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Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Technology amps up anxiety of moving

Posted in Personal, tagged on May 30, 2020| 1 Comment »

Some people change residences frequently, not only renters but home buyers. A woman once told my mother she never lives in a house longer than three years “because then you have to clean it.”

Then there’s my wife, Jane, who hates moving. Early in our marriage she declared that the next people who moved her would be a local funeral home.

We are now in the middle of buying and selling a house for the third time in the 21 years we have been married.

When we moved to Richmond, Virginia, in 2001, the only thing about the house-hunting process that had changed since I first bought a house as a bachelor four years earlier was the advent of online listings.

When we moved to Lenoir in 2013, the one new wrinkle was the ability to digitally “sign” all the sales documents needed in Virginia while we were on a computer in Lenoir.

But now?

The process of buying and selling a house — each separately but especially both together — has been transformed into a nightmare of text messages, emails and automated phone calls, all of which seem to be added onto instead of replacing the regular calls and emails that previously went between a buyer/seller and the real estate agent.

The day our house went on the market, my phone “blew up.” I had heard other people use that phrase, but I had no firsthand experience. My phone had never done it before. But, boy howdy, now I have experience.

Each time someone wanted to schedule a showing, I received both a text and an email requesting confirmation.

If no one confirmed it quickly, I received a phone call asking about it.

Once the showing was confirmed, I received both a text and an email showing it had been confirmed.

When an agent rescheduled, the entire cycle repeated. If someone canceled, there was another round of texts and emails.

After each showing, we received texts and emails showing the “feedback” provided by the agent for the person who saw the house, which usually was an email mostly full of questions that had not been answered.

On the house-buying end, we both receive automated emails requesting various documents, and if a couple of days pass we get reminders that we have not provided particular documents.

Our agent uses a website that tracks all the tasks that must be completed by either her or us, and each time she writes in that a task has been completed we get emails telling us that she has updated the timeline. The timeline is a wonderful tool, and I applaud it, but it’s yet another series of notifications that trigger my phone to buzz or bong or hum.

All of this piles stress on top of the ordinary stresses of moving plus the added anxiety of a worldwide pandemic.

If Jane and I live to complete the move to High Point, I feel certain she will not declare this time that the next people who move her will be a funeral home.

Mine will be the body they will carry out because she will kill me if I ever want to move again.

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The looming question: What now?

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on May 8, 2020| 3 Comments »

With Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order at least somewhat eased as of Friday evening, I know what many of you in North Carolina, and those in other states similarly starting to “reopen,” are thinking: What are we supposed to do now?

The answer can be found within one of the lines of criticism directed at Cooper by his opponent in this fall’s election, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. After Cooper announced the limited loosening of restrictions on businesses, Forest issued a statement that said in part, “He does not believe that North Carolinians have enough self-control, restraint, or common sense to act responsibly in a world with COVID-19.”

No matter how you plan to vote this fall, if you want to know what you should do now with the limited freedom of movement that fits under Cooper’s Phase One guidelines, look to Forest’s statement: Show self-control, exercise restraint, display common sense, and act responsibly.

Upon reading that, those of you who interact with the general public regularly probably feel a sense of impending doom.

A different quote applies here. In the 1997 movie “Men In Black,” about the secret government agency that deals with extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, actor Will Smith’s character asks why officials don’t trust the public with the truth because “people are smart.”

Tommy Lee Jones’ character replies, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.”

That may be too cynical and overly broad, but if there were not a nugget of truth to it then no one would ever be crushed under a stampede of Walmart shoppers on Black Friday, political advertising would contain no falsehoods, and scammers would have to apply for welfare.

Ever since the stay-at-home order and social-distancing guidelines first were issued, there have been complaints about some businesses and people who were not complying. And they are correct, it’s not hard to find people ignoring all social distancing guidelines.

The number of positive tests for coronavirus continues to rise in part because some people do not take the threat or precautions seriously. Even if the governor had left his orders unchanged, those people’s behavior would not be affected — just the way that anti-littering laws don’t stop some people from throwing their McDonald’s wrappers and leftover fries out the window in front of you on the highway.

The best thing you can always do is be the best kind of person you know how to be, the kind of person your parents would be proud to see on television.

