Franklin Roosevelt and Pilot Mountain School

I've been watching the Ken Burns series on The Roosevelts. Watching isn't exactly the word. It's too nondescript, because this history narrative has enthralled me. I checked to see if that's the word I really wanted to use and um, yes...enthralled, to hold spellbound, to captivate.

Not that I was even alive during the Roosevelt years, any of them. After "watching" these episodes, I'm positive I wouldn't want to have been alive during the Roosevelt years, any of them, although I more than admire those who doggedly survived those years, and grew strong because of trials they faced. Tragedy. World wide war. Uncontrolled disease. World wide depression. World wide war, again.

It's not as if I hadn't studied history. I have, although by the time my introduction to US history classes in high school and university arrived at the twentieth century, time was running out and we hurried through.

These episodes don't hurry. They show what I missed in those history classes, the family saga connected to the country where I live.

What I found most interesting is the verification of details I found during my research on the story of Pilot Mountain School. I saw this school's story unfold on television in the background of the Roosevelt story, Franklin's at least. He had polio. Chapter five, Pilot Mountain School children were quarantined due to the polio epidemic and their parents lived in constant fear that this horrid disease would strike their children next.

Franklin Roosevelt, 1937.
Photo credit: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

As president, FDR made a deal with the country, a New Deal, one designed to help the individuals suffering through the Great Depression no matter where they were, the South Mountains of North Carolina even. The REA, Rural Electrification Act, brought electric lines through the valley and to the proposed school site. The PWA and the WPA and the NYA, all economic recovery acts that brought jobs and institutions and training and yes, Pilot Mountain School. Partially funded by the PWA, the Public Works Administration, overseen by the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, and built by the boys of the NYA, National Youth Administration (boys age 15 and up because the men were called to war), this school would not have existed without some kind of deal, some kind of New Deal. It's there in chapter three of Lessons Learned, the results of the Roosevelt initiatives.

Chapter four, now that's another Roosevelt story, the World War II story and how the children and teachers of Pilot Mountain School supported the war effort and endured the hardships of the war reality. The Roosevelts: An Intimate History Check it out and as you watch, enthralled, think of this little school in the South Mountains of North Carolina.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

First Day of School

Today is the first day of school in our county. Even if I wanted to avoid it, I couldn't miss that fact. Not only is it on the local news, it was in the newspaper, in announcements at churches, and no surprise here, on facebook. Ah, facebook, the modern equivalent of the grapevine, only better, because photographs are included. 

I'm sitting on my deck this morning, reading through comments my friends posted about the first day of school, teachers excited about the prospects, parents snapping pictures of nervous children holding new backpacks and lunchboxes, grandparents requesting prayers as they sit back and sip their second cup of coffee and remember the once upon a time when it was their turn to have that goodbye, good luck, have a nice day intimate moment with their child.

I can only speculate what Pilot Mountain School would have been like on the first day of school if facebook had been around. 

Not that different, I'd venture to say. 

Nerves are still nerves whether 1942, 1952 or 2014. The unknown is still unknown. The teachers are still at the door. The children are still wide eyed. The parents are still fretting. The grandparents are still praying. Well, so are the parents. And the teachers. And, dare I say, the students.

True, lunchboxes have changed from brown paper bags with greasy spots at the bottom to Hello Kitty or some other variation with a thermos tucked inside.

True, book bags have evolved from a belt for strapping around the books to a full colored Hello Kitty design to match the aforementioned lunchbox.

True, the yellow number two pencils and Blue Horse notebook paper were bought from the school store, not from Walmart with its list of materials each school "suggests" their students bring the first day.

But also true is the hope that a new beginning brings. That will never change, thank goodness. 

It's what keeps teachers coming back.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Small Southern Town Baseball Fields

The title says it all.

About my latest project, that is.

Crump Field in Caldwell County, North Carolina

Is that a cool picture, or what! Look in the background at the three story grandstand and at the team "bus" that used to be a hearse. Study the players' faces, their pride.

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is 1955 small town south.

