View from the Mountain

The Ghost I Knew

You cannot have a ghost story without a spooky, somewhat mysterious house and where I grew up in rural Forsyth County was nothing like that but things change.

My mother moved back to 347 West Pine Street (pictured to the left) in Mount Airy the fall of 1963. I came home to that house for Thanksgiving that year, my first at McCallie, the military school I was attending in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

My bedroom had moved from our non-spooky house in Lewisville about thirty-eight miles away to Pine Street which certainly had the potential for spookiness. My dad had been in a house at that location since around the turn of the century.  My mom lived there from the mid-twenties until just before I was born in 1949. For many years, she ran a beauty shop on Main St. just walking distance from the Pine Street house.

The house also had a lot of history, some of it gruesome which is certainly helpfully when looking for ghosts. Many of stories that the house's four walls could tell never got explained to me before everyone who could shed light on the mysteries died.

Some the questions that I wanted answered never got addressed because no one ever wanted to talk about them. There were things that I did not even know to ask when I was growing up. 

The house at 347 West Pine Street is an imposing home. That was especially the case to a country boy who was more comfortable in the woods than in a big fancy house. By the time, I got old enough to care, I was on a mission to get away from the house and Mount Airy. That mission took me to Canada by the time I was twenty-two.

Upstairs above the floor with the bedrooms was a full stick-framed attic complete with walnut banisters. If ever there was an area that could house ghosts along with mysterious steamer trunks, this attic was it. The house even had a laundry chute which went all the way to the basement where there was a bedroom and bathroom for a maid.  The kitchen, dining room, and great room were on the second floor along with the bedroom my father was reduced to using because of a stroke.

It did not take me long to figure out that the history I did not know about was powerful in the minds of others.  My Aunt Molly when she visited would not stay in the guest bedroom. She always slept in one of the twin beds in my mother's bedroom. Eventually I heard the story about my father's first wife's attempted suicide. My mother, who at the time was nursing my grandmother, found my father's first wife hanging from the walnut railing around the top of the stairs. She saved her but the story was born.

I was never afraid of the house but there were some strange things like how cool the hallway always felt between my bedroom and the stairs to the attic. Of course there were strange noises but it was an old house. Then in 1974 after my dad had died, my wife and I were staying in my bedroom after coming back from our place in Canada. It was our first night in the house as a married couple.

We were going to bed and all of sudden the electrical panels started popping. It was like someone was running between the two floors flipping the circuit breakers off and on. The circuit breakers were not easy to move from one position to the other. They also made a loud noise. My mother was sound asleep in her bedroom. She always slept with a baseball bat by her bed but said the ghost had never bothered her.  I thought someone had broken into the house. I took a gun from my gun cabinet and checked the whole house. All doors were locked and no windows had been breached. Things quieted down as soon as I left my bedroom.  To this day, I have never solved the riddle of the noise that night.

My mother died in the spring of 2004.  I often said that if there was a ghost in the house, it would have to deal with the life force of my mother when she entered the realm of spirits.  My money was always on my mother winning any battle of the spirits.

After her death, we were faced with cleaning out the Pine Street house. It took us many years and we often spent weekends working on the house.  One weekend my wife was working in a hall closet on the main floor. She looked towards the foyer and saw something triangular floating from the stairs to the dining room. We are pretty grounded people but we could never come up with an explanation that made any sense. It was probably my imagination, but the upstairs hallway felt particularly cold that day.

This might prove I am crazy but not long after that I decided that the blinds in the attic had to go. I ripped them down and threw open the windows. It was not long after that when I noticed how warm the upstairs hallway felt. I smiled and thought to myself that my mother's spirit had prevailed and the restless ghost had been driven out once I opened the windows and made sure the attic got plenty of sunshine.

Even after that I was the only one willing to spend the night in the house alone. By that time the guns were long gone but so was the ghost.

So that is the story of the ghost that I once knew.

 

 

Not for Sissies

Long ago I remember hearing my mother say, “Old age is not for sissies.” She was 84 and I was 45. When you are forty-five, you think you handle just about anything. In the twenty-four years after college, I moved to Canada where we farmed for ten years, and we moved back to the US. I had already been at Apple for over a decade.

While I was a very successful at Apple, my mother who knew nothing about computers knew a lot more about life than me.