That doesn’t mean you have to wear a hazmat suit to the gas station.

It means having the sense to know that just because you feel fine doesn’t mean you haven’t been infected, so if you’re going someplace where you’ll probably be pretty close to people it would be a good idea to wear a mask of some kind to help reduce the risk to other people as well as their risk to you.

It means having the sense of history to realize that the last pandemic this extensive, the Spanish flu, lasted two years, not two months, so we will have to adapt our behavior for the long term, not revert to our old habits and go “back to normal.”

There’s another quote that applies. In “The Andy Griffith Show,” Sheriff Taylor scolds someone who is not displaying common sense, “Act like you got some smart.”

Show self-control, exercise restraint, display common sense, and act responsibly.

Or you can boil that down to something even simpler and easier to remember, something that I tell myself all the time — but don’t often enough heed — especially when it comes to interactions with other people:

Don’t be stupid.

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Coronavirus restores youthful perspective on time

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , on April 24, 2020| 11 Comments »

At long last, I found how to make time slow down.

But like the dog that finally caught the car it was chasing, I don’t know what to do with myself. Who needs all this slow-moving time? Take it back. You can have it.

Now I’m ready for time to speed back up again.

We all notice by our mid-30s that as we get older time accelerates. Each year goes by more quickly than the last.

By the time I turned 50, it seemed I barely was able to grow sick of mowing the lawn in the summer heat before frost hit, the leaves turned and I had to wear heavy coats again. Winters once seemed like a long, tedious parade of putting on and taking off heavy coats, but in recent years even the coldest weather has become almost tolerably brief because spring arrives so quickly. Almost. But spring departs barely after arriving, like a coworker who hates to be left out of a party but doesn’t like socializing.

Facebook serves up “memories” that feel recent but were posted a dozen years ago by a version of me that had mostly brown hair, which makes me think about how close I am to retirement age. Can the next dozen or so years really go even more quickly than the past dozen? It seems like a long way off, but back when I was 42, 54 seemed a long way off.

I thought it would go on like that endlessly, each year adding acceleration on top of the previous year’s speed like an ion engine building momentum in space until eventually I would whoosh effortlessly into the void, barely noticing as death arrives and passes quickly behind me.

But then came the coronavirus, and instead of speeding into a void it feels more like I have careened into a giant, moist sponge cake with thick, creamy icing. I’m embedded in it and can’t extract myself.

Last weekend on the radio a news reporter said it was the beginning of the third weekend since Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order took effect.

“What?!” I said. “That can’t be right.”

Two weeks? We had been cooped up mostly at home and locked out of many of our favorite businesses for a lot longer than that … hadn’t we? I checked the calendar.

Nope.

This is now the fourth weekend, not even 28 days yet.

But it feels like the fourth month.

Time has slowed to a crawl. My sense of the passage of time is now more like it was when I was 6. Inside my head, I’m whining, “But I haven’t been able to go out just to have a beer in FOREVEEEEEEERRRRRRR.”

I’ve seen memes on social media saying every day is like the movie “Groundhog Day.” We wake up and everything is the same, no matter what we do, because our options are now so limited.

I understand the frustrations of those protesting the stay-at-home restrictions.

But I also understand the limitations of the health care system to deal with a sudden influx of severely ill patients. There simply isn’t much room. Ask around. Fewer people than would fit in your living room would be a major crisis.

So when my inner 6-year-old whimpers, “How much longer is this going to taaaaaaaaaake?” my inner adult answers, “It takes how long it takes, now behave or I’ll pull this car over and GIVE you something to cry about!”

I’ll just have to take a beer out of the refrigerator, go sit in a corner upstairs, sulk and stare out the window, thinking about all the things I can’t do.

It feels like I’m grounded. We’re all grounded. It feels like it will never end.

My inner adult eyes the sulking 6-year-old in the rear view mirror.

“I know it feels like a long time,” the adult says. “I promise you we’ll go out when it’s over. Whatever you want.”

The 6-year-old rolls his eyes and half-heartedly answers, “Oh, OK.”

But to him the road ahead looks like a Kansas highway. It stretches on and on toward a distant vanishing point on the horizon.

