird serums?

On April 17, 1968, HUD allocated over $100,000 to put the ladies in white gloves and pearls within sight of their financial goal, and the rest followed quickly. A week later, after Boy Scouts cleaned and pruned the grounds, the Greensboro Woman’s Club hosted a public open house at Blandwood.

Joyous sounds of celebration have been ringing from the south lawn since 1970, when Blandwood Carriage House became a location of distinction for weddings and receptions, a state-of-the-art facility that has as its backdrop an ancient beauty where past and present coexist harmoniously. Live music, dancing, children’s laughter, business leaders congregating, a bride and groom’s exhilarating first hours as a married couple? They are all a living testament to those preservation pioneers who drew a line in the sands of time, to battles won against prevailing winds on a field of devastating losses. OH

An excerpt from a story in his first book of (mostly) Greensboro history, Hamburger², Billy Ingram’s new book about the Gate City is entitled EYE on GSO available where books are sold or burned.

2022 Department Wandering Billy

Wandering Billy

48 Hour Film Project

Lights, Camera, Panic!

By Billy [Eye] Ingram

“We’re a species that rushes through everything, then complains that time flies.” — Steve Maraboli

I recall reading an article by Jeri Rowe back in 2004 about The 48 Hour Film Project being held in Greensboro, the first city in North Carolina to host this worldwide competition that originated in Washington, D.C., three years earlier. The idea is that individuals or teams create a short motion picture, from concept to completion, in just 48 hours, with all teams starting at the same time — 7:30 on a Friday night, in our case.

First, some ground rules: The movie must run between four and seven minutes, contain a certain prop (this year was keys) and a line of dialogue (“Don’t lie to me”), plus a particular character (in this instance, a musician named Duane or Diana Fortran). Details may vary, but these are the general parameters, whether you’re making a 48-hour film in Greensboro, Rome, Lisbon or any of the more than 120 cities participating around the globe.

Over the last 18 years, this hambone has been lucky enough to mug for the silver screen maybe 10 times in various 48 Hour Film Project productions. This was my fourth for Evan Wade’s Stumblemuse Productions. Wade swears this year will be his final frenzy of filmmaking, which is hard to fathom given the enthusiasm he brings to the event. He’s served in one position or another almost every season, the last dozen as producer. “As I went through my 30s, feeling unsatisfied and looking for a new pursuit, I found a certain satisfaction and glee during the 48 Hour Film Fest,” Wade says. “The weekends are always highlights of any particular year, a great networking opportunity that keeps art alive in my heart, helps bolster my confidence as a leader while developing friendships that will last a lifetime.”

At the Friday evening kickoff this year, each team blindly selected two genres to pick from: science-fiction, comedy, western, film noir . . . you get the idea. Given a choice between drama or family film, we settled on the latter. It was decided I would play the lead — just my luck that I banged up my face a couple of nights earlier while avoiding tripping over the cat. Basically, I fought the wall and the wall won.

The next morning, cast and crew got together for the first time. Already there was turmoil. When an Italian restaurant was needed at the last minute, I suggested we decamp to New York Pizza on Tate Street where bar manager Gavin Holden was receptive to the idea of us filming there. This Slip ’N Slide approach to filmmaking is inherently exciting, developing characters and scenarios on the fly, in the moment. Fortunately, Evan Wade had assembled a team of top professionals with years of experience behind them. Director Ken Randall and Matt Amick, director of photography, engaged in guerrilla filmmaking at its finest. Under their pilotage everything looked and sounded pro all the way, moving deftly, quickly through scenes. After just six hours on Saturday afternoon we were done.

For my role — a washed up, one-hit wonder trying to convince his son to go into the music business — I was lucky to be partnered with a very talented actor, Chris Pierce. Our back-and-forth was more like stage acting, which generally requires eye contact, whereas with film it’s often advantageous to cheat a bit to the right or left of your co-star, showing more of your face to the camera. Together we ad libbed our way around the written word, with a lot of our funnier, off-the-cuff scenes ending up on the digital cutting room floor.

My character was a raspy, bitter, high-strung contrarian — basically a walking heart attack. Spoiler alert for a six-minute film: He has one. In the bar at NYP no less. Talk about an ignominious demise.

In my experience with making 48-hour films, anything that can go wrong will. Flexibility is essential to getting things done on schedule. When a location fell through, I suggested we regroup at my place nearby, a four-plex built in 1930 that has been a background for dozens of motion picture and TV productions.

Not so bad, comparatively. Another team lost a crucial cast member due to a car accident on Saturday, necessitating reshooting everything next day. And when the organizers say you have only 48 hours, they mean it. One group found out the hard way after turning in their film 30 seconds late.

Our own nail-biter came during post-production. “Everything seemed fine until the audio started getting out of sync,” Wade tells me, referring to the crunch Sunday evening, deadline rapidly approaching. “We laughed nervously. [Editor] Louis Bekoe frowns and we make the fix. It happens again. Ten minutes later, we watch the ‘final cut’ again, now all flustered, when [production assistant] Lisa Steele notices the required line is missing . . . at which point, Louis’ main computer crashes.” With only 13 minutes to spare, they somehow beat the clock.

Screenings of all 28 submissions took place at the Carolina Theatre the very next weekend. This year was the first for our new city producer Mike Dickens. For a position with loads of responsibility and no pay, he did a bang-up job of coordinating everything. When he’s not wrangling cinematic cats, Dickens serves as webmaster/digital operations specialist at UNCG.

A total of 15 films were selected for the “Best Of” night held a week later where awards were handed out in 13 categories. Our contribution, Chitarra’s Requiem, won Best Special Effects, while Best Film of 2022 went to those that are fools, which will go on to represent the Gate City at Filmapalooza 2023 with the possibility of a screening at the Festival de Cannes next year.

My personal favs this year were BUSK by Good Gravy Productions; Biggest Fan by Hot Batteries; Friends and Funerals, a comedy written, directed and edited by My Big Fat Fabulous Life star and dapper dresser Lennie Alehat; Reconsidered Ghosting by 13th Pygmy Productions; and Kawabunga Productions’ Grandpa’s House.

Best in show was, in my opinion, the genuinely hilarious National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day by Colonel Popcorn Productions (awarded Audience Favorite: Group A). Turns out there really is a National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day, celebrated the day after this clever amuse-bouche wrapped. (Some of these films are viewable on YouTube.)

Acting is mostly something to dabble in today, but I started out my professional career in my teens as a working actor. From 2003–2006, I was writing and appearing on programs for VH1 and Bravo, while, a few years ago, I was almost cast as a murderous sex pervert on Death Row for a cable network series. Very disappointed at not snagging that part — I was far creepier and infinitely more nauseating than the guy they cast!

While Evan Wade won’t be at the helm next summer, hopefully some other team will recruit this scenery chewer for another wild weekend of frenetic filmmaking. OH

Billy Ingram produced, directed and starred in his first television production at 11-years old, broadcast on The Kiddie Scene with Mr. Green in 1968 with a script lifted out of Cracked magazine. Find him on IMDb and watch his 2022 48 Hour Film Project at YouTube.com/watch?v=UNJFZRT8Y8E.

2022 Department Wandering Billy