tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4857301896774461102024-02-21T05:08:36.473-05:00Rocky Knob BlogJack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.comBlogger187125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-76988842839030604892019-10-21T15:30:00.002-04:002019-10-21T15:30:30.270-04:00Still Playing Music -- And Better Than EverA recent issue of AARP The Magazine had a nice story about Carlos Santana, the iconic Latin rock guitarist whose career has spanning more than half a century and who, if his father had had his way, might best be known as a famous violinist — or maybe even a fiddler. I enjoyed reading it. <br /><br />But If there’s a better, more compelling story of American grit, determination and initiative than the one being written and performed song-by-song by a group of polished, veteran musicians known as the Folk Legacy Trio, I’d like to see it.<br /><br />I hope the magazine will take a look at George Grove, Rick Dougherty and Jerry Siggins, all of them in the 70s, for what they’ve been able to build. Because if you were trying to show readers what folks our age can do to restart their work lives after a disheartening turn of events, and produce a superb new product that is wowing audiences wherever they go, it’s these guys.<br /><br /> I’ll admit to some bias here. George Grove is from Hickory, a North Carolina boy who went to Wake Forest, served in the Army and became known as one of the best bluegrass and folk music players in the business. He played for years at the Grand Ole Opry before becoming a four-decade member of The Kingston Trio, still performing after more than 60 years. And I’ve gotten to know George, Rick and Jerry, as well as the fabulous bass player Paul Gabrielson, at the Americana Folk Music Camp held each year at Scottsdale, AZ. <br /><br />Grove and the other members of The Kingston Trio were just about to have dinner before a performance two years ago when they found out their jobs had been sold and they’d soon be out of work. <br /><br />Grove, a member of The Kingston Trio for 41 years, had been the de facto musical director of the trio as well as an accomplished banjo and guitar player for decades; Rick Dougherty, an Irish tenor whose soaring voice gave the trio a sound that kept audiences spell-bound, and Bill Zorn, a powerful singer, were in their early 70s — and devastated. They found themselves jobless with nowhere to go. And no wish to retire.<br /><br />The decision by The Kingston Trio owner to sell the brand was a stunner — and may become a textbook case of how not to run a business. The Grove-Dougherty-Zorn version of The Kingston Trio — by one count the 11th version of the group in its 60-year history — was regarded by many as the best combination of talent, stage presence, timing, poise and musical entertainment since the Trio first burst onto the music scene in the 1950s. <br /><br />It’s worth remembering that The Kingston Trio for a time was the most popular musical group in the world, according to William Bush in his book “Greenback Dollar: The Incredible Rise of The Kingston Trio.” They had a smash hit with “Tom Dooley,” placed 14 albums in the Billboard Top 10, “with their first five studio albums reaching number one (a feat unmatched by any other act — before or since.” <br /><br />Grove, Dougherty and Zorn wrapped up their careers as Kingston Trio members in September 2017. Zorn began playing with other performers while Grove and Dougherty, both of whom had exceptional musical training and experience, began trying to figure out their futures. Dougherty had two children in college already, and while he had other skills including information technology, he and Grove didn’t want to give up. They wanted to keep performing music — but how? <br /><br />They thought they might play as a duo, occasionally doing concerts with such icons of music of the folk era as Noel Paul Stookey or Tom Paxton. But Grove and Dougherty soon concluded they needed a third singer as part of the act. After a round of auditions they found Jerry Siggins, a former Disney performer who had been the lead singer for 27 years with the doo-wop group The Diamonds. Siggins noticed something right away: the new trio became fast friends almost instantly. “I’m very fortunate to be with two guys who really know what they are doing,” he said. <br /><br />The first song they rehearsed, “Road To Freedom,” by John Stewart — a stirring anthem seemingly tailored for the Civil Rights Movement in the ‘60s — told the tale, Grove said. “We heard that ethereal “4th voice” beyond the three of us. The enthusiasm, the harmony, the talent, the timing, the timbre of the voice caused something to happen — it’s hard to explain, but it’s extraordinary and rarely occurs.” <br /><br />Performing as the Folk Legacy Trio, the three have shunned the earmarks of The Kingston Trio. “We didn’t want to wear striped shirts. We didn’t want to look like The Kingston Trio,” Grove says. They don’t. Out of respect for the music and for the mature audiences that flock to the concerts of the new group, they wear matching vests and shirts, sometimes with ties, and they deliver a rollicking good time singing the best of the Great American Folksong Book and talking of its history and the artists of the era who are longtime friends.<br /><br /> As Dougherty puts it, “We’re sort of the elder statesmen of the folk music genre. There are not many folk groups left. We’re keeping alive the music we have loved to play all our lives.”<br /><br />You can find the Folk Legacy Trio easily on the internet, along with their upcoming schedule of concerts. My advice is to find a concert you can get to, and go to it. You will enjoy every minute of their shows.Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-2749719441900311382018-03-08T08:19:00.003-05:002018-03-08T08:19:29.182-05:00Growing Up With Woody<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Hard to say goodbye to an old friend of many years, even one that I wasn’t really close to. When we ran into one another it’d usually be a handshake and a word or two, but not really a relationship. But I spent a goodly part of my adult life with Woody Durham, most of it on warm autumn afternoons and frigid winter evenings, listening to him call the Tar Heels through games that ranged from deep disasters to towering victories and national championships. Even when we had football tickets I’d take a little headset radio with me just to listen to Woody — and even when the Heels were on national TV broadcasts with the big network boys, we’d turn down the sound and listen to Woody.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I grew from a young man in the 1970s to a gimp-kneed geezer in the 21st century listening to Woody and his sidekicks like Mick Mixon and Eric Montross and even for a while his boyhood hero Charlie Choo-Choo Justice. I was always impressed by the fact that he seemed to know everything about every Carolina player, but also most of the players from the opposing team. If you listened regularly, you would pretty soon know where every UNC player had come from — and to this day when we are driving through South Georgia, my wife Martha B. will ask, “Where is the Gray, Georgia junior these days?” We’d laugh, because Woody’s description of Al Wood would roll effortlessly off his tongue, and it was usually because Wood had just hit a long one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">My children grew up the same way, listening to Woody as his words flowed out through the big speakers in our den. He didn’t always open a broadcast this way, but when he would start with “And the Tar Heel Sports Network is ON the air,” it seemed like a dramatic moment on a very cold night that was about to heat up and might turn into an inferno before the Heels and the Wolfpack or the Demon Deacons or the Blue Devils got through tearing each other to shred and setting off the evening’s celebratory fireworks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Woody’s words became part of our family lingo — sometimes “Good gracious, Gertie” and sometimes something like “Go to war, Miss Agnes” when something spectacular happened. And listeners had their own private routines in tight moments when Woody said, “Go where you go and do what you do” — the signal to turn to whatever your lucky spot was and get there quick. For me it was a quick trip to the fridge to grab a cold one and get back to my front-row seat before play began again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Things weren’t always they way you wanted them, and I bled with Woody when he would try to interview the sometimes tight-lipped football coach Dick Drum, whose answers after a long and involved question might be “Yes, Woody.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And one night in a game with, I think, Virginia, play stopped when a collision resulted in a Cavalier writhing on the floor in pain. This was during a time when the broadcast was sponsored by a well-known hot dog manufacturer. As the Cavalier staff was tending to the hurt player, there was no sound from announcer or advertiser. Then Mixon broke in with something like, “Well, Woody, this is a family broadcast so I can’t say exactly where the Virginia player is hurt, but I can tell you this would be a good time for a Beef Master Frank from Curtis Packing.” And the next sound was Woody trying to stifle a belly laugh that went on and on and on. It was a while before the broadcast could resume,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I was a Carolina Cheerleader back in the late 1960s when the Mouth of the South, Bill Currie, was doing the broadcasting, and while Currie was colorful and fun-loving, I recognized when Woody Durham took over in the ‘70s that this was a serious student of sports who did his homework, knew his stats and worked hard to be fair to players from other schools. And while he clearly was a Tar Heel loyal to the Carolina Blue, he was also a realist. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One night the late Gene Wang, then of United Press International, asked me to keep statistics to help him cover a Carolina game on a weekday night against Wake Forest in Chapel Hill. This was before Carmichael Auditorium opened, and the press box was in the ironworks high above the old Woolen Gymnasium. It did not go well for the Heels, and part way through the game Gene had to grab me by the elbow to remind me that it was bad form for sportswriters to razz the refs from the press box. It wasn’t helping anyway, as the Demon Deacons just pounded the stuffing out of the Tar Heels that night. We were sitting a few spaces away from Woody, and as Gene was finishing his story on deadline, Woody was wrapping up his postgame comments. Then with a sigh he signed off, yanked off his headset, looked around, and said, “Boys, that was a country ass-whupping.’” It was.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Fortunately there weren’t nearly as many of those as there were dramatic victories. Woody brought them all into our home with pictures of the action painted in streams of words, shaded in blue but always putting his listeners right there at courtside or on the 50 yard line. With all Woody’s experience over the years in Blue Heaven, I expect that by now, he’s already begun helping the Heavenly Host understand how the game is played — and where each of the angels went to high school.</span></div>
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Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-63340082381581855342017-09-10T20:23:00.000-04:002017-09-10T20:26:59.499-04:00Sid Paine, cousin extraordinaire<div style="border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;">
My cousin Sid Paine died the other day while on a trip with his wife Elaine up in Vermont, pursuing their common passion for travel, meeting other folks, hearing their stories and telling, oh, I would guess about 1,000 stories of their own. He was a spectacular human being, and I find myself recalling that he has been my idol since I was age 5 or 6.<br />
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Sid was everything I wasn't: Good looking, great hair, a million-dollar smile, a terrific athlete in every sport he ever took up, and equipped with that rare ability to make friends with just about anyone, anywhere. He should have been an ambassador, but what he was was an educator, a historian, and oral storyteller who knew people around the world, and knew their kinfolk back in places like Haw River and Monck's Corner and Ninety-Six and South Bend and Chapel Hill and Columbia and any city or county in the South named for Nathaniel Green.<br />
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I'll put his formal obituary at the end of this post, but the thing that always made me feel better was just being around Sid's and Elaine's good cheer. The world might be caving in around you, but they'd be telling you about some fisherman in Wales or a castle watchman in Salisbury or a wayward student at Darlington School or the time in high school when Sid had to guard future basketball All-American at UNC, Lennie Rosenbluth. And Sid's punch lines always had you in stitches: "Yep. Held him to 40 points," he would say with a grin. "All I saw that night was Lennie's armpit."<br />
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Sid and Elaine were career teachers who taught their students about life, not just about the course of instruction or what they needed to know to get through the school year. They were walking Encyclopedias of what it means to be a citizen any place on the planet. Oh yeah -- they also knew the best places to eat wherever you were going, or the best place to find a good Scotch, or their favorite place at Augusta National to watch the Masters, or who to talk to when you wanted to do something different on vacation<br />
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Sid had a little bit more than a decade on me, and it was his idea to go to England and rent a narrow boat, as they are called, to navigate along the hundreds of miles of restored industrial-revolution canals across that country. Sixty feet long and six feet wide, with a little bitty diesel engine and a long tiller to steer by. There is nothing like locking yourself through scores of hand-operated locks on those old blackwater canals, poking along at 3 m.p.h. through the English countryside, stopping every few miles to stake the narrowboat fore and aft to the towpath and pop into a pub and pass the afternoon with his new best friends of, oh, about 10 minutes' acquaintance. <br />