My inner adult knows we are in a slow-motion race on that road. The prize is a healthy community, and it doesn’t go to the ones who get to the end first but to the ones who get the farthest without running anyone off the road. It’s harder than it sounds.

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What evil lurks in the hearts of peanuts?

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on January 24, 2020| Leave a Comment »

They say only the good die young.

I wonder, then, what sordid deeds Mr. Peanut must have committed in the nearly 104 years before his recent death.

Yes, if you haven’t seen the TV commercial, Mr. Peanut is dead.

He and two men were riding in the peanut-shaped Nutmobile – the Planters answer to Oscar Meyer’s wienermobile, I suppose – when it headed for a cliff. They jumped out just as it went over the edge, and they found themselves hanging like Wile E. Coyote from a branch over a deep canyon. As the branch began to break from their weight, Mr. Peanut let go, sacrificing himself and plunging to the canyon floor, where the wrecked Nutmobile lay.

Looking down, one of the two men said, “Maybe he’ll be all right.”

And then, just to eliminate all doubt, the Nutmobile exploded.

That commercial is a teaser for another commercial that is scheduled to run during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.

Officials at both Planters and VaynerMedia, which created the commercial, swear that the character is dead, so presumably Mr. Peanut will not emerge from the flaming wreckage as an intact but roasted peanut. The Super Bowl commercial reportedly will show his funeral.

Maybe viewers will be introduced to Mr. Peanut’s progeny at his funeral, or much of his extended family, and one or more of them will take up his mantle.

Actually that’s probably exactly what will happen. There is no chance in the world that Planters is going to just give up using such a well recognized symbol.

Perhaps VaynerMedia hopes to do with Mr. Peanut’s family something similar to what KFC has done with Colonel Sanders since that character was rebooted in 2015. Now there is not just one Colonel, not just one image based on a real, historical person, there is a different Colonel played by an entirely different actor for every product or deal KFC offers. There’s even a female Colonel (at least just the one so far), played by country singer Reba McEntire when promoting the introduction of “Smokey Mountain BBQ” chicken. (My favorite is the Extra Crispy Colonel, played by deeply tanned actor George Hamilton.) It’s endlessly adaptable.

So maybe now, instead of the one Mr. Peanut with his unchanging monocle and top hat, there will be a whole family of Peanut characters, each with his or her own appearance and personality suited to the various Planters products. And whenever Planters introduces a new one, they’ll just roll out a new member of the family.

I just hope that the depiction of the funeral includes some dark character in attendance who will tell us Mr. Peanut’s naughty secrets, maybe a “second” family from a tryst with Miss Cashew, petty thievery, major stock holdings in Nutella and JIF, or forbidden passions, such as a late-night habit of snacking on peanuts – cannibalism! What would be the worst Mr. Peanut could have done in 104 years?

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When not getting up is falling down

Posted in Personal, Writing, tagged on November 22, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Friday morning came.

I hate it when that happens.

I’m happy when the end of the work week is near, but by Friday I am tired of getting up in the dark for the fifth straight day. Sometimes my first thought when I wake is that it’s Saturday, I forgot to turn off the alarm, and I can stay in bed. Then the stark, terrible realization hits that, no, it’s really Friday, and I really need to get up.

This time, when my alarm went off I knew for certain it was Friday, and I grudgingly got up in the dark and went to the dresser to put on my exercise clothes.

My wife, still in bed, mumbled, “I’m going to sleep a little longer.”

I stared across the room at the bed for a moment.

Then I went back and climbed under the covers.

Her alarm then went off, and she turned it off and lay back down.

An hour later, I woke when she got out of bed.

I stayed put and pulled the covers up. She closed the bedroom door and went downstairs to get ready for work.

I couldn’t get back to sleep, though I tried for 20 minutes. When I finally got up, got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen, I started looking through the News-Topic when I saw a note my wife had left next to my seat the previous night explaining what she needed to do at work on Friday.

“I can’t sleep in,” the note said. “Don’t let me sleep in.”

As the saying goes: I had one job.

I am not usually the half of our marriage who is relied upon to keep to a schedule, but it’s horrible when the times arise that I am relied upon and fail.

To be fair, she left the note after I already was asleep Thursday night. She just assumed that, as usual, I would be up first.

And it worked out. She got up early enough on her own that she was not running around like a chicken with her head cut off trying to leave the house on time.

But it could have ended badly.

What if she hadn’t awakened on her own? The only thing that woke me was her getting out of bed. If she were relying on me, we might have slept until it was light out.

She might have been late, and when she’s rushing around because she’s late she tends to forget something – maybe just her earrings (I say “just,” but she feels half-dressed without her earrings), but sometimes she forgets her phone, or the key to her office door, or even her wallet.

Because of my job, on any given day I may or may not be home first in the evening, and most Saturdays I work at least part of the day, complicating plans for going to see movies or making day trips. We’re going to have a very short Thanksgiving holiday because of an unexpected staff vacancy requiring me to be back in Lenoir, just in case.

Anyone married to a journalist comes to expect the unexpected in this way. The hours are, to some extent, reliably unpredictable.

That makes it all the worse when the one thing I do with great regularity – wake at 5 a.m. to start the coffee, read the paper and watch “SportsCenter” – does not happen the one time that she is counting on it.

“I failed you,” I told her.

She laughed and kissed me.

I dodged the bullet this time. But there will be a next time. I know there will.

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Need a motto? Here are some for free

Posted in Personal, tagged , on November 1, 2019| Leave a Comment »


Business North Carolina magazine recently voted downtown Lenoir’s motto as the best in the state.

I had thought that “Together We Create” was a great motto the first time I read it, blending both the area’s focus on the arts and the city’s manufacturing legacy, so it is nice to see it win acknowledgement from the high-powered marketing and communications experts who did the judging for the magazine.

To be fair to most of the rest of the state, though, it seems that most places didn’t have a motto in the running. The magazine says “roughly 20” entries were received, and from those it selected the top five.

And it would seem that many of those that were sent in don’t exactly sing. The motto voted fifth-best was “Well-centered.” I can imagine the session that came up with that:

Group leader: “What does our town have to brag about?”

Member one: “Well, we’re kind of smack in the middle of everything.”

Member two: “The schools are OK. Well, my nephew isn’t, but I think that’s on him.”

Member three: “The meth use seems to be dropping.”

Leader: “Let’s go with the first.”

Maybe most of the towns around the state don’t have a motto. That could be on purpose. Adopting a motto can be a perilous thing. The chances are very good that the motto will come in for ridicule.

I remember nearly 20 years ago when I was living in Winston-Salem and that city adopted the motto “O! Winston-Salem: Now that’s living.” The city spent $65,000 for that, according to an article in the Winston-Salem Journal, but few people liked it, and it mostly faded away.

It didn’t help that around that time a doctor in the city made national news for a medical treatment he developed for women that turned out also to have a genital-stimulating side effect.

Most elected officials don’t want to spend taxpayer money to come up with a motto that everyone may hate anyway.

So in the spirit of the “infinite monkey theorem” – which says that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare – here are some free suggestions for county and municipal officials around the state to consider.

“You could do worse.”

“Our town appears on all quality maps.”

“What you see is what you get.”

“You may not like us now, but wait until you get 20 miles down the road.”

“If that’s your attitude then just keep driving.”

“Misery loves company.”

“At least as honest as the median town.”

“Most likely above average.”

“Better than you’ll remember.”

“Better than good enough.”

“When it’s time to settle, we’re the place.”

“Wake up and smell the coffee.”

“When your dreams fade, we’ll still be here.”

“Keeping up appearances.”

“Closer to paradise than you deserve.”

“Few regret staying.”

I’ll keep working on the list. They may be terrible, but at least no taxpayer money was spent to produce them.

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Man with big bus slept here

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on October 26, 2019| Leave a Comment »


A man who called the News-Topic on Friday didn’t dilly dally.

“You ought to send a reporter over,” he said without any preamble. “Ricky Skaggs stayed at the Comfort Inn last night and he’s still there. I just saw him.” Then he hung up.

Skaggs, the famous country and bluegrass musician, performed Thursday night at the J.E. Broyhill Civic Center, and after the show his tour bus headed up the highway to the hotel. Clearly, he preferred to spend the night in a stationary bed rather than on a bus.

No reporters were available, so I grabbed a camera and headed to the hotel. I thought I might get a photo of Skaggs and his band boarding their bus to leave.

When I got there, the bus was parked at one edge of the parking lot, clearly still in “night” mode – the bus’s sleeper compartment was still extended, and a roll-down shade covered all the windows at the front of the bus. There was no activity. It seemed unlikely anyone would be leaving soon. The deadline for checkout at the hotel was still two hours away.

I briefly contemplated hanging around to wait. It would be a nice shot to have.

But the more I thought about it, the more the idea made me feel like Mayor Pike on “The Andy Griffith Show,” who would lose his mind and all sense of proportion at the mere suggestion of a celebrity showing up in Mayberry.

Did I really want to stake out the Comfort Inn? After all, he probably would be dressed like anyone else in that situation: in casual, comfortable clothes, all set to spend the coming day on a bus.

And that’s what it comes down to. Skaggs is a famous person, but in all the ways that matter he’s a person like anyone else. Yes, it’s notable that he was staying here, and people would like to know – and now you do – but lurking outside hotels is what paparazzi do. Does anyone want a stranger shooting their photo first thing in the morning?

And I had another consideration. There’s a saying in football and other sports that is intended to discourage excessive celebrations over small accomplishments: Act like you’ve been there before. There must be a corollary for situations like this.

If there’s a celebrity in our midst, maybe we should act like we’ve seen a celebrity before. “Oh, hi, Ricky. How’d you sleep? How about some coffee?”

After all, why shouldn’t Ricky Skaggs stay the night in Lenoir after a concert? What’s the alternative? The hotels here are no different than their counterparts in the same chains in Hickory, and after a long, tiring performance would anyone really want to drive an extra 20 to 30 minutes when there’s a perfectly good hotel just 4 miles up the road?

And I’d rather that a famous person decided to stay here rather than felt an urgent desire to get as far away from Lenoir as possible just as soon as he could.

I can think of several reasons a person not only wouldn’t want to avoid Lenoir but might prefer staying the night here. For one, people here are friendlier than they are even just one county over. That’s been my experience, and I’ve heard it from many others. Also, nights here almost always are truly quiet. If what you want is sleep, you are better off trying it in a small town. Maybe one reason he stayed is we don’t have paparazzi here.

I had mostly made up my mind during my one drive around the parking lot. Driving back out onto Blowing Rock Boulevard, I only became more sure.

By the time I got back to my office, I had an answer ready if anyone else called about Ricky Skaggs staying the night.

Well of course he spent the night in Lenoir. Why wouldn’t he?

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New meaning to ‘all pumped up’

Posted in Personal, Writing, tagged on October 19, 2019| Leave a Comment »

A Canadian family rocketed across the internet this past week for something I would have thought only an American family would do.

They posted on Facebook the photos from a family photo session, all wearing … well I guess you have to say they were wearing biodegradable costumes.

They posed on hay bales, and among colorful fallen leaves under a tree, and with a rusty old tricycle.

These could be scenes from anyone’s family photo session – if every member of that family were mostly naked.

Not entirely naked. That actually would have been less remarkable. And I bet the photos would not have spread so far.

No, each member of the family – mother, father, elementary-school-age daughter, and infant child – wore a pumpkin. A real pumpkin.

I don’t use the word “wore” as a euphemism. Each one literally wore a pumpkin that had been hollowed out, with leg holes cut through it at the bottom. (Except for the infant, who was placed inside a pumpkin that had just an opening at the top.)

And that’s all any of them wore, so far as you can tell from the photos. Well, the baby had an orange blanket too, and with his head jutting confusedly from a giant hollow gourd, that photo was funny, as was what appeared to be a candid shot between poses of the young girl and the baby, with the young girl looking cranky.

The rest were varying grades of disturbing.

Particularly one photo of the father lying on his side on top of hay bales, seductively eyeing the camera, evoking the famous Joe Namath nude photo from “Playgirl.”

The mother’s hands were full during this photo session – in each hand she held a hollowed-out top of a small pumpkin, one clutched over each breast.

So many questions came to mind as I reviewed the photos. “Why?” was the least among them. For instance:

The pumpkin leg holes are clearly oversized, so did these people take off the pumpkins after each photo, move to the next place, put them back on and pose? Or did they grab their pumpkin-pants with both hands and waddle over?

Whichever way they did it, who helped the mother keep herself covered? She has only two hands, but alone in the family she requires three pumpkins for each shot.

Did they let the pumpkins dry out before wearing them?

Did they wear underwear?

If not, does pumpkin chafe?

Are they the only people who have worn these pumpkins, or are there more photos like this of other people who at least had the sense not to post them publicly to be shared around the world?

If anyone else wore these pumpkins, did they have to be sanitized before the next family arrived?

How much money would it take for me to get naked and wear a pumpkin?

What would my wife do if she came home and found me in the foyer wearing nothing but a pumpkin and smile?

Actually I ran that last one by my wife, with just a little hope that maybe some fun and games would be in our future.

Instead, she said, “All I can think about is the awful smell of pumpkin! I’m glad I didn’t see those pictures.”

I’m a little tempted to try to get answers to some of the other questions myself, but I’m afraid I’d smell like pumpkin for the rest of the day and my wife would make me sit outside, drawing fruit flies and frightening the neighbors.

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Young life unfolds in essays

Posted in Personal, tagged , on October 11, 2019| 3 Comments »

While clearing out emails about a week ago, most of them spam, an unexpected name popped up.

It was a young cousin – very young, a high school senior, making her about 37 years my junior. I had seen her in person perhaps 10 times since she was born, and other than exchanging “hi,” I’m not sure we ever spoke. She and the other cousins about her age popped into the room, awkwardly said their hellos and ran outside to play. I knew her primarily as a young girl, and now a young woman, with movie-star good looks in her mother’s photos on Facebook.

She emailed to ask me to review the drafts of her college application essays and make suggestions. I had done the same for her older brother a couple of years ago.

The experience was not quite like reading a young woman’s personal journal, but her conversational writing style felt almost like hearing her speak, and the essays in many ways fleshed out a picture of someone I would not have recognized as matching the Facebook photos.

This beautiful, dainty-looking girl turns out to love power tools and construction, things she was introduced to on church youth group mission trips.

“I happened to have a knack for the power tools!” she wrote. “I became proficient in using the table saw, circular saw, nail gun, and my personal favorite, the chop saw.”

I pictured her in goggles, heavy gloves and a hard hat, her blonde hair tied up tight in the back while she – petite and thin, perhaps weighing 100 pounds, perhaps not – wields a nail gun.

On one mission trip to Laredo, Texas, she chose to work outside on construction with the boys, the only girl not to choose indoor work teaching Vacation Bible School. Outdoors, in summer heat reaching over 100 degrees, her group nailed siding to a building and drilled a new well.

Now I added to my mental picture dirt streaks on her cheeks and sweat soaking her shirt and hair. Such a different look than I saw on Facebook last spring, when her mother showed off her prom dress.

Her construction work on mission trips got her interested in taking drafting classes in high school. She took all three that her school offered – the only girl in all three classes. Before long she realized she knew about as much about construction and drafting as the boys. She also experienced the sexism that women in a man’s world so easily still find.

Further running counter to all the girly images from Facebook, I learned she has been working as an intern at a veterinary hospital. But this is no pet-the-kitties gig.

“I have learned how to squeeze anal glands, conduct heartworm tests, analyze fecal samples, etc.,” she wrote, and now I may never be able to unsee the mental pictures that sentence brought to mind. “In addition to this, I have gotten to watch surgeries, including spays and neuters.”

Of course, what these essays really showed me was a series of snapshots of the blossoming of a soon-to-be-adult, full of complexities and experiences that defy your expectations. She’s not fully there yet, but she’s well on the way.

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I didn’t print the legend

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , , on July 16, 2019| 1 Comment »

The little town of Rhodhiss lost the businesses and industry that gave the town its name (from cotton mill owners John Rhodes and George Hiss). But it still has a legend that came out of them, the fate of some unusual fabric spun in a now-closed mill.

Four years ago, in July 2015, one of my reporters was doing a more or less routine story related to the legend, and I Googled part of her story and found something that indicated the legend was wrong. I had her look into it.

What she wound up writing made her feel bad because it made the News-Topic a villain in that town, but it didn’t put much of a dent in the legend, which the town is celebrating on this 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

One of the famous movie lines related to journalism, from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” is “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It’s a good line, but it’s not journalism. I don’t know whether many journalists would do what the newspaper editor in the movie did, reject running the real story told by U.S. Sen. Ransom Stoddard, and I don’t think it makes sense to ignore the facts that fly against Rhodhiss’ legend, as satisfying as the legend may feel.


And as the main source in the story said, this doesn’t mean there is nothing at all to the legend, only that some research is needed to find out exactly what was done with that fabric. Maybe, for instance, the bag under the lunar lander …

 

 

 

 

 

Read the story and decide yourself.

Rhodhiss’ point of pride called into question

By Lex Menz

RHODHISS – As you drive into Rhodhiss, the road signs show an astronaut in a space suit over the words “U.S. Moon Flags Woven Here.”

An astronaut also appears on the town seal.

It’s common knowledge throughout town that fabric used to make at least the first flag to go to the moon, if not more, came from Burlington Industrial Fabrics, which once had two factories in town but left in 1983.

A scrap of material sits folded up in a drawer at Town Hall that came, it is said, from the same batch as the moon flag material.

Town Manager Art Delaney never even considered that the story could be wrong until he recently called the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources in Raleigh about getting a historical marker for the town about the flag fabric having been made in Rhodhiss. The person he spoke to said that according to information on the Internet, his story was incorrect.

“She said they were pulled off a shelf at a post exchange in Washington, D.C., and just handed off,” Delaney said. “I nearly fell off my chair.”

Delaney wouldn’t be the only one falling off of a chair. Many people around town have personal stories about their connection to the flag fabric.

Carl Compton, who lives on the Caldwell County side of Rhodhiss, worked at Burlington Industrial Fabrics as a weaver right out of high school in 1961 and eventually was promoted to loom fixer. The company made special materials, including material for the Goodyear blimp and fabrics for NASA. Among the fabric made on the 64-inch looms was one that Compton said was extremely heat-resistant and involved Kevlar, a fabric best known for its use in bulletproof vests.

Shortly after the flag was unfurled on the moon in July 1969 by Apollo 11, the mission carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Compton said, Burlington Industrial’s employees were informed of their accomplishment.

“We didn’t know what we had done,” he said. “It really surprised us.”

Compton said the company’s announcement was a proud moment.

“We were just working. That was our job. We weren’t trying to crow about it. But, if I had known, I would have gotten some pictures,” Compton said.

But Rhodhiss’ flag story doesn’t fly, according to Anne Platoff, who wrote a research paper in the early 1990s, when she worked at the Johnson Space Center, about all six of the flags that were taken to the moon.

“It’s an interesting story, but it’s unverified,” Platoff said of Rhodhiss’ story.

Her research paper, “Where No Flag has Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon,” details considerations that went into the flags and flag poles and where they came from, and no part of that story includes Rhodhiss. Her sources included a press release from NASA in July 1969 stating that the flags were ordinary nylon flags ordered from a catalog.

“I went through the evidence there was at NASA, and the only documentation I found at NASA was that it was purchased from a government stock catalog,” Platoff said. “As a historian, I will only go with what facts I have. I have found absolutely no evidence that points to who made the flag on the moon. I found no indication that it was a specifically made flag.”

However, she said Rhodhiss may have been involved in the Apollo 11 mission, just not in the way residents think. Possibly the material woven there was used for the flag patches on the spacesuits or some part of the ship. But that would take some research to find out.

“Maybe this is one of those cross stories with some truth,” Platoff said.

Delaney said the state will send him an application for a historical marker, which requires a packet of information to back the town’s claim.

“We’re going to send it back and see if we could get something,” Delaney said.

Ansley Wegner, a research historian and the administrator of the Department of Cultural Responses’ historical marker program, said the decisions on applications for historical markers are made by a committee of 10 history professors. Stipulations include that the information supporting the marker request must have a secondary source, such as a historical non-fiction book.

“It’s hard to say what the committee is going to approve,” Wegner said. “It’s up to them to decide whether it’s state historical importance and not local historical importance.”

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