She understood that families can get complicated, hard work does not always result in success, and most importantly she knew the value of continuing to work even when it was not easy.

She could accomplish amazing things, but she did it not through a flurry of activity but through methodically getting things done as she was able. When she was in her nineties, she was proud of still being able to dress herself even though it took her over an hour.

Her mother died during the 1918-19 flu pandemic. At the age of nine she became the lady of the house. She had to cook for her five siblings. Many times she told me the story of making biscuits in the morning for the family but having one of the boys put the heavy pan in the wood stove because she could not lift it.

She left home in her teens because the new stepmother and my mother did not see eye to eye. If I remember the story correctly, as she was leaving she told the stepmother that if it ever got to her that the stepmother had laid a finger on one of her sisters, she and her favorite cast iron frying pan would be back to deal with it. Mother had grown into being very proficient with a cast iron pan.

Blanche, after putting herself through cosmetology school, became a successful beautician running her own shop on Main Street in Mount Airy and later after I was born, she had one in the back of our house in Lewisville, North Carolina. It was the way she supported us.

As a single mom in the fifties, she managed to raise me and become a very popular Boy Scout mom who was considered a better driver than most of the men. I never lacked for love. I also learned the value of education and hard work.

Like all of us, mother had things in her life that challenged her, but she always rose to the challenge even if it involved a lot of false starts. She was someone you could count on when help was needed. We had a cattle field day at our farm in the late seventies. My mother who was in her late sixties got on an airplane and flew from North Carolina to New Brunswick which included switching terminals by herself in Boston to help with the 300 people who showed up.

Mother was in her mid-eighties before she gave up her driver’s license. When she did it, she told me not to worry, if there was an emergency, she could still drive. A few years after giving up driving, she had to give up working in her flowers. It was the stairs in and out of her house that put an end to the flowers. It was then that we realized the house was holding her prisoner.

When our good friend RJ who was living upstairs in the house died suddenly, mother had to move. RJ had been her legs, getting groceries and things that they needed. She had continued to cook for them as he continued to work for the local newspaper.

Mother moved in with us and we offered her our main floor bedroom. She wouldn’t hear of it. Every night, she would go up the stairs on her rear, one step at a time to one of our other bedrooms. It is appropriate to mention at this time that one of our daughters likes to she comes from a long line of stubborn. It is pretty easy to see the source.

Eventually we built mother her own room and bathroom but when it was time, mother reluctantly moved into an assisted living facility. In spite of declaring she could never make new friends, she made some of the best friends of her life in those last three years. It was only in the last few days of her life that she had to have help getting dressed.

Only after all her new friends passed away was she was ready to let go. Her mind was still clear but her body had worn out long ago. She was ninety-three years and six months old. She is still missed every day by those of us she touched and nurtured.

I have cousins who say that they would have never had Christmas if it wasn’t for their Aunt Blanche, my mother. Another claims that he would have gone down a bad road and likely be dead if my mother hadn’t forced him to go to military school.

She was a force of nature.

Beam Me Up Scotty, I am ready

Back in January 2007, I wrote an article,What Jobs told me on the iPhone, for the Guardian Newspaper. It was three years before the iPhone was introduced. It was also back when you could get a decent check for writing a good article. Certainly, that long ago none of us even Steve Jobs had any idea of the seismic change that smartphones were about to bring to all our lives.

The iPhone was introduced in January 2010.  I finally got a Droid (Android smartphone) in March of that same year. I went with Android for three reasons, I know how Apple works (they are a money machine), I needed better phone reception (Verizon had better reception, AT&T had the iPhone, and I was interested in maps, GIS, and mapping.  I judged the Android-Google-Map connection better than that of the iPhone.

So I joined the Google-Android world and have never really regretted it. I even ditched Verizon over four years ago and signed up with Google FI.  My wife had been on a flip phone. Our service her flip phone and my smartphone with Verizon was regularly over $120. With two smartphone on Google FI our charges for the two phones were around $53 a month.  Perhaps my wife getting a smartphone a few years ago was fortuitous. She was a proficient computer user but had done little texting. In the last four years, texting has become the choice for informal communications. I have to say it was only the tip of the iceberg.

Here we are in September 2022.  After today's experience at a nearby DMV office, I am not sure how citizens of North Carolina without smartphones and the smarts to use them are going to survive. Over a month ago, I made an appointment to get my NC Real ID Driver's License. I wanted to get it done before my passport expired.  The passport expires this month and I suspect it might take a while to get it renewed. It turned out that what most impressed them was an original notarized copy of my birth certificate. What shocked me was how deep technology had penetrated the world of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) which impacts almost all of us.

We pulled into the DMV parking lot in one of the most rural of North Carolina areas. We got the last parking spot. I smiled at my wife knowing that she might regret coming if the wait ended up very long.  As I walked inside I was greeted by a large sign with a QR code.  The sign asked me like the one you see in the post to scan the QR Code to check in. I was getting some first-hand experience with Q-Anywhere, the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles app to make it easier to get services. It is a great idea but I watched as a number of baffled people waiting patiently to see if they could get around the system. When one of the two employees finally had time, they were told politely that the QR code or the less prominently displayed texting options were the only way to show up for appointments.

I heard at least one person say, but I don't have a smart phone. Even for someone like me (drenched in technology), the experience wasn't seamless. I scanned the QR code using the camera app on my Google Pixel 6 phone, touched the URL which showed up and quickly got to the right website to send a text, but the cell service was going in and out (too far from the 5G towers?) so I had to step outside to send the text response.

That worked fine and I got this message.

NCDMV: You have checked in successfully. Your ticket number is A123. Please proceed to the lobby, you will be called shortly. Msg/Data rates may apply. -Reply STOP to opt-out

 

NCDMV: Please proceed to Station 01 in XXXXXville. Thank you for waiting from a safe distance -Msg&Data rates may apply. -Reply STOP to opt-out

I took a seat by the only empty seat in the room.  The empty seat was quickly filled by a cute long-haired teenage girl. About a minute later, one of the two employees came out. He asked if everyone had checked in. Two people standing at the counter said they had not.  He told them to go home and make an appointment on their computer.  One of them said "I don't have a computer." He gave him a printed flyer and said call this number.  He then turned his QR code sign around and said they were no longer taking new check-ins until after 2PM (It was 11:10 AM)

 

A couple of minutes later the late arriving teenager was called back. In a couple of more minutes I was summoned by text. My appointment took less than ten minutes. The DMV employee made sure I was registered to vote, checked my organ donor status, took my picture, thanked me for being well prepared with lots of documentation and said I would receive my new license within two weeks. He said to keep my temporary license with my old one until the new one arrived. I paid my $14 by credit card and left. Unfortunately, they have yet to allow you to pay by smartphone but they have moved up from requiring cash.

 

As I left, I could not help but think of the story my mother often told. She was fond of saying that when she moved to Mt. Airy in the 1920s, the population sign on the outskirts of town read 150. I have not been able to verify that or her story about getting her first driver's license.  She claimed that the Justice of Peace said, "Blanche can you drive?" She responded, "Yes." He said "Here's your license, give me a quarter." That was likely about about 1935 when she was twenty-five.

 

Just to hammer home the grip of technology. We had lunch on Highway 601 just north of Mocksville.  When our check came, it had a QR code on it that allowed me to pay without handing over my credit card or signing anything.

 

Beam me up Scotty, I am ready.

 

 

 

 

Once There Was Only One Cat Beneath The Tree

When I was around three years old, my single mother and I moved to Lewisville, North Carolina from just across the Yadkin River in Yadkin County. It was where my mother had been born on a mill pond.

Sometime before I was very old, a black and white stray cat found its way to the porch that connected mother's beauty shop with the rest of the house.  My bedroom, the former breezeway, also opened onto the same porch. Mother told me in no uncertain terms, that I could feed Whiskers but that I could not bring her into the house.

I slid open the screen on the aluminum screen door to my room. It did not take much convincing with food for Whiskers to jump into the house by herself. Technically, i was innocent. I don't think I got punished. Whiskers was with us until my freshman year in college. When my mother, Whiskers, and I moved to Mount Airy in 1963, my dad fell in love with her. He decreed that she should enjoy a canned salmon and canned milk diet. The picture at the top is Whiskers under the tree in our Mount Airy house probably ten years after she first sneaked through the screened door. There were a lot of changes in those ten years before I headed off to military school.

I was five years old before there was a television in our neighborhood. I was in grade school before we had a black and white set in our home in Lewisville just west of Winston-Salem. It was a very different time.  Unlike the children of today, we were free-range children, showing up at mealtimes and just in time to fall exhausted into bed on summer evenings

Our doctor made house calls.  We walked to school or rode our bikes. After school, we played pick-up football or baseball. We built forts in the woods and dammed whatever creeks we could find. Getting to go fishing in a farm pond was a huge treat.

There was a bus service from Winston-Salem but mother always drove us past the Lewisville feed mill to the big city. We got rid of our trash by burning it in a barrel. Sodas were a nickel until they moved them from water cooled boxes to machines outside of gas stations. Then they went to a dime. Nabs came in a square four pack. My first memories of going to the local general store are of going to a counter and handing them a list which they filled. It wasn't long before they opened the aisles and everything went to self-service except the cold cuts and meat counter. The gas stations had teenagers or men who came out, pumped your gas, cleaned your windows, and checked your oil.

Before the television, we got our news from a morning and evening newspaper that was delivered each day. Even when I was very young, I started the day by reading the newspaper.

We lived on a red dirt road but we had a gravel driveway and were proud to have it.  Our car did not have air conditioning but did have a standard transmission which was three on the tree. Our grill was a little round one and cooking on it was pretty special because I got to be in charge of it. I .was a teenager before we got the one room air conditioner for our living room. On hot summer nights I would sneak in there and sleep on the sofa

Churches had revival services in packed tents and when people died the bodies were placed in homes for visitation.  There were softball games at night during the summer at the school. It cost twenty-five cents to get in the bleachers. It was the entertainment for summer nights except for chasing fireflies and capture the flag. The highlight of summer other than the two weeks mother took off were riding the old activity bus to Tanglewood Park were we swam and took swimming lessons in the morning, had a hot dog for lunch and played putt-putt until the bus took us home.

Sunday afternoons in the summer were spent at our relatives, often eating homemade ice cream or watermelon under the shade trees. In the winter we played tag or sometimes played cards.

They were only a few drive-in restaurants but they often had real carhops. If you went to a movie anywhere besides the city, you went to a drive-in theater. Once my teenage cousins got me in by having me ride in the trunk The first restaurant I remember was the Dinette in East Bend, NC. Going to town sometimes meant a grilled cheese at the Woolworths' lunch counter.

The big city of Winston-Salem had a magical Sears Roebuck store that had everything you could imagine needing. The city also had movie theaters and a K&W restaurant which my mother loved.  The first fast food restaurant on our side of Winston-Salem was a Burger King. It arrived about the same time that the first shopping center with a supermarket was built.  The Krispy Kreme might have gotten there first.

We had relatives who heated with coal and others who had an oil stove with mica window for their main heat. One relative only had an outhouse and no indoor plumbing.

Most roads were two lanes and when you went on a long trip to beach, you packed your meals to eat along the way. I learned early to navigate with paper maps and watch at night for lights shining on the power lines so mother would know to dim her lights.

Ten years after Whiskers first came and I returned from my first year from military school, the world had changed. Supermarkets were on their way to taking the grocery business but we still had a farmer come to the backdoor a couple of times a month selling homemade butter. For a while longer glass bottles of milk continued to show up on our steps.

I could walk up to Mount Airy's main street and find a couple of hardware stores, Robby's Army Surplus store, Flip Ree's Men's Clothing, Floyd's Barber Shop, the post office, the police department, two movie theaters, a couple of newspapers, Snappy Lunch, a furniture store, jewelry stores, a big department store. at least two banks and a few other restaurants.

When I went away to college in 1967, I got to visit the one room showroom of LL Beans. I came home with a catalog. Mail order was just beginning.

No one imagined that they would one day do most of their shopping by having cardboard boxes delivered to their houses.I never dreamed that a pandemic would lead us to having four cats and no Christmas tree, but that is another story.

I remember when things were very different.

If Silver Could Talk

Silver is not very popular these days. Some silver things can hardly be given away. My generation has one foot in the world where silver items were well used and certainly respected and today's world where silver pieces cannot find a home where they even see the light of day and a little polish.

At least this straddling of worlds provides a little perspective. I know my mother who was definitely not born with a silver spoon in her mouth learned to love silver when she became the grand lady of the house at 347 West Pine St. My dad who I hardly knew loved to have dinner parties. In those days, the first half of the last century, a good party apparently required silver. I did not grow up with silver because my mother and dad were not living together during my early years.

It was only in the sixties when I came back from my first year at military school that my mother had moved back to Pine St. to take care of my dad who had a stroke. There were no parties in those years but there were extended family dinners when mother got to show off all the silver trays, punch bowl, and silver spoons.  I never thought much about them until after my father died and mother starting trying to give us silver every time that we walked through the house.

Giving us silver that she no longer used and was tired of polishing only had a limited impact but it did not matter. In July of 2004 when her boarder and long-time friend, RJ Berrier, died, she announced that she was moving in us.  She packed her suitcase and walked out of the house and left us to deal with it and everything in it.

It was then when we started figuring out what to do with everything mother had left behind that I started wishing that the silver could talk. I am sure there were plenty of Mount Airy people in the Pine Street house during the twentieth century. I suspect there was enough drink to keep the stories and conversations flowing into the early morning hours.

I know so little about the real person who was my father that I would gladly welcome a talking silver tray. Today we get snippets of who people are in video clips and social media. Certainly there is no shortage of casual photographs. Ninety years ago there was little to record the parties of the day but the memories of those you attended. If letters were written, I have not been fortunate enough to find them. 

Given a little magic, I would expect the silver to recount strong opinions which likely were freely expressed.  While people certainly disagreed about things in those days, certainly they all believed in a better life for their children through education and science. It is safe to say that they shared a vision of country ready to be built by people willing to work and pay their fair share of taxes.

One of the few things I remember my dad telling me and I sure the silver will back me up was that he was proud to be able to pay his taxes. Today that thought is about as popular as silver trays are. I know that my dad who came to this country at the age of five, got his education in night school and worked with his hands until his business skills could take over was sincere in saying that.

The Disappearing Narrative of Our Lives

Cathedral of Trees, Rich Park, Mocksville, NC

For years there has been a rush for our lives to become digital. Few people I know write letters requiring a stamp. The staffing at local newspapers continues a long-term decline. The bits and pieces of local life are more and more under-reported. Email with changing clients and no good way to preserve the important ones has always been a poor choice to preserve history. Now people seem to be abandoning email for SMS or even the less reliable Facebook messenger. Try finding something from fifteen years ago in your text messages.

I suspect we are losing the really interesting things that might help historians understand us and our times. What is film worthy today might not be as important years down the road as the letter you did not write to your cousin living in another state. As my wife and I have moved over the years and downsized our living spaces, we have been forced to jettison many of pieces of paper that at one time I hoped to preserve. I suspect we are not alone.

Even if you are among the few of us who still read paper newspapers and you do have a copy of that newspaper article that meant so much to you, can you actually put your hands on it? Part of my early life in Mount Airy, North Carolina, was defined by my knowing R.J. Berrier. R.J. as he was known to his friends spent fifty-two years writing for the Mount Airy Times and then the Mount Airy News. I wrote about him in a post, Love and Respect for Print. When I woke up today to read that one of R.J.’s friends, Eleanor Powell, had died at the age of ninety, I was immediately reminded of the article that she wrote around twenty years ago celebrating R.J.’s many years in the world of newspapers.

I tried a Google search and then a search on the Mount News Archive. The searches returned nothing which surprised me because I remember Eleanor getting an award from the Associated Press for her article on R.J. It seems a shame that so much of what makes life memorable is so hard to keep close. I likely have a copy of the article somewhere in the boxes that followed us to our new home. I might have been able to have put my fingers on it two houses ago, but not now.

Modern life throws enough challenges at us that it is hard enough keeping up with the needs of today without trying to organize the past. If nothing else I think this demonstrates why writing for yourself is so critically important. When I went to write this piece, I could not remember exactly how long R.J. had worked in newspapers. There is certainly no one alive that could tell me. I thought it was around fifty years. Fortunately, a little over fifteen years ago, I wrote that post about R.J. and the information was there. I am sorry that I did not scan Eleanor Powell’s article about R.J. at the time.

Perhaps the best narrative of history is the one you write yourself. I am pleased to chronicle my own times and how the world has looked to me. Writing to record your own view of the world might be the best remedy.

There are advantages. Just before we left the coast and moved inland, my new neighbor, Bill, told me that he wanted to debate me about something I said about the history of the White Oak River. He said he changed his mind when a Google search showed that I was the author of one of the top-ranked articles on the subject. There is nothing like being your own authority on the subject because no one else thought it was important enough to write about it.