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We didn't see one another every year, but when we did, we had to allow two or three days just to catch up on the family stories. Our mutual grandparents, Mary Atkinson Monie Betts and Dr. Joseph Shawen Betts of Greensboro, N.C. were characters in their own right -- fascinated by the history of generations of family going back to places like Kilmarnock, Scotland and the Towles Point Plantation on the Rappahannock in Virginia, and tales of growing up in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We'd tramp around the battlefields of Yorktown, explore the yonder reaches of the Blue Ridge Parkway, replay long-forgotten football and basketball games, tell outrageous jokes and carry on late into the night, exploring unanswered family questions that we never thought to ask the grownups about.<br />
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I've thought about this a time or two: I don't think I could've invented a more likable, cheerful, knowledgeable and always-ready-to-talk-though-the-night-if only-you-could cousin, as Sid Paine. Everyone in our family will miss him greatly, but I especially will miss those moments when he'd remember something, get a sly grin on his face, hunch over the bar and ask me, "Say, did I ever tell you about the time......" and then we'd be off on another lively Betts family tangent, digging up something from long ago, and wearing it out over another wee dram of that MacCallans he took with him in the trunk of the car. Oh, the stories. Rest in peace, Sid, and the next one's on me. See you.<br />
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From Mackey's Funeral Home:<br />
Sidney Betts Paine of Greenville, S.C., beloved husband of Marie Elaine Brooks Paine, died on September 5, 2017 in Burlington, Vt. Sid, who was born in Greensboro, N.C. on June 26, 1936, was the elder son of the late Sidney Lake Paine and Margaret Delaney Betts Paine. Besides his devoted wife of 58 years, Sid is survived by daughter Elizabeth Paine Weaver, her husband William Bennett Weaver, and their children Matthew Bennett Weaver, his wife Erin Wolfe Weaver and daughter Reagan Julia Weaver, and Lindsay Elizabeth Weaver, all of Rock Hill, S.C.; daughter Marianne Paine Childers, her husband Gregory Stephen Childers, and their children Delaney Brooks Childers and Cameron Stephen Childers, all of Greer, S.C.; and a brother Christopher Borden Paine of Asheville, N.C.</div>
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Sid’s paternal grandfather, Sidney Small Paine, was the world’s largest manufacturer of corduroy, while his great grandfather, Sidney Borden Paine, was the first to electrify a textile mill. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Shawen Betts, was the president of the North Carolina Dental Association, and his grandmother was a founder of the Greensboro, N.C. Historical Museum.</div>
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Sid graduated from Woodberry Forest School and earned B.A. and M.A degrees from the University of South Carolina. He was also a veteran of the United States Army. He taught at the Darlington School in Rome, Ga., the Stanley Clark School in South Bend, In., where he was also assistant headmaster, and the Greenville County School System (including Hillcrest Middle School, Greenville Middle School and J.L. Mann High School), where he also held administrative positions. He retired in 1997.</div>
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During their summer vacations, Sid and Elaine took their daughters on expeditions to all 50 states, as well as most of the provinces and territories of Canada, dipping into Mexico as well. In 1985, they spent 7 weeks touring England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland plus Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. After the girls had left the nest, Sid and Elaine continued international travel and visited all the continents at least twice, except for once to Antarctica.</div>
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Sid enjoyed the game of golf, especially playing with the Golden Boys of Pebble Creek Country Club and the members of Senior Golfers of South Carolina. He was privileged to play some of the great courses in the United States and in foreign countries.</div>
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Sid was a life-long Episcopalian. A memorial service will be held at St. James Episcopal Church on 301 Piney Mountain Road on Saturday, September 16 at 11:00 A.M.</div>
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In lieu of flowers, memorial may be sent to St. James Episcopal Church on 301 Piney Mountain Road, Greenville, SC 29609.</div>
Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-43742873591923535162017-09-08T07:59:00.002-04:002017-09-08T07:59:58.880-04:00Changes on the windWhen we woke up yesterday the thermometer told us what season it was: 46 degrees, and no longer late summer. It's still a couple weeks before the autumnal equinox, but the sharp breeze carried its own message: Start bringing the firewood up to the house. It won't be long until the soapstone wood stove, cool and silent since last spring, will be fired up and providing most of the heat as we head into increasingly cooler weather.<br />
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It's a time of year I love: the change in the seasons, the dramatic colors on the maples and chestnut oaks and poplars, the hauling in of the abundant apple crop this season and the putting to bed of this old farm. There's a fence to be rebuilt, and a bit of orchard to put in when the new apple trees arrive, and the mowing -- ye gods, the mowing. Our extended family owns 71 acres on this Belcher Mountain spread, and I keep the open fields open by giving it a good bush-hogging several times in the warm season and a final cut along the Smith River feeder creek in November with the sickle bar mower, an iron beast made a long time ago by Massey Ferguson that fits, with a little bit of cussing and banging and heavy grease, on my Kubota tractor. <br />
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We've also learned over the years that when our apples ripen, the critters here about -- the bear cubs and the ground hogs and the bobcats and I don't know what-all -- will give us a few days to get ours before they crawl up into the trees and sample each apple a little bit. We've harvested the apples inside the fence; Today's the day we go after the heritage apples -- the Limbertwigs, the Northern Spies, the Firesides (still coming on an apple tree trunk that has lain on the ground ever since Hurricane Fran in 1996 -- or was it Hugo in 1989?, the Yellow Bellflowers and the seedlings that still produce fruit even when we don't know their names. We call 'em Uncles for lack of a better word -- a contraction, of sorts, for "unknown apples."<br />
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There's firewood to cut and split, too. Much of a massive maple blew over during a summer storm down near the old Connor-Wood house in the bottom, which loses more of its roof and siding each season, and the woods are full of dead-on-the-stump, leaning-and-looking-to-make-widows, fallen locusts. Those are prizes -- good firewood, already dried most of the way, and ready to burn this winter once they have a little more chance to dry out and get ready to make some heat. I've alerted a couple of friends that we'll have a firewood gathering in a few weeks, felling, cutting and splitting enough of these old trees to help each of us get through the winter. We somehow get a lot more wood cut, split and loaded into various trucks and trailers than we would working alone, even without the distractions of story-telling, leg-pulling and spleen-venting that can go on when gents of a certain age get together amidst the roar and clink of chainsaws, wood splitters and mauls and wedges. We'll top off the day once the work is done by a sip or two of a noble whiskey -- in front of a roaring chiminea, of course, to toast the remains of the day, solve world problems, run down whatever crowd is in Washington lately and reflect on the glories of the season. Bring it on.<br />
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-7268608584854110722017-04-15T08:26:00.000-04:002017-04-15T08:26:43.747-04:00Our new song on a new CD: August 2017<div style="color: #1d2129; font-family: 'San Francisco', -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, '.SFNSText-Regular', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: -0.23999999463558197px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
Many of my friends have heard this story so often they could recite it from memory. But once more: Nearly a lifetime ago<br />three boys at Greensboro's Page High School began playing guitars and an old tenor banjo, with a plan to become the next Kingston Trio. It didn't happen. But the band's members continued to play when they could over the next five decades. Two died along the way, one in an auto accident, one from cancer, but still sang the folk songs of that era.</div>
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And the <span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;">Kingston Trio still prospers, directed by Bob Shane, the surviving m<br />ember of the old band, and his wife Bobbie. The band is still on the road with a newer generation of Kingstons, entertaining audiences everywhere with the songs that made the trio the hottest musical group in the world for a few years. They're recorded most if not all of the recordable folk music, so they've taken to making new albums with new material. </span></div>
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A first such writer's project album with some excellent songs came out a few years ago, and a call went out three years ago for more submissions. My lifelong friend Wood Allen asked me to write a song, took the result, edited it and put it to music before sending it in to the Kingston Trio. They liked it. In 2014 we flew out to Chandler, AZ to see the song put together in the sound studio, and have been waiting ever since for the remainder of the album to be recorded, mixed and produced. It seemed to take forever, but with the trio on the road so often, it was hard to get everything done.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wood Allen, left, and I work out the timing for "On The Wind," our newest (ok, and onliest) song, to be published by the Kingston Trio in August at the 18th Annual Kingston Trio Fantasy Camp in Scottsdale, AZ</td></tr>
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Now comes word from the Kingston Trio website, sent along by fellow Kingston Trio fan Sue Keller, that it will happen this summer at the 18th Annual Kingston Trio Fantasy Camp in Scottsdale, AZ:</div>
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Sue Keller<br />April 13 at 5:17pm</div>
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From the KT website:<br />New CD Release Date </div>
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Our apologies for all of you who are waiting so patiently for The Kingston Trio's new CD. Bob Shane has decided that he wants to hold off the release of the CD until Kingston Trio Fantasy Camp (August 8th - 12th). </div>
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For one thing most of the contributing writers will be there and Bob thought that releasing it then would honor them, plus where better place to release it, especially since this is the 60th year of the Kingston Trio. That's a jubilee!! </div>
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The CD will go for sale online at The Kingston Trio Store during that time too, so don't worry if your can't be at camp. We'll have it for you at the same time. </div>
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It's only 4 months away and will be worth the wait!</div>
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Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-82858820544588153742017-03-15T11:42:00.003-04:002017-03-15T11:42:59.199-04:00How the granddad I never met helped fix the water system the other dayWhen the former Party Doll Strickland asked "Hey, is the well out of water, or something?" the other morning, I knew it was going to be a long day. I was wrong. Turned out to be several long days, but this story has a happy ending. My grandfather, Charles Smith Minor Sr. of Anderson S.C., died a decade before I was born, but among the things I eventually inherited more than half a century later was his set of Handy dies and taps, fitted neatly into a hinged wooden box with slots and discs routed out to hold these tools. The helped save the day when we discovered, long after we should have, that our water supply system up here in the Blue Ridge Mountains had three separate leaks, spread out over more than 300 feet of horizontal pipe and another 250 or so feet of pipe down in the well.<br />
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But I'm getting ahead of the story. On that Tuesday when all of a sudden we didn't have any water, I took a quick look at the water pressure tank and gauge under the house. Tank looked ok, but you can't really tell anything by looks. The pressure gauge, however, told the short story: There was near zero water pressure, and after turning the pump breaker off for 15 minutes, then back on, the pump had reset itself -- and I watched as the water pressure came up, then dropped back down, then came up, then dropped back down.<br />
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I know a few things about water wells and pumps and pressure tanks from a summer job many years ago with Bainbridge & Dance Water Well Co. in Guilford College, N.C. And I know a little about leaks, so I called a couple of plumbing contractors and explained the problem. That's how I met the Pump Man, as he is known around Floyd VA. His real name is Rick Gibson, and in a quick trip out he determined that the pressure tank's internal bladder had gone bad and that the tank itself was waterlogged. That pressure switch didn't look any too good, either, rusting away as water dripped down one side, and part of a wire showed copper. Not good.<br />
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A couple days later, Rick was back with a new pressure tank and switch. He made short work of installing it -- cutting the old tank out and removing the bad switch, and putting in the new ones. And then we watched the pressure gauge as the water dame up, then dropped back down, then came up.... Well, you know the story there: Another leak.<br />