Only better. That is rural small town south, if there could be such a designation, out where there are no blue laws to prevent the teams from playing baseball on a Sunday afternoon, out in the fields surrounded by cows and horses and corn. Blue Law Baseball, that was my original working title, but as I've researched and interviewed, that's changing. The story is so much more.

Rural small town baseball was definitely in existence on the grounds of Pilot Mountain School.

The story is different, but the theme is the same: The love of the game and the love of community. That's what caused the fathers to come out to the schoolhouse and build a ball field where their children could spend hours and hours being kids. Both boys and girls were there on the field in the mornings before school. They played ball during recess and lunch break. They rode their bicycles back to school after their chores were finished at home. Younger boys modeled their style after the older boys they played alongside. Older boys allowed for mistakes and unknowingly influenced the little ones. On Sunday afternoons whole families showed up. Not much was organized. Not much was official. It was just play.

For the love of it.

I can't wait to share my new project with you.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

July 28, 1914

Seems like this month has been chocked full of "anniversaries" of significant world events. Forty-five years since the man on the moon giant leap and already the press is gearing up for the fiftieth in five years down the pike. There's always the Fourth of July to recognize and following that, the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day. 

This morning I saw one more to add to the list in these waning days of July, 2014.

The beginning of World War I, the Great War, the war to end all wars. Sigh. H. G. Wells wrote essays about it. Woodrow Wilson borrowed the term, used it once in his argument to save Democracy by leading the US into the fighting. 

Book Title page from Wikipedia

President Woodrow Wilson Photo from Wikipedia

One hundred years ago, following the assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand, tensions boiled over into battle. July 28, 1914. A hundred years later and now we know. The war to end all wars didn't. Sigh.

What is it about July? The heat? The weather? The climate? Maybe that's where the catchphrase "political climate" comes from.

1914 in the South Mountains of North Carolina, the political climate was being reestablished after The Civil War fifty years before. The War Between the States. The War of Separation. The War of Northern Aggression. The Brothers' War. Mr. Lincoln's War. And my favorite, the Unpleasantness. Sigh.

The parents of the students who eventually attended Pilot Mountain School were just beginning their lives around 1914, a hundred years ago, babies unaware of the troubles across the pond, babies depending on adults to make the world right. The school was not even considered until 1925, not built until 1942 in the midst of yet another great war. Amazing how life can be sectioned by the wars of each generation. 

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing, long time ago? 

Those song lyrics come from my generation's war and much of the Pilot Mountain School era as well. VietNam. Sigh.

When will they ever learn?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

On Editorial Cartoons

As I was driving this morning I tuned in to NPR and heard an interview with Ed Williams, the former editor of the editorial page of the Charlotte Observer, discussing his new book, Liberating Dixie: An Editor's Life from Ole Miss to Obama. This was, in case you missed it, as I was driving. One of his statements early on I wanted to remember and so I dug around for a pen and paper to jot it down. As I was driving.

I could only rummage so far.

I found a brown Subway napkin, left over from an earlier meal. I drew circles on it (the broad airbag spot on my steering wheel as a desk) with the ink pen I found in the door pocket, but I couldn't get ink to flow. Meanwhile, traffic flowed around me and I could do nothing but flow along with it. I began chanting the sentence over and over and over. It almost became a mantra:

The job of the editorial page is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Or something to that effect since I was doing it from memory. Over and over I said this, overlaying the conversation on the radio, waiting for a stop light to catch me, which for the first time ever, it didn't. When I pulled into the bank parking lot I wrote hastily, before I forgot, while he was still talking.

The quick research I did when I came home attributed that quote to Finley Peter Dunne, an editorial writer in Chicago. It's a far leap from the audience and the needs of the comfortable and the afflicted in Chicago's south side to the audience and the needs of the comfortable and the afflicted around Pilot Mountain School of the south mountains, but I'm going to make it, thanks to the superintendent of schools in Burke County from 1925 to 1963, who couldn't help but stir the pot with his editorial cartoons. He saw what the world didn't, the underbelly of mountain culture and how it affected his students and his teachers and his community. So he did what all activists do. He stood up for them. Through his drawings he gave an insider's view to the political situation in North Carolina and offered a glimpse of his dealings with legislatures who controlled the budget.