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So we traipsed 300 feet down the hill to my workshop, where there's a frost-free hydrant where I get water for various projects in the workshop or the barn. There's a big handle on top that lives a four-foot internal rod with a rubber blob at the low end. Lift the handle and water flows; push the handle back down and the rubber blob stops the flow of water -- and nearly as importantly, a small hole in the pipe casing allows the four-feet of trapped water to trickle out. So the water doesn't freeze, and the frost-free hydrant can be used even in cold weather. Rick put his ear to the galvanized pipe sticking up out of the ground, listened intently for a moment, and invited me to do the same: we could hear water running constantly, which mean this was where the second leak was. Would we have to dig it up and replace the whole hydrant? "Don't know yet," Rick said. "This is the kind of thing that takes the fun out of plumbing."<br />
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Rick's been in the plumbing business for some 32 years, and had learned to take one thing at a time. He removed the hydrant head and, after a good bit of grunting and pulling and levering and wrenching, pulled out the four-foot rod. But there was no rubber blob at the end of it, as there should be. There were only some damaged pipe threads where the rubber blob's internal fitting should have screwed onto the rod. Rick began using a small saw and file to try to tidy up the damaged pipe threads. I watched for a couple minutes and thought of something. "You know, I think I have a set of dies somewhere that belonged to my grandfather. Lemme see if I can find 'em -- but I'm probably not lucky enough to have the right size die if can lay my hands on the box."<br />
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I was wrong again, and happily so. The wooden box of dies had five or six taps -- the threads you would cut inside a nut, for example, and five or six dies, for cutting the screw thread on a piece of pipe or rods. And after a couple tries, we found exactly the right die. Took a good two minutes to recut and thus restore the original threads. The Rick gently lowered the rod down into the hydrant pipe, slowly fished around for a moment, then began turning the rod in place. Then he pulled it up, and as it came he was smiling. The old rubber blob -- misshapen and part of it split, so it wouldn't seal off the shaft -- came up with the rod. And our luck was holding: Rick had a replacement for the rubber plug on his truck -- sort of a minor miracle itself. How often are you going to be able to produce the right die -- from a set manufactured back during the Great Depression -- and then find out that you have the right esoteric part on your truck? Trust me, as the President likes to say, but not often.<br />
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So with the hydrant restored to good order, and having fixed two separate leaks, we traipsed back up the hill, got under the house, and after flipping the breaker, watched the water pressure come back up on the brand-new pressure switch gauge -- and then watched in dismay as the water pressure went down again, then up again, then down again. If you're still reading this, you know what this meant: yet a third leak, somewhere in the system.<br />
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"We'll have to pull the pipe out of the well and look at the pump," Rick said. I groaned. In my Bainbridge & Dance days, that meant some back-breaking work, pulling flexible pipe out of a well and walking it out into the field just to get a gander at the submersible pump. And I knew how much pipe that would be, because our well driller had gone down 360 feet before deciding that was deep enough.<br />
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But there was more good news: In the years since I last pulled pipe from a waterfall someone had invented a three-wheeled contraption that would grab the pipe and pull it smoothly out of a deep hole in the ground. It took a little maneuvering to get the gizmo off Rick's truck and in the right place to pull the pipe, but pretty soon Rick was laying down 50-foot figure-eights of pipe and electrical wire behind him. The pipe was solid, but when the end came up out of the well, the pump was just hanging on with a bit of electricians' tape and a few pieces of electrical cable. There were remnants of three metal hose clamps, but each one was missing part of its metal band because, I do believe, the screw was of a different kind of metal -- and galvanic action had eaten those clamps for lunch.<br />
And all that pipe had been empty of water, indicated that the foot valve at the top of the pump was not holding the water in the pipes. This was, of course, the key leak Rick had been chasing all day, but the other two leaks had to be fixed, too. And our luck was still holding, because Rick had the right replacement valve to install on the pump -- plus the right hose clamps and barb to keep the pump connected to the pipes and keep water flowing into the house, and not back down into the well.<br />
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So after replacing the pump valve and attaching new clamps and using some fancy tape to wrap parts of the pipe, we put the pipe back in the well, replaced the camp, and trudged back up to the house to consult the pressure gauge. And lo and behold, the water pressure came back up -- and stayed where it was supposed to. Finally there was cause for some celebration, of sorts. I observed that it's not every day you have to trace three leaks spread over 300 feet of horizontal run and 250 feet or so of perpendicular pipe, and Rick allowed as how that was on the unusual side. "But the real miracle was that I had all of the parts on my truck to fix each of those leaks, and didn't have to go off for hours hunting them up.<br />
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But, I pointed out smug, it took my grandfather's tap-and-die set to save the day on that hydrant. "Yeah," Rick said. "But I've got a set just like that at home. Just didn't have it on my truck."<br />
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-1162660438158899332017-02-05T10:28:00.000-05:002017-02-05T10:36:05.888-05:00Good dogsOn a peg on a wall in a dusty corner of my workshop hang the collars and tags of some of the best friends I ever had. The collection started with the old leather collar of Sunshine, a brainy Golden Retriever who lived with us nearly a decade, long enough to help raise the children but not long enough to know them in her old age. She died early of cancer.<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=485730189677446110" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>Then there's the red web collar that belonged to Maggie, another golden who specialized in playing tug-of-war with children and putting away impressive amounts of Oreo cookies (and who is the star of a short story, still to be written but often told, called "The Dogs of Lakemont"); and the blue collar of her playmate, a handsome, brave and none too wise Westie named Mac. They engaged in hilarious faux fights, rolling around the floor with teeth bared and growling, but never seriously clamped down on one another. Mac was afraid of no one, and I believe he would have attacked a bear if he ever had had the opportunity. He wouldn't have won that fight, but would have gone at it anyway just for the sheer joy of tearing into something new and different.<br />
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Not long ago I put up the little red collar of Sadie, a gentle French Brittany Spaniel who we had to put down just days before Thanksgiving after a long and happy run up here on Rocky Knob Farm. It has taken me this long to write about her, but I expected that. When Mac met her unfortunate end in the 90s after getting into a batch of splintery bones, and when we had to put Maggie down a year or so later of old age, we grieved for months that turned into years before we dared to bring on another pet.<br />
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Sadie came our way from a family down in Chatham County that rescued Brittanies, most of them the liver-and-white variety. The French Brittany Spaniel is black and white, but Sadie had just a bit of amber in her topside hair, and an engaging clutch of it stuck up straight. We almost called her Spike, but that seemed disrespectful, and stuck with her given name of Sadie. <br />
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She had lived with an elderly gentleman in western North Carolina who became too sick to take care of her, and her foster family warned she might roam far and wide. She never did. Turned out she liked living with us and rarely strayed out of sight up here on the farm. She would disappear for minutes on end, then reappear at the other end of the house or the far side of the garden or the other side of the barn. There was some photographic evidence of limited wanderlust, however. One of our hunters from Surry County sent me an email containing photos from his game camera down in our woods about 200 yards below my shop. There was a picture of two bears that appeared to be waltzing; several pictures of a part-albino deer, and the scariest of all: a French Brittany Spaniel named Sadie, nosing around a patch of woods where the deer and the bear liked to feed.<br />
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A few years ago Sadie took sick. Went to the doc, went to the vet school in Blacksburg, and no one could diagnose what was wrong. The vets recommended exploratory surgery, or preparing for the worst within as little as days if not weeks. We brought Sadie home and made her comfortable, started giving her forbidden treats from the dinner table, and three weeks later, after she had gained a few pounds, we realized we had been gamed. Sadie was trotting again, and soon running, and eating at least twice a day, and there were a few more years of a lively, funny, loving dog on this farm.<br />
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Still, she was 15, and that's a mighty fine old age. She had slowed down last fall, we knew. When we were gone on a trip, our house-and-dog sitter reported she was moving slowly, but she liked to ride in the car with the top down, and thus Sadie held court over north and eastern Patrick County, Princess of the Parkway, as friendly a dog as you will find. <br />
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By early November she was calling it in on some days -- sleeping late, eating little, waiting for help getting up and down the three steps to the deck. A month or so earlier, she had been leaping up those steps; after seeing her throw herself onto the steps and sliding back down when she couldn't make the top, my heart broke a little for this proud dog who used to race us from the mailbox to the house -- and win.<br />
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On her last day, I carried her out to do her business in the grass. Instead, she lay down, spreadeagled, eyes raised at me as if to say, "It's time." It was.<br />
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One day later this year, or maybe next, we'll go find us another dog in need of some farm life. Don't know when that will be. No rush, I guess. We've had four fine dogs who have graced and enriched our lives with their intelligence, heart, companionship and unconditional love. I suspect there'll be at least one more.<br />
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-61762738364543950512016-11-13T16:19:00.001-05:002016-11-13T16:42:00.594-05:00The old family cabin, up in smokeIt was a lovely fall morning, crisp under blue skies, with just a touch of frost until the breeze when I got down to the big garden to finish putting it to bed for the year. There were a few more peppers to pick, and old iron tiller to haul up to the barn, and a lot of weeds to mow down and tomato cages to stack and store. It took about an hour to hack down the tough weeds around the last of the potato patch, and I was thinking of one more cup of coffee up at the house when I took a look around.<br />
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And my blood froze. There on the northeast side of the hill, was a perfect column of white smoke over the tree line, the smoke drifting a bit on an unfelt puff. I jumped into the RTV, threw it it into gear and gritted my teeth as we crawled up the hill towing trailer and mower. At the foot of the driveway where Fran and Hal Strickland began building the family cabin in 1965, more smoke was moving through the trees. I dashed across the road and into our driveway, blowing the lame little horn, grabbed my cell phone at the house and went back. Renters that morning had left the cabin and locked the gate, and it took a moment to get it open and up the hill.<br />
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At first glance, it looked like a woods fire, burning in patches around the house, but not yet on it. But not far from it either, and the first flames were just about to lick up the deck posts of one of the finest views of Piedmont Virginia that can be had from about 3,200 feet of elevation. By the time I had run back downhill and called in the alarm to the Patrick County dispatcher, smoke was heavier -- and just like that I could see the first flames on the deck.<br />
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By the time I got the garage open to see if there was a rake or something to pull some of the fire apart, I heard glass bursting, as if someone were throwing brickbats at the big windows that gave the house such a grand view. I knew what that meant. Because even if the volunteer fire departments serving this part of southwest Virginia got up to us in record time, the house would still be gone.<br />
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It was, as houses go, a modest place -- a modified A-frame with a four-bed loft and a spiral staircase that my father-in-law had designed in his 50s, and that he and Fran had made their summertime home for roughly a half-century. Martha and I were courting when the house was going up, and over the years we put a lot of sweat equity into running wiring, hanging wallpaper, cutting firewood and enjoying the incomparable paradise that Patrick County can be. There were innumerable family gatherings -- birthdays, Easter egg hunts when the young-uns were little, anniversaries, memories of Fran and Hal dancing to Lawrence Welk on Saturday evenings, gatherings of the aging folk group The Villagers back in their heyday, memories of Fred Birdsong and Jim Garrison, both of them lost far too young to accident and disease.<br />
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In this place my children grew up, hanging onto the rear hitch and later the rollbars of Hal's succession of farm tractors -- the Econo 14, then his first Diesel, then a 21 horse New Holland. In these fields our children first learned to drive a stick-shift transmission. And every Thanksgiving that they could find a ticket, they have come back east to the hills for the best family reunions you can imagine.<br />
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They'll be here next week, too, staying with us in the house we rebuilt in 2011 after another house fire, evidently started by a severe electrical storm in 2010 while we were in Raleigh packing for the beach. It ill be sad for them to see the pitiful remains of a little cabin so loved by a far-flung family living in California and Hawaii and Mexico and Idaho and Utah and Texas and Georgia. We'll still have wonderful Thanksgiving celebrations and carry on as families always do. <br />
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But we will miss that A-frame cabin, and the magnificent views, and soapstone wood stove that kept us warm in cool weather, and the bonds that Fran and Hal Strickland forged in their children's and grandchildren's lives. It was just a house, you know, but a palace could not have been a better place to raise kids, eat like kings and look out over one of the most astonishing views on earth. Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-85109385018453614552016-09-26T08:06:00.002-04:002016-09-26T08:06:18.306-04:00New golf course opens at Rocky Knob Tractor & Yacht Club, then closesProbably nothing more hazardous or hilarious than a group of 70-year-old men getting together and acting like college freshmen once again, but that sorta describes what went on last week here at the Rocky Knob Tractor & Yacht Club. Since we live in Virginia now, we have to have a name for the house, you know, and RKT&YC is ours. There are several others. Burnt Downs is one, but that's another and sadder story.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Groundskeeper Jack Betts, left, and New Course Superintendent Bob Kulp at Rocky Knob National</td></tr>
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This year a group of old boys who first met in the winter of 1964-65 at Chapel Hill, and went on to be pretty fast friends over a lot of years, came up to Belcher Mountain for the annual Beta Beach Trip. It long has been at places like Beaufort or Ocean Isle or Savannah, but this time they came up here. We rented two houses and got use of another, all overlooking the Rock Castle Gorge and the Piedmont, plus the RKT&YC, which overlooks a hayfield. They started rolling in on Tuesday and rolled out on Saturday in time for the football game in Chapel Hill. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Duffers Rob Crowder, Mike Waltrip, Pete Whittington, Cary Raditz and Clay Harrell at Rocky Knob National</td></tr>
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We smoked ribs one night, went to Dogtown Roadhouse in Floyd for pizza one night, and boiled up shrimp and wahoo another night. Some went to to see Lee Chichester, our neighbor down the road and author of a book on falconry, for a closer look at her birds. Some drove out to Old Mill to play some golf. Some went down to the Blue Ridge Music Center to play some music in the Friday Midday Music Jam there. Some sat around and told stories for about the 11 gazillionth time.<br />
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But it was Dr. Bob Kulp, a crackerjack golfer, who had the best idea. He brought up some clubs and pins and cups and flags and a bag of gently used golf balls from his course down in Georgia. I had been mowing out a short course in our hayfield for several weeks. We planted the cups and flew the flags and doled out the clubs, pairing non-golfers with veterans, and held a tournament.<br />
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Well, you might have called it mass chaos interrupted by too much merriment and too little golf expertise, but we called it a tournament -- the first ever at The New Course at Rocky Knob National Golf Club. We believe it to be the finest tournament classic for a two-hole, 100-foot-long course anywhere in the free world. That's our story, and we're sticking to it.<br />
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No one can accurately remember who won. Things got a little hazy. High spirits and such, if you know what I mean. But everyone had the same chance to whack a golf ball and send it off somewhere into the toughest roughs you will find at any tournament sanctioned by Dr. Kulp. In fact, it was so popular that we had to close it down after two days, and sad to say, the New Course at Rocky Knob National no longer is open. Okay, the cups are still in the ground, and it could be revived on short notice, but it's late in the haying season, and it's time to bring on the tractors.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bill Gordon and Rocky Knob National Legal Counsel Scott Patterson</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A bunch of old guys in the background, and announcer Pete Whittington with the Bug Light Microphone</td></tr>
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Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-40252634125311104732016-09-12T20:01:00.001-04:002016-09-12T20:01:52.943-04:00September Sunday afternoon, Belcher Mountain Road, by the old U.B. Handy Farm on the Southern rim of the Rock Castle Gorge.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-88865798120574771422016-08-23T09:24:00.000-04:002016-08-23T09:24:02.211-04:00Tom Dooley and Laura Foster, still pulling them inWe were packed into the living room of a home perched on the lower slope of one of those mountains surrounding Phoenix the other day, listening to a band called The Lion Sons singing and playing songs we had heard most of our lives. Then Mike Marvin, the guitar player, paused and brought it all home. Funny, wasn't it, he asked, that a woman who lived in the 1860s was still bringing us all together, time after time.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tim Gorelanton, Mike Marvin and Josh Reynolds -- The Lion Sons</td></tr>
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Everyone in the room knew who he meant, though it still took a moment to follow that line of reasoning, but he was absolutely right. Had not Laura Foster died of stab wounds at the hand of Tom Dula in Wilkes County, N.C. in 1866, we probably wouldn't be going to considerable expense and effort to attend gatherings like the one in Phoenix all across the land -- and contemplating attending more of them next year.<br />
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But because Tom Dula (locally pronounced Dooley in the mid-19th century in Wilkes County) was accused, tried and convicted of Laura Foster's murder, and because someone wrote a song about Tom Dooley, and because a long time later an entertaining group called The Kingston Trio recorded a new arrangement of the song, and because that song went to the top of the charts, made the trio wealthy, and promoted a late 1950s folk music revival that still reverberates today, we join hundreds of other Kingston Trio fans in places like Alpharetta GA and Scottsdale AZ and maybe next year Astoria OR.<br />
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I know, I know. Some folks chuckle at the idea of the Kingston Trio. It was, after all, the hottest musical group in the world for a few years, before the Beach Boys and the Beatles came along. One story goes that the Beatles in their early years once opened for the Kingston Trio, but I don't know if that's true or not. What many do not know is that the trio, in its current version, still tours with a couple of hundred concerts around the country each year. One of its founders, Bob Shane, is still alive and performing his signature "Scotch and Soda," a great song that, another story goes, Frank Sinatra declined to record only because he could not do it as well as Bob Shane. About the only person in the world I know who can sing it like Bob Shane is my buddy Wood Allen, who is a great singer and player.<br />
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Each year, about three dozen serious fans of the Kingston Trio pay about $4,200 each to attend the Kingston Trio Fantasy Camp in Scottsdale, AZ (after a week there in the Arizona heat, the former Party Doll Strickland has renamed it "Scorchdale"). During the week, the campers rehearse much of the day, and each night there's a new concert. The group sings a number or two with the current trio of George Grove (a Wake Forest University grad from Hickory), Bill Zorn and Rick Dougherty. Each camper also plays songs with a newly formed trio made up of other campers, and each camper sings a solo with two of the Kingstons. There's a lot of music on that stage at Scottsdale Resort.<br />
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I didn't go as a camper, but as a guest of Wood Allen and as a hanger-on, because the resort makes rooms available for, pun intended, a relative song, to anyone who wants to hang out with these folks. They jam late into the night with others who come to enjoy the music and make some, too, and with a group of Bloodliners, the name for ardent fans of singer songwriter John Stewart, who played with the trio for years and who produced his own albums, one of which was called California Bloodlines. Thus the Bloodliners, and these fans are pretty tight with Kingston Trio fans, so every gathering is an enthusiastic reunion of old friends from around the globe. My friend Tom Craig is a Scot, but he makes the journey every year to see other old friends, including Tom O'Donnell, a West Virginian who has a home in Great Britain not far from the other Tom. It's amazing to run into recent friends and old buddies who have been on the music circuit for years in amateur and professional appearances.<br />
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And it was amazing to hear The Lion Sons, two of whom are related to Nick Reynolds, the original Kingston Trio performer who played that smallish Martin Tenor Guitar and was a fan favorite for years until his death in 2008. Nick's son Josh plays with the Sons, as does Nick's nephew Mike Marvin, who pointed out the connection between Laura Foster and hundreds of fans' reason for coming to these gatherings. Also in the group is tall Tim Gorelangton, but a story of Mike and Josh grabbed me in the gut. Nick had taken a teenaged Mike into his home to live when Josh was still a small boy. Neither of them remember Nick singing in the Reynolds home, with one exception: When Nick put the boys to bed each night, he would sing Woody Guthrie's "Hobo's Lullaby" before they fell asleep. It's a sweet song with a soft pace, and when they sang it for the crowd that hot sleeping afternoon in Phoenix, I'll wager there wasn't a totally dry eye in the house:<br />
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"....Go to sleep you weary hobo,<br />
Let the towns go drifting by,<br />
Feel the steel rails singing,<br />
That's the Hobo's Lullaby......"Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-54099067465540134662016-07-17T09:26:00.001-04:002016-07-17T09:26:14.219-04:00Fretwell's Bass Shop: An All-American InstitutionWhen you step off of West Beverly Street in downtown Staunton VA and through the doors of No. 17, you step into one of the great institutions of American culture. No, not a museum, or a college classroom, or a majestic courtroom with all the trappings of a justice system built upon the best principles of the ages.<br />
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Nope. You're walking into a music store with a reverence for tradition, a respect for honest, well-built instruments that people can make a living playing, and the skills of the luthier and the ability to put back together stringed instruments that have had the daylights beaten out of them over the years. And the friendliness to make you feel good about dropping in. And the inclination to drop everything, pick up a bass or a guitar or a banjo, and start jamming with a stranger or an old friend.<br />
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You're talking, in other words, about Jerry and Mary Jane Farewell's Fretwell Bass and Acoustic Instruments shop. Every good music town has a shop sort of like this. Barr's Fiddle Shop in downtown Galax comes immediately to mind, and I've walked through the doors of a dozen more across the south in my 70 years. The best of them buy, sell, trade, repair and encourage jamming.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jerry Freewill</td></tr>
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But Farewell's is special to me for several reasons. They fixed me up with a wonderful old 1959 Kay bass fiddle a few years ago after my 1946 Kay burned to a cinder in a house fire. And with Jerry's semi-retirement recently (he still comes in and works, but Mary Jane says if you're looking for him, head to the nearest golf course), The Fretwells and their staff, Travis Weaver and Sissy Hutching, his wife, agreed to a request from the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation for a serviceable bass for use in the Blue Ridge Music Center's Midday Music Program. That bass will be available for use in any of the seven-days-a-week free music performances from noon to 4 p.m. at the Music Center, located a few miles south of Galax near Milepost 213. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Jane and Jerry Freewill</td></tr>
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The Fretwells decided to donate a 1982 Engelhardt C-1 with new strings, new adjustable bridge and other work to make the bass look good again, as a way of paying back the folks around Galax for their loyal business over the years. It's a good four hours from Staunton to Galax down I-81 and I-77 to the Galax Old Fiddlers Convention at Felts Park, and for years the Fretwells hauled a trailer full of 20 or so ready-to-go basses, plus boxes full of new strings, sound posts, bridges, clamps, glues and tools to restring and repair basses right on the spot. Many's the night they stayed up late revitalizing old bases and jamming with the thousands who have attended America's oldest fiddle competition, as it's often described, and the Fretwells got a lot of business out of Galax. So when the Foundation, whose board I chair this year, recently requested a bass donation, the owners and their staff thought about it, did a little research, and decided it was a way for them to give back to a community that Jerry Fretwell says "was always good to us." And it leaves players in years to come a reminder of the Farewell's place in the region's tradition of old-time, bluegrass, folk, mountain and other sorts of traditional roots music.<br />
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The Farewell's generosity in donating the reconditioned bass is important. When you're jamming, you need someone playing the bass, not just for the deep tone of the notes, but especially for the percussive time-keeping a good bass player provides. If the bass can provide a consistent beat, everyone can play on time and sound good. If there's no bass available, sometimes there's a musical train wreck. I've been playing my old '59 Kay in the Friday Open Jam at the Blue Ridge Music Center for several years, but I can't be there every week. We often has someone who can play a bass fiddle, but we don't always have a bass available. Now, thanks to the Farewell's donation, we'll have a bass at all times for someone to play. It's a huge thing to have access to such an instrument, and we're grateful.<br />
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Last week, Richard Emmett, the Foundation staffer who runs the music program for the Park Service at the Blue Ridge Music Center, and Broaddus Fitzpatrick of Roanoke, a former board chair who now chairs our board advisory committee on the music center, and I drove up to Staunton to see the Fretwells and pick up their donation. We heard funny stories about the bass business, about music makers and the stars who have dropped in to jam with Jerry, about how the shop's craftsmen have put back together old basses with some life still left in them, and we heard them jam. Here are a few more pictures from that session:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Jane, Jerry, Travis Weaver and Sissy Hutching</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Travis Weaver, left, on guitar, Sissy Hutching on the ukulele, and Jerry on his prized Epiphone B-1</td></tr>
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-3681773932661274122016-07-13T09:48:00.001-04:002016-07-13T09:48:45.332-04:00The Denim BallNever knew Moses and Bertha Cone, of course, as Moses died early in the 20th century and Bertha died when I was a year old. But I've always been grateful to them and to Moses' brother Ceasar. You see, if they hadn't moved South back in the late 1880s to begin building what became the Cone Mills industrial dynasty -- and become the world's biggest producer of denim -- I would not exist. It's a longish story, but the more important one is this: <br />
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The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, which I chair this year, has raised millions of dollars since its founding for the Blue Ridge Parkway, perennially either the top or the second most popular unit in the National Parks system. And Flattop Manor, the marvelous summer home that is centerpiece of the BRP's 3500-acre Moses H. Cone Memorial Park near Blowing Rock, needs help. The Foundation has committed to raising a lot of money to help preserve the house and to undertake maintenance and improvement projects all over the park, including the carriage house. So we're holding a fundraiser on Saturday Aug. 6 at another grand place in Blowing Rock, Chetola Lodge, to help raise money to pay for those projects. We're calling it the Denim Ball, which seems appropriate, as Moses Cone is often referred to as the Denim King. Here's our logo for that function: <br />
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You can read more about the Denim Ball and the needs of Flattop Manor at our website www.brpfoundation.org/thedenimball and you can order tickets there, or by calling (866) 308-2773, ext. 245. It's $100 per ticket, with dinner, entertainment, dancing and an auction.<br />
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I confess I care about this for a lot of reason. One of them is my passion for the Parkway, and the Cone Memorial Park is an important part of that. The other is my family's connection to the Cones. I don't mean we were close. But there were relationships. My father John Betts' boyhood friend was Clarence Cone in Greensboro in the first quarter of the 20th century. My uncle Tad Paine's father was a textile executive in his own right, and had a strong partnership with the Cones, and my cousin Sid Paine had summer jobs in those textile mills, fixing looms among the racket and clamor of the mill. And I grew up knowing Larry Cone, father of Kristin Cone, long a member of our Foundation's Council of Advisors.<br />
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But here's what I really appreciate about that extended Cone family. In the depths of the Great Depression, my mother was a school teacher in Anderson, S.C., living at home because teachers' salaries were deplorable in those days. She heard about a company up in Greensboro that was offering qualifying teachers a pretty good deal if they would come to Greensboro and do a little extra work for a little extra money, checking up on Cone millworkers' families to make sure things were okay at home, that sort of thing. By today's standards this kind of arrangement would sound positively patronizing, I suppose, but the Cones did a lot of good in Greensboro -- built a YMCA, held patriotic picnics, sponsored a band, helped build schools and churches, paid for athletics programs and so on. <br />
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So Olive Minor came up from South Carolina to Greensboro to teach at Proximity School, surrounded by mill houses, and got an extra month's salary for her social work visiting students' homes. And she met John Betts at a dance, and impressed him by accidentally sitting down on his fedora at a dance and they laughed about it, and after a long courtship and marrying in 1937, and enduring a world war, they finally gave in to my sister's begging them for a little brother, and she gave birth to me 70 years ago this week. My parents never had it easy, but they had good lives, and I'll never forget what brought them together in the first place. <br />
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That's just one reason I'm buying tickets for the Denim Ball Aug. 6. I hope you can, too, or at least send the Foundation a donation for this good cause.<br />
<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-53667712996888356262016-07-12T09:09:00.001-04:002016-07-12T09:09:27.853-04:00Remembering an old sailor<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">From a Facebook post July 4, 2016:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Our family is spread out all across the United States these days, and have been for years, but I can tell you the children and grandchildren of John M. "Windy" Betts are toasting his 110th Birthday today from Virginia, Utah, Idaho and California.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> Born in a house just across the street from the Executive Mansion in Raleigh on Independence Day in 1906, he was a happy feller every one of the nearly 48 years I spent as his boy -- but none happier, in my memory, than when we were o</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">ut in the middle of nowhere camping in a pine forest or on the water somewhere, hauling in halyards and flying along at, oh, 6 or 7 miles an hour tops. He left us in 1994, at age 88, having never uttered a complaint, and rarely an angry word. </span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">You can see the joy this man carried with him in this photo from, I would guess, about 1913 or so -- future sailor, but already a splendid person. Happy Birthday, B.</span><br />
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Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-87896246664363403662016-05-09T09:28:00.003-04:002016-05-09T09:28:40.175-04:00Spring, and grateful for it What I had in mind was sitting in one of the deck rockers, cool drink in hand, and gazing over rank on rank and row on row of apple trees, swaying gently in the wind with a variety of bright red and glowing golden fruit on the limbs.<br />
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Maybe one day, but we evidently won't be there for years. And we probably won't be sitting in rockers, either, for I have discovered one of the key rules about growing apples: don't plan on sitting around much, unless you can afford to hire people to do the work for you.<br />
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Since sometime last fall, I have been running pretty hard trying to get a new fence in to protect the new apple trees and get them staked out and pruned and braced and fertilized and sprayed and..... I forgot what comes next, but it won't be rockin' and sippin' and takin'in the sights, apparently.<br />
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We are, however, making some progress. This is how things looked back in March, when the ground was still pretty hard and I was just beginning to bore postholes. The only protection from deer were some smallish cages that didn't quite do the job.<br />
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And this is how things looked this morning -- posts in, fences up, stakes in the ground, trunk guards on, trainers in on some trees, and everything leafed out. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">May 9</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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And the lower part of the new orchard, facing an elderly Northern Spy and, further down the slope behind another tree, a Cheese Apple.<br />
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What you can't see is the whuppin' that nature brings these little guys -- battering from a late freeze, harsh winds, mean little ants and mites and crawlers, some powdery looking fuzz and some ugly spots here and there that make me wonder why I ever thought this would be easy. I'm spraying for everything and hoping for the best. But everything is still alive, as of the moment, and the 12 heritage apple trees I discovered last year around the rest of this old farm now turn out to be maybe 13 or 14, now that we have had a crew in to renovate most of them and give the trees room and guidance to grow. They are responding vigorously, and we have high hopes.<br />
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Our orchard is probably too small to be called an orchard -- patch is probably more like it, but we're not done planting yet, just pausing to catch our breath, and backing up about 50 feet to squint and see how good everything looks, here in the full glorious inhalation of Spring. Thank you kindly. And come see us.<br />
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-70226223883922719782016-03-27T08:59:00.000-04:002016-03-27T13:16:03.923-04:00On The FenceThe plan was simple:<br />
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1. Get our woodcutter and his cherry-picker over here no later than the end of October to take down the overhanging trees at the west end of our high field, shave off the leaners for a couple of hundred yards and clean up the limbs, chips and sawdust.<br />
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2. Get the new fence -- I did mention a fence, didn't I? Years ago Diane Flynt told me if I wanted to grow apples, put up a good fence first -- up by no later than the end of November.<br />
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3. Plant the rest of the apple trees no later than the end of the year, and disassemble the individual apple tree cages that initially kept the deer from getting at the apples, but by now were just restricting growth that desperately needed to be pruned, braced, tied back and otherwise trained to new shapes..<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not quite an orchard -- just an apple patch</td></tr>
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4. Prune all the trees in the apple patch -- it isn't really an orchard just yet, with just a dozen trees at the time, but it will be -- in January and spray with a urea solution all the old dead leaves on the ground.<br />
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5. Hire someone to prune the 12 old heritage apple trees -- neglected for many years instead of getting the pruning and other attention that apples need -- that bore fruit on this old farm in the Spring of 2015, and spray those trees too.<br />
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6. Be ready to spray all the trees, new and old, with dormant oil and copper by the time they begin to bud and show leaves.<br />
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Sigh.<br />
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Didn't happen, for a variety of reasons that all have to do with the usual Rhythms of Life -- stuff happens, things don't quite work out the way you planned, you do the best you can.<br />
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So our woodcutter came by the first week of January and got the hardwoods at the end of the field cut down and trimmed back, and tidied up a bit. Then 13 inches of snow fell and the ground froze and the winds of February howled. An experienced crew of pruners came and got 11 of the 12 old trees pruned to better shape -- renovated, apple growers call it -- before a sudden snowstorm stopped them in their tracks on a viciously miserable day in early February. Haven't seen them since, and that 12th tree, thought to be a Northern Spy, still needs more work<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">ready to bore the postholes</td></tr>
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The fence material was delivered in late winter, ground still hard as concrete. Got 42 stakes in the ground precisely where I wanted them. Never realized you could pound a plastic stake into ground hard as concrete, but when you are desperate, you can coax them in. In early March a mild thaw and a warm rain loosened the dirt. Over two days I bored 42 holes with the 6-inch augur mounted on my tractor. Most of the holes were in the same vicinity as the stakes I had marked them with, but on a steep grade some of them went in different directions. Rhythms of Life, ibid. Used an analog posthole digger -- a Mankiller, Barnie Day calls it -- to straighten out those holes that went hither, tither and yither.<br />
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Got the posts into the holes and the corners braced up with horizontal timbers, reasonably level and plum and ready for fencing. Started unrolling the heavy-duty plastic deer fencing (deerbusters.com) that we stapled to the posts with 1 1/4" long galvanized staples, and got ready to zip-tie the fencing to three strands of 12-gauge monofilament line that circles the 10,000-square-foot apple patch. Got about halfway through the job before I fell, in an unguarded moment, from the utterly ridiculous height of, oh, maybe 2 feet maximum, flat on my back. Still don't know how the leg got banged up but the back has been complaining petulantly and relentlessly ever since. Treating it with a potion of Knob Creek's finest and Rocky Knob Tractor & Yacht Club wellwater. Rhythms of Life, op cit.<br />
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Got the third leg of fencing up yesterday and hope to get the final leg up tomorrow. Staples are going in much more slowly, and the hammerer is cussing at a faster and more alarming rate. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Down by the southeast corner</td></tr>
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Had a 90-minute tutorial from Diane Flynt, founder and owner of Foggy Ridge Cidery, last week on pruning young apple trees, and finally got our apples, at least the new ones, in some better shape for the new season. Opened up the middles of the trees, took out unwanted growth sorted through central leaders, braced horizontally as many of the remaining limbs as I could and began to remove the individual cages. Too late for spraying urea, but dormant oil with copper will come soon for all the trees.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Diane Flynt demonstrates pruning a young apple tree at her orchard</td></tr>
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We're holding our breaths that a herd of deer won't come stampeding through the new unfinished and as yet not quite functional fence. I scrounged up a rusty, flimsy old gate that my father-in-law had discarded years ago, and propped that up where a new 10-foot wide mower gate will go one day.<br />
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The old gate is held together by habit and rust, mostly, and I think a deer could lick its way through the middle in about two or three minutes, but it looks heftier than it is. So do I, but I am starting to win this long fight, and if the back doesn't go out again, I might have it all wrapped up in a couple of weeks, if the bourbon and the staples last. If not, surely by the end of October. Late November for sure.Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-82436309454034516422016-02-05T09:21:00.001-05:002016-02-05T09:21:56.044-05:00Of saloon boats and fiddles and things that fly off the handleA few years ago we were helping our friends Theresa and Brian Palmer bring their 42-foot Khady Krogen trawler "Intermission"back up the intracoastal waterway from Vero Beach, Fl. Brian is a Scotsman and a furniture designer, and I very much admired a little doodad he had put together that I immediately recognized as a handy thing. I've forgotten what he called it, but I knew I was going to steal his idea and make one of my own.<br />
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Boat owners and recreation vehicle owners know that one constant of life on the water or on the road is that things are nearly constantly in motion -- from waves, from winds, from uneven roads and the swaying and heeling and corkscrewing that comes from rounding corners, trimming sails, speeding up, slowing down and sometimes even just walking around the vessel or the RV. And because those vehicles move in unpredictable ways, the number of items that will slide off a table, or take flight during a bumpy ride, or otherwise vibrate to the edge of the known world and fall off, is endless: Cups of coffee, paperback book, cell phone, wallet, glasses, bag of chips, a pencil -- you name it, if you put it down carelessly, it will soon be airborne. And possibly broken or lost or worse.<br />
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What Brian made is a little wooden tray with a rim around it that sailors call fiddles. The rim keeps object from sliding off the tray or table. And the tray has a little keel under it, a strip of wood attached perpendicular to the bottom, that fits in between the cushion of the settee in the saloon and holds it stead.. That's what sailors often call the couch in the main cabin. So I call the tray a sofa boat or a saloon boat, and for our Forest River motorhome our saloon boat fits right in the slot between the settee cushions of our saloon, and holds all manner of things that once went a-flying at even the merest hint of a sway or a bump or a swerve. I made it out of some leftover cherry and walnut that was on its way to the kindling bin. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKo6qrRinKvt-4uOdPLkcOlKzRE_qf71u8OFFto8p_sfo9dpYoB2nMfPUJueLC5Ao7ORXDJgo3kSzWbZoyB5wQDbg5SqMSbmECdXPvaY8vzDm71T1pmvhI1HFBWMvZRTi2W-VfRMzGo7jQ/s1600/saloon+boat.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKo6qrRinKvt-4uOdPLkcOlKzRE_qf71u8OFFto8p_sfo9dpYoB2nMfPUJueLC5Ao7ORXDJgo3kSzWbZoyB5wQDbg5SqMSbmECdXPvaY8vzDm71T1pmvhI1HFBWMvZRTi2W-VfRMzGo7jQ/s320/saloon+boat.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Genuine authentic not quite exact knock-off of Intermission's saloon boat</td></tr>
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Brian and Theresa are down in the Bahamas right now on Intermission, and we have been in Florida. I felt compelled to tell Brian that I had stolen his idea. So I messaged him: "Brian: I have stolen your sofa boat idea and adapted it to our RV. I have instructed my accountant to figure out what would be a reasonable royalty for a one-off such as this. I am happy to report that it works as well on a land yacht as on Intermission. Cheers! Jack"<br />
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Truth to tell, I had in mind a glass of Macallan whiskey for a suitable royalty, as Brian is a Scot, but I was willing to consider anything up to, say, $1 in cash. A glass of Macallan would be several multiples of that, so I was sure he would opt for the Scotch.<br />
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And Brian messaged back: "Very interesting, an excellent copy. My attorney will be
in touch with you. This is a flagrant abuse of my design copyright #XYV
001-2645. Mind you attorneys are tough to find down here in the Abacos. It may
be awhile before you hear anything. Capt. Brian"</div>
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So if you hear of me being hauled into court and sued for stealing Brian's idea, you'll already know I have confessed from the get-go and offered what I consider a handsome royalty. No need to get the lawyers involved. Anyone else drink to that?</div>
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-56778282607830619892016-01-03T10:13:00.001-05:002016-01-03T10:13:35.767-05:00Packing in the bivalves at Blue Dog Oyster Roast, RichmondBaker Ellett, political consultant and real estate broker, has held for 11 years the annual Blue Dog Oyster Roast to benefit the local food bank in Richmond. Friday he was joined by hundreds of friends and acquaintances toting donations for the food bank. It was held behind his business, Blue Dog Properties in the Scott's Addition area of Richmond, and they stayed for hours, throwing down hot steamed oysters and cold Founder's IPA and sampling Barnie Day's wrap-cooked ham and all kinds of other goodies. Here are a few scenes from the festivities:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK1sv-Lrwn7BCJB6PWK3NhGNVykcY3LrVClCqST0M0aqkQ1dxo_ryq3TKeI_ddk3pIsxtTUCW0w0c2gv7_K5bi8Yd6C142DqSj2Vm6HZ4T97fmX1i3t02mOJExYLp-mCDOPXOd3vZ-DPAB/s1600/IMG_0768.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK1sv-Lrwn7BCJB6PWK3NhGNVykcY3LrVClCqST0M0aqkQ1dxo_ryq3TKeI_ddk3pIsxtTUCW0w0c2gv7_K5bi8Yd6C142DqSj2Vm6HZ4T97fmX1i3t02mOJExYLp-mCDOPXOd3vZ-DPAB/s320/IMG_0768.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Baker Ellett rakes oysters off the cooktop that have steamed for about 8 minutes under wet burlap. </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Old friends former Virginia Del. Barnie Day, ink-stained wretches Jack Betts, late of the Charlotte Observer and columnist Jeff Schapiro of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and political consultant and real estate broker Baker Ellett, organizer of the annual event.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiTShwFCEOoBq_h3jcBx-d3C0bOa_rBFnzj8bYZAA5rMNrBP6qGAVPZAFURDamhMLy3j-dxXBUZYRVmqHT3mE8VqIM9ty7ON452Od5YdFU0QuHUqtZiHKXpz1G5fAbBvvTCBPkyNReRJg2/s1600/IMG_0732.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiTShwFCEOoBq_h3jcBx-d3C0bOa_rBFnzj8bYZAA5rMNrBP6qGAVPZAFURDamhMLy3j-dxXBUZYRVmqHT3mE8VqIM9ty7ON452Od5YdFU0QuHUqtZiHKXpz1G5fAbBvvTCBPkyNReRJg2/s320/IMG_0732.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of J&W Seafood's finest oysters from down somewhere near Deltaville. Not sure if these are Rappahannock or Yorks, but they were all good.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td></tr>
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Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-84443385714172693182015-12-06T09:22:00.002-05:002015-12-06T09:22:32.866-05:00A new use for some old logsBack in 2007 we built a log home on our property in Patrick County, Virginia. The logs were milled by Southland Log Homes at its mill near Elliston and delivered on a cold rainy day in May '07. They gave us plenty of materials -- including about 10 percent more logs than we would need, just to make sure there was enough in case some were ruined during construction.<br />
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The house went up pretty fast during construction, but not as fast as it went up three years later after it was struck by lightning. The house burned to the ground in June of 2010. We rebuilt with Hardy Plank siding -- tough to burn, or so we are told -- and never got around to using the left over logs.<br />
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Not until the other day, that is, when our son John was visiting. I had rounded up some stone and a fire ring, and we pulled back the tarps on the unused eight-tear-old logs and brought a few of them into the little patch of woods east of our house. Had a bunch of Ollie Screws -- the long skinny screws log home companies use to torque down on the logs -- and we screwed them into some leftover six by sixes that we had trimmed down to size. Burned up one drill before we borrowed a heavier duty driver from a friend to get those long screws down into the wood. <br />
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You see the result here -- along with my kindling cart, converted from an old baby carriage that once belonged to our neighbor Leslie Bevacqua's daughter in Raleigh and tossed out on the trash heap one morning. Helps keep us warm up here at nearly 3,200 feet of elevation in the Blue Ridge.<br />
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Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-71899296781602847022015-10-25T09:49:00.000-04:002015-10-25T09:49:04.901-04:00Spies in our yard! Northern Spies, yet! For the more-than-four decades we've been coming up to Patrick County's Belcher Mountain, we've known there were some apple trees on the property -- some old ones, in fact. Until we retired in 2011, though, we weren't up here often enough to take note of where the trees are, or to guess what they might be. I would have told you there might be six apple trees on the yonder hill, tucked away here and there not far from the old Conner-Woods house down by the springhouse.<br />
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This year was a revelation. For the first time, I realized there are at least a dozen apple trees on the property still capable of putting out red and yellow apples. Thanks to an amazing spring that came on slowly and without a killing frost, we found applies on 12 trees, and a few more apple-looking trees on the borders of old fields that we've slowly uncovered as we hacked away decades of overgrowth and briars and clinging vines. But I had ever known what any of them might have been. Sure, we had a hunch that two trees near the asparagus patch might be some kind of Golden Delicious, and maybe that red apple tree might be some kind of Red Delicious, only better tasting. In one of the notebooks my father-in-law, Hal Strickland, carried around, I came across one notation: the apple tree nearest the old house might be a Fireside. <br />
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I showed a few of our apples to our friend Diane Flynt, of Foggy Ridge Cidery over near Dugspur, and she showed me the best way to tell if they're ripe (cut 'em open and see if the seeds have darkened; if they have, you can plant 'em, she advised). She also gave me the name of an apple expert in Virginia who might be willing to take a hard look and tell me what they are. So I sent a box full of two apples from each of the trees (except from Tree No. 5; the apples were gone by the time I got around to collecting samples), marked 'em with a Sharpie and sent them off to Professor Apple, whose real name is Tom Burford.<br />
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Not long ago a message arrived from the Professor. He had not had time to study them in great detail, but had identified about eight. That little apple tree by the blueberry patch is a Red Siberian Crab apple. The two we though might be a Golden of some sort are Yellow Bellflowers. That red we thought might be a Red Delicious is something far better: a Limbertwig, so called because they grow on long, drooping, springy twigs, and they taste great.<br />
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True, that tree my father-in-law mentioned is indeed a Fireside, and another tree closer to our house is also a Fireside. The website applejournal.com describes it this way: "Fireside is a great fresh-eating apple with a great name. Originating
from Minnesota, it is mainly seen in northern orchards. It doesn't get
as red as McIntosh, Cortland, Empire, Jonathon and other northern
varieties when ripe, but rather is splashed with quite a bit of green.
This color doesn't affect the flavor, which by the way is excellent. You
may notice some peening on the skin, which look tiny little dents. This
is not a defect, just part of this apple's interesting character.
Minnesota apples certainly have the best names."<br />
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There's also a Green Cheese apple tree, sometimes called a Cheese Apple, not far from our house. But the one I like the most -- actually, two of them, one down by the creek and the other about 200 yards from where I write, are Northern Spy apples.<br />
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Oh, my. Down here in the Southland -- even in the Appalachians, where folks often had widely differing views about the War Between the States -- the idea of a Northern Spy lurking about is enough to get your attention. I'm not clear where the "spy" part of the name came from, but they are said to be cultivars of an apple native to the Northern East Coast of the U.S., plus parts of Michigan and Ontario. One website I looked at provided some light on the topic -- the Northern Spy is also known sometimes as the Northern Spie, or the Northern Pie Apple. <br />
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OK, could be, but I rather like the sound of "Northern Spy." And so did Edgar Lee Masters in <i>Spoon River Anthology, </i>who wrote this in the poem "Conrad Siever:"<br />
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<tr><td align="left">N<span>OT</span> in that wasted garden</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="1"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">Where bodies are drawn into grass</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="2"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">That feeds no flocks, and into evergreens</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">That bear no fruit—</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="4"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">There where along the shaded walks</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="5"><i> 5</i></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">Vain sighs are heard,</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="6"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">And vainer dreams are dreamed</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="7"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">Of close communion with departed souls—</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="8"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">But here under the apple tree</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="9"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">I loved and watched and pruned</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="10"><i> 10</i></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">With gnarled hands</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="11"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">In the long, long years;</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="12"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">Here under the roots of this <b>northern-spy</b></td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="13"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">To move in the chemic change and circle of life,</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="14"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree,</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="15"><i> 15</i></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">And into the living epitaphs</td><td align="right" valign="top"><span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="16"> </a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">Of redder apples!</td></tr>
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Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-75762806659721321422015-10-15T12:08:00.001-04:002015-10-15T12:08:29.391-04:00October afternoon with curious dog<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlN1HoByPvV1aGUvGfQEwf5duSvLCDgS7pWioeNjf2rtOwYPiNA5c9wXoxKYLYB719UqEsG9uYUZIODN8W6pzfH-kKQ1D_0k1KQbf6LEPCbHYcab5JDXyZ0ikyMgXzd0_U4Y7hm_bNBSlx/s1600/October+Sadie.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlN1HoByPvV1aGUvGfQEwf5duSvLCDgS7pWioeNjf2rtOwYPiNA5c9wXoxKYLYB719UqEsG9uYUZIODN8W6pzfH-kKQ1D_0k1KQbf6LEPCbHYcab5JDXyZ0ikyMgXzd0_U4Y7hm_bNBSlx/s640/October+Sadie.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sadie, French Brittany Spaniel</td></tr>
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-24739954222893960872015-09-23T08:03:00.003-04:002015-09-23T08:10:41.782-04:00Jammin' at BristolFor several years I've been hauling my old 1959 Kay upright bass down to Galax on Fridays to play in the four-hour Midday Music program in the breezeway of the Blue Ridge Music Center. Toting that bass around, playing it for that long a time and then getting it, and the special stand, and the special stool, is a load -- sometimes seeming more like a process than a performance. So when I heard about the Jam Town Jam Camp planned for the four days preceding the annual Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion at the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, I signed up, went over to Bristol and spent a wonderful week making mostly bluegrass music with some talented people.<br />
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Among them were Gilbert Nelson and his wife Leigh, professional musicians and good teachers who operate these jam camps all over the East under a program developed by Pete Wernick. The plan isn't to produce professional musicians, but to help dedicated pickers get better at it, learn how to improve their playing skills, absorb the rules of jamming etiquette, expand their repertoire of songs, understand better how to harmonize with other pickers, and become more familiar with stage management, microphone setup and use, and even such things as how and when to make runs up and down the bass. In other words, not reinventing the wheel, but making sure pickers come away with more knowledge and better skills, and having fun. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1JVgPdj7zfRdp02Z-X6959bgGgSK-1An5ScI4xxY05EQVAgvh08LQ57E0xQ-8EJSdAogQbTa1ikRU2g5QW0_73aHZiyqoIl1jmDv7avhxpTdn9jTgY52b0fIy5IATvvkLdTaJxeqYd_My/s1600/IMG_0477.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1JVgPdj7zfRdp02Z-X6959bgGgSK-1An5ScI4xxY05EQVAgvh08LQ57E0xQ-8EJSdAogQbTa1ikRU2g5QW0_73aHZiyqoIl1jmDv7avhxpTdn9jTgY52b0fIy5IATvvkLdTaJxeqYd_My/s320/IMG_0477.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leigh Nelson, left, and Gilbert Nelson at Jam Camp</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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Among other things, we broke up into four bands of about 7 players each, and performed on a stage that a little later that evening would be occupied by the award-winning Black Lillies. So our story, of course, is that we opened for the Lillies. Never mind that our audience was spouses and friends and nice folks who wandered in off the street, while the Lillies' audience was a sold-out, paid audience of enthusiastic fans. Our band called itself the Bluegrass Misfits -- we had three banjos but just one dobro, one mandolin, one guitar and one old bassman. Here's a couple pix:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHDMjX06Jp8LJqsVRNIv4UE9Zh_AP7Maq9aG2A5Q1bc-CZkVxnxhwfMknkhGHifQz5mOQ0KXBHn8CFuOmc0VfXYD56_fm0XOiOJ3wJHXsvyezVtbe1xgeElYyFZeddkIgX4tuGGhGiChC3/s1600/IMG_0452.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHDMjX06Jp8LJqsVRNIv4UE9Zh_AP7Maq9aG2A5Q1bc-CZkVxnxhwfMknkhGHifQz5mOQ0KXBHn8CFuOmc0VfXYD56_fm0XOiOJ3wJHXsvyezVtbe1xgeElYyFZeddkIgX4tuGGhGiChC3/s320/IMG_0452.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Misfits, on stage</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjpAr3KTjkL5_2BV6dlXaMUjXTfSLs9l4ln_cTot7Ry1xfDKmFS4H_phxkFW5fhoZwj81oaRi3QKwzdnnE2yXACTh6edknFnCv4bTGj-AOWJdSWq4LS1NHLmeNVL04YyibaasUCD7eKoXf/s1600/IMG_0454.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjpAr3KTjkL5_2BV6dlXaMUjXTfSLs9l4ln_cTot7Ry1xfDKmFS4H_phxkFW5fhoZwj81oaRi3QKwzdnnE2yXACTh6edknFnCv4bTGj-AOWJdSWq4LS1NHLmeNVL04YyibaasUCD7eKoXf/s320/IMG_0454.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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The best fun of the evening came when Leigh and Gilbert, joined by teachers Bob Minke and Dee Rosser, were performing, and invited up Hannah Jacobs of Danville, whose sweet high-range voice had transported the Misfits with her rendering of "Angel Band", and Corinne Macintosh of Lanexa over near Williamsburg, who played the Stanley crosscut saw with her fiddle bow. You ain't never heard nothin' like it -- hilarious, charming, eerie, and right smack dab in the middle of the bluegrass tradition that if you can play it, people will listen and let you know when it's good. They did. Here's another photo, showing Hannah at the mike and Corinne sawing away on the saw. You can't make this stuff up.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB9scAIzYswbLaF_YTUYe7atl6lWwsQyYnC2w184BS2KnmuKOu3MAIDyoBtnVJe7USU_TRQAoxzh69hyz1B7GAGh6lfhKs8gsGGORqu4kJce6c7Qd4cH8XLEFZ1f-FnAInW-HymwrJny7_/s1600/IMG_0468.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB9scAIzYswbLaF_YTUYe7atl6lWwsQyYnC2w184BS2KnmuKOu3MAIDyoBtnVJe7USU_TRQAoxzh69hyz1B7GAGh6lfhKs8gsGGORqu4kJce6c7Qd4cH8XLEFZ1f-FnAInW-HymwrJny7_/s320/IMG_0468.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sawing away at a Stanley 26" crosscut saw</td></tr>
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-51732427790254115192015-09-13T11:25:00.001-04:002015-09-14T09:03:43.217-04:00Of birthdays, bikes and books<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcAzaTf9jfcyn0TKvZni6rFnma84MGuNuTE7vldwqt72xQ0LJ_83Pbn22qIlCoabNiS_JWcAX0OgCIRt5xUzLFAkDHbZjB-A_VbPch4d5DnyWvt47jMGJXT-YQhDh5ZGHkAQ1xci21nYqV/s1600/DSC_0187.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcAzaTf9jfcyn0TKvZni6rFnma84MGuNuTE7vldwqt72xQ0LJ_83Pbn22qIlCoabNiS_JWcAX0OgCIRt5xUzLFAkDHbZjB-A_VbPch4d5DnyWvt47jMGJXT-YQhDh5ZGHkAQ1xci21nYqV/s320/DSC_0187.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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For the past five years, Chuck and Diane Flynt of Dugspur, pictured above, have raised a bunch of money for the Jessie Peterman Memorial Library in Floyd with a birthday ride down the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is the 6th year, and the goal is to ride a mile for each of Chuck's birthdays -- 75 miles this year. Some of the dozens of riders opt for other goals -- 20 miles, or 40, or 50, or whatever seems right. The Flints contribute a dollar for each mile biked to the library. It all adds up.<br />
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Last year, for example, the birthday ride brought a contribution of nearly $1,200, and the folks at the library were thrilled. As I reported last year, branch manager <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"> <span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;">Cathy
Whitten<span style="font-family: inherit;"> said, </span></span></span></span><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;">"</span></span><span style="color: black;">We are so grateful to all of you who ride and donate. It’s
just the most delightful thing to us that you all would do this!"</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;">This year's event was a huge success, raising $1,589, reports Chuck Fl<span style="font-family: inherit;">y</span>nt. </span></span></span></span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Thirty-<span style="font-family: inherit;">one </span></span></span>riders participated in this glorious event. </span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We
all had a great time and are a little tired and sore from the experience. </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Paul
Lacoste finished with me as he has for all the six previous rides. Craig Rogers
from Patrick Springs, a biking newbie of only 4.5 months, completed the 75 mile
course ahead of his coach and inspiration, me. I won't let him start early next
year!"</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;">It looks like pretty much fun for the riders who gather early on a Sunday morning to head up the Parkway for the Big Dogs ride up to Rakes Millpond. <span style="font-family: inherit;">The wind was howling and it was just over 52 degrees this morning when they l<span style="font-family: inherit;">eft for the first 25-mile leg. The<span style="font-family: inherit;">y rol<span style="font-family: inherit;">led back in <span style="font-family: inherit;">at mid-morning to get a qui<span style="font-family: inherit;">ck snack and then join the Puppy Dog<span style="font-family: inherit;">s riders for the second segment down to <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fancy Gap and back.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi45Pm9v1bGrFrsWynE-A1ZzzJm6Q-DedK_9rFVC6icZb2TAeyVf-QQgT1OpabD9-G-cVCd17BB38_9wEpdmfOq-9CWaHOe7sP61Sw1UnX-YFlMX6I4mjVt9Yb-r2s80ECAThyphenhyphenPllCnblMd/s1600/DSC_0023.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi45Pm9v1bGrFrsWynE-A1ZzzJm6Q-DedK_9rFVC6icZb2TAeyVf-QQgT1OpabD9-G-cVCd17BB38_9wEpdmfOq-9CWaHOe7sP61Sw1UnX-YFlMX6I4mjVt9Yb-r2s80ECAThyphenhyphenPllCnblMd/s320/DSC_0023.JPG" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dan Sweeney gnarfs a banana-and-peanut concoction before heading out with the Big Dogs</td></tr>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But at least this morning it wasn't sleeting, as it was for part of the ride four years ago. Today's <span style="font-family: inherit;">gusty, strong winds were enough to battle. Craig Roger of <span style="font-family: inherit;">Border Springs Farm in Patrick Springs<span style="font-family: inherit;">, fairly ne<span style="font-family: inherit;">w to serious bike riding, said he fought not only strong wi<span style="font-family: inherit;">nds but also some st<span style="font-family: inherit;">artled turkeys in the road as he biked up and down some of those steep hills. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEico5R2i_mfYztIzC0QkVqN-sJEHS_CLGScGFqVzaTXShYFPaGRW5zUi6EaaRc8ecYjSR9haTYDjLdNZQzwVEC3TsGspcHQJtNbnNDt1LCZuYZtkFDktrMxjd1Kq7x5cHxZTN0XzMq-ZaDZ/s1600/DSC_0010.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEico5R2i_mfYztIzC0QkVqN-sJEHS_CLGScGFqVzaTXShYFPaGRW5zUi6EaaRc8ecYjSR9haTYDjLdNZQzwVEC3TsGspcHQJtNbnNDt1LCZuYZtkFDktrMxjd1Kq7x5cHxZTN0XzMq-ZaDZ/s320/DSC_0010.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Craig Rogers and Chuck Flynt, shortly before Craig was first out of the blocks toward Rakes Mill Pond</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbizIiqtGr6lV9fzHtc45JHjwvMYIcO15wpMg79YUCKD47583QwTrNu0GVEeH6yGXJxq2_n68BwUQ2chhaLHVIBIMc6xhTlgXcbOVsOtcrPNvM1JW_-1sh8d1d9hiEZyP0PEEdCgjjODm3/s1600/DSC_0015.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbizIiqtGr6lV9fzHtc45JHjwvMYIcO15wpMg79YUCKD47583QwTrNu0GVEeH6yGXJxq2_n68BwUQ2chhaLHVIBIMc6xhTlgXcbOVsOtcrPNvM1JW_-1sh8d1d9hiEZyP0PEEdCgjjODm3/s320/DSC_0015.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Craig, heading north, first leg</span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD4HgbZaEeB6S6uTvqmX1ayNP9CNhpVYCjXAEZD8vn-YHCuZc6ktC80WetODzEcPlTE7seDen027dDMDtyAgAdrvgwbv0K5-swIpsEnjxIpANEgu2bx-blO8RRR2XlfniXTPBNNllRH0vR/s1600/DSC_0104.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD4HgbZaEeB6S6uTvqmX1ayNP9CNhpVYCjXAEZD8vn-YHCuZc6ktC80WetODzEcPlTE7seDen027dDMDtyAgAdrvgwbv0K5-swIpsEnjxIpANEgu2bx-blO8RRR2XlfniXTPBNNllRH0vR/s320/DSC_0104.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Heading back d<span style="font-family: inherit;">own toward Mabry Mill</span></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwu1qY98Dmv-VaAn4BTDeQ-MwcEabYvkDwqH6z4WjKNnbH8EXEtjNCd65lZFeZ0XrL-GfaEUUZ9CCV__ruyNFtUqntmFYZthbBRwAALNnQBHjcWgOIkm-VysJO7TY6VgnLI9iotu0N0KBk/s1600/DSC_0287.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwu1qY98Dmv-VaAn4BTDeQ-MwcEabYvkDwqH6z4WjKNnbH8EXEtjNCd65lZFeZ0XrL-GfaEUUZ9CCV__ruyNFtUqntmFYZthbBRwAALNnQBHjcWgOIkm-VysJO7TY6VgnLI9iotu0N0KBk/s320/DSC_0287.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Newlywed Dan and Beth Sweeney</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJnJuov4FLz4h262nvm3Id9OTdylG_vmOacvLtiXlIZ2f1wsCcoTr75j49K3_zLa_8ToTAiqCJPAOLHuZBtaYyIVuxE0GRm_z7ni0_zsu-5Ena6tyG_ANN2Hlma3ZpJBNjnAyNDWmFDn5/s1600/DSC_0265.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJnJuov4FLz4h262nvm3Id9OTdylG_vmOacvLtiXlIZ2f1wsCcoTr75j49K3_zLa_8ToTAiqCJPAOLHuZBtaYyIVuxE0GRm_z7ni0_zsu-5Ena6tyG_ANN2Hlma3ZpJBNjnAyNDWmFDn5/s320/DSC_0265.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Floyd builder Ed <span style="font-family: inherit;">Erwin, about to start on the second leg</span></span></span></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-13968112824310857992015-08-29T08:41:00.004-04:002015-08-29T08:42:57.060-04:00The old New River, still magnificent It was a little over 40 years ago when I first began hearing about the New River -- not the one down near Camp LeJeune on Carolina's coastline, but the one up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and North Carolina. It caught my attention because U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin -- not widely known as an environmentalist in those days -- was talking about what a shame it would be to lose that old waterway for a hydroelectric project that would inundate one of the oldest river valleys on Earth. I was a green-as-grass Washington correspondent for the Landmark Newspapers -- Norfolk, Roanoke and Greensboro -- and covered the dad-gummedest fight you ever saw in Congress over Appalachian Power Co.'s plan to dam the New near Mouth of Wilson and drown one of the most gorgeous rivers in America.<br />
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I won't rehash that fight, but suffice it to say it took an alliance of Republicans and Democrats -- that's right, that's how it sometimes worked in the mid-1970s -- to adopt legislation putting the New River in the Wild and Scenic Rivers system and thus make it off-limits to damming and flooding. There was Republican NC Gov. Jim Holshouser and Democratic Sen. Sam Ervin and Republican Sen. Jesse Helms and Republican Congressman Wilmer "Vinegar Bend" Mizell and later Democratic Congressman Steve Neal working side by side to keep that river open and flowing. They won, in what was an amazing set of circumstances that culminated in a huge victory for environmentalists when President Gerald Ford signed the final papers.<br />
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A few weeks ago I was cycling with friends along the bike path that runs alongside the New River in Grayson County, VA -- well downstream of the old proposed dam site, and was once again astonished at the beauty of this rugged old river -- wide and slow in places, then rough and wild in others with big jagged boulders primed and waiting to tear up canoes and kayaks just a few hundred yards downstream. We biked along the path of the old Norfolk & Western Railway, where trains ran for nearly a century alongside the river from the vicinity of Galax on to Pulaski. The late bluegrass musician Jim Marshall -- who died in a funeral home just a few weeks ago -- wrote about this in his song "The Old New River Train Won't be Coming Back."<br />
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That New River bike path is part of the New River Trail State Park -- running for some 57 miles though that area of the Blue Ridge as the river makes its way north to West Virginia and into the Kanawha and the Ohio and then to the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico.<br />
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Joe Tennis, in his fascinating book <i>Virginia Rail Trails: Crossing the Commonwealth</i>, reveals some of the details of that old railroad. He wrote about how the work began in 1882 and eventually "pulsed like a main vein through these Virginia villages, where mining -- and dining on the legendary catfish of the New River -- was a way of life. Mile after mile, the railroad followed the river's course on a shelf, just above the floodplain."<br />
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So it is today as you leave the town of Fries, Virginia, on the New, for a leisurely bike ride heading north -- down the river, interestingly enough, on that shelf just above the river and its banks. It's a lovely way to break back in on biking. It had been decades since I biked regularly, and everything about biking has changed, it seems to me. The first day Kerry Hilton and I went about 5 miles -- hardly enough to warm up for veteran bikers, but it was enough for these old legs and hindquarters. The next day we put in about 12 miles -- and when two rockets passed us on the old railroad bed that now serves as a hiking/biking/horseback riding trail, Kerry informed me they were not FA-18 jets, but our friends Lee Chicester and Jack Russell, racing along toward Pulaski as they trained for a 400-mile expedition up in the Northeast.<br />
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I never got anywhere near Pulaski, but then again my goals were much less ambitious than theirs. This seemed appropriate for a railway that was never quite finished. Tennis relates how the New River Plateau Railway Company "had ambitions to keep going," with plans to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains and "take a dive" on down into Mt. Airy in Surry County, N.C. By the early 1890s, Tennis writes, the New Rive Plateau Railway had become part of the Norfolk and Western (now the Norfolk Southern) and got as far as Galax. This line was part of the planned North Carolina Branch. The state line is not far south of Galax, which the line reached in 1904, "But there, the North Carolina Branch would stop -- still a few miles short of the North Carolina border."<br />
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The branch line to Fries -- pronounced locally as Freeze in the winter and Frys in the summer -- ran well into the 1980s, when the property was donated by the railroad to the Commonwealth of Virginia. It then was turned into the New River Tail State Park, and has a bit of everything -- trestles and bridges to traverse, tunnels to zip through and such historical oddities as the Shot Tower, visible from the highway just off I-77. The 75-foot tall tower was built of limestone by Thomas Jackson in 1807, Tennis wrote. "In the tower's top room, melted lead was poured through various sizes of sieves. That hot lead then fell 150 feet through a shaft to a large kettle of water, which acted as a cushion. Jackson reached his finished shot by an access tunnel near the river. The shot was sold on site to hunters, traders and merchants or sometimes shipped downriver by bateaux."<br />
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In coming years I plan to see more of the old New River's sights and sites. I expect I'll start once again in Fries or maybe nearby Galax, and enjoy that gentle ride down the river, heading north. And when I stop I'll lift a glass to all those who in the 1970s saw in the New River a place of unparalleled beauty and rugged splendor, and voted to keep it like it is. <br />
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<br />Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-485730189677446110.post-88498972973806606222015-08-17T16:04:00.001-04:002015-08-17T16:10:27.638-04:00High 'mater season in the Blue Ridge Almost everyone I know is a better gardener than I am and they grow a whole lot more stuff than we do here at 3,186 feet of elevation. But this has been a wonderful year, starting with a long slow spring without a bad late freeze, enough rain often enough, and some unseen hand from a higher power constantly helping things along. There are tassels on the corn now, 'taters are lovely, onions seem to be holding their own, zukes and cukes and crooknecks still put out, the peppers come and they go, but mostly they come in batches, the rabbit-eye blueberries have come in strong and the 'maters, by golly, we're getting enough to start a produce stand. Here's <br />
one 15-minute harvest, not counting the slightly nibbled 'maters I threw in the crick:<br />
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Let's see, those red things include cocktail tomatoes, Romas, Dolly Partons, German Johnsons and I think a Big Boy or two. Jane Kendall and I used to laugh about how we liked our 'mater sammiches: "Made at 8 and eat at noon." Now that we're knee-deep in this 'mater bounty, I think I'll fry a mess of 'em up in cornmeal and bacon grease for breakfast tomorrow. Reminds me of what Woody Durham used to say when the Tar Heels were on a roll: Go To War, Miss Agnes!<br />
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P.S.: I always wondered what that meant, and a few minutes after posting about 'maters, I looked it up on the world wide interweb. Turns out to be one of Chuck Thompson's on-air gems, some years before Woody. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:<br />
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<b>Charles L. "Chuck" Thompson</b> (June 10, 1921–March 6, 2005) was an American <a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportscaster" title="Sportscaster">sportscaster</a> best known for his broadcasts of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball" title="Major League Baseball">Major League Baseball</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Orioles" title="Baltimore Orioles">Baltimore Orioles</a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League" title="National Football League">National Football League</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Baltimore_Colts" title="History of the Baltimore Colts">Baltimore Colts</a>. He was well-recognized for his resonant voice, crisply descriptive style of <a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play-by-play" title="Play-by-play">play-by-play</a>, and signature on-air exclamations <i>"Go to war, Miss Agnes!"</i> and <i>"Ain't the beer cold!"</i>.<br />
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So there you go. How 'bout <b><i>them</i></b> 'maters? Jack Bettshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16863064708403104909noreply@blogger.com0