How much has changed since the 1950's?

When I was writing this book I went through stacks and stacks of original editorial cartoons now in the possession of the History Museum of Burke County. Looking back with that quote in mind, I see how the afflicted were comforted in the fact that at least one person understands their tribulations. I see how the comfortable became afflicted (and enraged, I'm sure, at some of the cartoons I was privileged to see) when their actions were questioned.

So today, and every day, read to become comforted. Read to become afflicted, too, in case it's speaking to you.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Sequel

So many times I've run across people who have some connection to Pilot Mountain School, but were not in my radar for interviews. The stories they tell could fill another book, Lessons Learned, the Sequel.  

The same goes for people I interviewed, who are mentioned and whose stories already enriched the book. They approach me and tell me of something else they remembered. Lessons Learned, the Sequel. I really ought to do it. But no. I'll just post them here.

Last week I was sitting in an outdoors venue, Catawba Meadows Park in Morganton, NC, listening to Bluegrass Music at the eleventh annual Red, White and Bluegrass Festival. 

A sample photo from the 2007 performance
 from the Red, White and Bluegrass website photos

Just before dark, when the lightning bugs would be the only visible form of illumination beyond the stage lights, I recognized a man I had interviewed on the school project. Yes, he remembered me. And yes, he had a story he had forgotten to tell, but not about the school. This particular memory was precipitated by my asking him if he knew a particular moonshiner I mentioned in my newest book.

Yes, he did and that man's family made the best banana brandy ever. While I was mulling that taste over in my mind, he went on to tell a story.

Since his mother was the only local medical person living in that part of the South Mountains in the late thirties, people often came to their home for assistance. Late one night a knock came at the door, rousing the family from a deep sleep. It was a neighbor from further back in the hills. He had been in a drunken argument that ended in a violent fight. His enemy had bitten his ear, tore at it, nearly pulled it off, left it dangling. He came to this nurse, begging her to cut it off. She refused, but he persisted. Finally she woke her husband, told him to build up the fire in the cookstove and boil some water so she could sterilize the kitchen butcher knife. She whacked off the ear, threw the evidence in the fire, patched him up and sent him on his way. I don't know who really learned the lesson that night, but it was well remembered seventy years later.

I admit, some stories fit into a sequel about lessons learned at a school better than others, but this particular story gives a glimpse into one thing that I found over and over at Pilot Mountain: community. Reasons don't matter. Compassion does, caring for neighbors, helping them through rough patches. What a lesson this man learned as a small child that night. We should all be so fortunate.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Attitude, Natitude

I love word play. I'm a writer, how can I not? So when my husband and I went to DC last weekend to attend three games between the Braves and the Nationals, he watched the baseball game and I watched the people, especially the ones who wore t-shirts displaying the word "Natitude."

What a word, this combination of hometeam Nationals coupled with the emotions assigned to attitude. Natitude, an expression of optimism and fortitude and, well, attitude! It's an announcement in a "Look out, people, here I come" kind of statement. Full of energy, that word. Full of the brashness of youth, too. To be crammed into the Metro with thousands of red shirted people with Natitude is quite the experience, believe me.

Of course that word play wouldn't work for the Braves. I don't think Bratitude would send the same kind of positive message to the world. I pull for the Braves, but I wouldn't even cheer once for the Brats.

It's all in the usage.

I learned that word play lesson not too long after Lessons Learned was published. My husband was reading it and enjoying the real book instead of a flat manuscript, when he shouted, "Found a mistake."

There it was, "The Three Baers."

But wait. That was intentional. It was the title of a book by Bertha Moore, of the Pilot Mountain area, an author who paid frequent visits to the school. She didn't coin the word. It was a family name, German in derivation. Baer. She borrowed it, word played with it to develop a story around a set of triplets with the last name Baer.

My mistake wasn't in using the word. My mistake was in not explaining the spelling of the word to the reader. Lessons learned there.

Natitude, on the other hand, doesn't need much explaining. All it takes is being at a ball game surrounded by thousands and its context is obvious.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen