How JoAnn and Bill Owings became guardians of a proud Triad legacy

By Nancy Oakley   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

The view from the front porch, revealing a graceful fountain in the side yard, convinced JoAnn and Bill Owings to purchase their historic home on High Point’s Parkway some 30 years ago. “It was the yard,” JoAnn says emphatically. “The gardens were beautiful. You could see, even though everything was overgrown, this yard was beautiful.” Towering oaks, magnolias and other deciduous trees sheltered a massive lot — four lots, actually — choked with wisteria and fallen limbs. “Leaves were everywhere,” JoAnn recalls. “We didn’t even know there were boxwoods,” she adds. The condition of the house was equally daunting. “We walked through, walked out and shook our heads, and said, ‘There’s no way,’” Bill remembers. A litany of problems stemmed largely from plumbing leaks: “Holes in the ceilings — it was just gone in the living room and dining room.” The wall between the music room and dining room was literally falling down.

But on a second visit, the Owings began to reconsider. They both loved history and had always admired the Neoclassical architecture of the house, which they’d passed many times, living nearby in a smaller abode. But at that juncture in their lives, around 1990, with two daughters, a 10-year old and an infant, they were outgrowing their dwelling in the neighborhood so conveniently located near Bill’s base at High Point Medical Center where he works as an anesthesiologist. Ultimately, it was that view from the porch, with the brick walk and the fountain, its aqua-colored walls surrounding a sculpture of a mythical imp wrestling a fish that seized Bill’s imagination. “You can’t find this anywhere, anymore,” he says, referring to the Italianate water feature. “I think she put that in during the late ’40s, after World War II,” JoAnn reflects. “It’s almost as if she went to Italy, went on a trip, came back and said, ‘I can do that.’”

“She” was Lola Lee Blanks Hudson, and it appears there was very little she couldn’t do. An accomplished Tennessee belle, Lola with her sister LaVerne studied at the Memphis Conference Female Institute in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1903 before taking up teaching music in Arkansas. A photograph around this time reveals a bright-eyed young lady, her dark hair piled high in Gibson-Girl fashion contrasting with a slight impish smile. Lola acquitted herself well as “a musician of rare ability and marked talent . . . [possessing] a smooth, even touch and is worthy to be called an artist,” enthuses a reference letter from one of her teachers from American Conservatory of Music – Chicago. “They were wonderful piano players,” says Lola’s grandson William Pennuel (“Penn”) Wood, whose father Elliott Sherrill Wood founded Heritage and Henredon furniture companies, among others. Over the years, Penn Wood, vice president of Woodmark Originals for 19 years, has served High Point on a number of boards, including the N.C. Shakespeare Festival, High Point Arts Council as well as the statewide Museum of History Associates. “Mrs. Hudson read music,” Penn Wood recalls. “LaVerne played by ear.” They even cut a record, which he describes as “a hoot to listen to — a lot of ragtime.” In later years, as Bill Owings heard it, the sisters would invite the neighborhood children to play in the vast yard, with pocket gardens, a fish pond and Lola’s whimsical animal sculptures on Sunday afternoons. “And if they found a four-leaf clover the sisters would play them a duet,” he says.

But that was long after Lola had come to High Point as a young matron, having met and married another Tennessean, Homer Tyre Hudson Sr. He and his older brother, Charles Crump, better known as “C.C.”, would have an enormous influence on the Triad, and particularly Greensboro, with what began as a modest clothing operation, Hudson Overall Company, later renamed Blue Bell, which would morph into blue jeans giant Wrangler and give the city its nickname, “Jeansboro.”

As Penn Wood tells it, the boys’ father, a widely respected professor in eastern Tennessee, had died at an early age. Their mother remarried into the Graham family, which had North Carolina connections in Asheville and Pleasant Garden. When an aunt in Pleasant Garden died, leaving C.C. some money, the young man ventured east to the Gate City, taking a job sewing buttons at an overall plant, Hunter Manufacturing. “This work commanded wages of twenty-five cents per day,” writes Wood in a personal family history. He goes on to explain that the job afforded C.C. the opportunity to learn every facet of the business — from manufacturing and marketing to merchandising, sales and distribution. Thus, the young man was well-positioned, when his employer went out of business: With enough saved earnings to acquire a line of credit, he bought five sewing machines and, as many in Greensboro know, in 1904 set up shop above the former Coe Brothers Grocery on South Elm Street. Homer, living in West Virginia with Lola and their growing family, joined the enterprise.

Buying tightly woven “deeptoned” denim from Cone, the brothers fashioned work clothes so prized among the engineers on the trains pulling into the Gate City, just a stone’s throw from the Coe Grocery loft. They would frequent the fledgling business to buy overalls. On one of these visits — or so local lore has it — one of the train engineers asked about a brass bell on one of the Hudson brothers’ desks, perhaps a memento from their deceased father’s teaching career, with the curious blue patina from the denim lint. And so the legendary brand’s backstory, apocryphal or not, was born.

Relocating to different manufacturing sites throughout downtown Greensboro as it expanded, Blue Bell, by 1919, boasted 250 employees and operating expenses totaling more than $600,000. Wood writes. “ . . . what a boon to the local economy . . . the brand suggests a strictly Southern product; the cotton is raised here, the goods manufactured here and the overalls fashioned here.” That same year, Homer Hudson purchased the High Point Overall Company, which would be known for its Anvil Brand work clothes. Three years later, Homer and Lola Hudson built the brick Neoclassical Revival at the far end of Parkway, which they would dub “Home-Lea.”

 

“Parkway,” says Benjamin Briggs, executive director of Preservation Greensboro and native High Pointer, “was an earlier iteration of Emerywood.”  Before the latter subsumed the street, which became the busy thoroughfare it is today, Parkway — and particularly the corner where the Hudsons built  — was “kind of like a suburban estate,” Briggs explains. Not so unusual, considering this was the period when the power elite were fleeing grimy industrialized cities and dust-filled factories for literal green pastures.

Briggs has memories of seeing the overgrown gardens when he was child riding the school bus in the 1970s. “They were derelict and overgrown. Wooden features had rotted away. But the bones were still there,” he recalls. The Neoclassical house (now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a supporting structure for High Point’s Uptown District) is distinctive for that portico that so entranced the Owings. “There are some stylized details on the columns that are delicate; dental molding on the capital; a demi-lune window over portico; brick lentils over capitals,” Briggs offers. According to Penn Wood, the brick, and particularly its crisp white mortar pointing, was a source of pride for Lola Hudson. He indicates it in a photograph of Lola’s daughters, La Verne (Wood’s mother) and Hybernia, two bobbed flappers standing hand-in-hand in front of the arched doorway. The porch later served as the setting for a group photo accompanying a society feature in the High Point Enterprise. The story describes a bridal luncheon that Lola hosted in 1952, the year Homer retired: “Magnolias banked the mantel and were used elsewhere in the living room to which guests were invited on their arrival. Yellow snapdragons were combined with Madonna lilies and lacy gypsophila for the exquisite centerpiece used on the buffet table. . . After being served from the dining room table, guests found their way to the garden room, so named because it overlooks Mrs. Hudson’s lovely sunken garden.”

“She was a student of gardens,” says Wood of his grandmother, a founding member of High Point’s Mid-WeekGarden Club, established in 1923, for which and she and sister LaVerne would provide musical entertainments. He recalls touring destination gardens and sites like Natural Bridge, Virginia, with his grandmother en route to Washington, D.C., to visit relatives. “It was fascinating as a young boy.” He also remembers her visiting his mother in Sedgefield, where he grew up. One summer, he recalls, Lola planted her entire lower garden in soybeans. “Supposedly they put nitrogen in the soil. It looked so rural,” he laughs. “But as a gardener, she would have been interested in the nutrition of the soil.” Lola, after all, came from a long line of planters, starting with the Blankses of Tennessee, who were descended from early settlers along Virginia’s James River. Her parents, Francis Marion “Frank” and Jefferson “Jeffie” Lee Gill Blanks ran the Riverby Inn in Swannanoa in the 1930s. Wood notes that the family tended a large vegetable garden that would feed the inn’s guests.

He adds that Homer loved gardening as well, though most of his time was taken up with the overalls business. “We didn’t see much of him,” Wood recalls. “He was nose-to-grindstone and very nervous.” He remembers his grandfather as being a natty dresser — a must for an executive in the clothing and textile business — who acquired a new car every year, usually a Packard, though Wood does remember a luxury LaSalle.

After the sale of Blue Bell in 1926, C.C. Hudson sat on various boards and offered his service to several community and civic organizations, including the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce. “He grew roses,” says Wood. He recalls his great-uncle’s log cabin retreat, Idlewild, designed by architect Charles C. Hartman. It occupied a large wooded lot in the Gate City’s Kirkwood neighborhood before it was dismantled and moved to Snow Camp in 1994.

C.C. died in 1937, Homer, in 1959. Following his death, Lola invited La Verne, also widowed, to live with her. Penn Wood remembers a couple who served as caretakers, “Sandy the driver and Captola, the cook.” But as often happens, when people age, their houses do, too. Lola remained on Parkway until her death in 1974 (LaVerne had died two years prior). By then the house was already falling into disrepair. Subsequent owners did little to keep the place up. Pipes leaked. Ceilings crumbled. The yard became a veritable jungle, as Briggs witnessed from the school bus during his youth, and as the Owings had noticed.

But once they committed to buying “Home-Lea,” which was living up to its punny moniker, they were determined to restore it to as close to its original incarnation as possible, right down to some of the accents, such as a crystal chandelier. “My kids were like, ‘Oh! Let’s put something modern in here!’” JoAnn laughs. But she and Bill remained steadfast in their mission. “Because of the history of this house — we both love history — we didn’t do anything to change its structure,” JoAnn explains, as she stands in its front hall where curved stair banister and inviting sunny living room with chintz coverings intersect. To the right an unusual arched doorway framed by dental molding leads to a compact music room, dominated by a grand piano boasting photographs of the Owings’ grandchildren, and behind it, built-in shelves filled with china. Beyond that is an elegant dining room abutting one of the few changes, a fully updated kitchen. “But,” JoAnn continues with a grin, “We had a lot of remodeling to do!”

So much remodeling, in fact, that it would be two years before the Owings could move in.

A good bit of the work involved replacing fallen molding and restoring the plaster ceilings damaged by water. “It’s a good thing we did it in the ’90s,” says JoAnn, “because today you can hardly find the [crafts]people anymore. Some pieces had to be copied.”

They modified the fireplace slightly, swapping its simpler brick firebox for rich, dark green marble, but kept the plaster medallions just above it and the dental molding along the mantel. These are flourishes that Benjamin Briggs says are distinctive among High Point homes of that period. “You see things in High Point that you don’t see in other cities,” he notes. Populated with wood craftspeople, it’s how this area became a great treasure of detailing.” And how High Point’s residents developed a keen understanding of different varieties of woods. “There are more wood types,” he continues, offering black walnut and tiger oak as examples. He goes on to explain that High Point’s woodworkers were also skilled at creating illusion, using one kind of wood, such as poplar, to create the look of another.

This trick bears out in the pine paneling of the Owings’ sunroom, which they use as a den. Because of its rosy hue, it appears to be made of cherry. “It was built on in 1948,” says Bill of the addition. They know the precise date because during the remodeling they removed some damaged wallpaper inscribed by the craftsman who hung it. The inscription, JoAnn remembers, “said something about World War II, and he had signed his name that he had done this wallpaper in 1948. He had the neatest handwriting!”

She goes on to say that the room is the Owings’ favorite, and they use it “all the time,” for relaxing, watching TV and growing several plants, like the Meyer lemon tree, which produced enough fruit for lemonade last Thanksgiving.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of the space. Large south-facing picture windows — their original Venetian blinds refurbished — look out onto the wooded portion of the vast lot below. This would have been the “garden room” alluded to in the High Point Enterprise article chronicling Lola Hudson’s luncheon. With seven heaters warming the room from a water-based system, also original (though the Owings did add air conditioning to the house during the remodeling), the room “stays so nice in the winter,” JoAnn notes. Conversely, the ample shade from the veritable forest outside keeps the temperature down in the summer. “There’s incredible shade,” says JoAnn. “If people only knew: Don’t cut your trees down! It’s truly 10 degrees cooler. And the breeze comes through, and you’re protected from the bad winds, because the leaves take the wind.” And as Bill observes, “Even though you’re in the middle of town, in the summertime, when the trees come out, you really can’t see anybody’s houses.”

Another curious feature of the sunroom: cork flooring. “That was Dad’s idea; his office at Heritage had cork floors,” says Penn Wood, explaining that their inspiration came from the Whalehead Club, a 1920s-era duck-hunting lodge in Corolla, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. “Between the dogs and the kids we’ve had, it doesn’t last,” JoAnn observes, showing some areas where the cork has pitted. “But I’m keeping it. The sound quality [of the room] is incredible.”

One might think kids and dogs would be incompatible with a historic house, but JoAnn maintains just the opposite. “Didn’t they build them then for families? For a lot of people? Big halls, lots of staircases, lots of rooms, not bumping into each other,” she posits, as she climbs the stairs to the second-floor bedrooms, some adorned with the accouterments of their four childrens’ formative years: fishing rods, prints and mementos of Bald Head Island, the family’s longtime vacation spot. A decidedly feminine room — painted a pale shade of lime with floral accents — occupies one corner. Next to it is a nursery for when the Owings’ empty nest fills up with visiting grandchildren, and one level up is an attic converted to an apartment. “Our eldest son got to move to the third floor and that space. He probably had some good parties up there!” Bill jokes.

The master on the second floor, directly above the cork-floored sunroom, is another rare change the Owings made: enclosing what used to be a sleeping porch. The room is simply appointed, save a delicate avian pattern on the drapes, as if the decorative birds have flown in from the surrounding trees outside.

Its windows face west, overlooking the expanse of green lawn that abuts a side street. Glimpses of a plastic pink ribbon marking an electric fence around the periphery of the entire property, all four lots’ worth, suggest the presence of the latest member of the Owings’ family: a boisterous 6-month-old Australian Shepherd named Baxter. From the upper patio just outside the kitchen door, he can be seen bounding across the grass toward the fountain and the brick retaining wall currently being repointed by an Archdale mason. Closer to the house is a pond, one of the Owings’ few additions, with two graceful ibis sculptures. Baxter serpentines around Bill as the two make their way up the gravel driveway below. “He ate my furniture! It was wicker,” JoAnn laughs as she points to a sitting area facing south, overlooking the woodsy portion of the yard, dotted with daffodils in early spring; a tree house, where the Owings’ children and now grandchildren play, is set farther back. Around the corner is a dining table where the family takes meals in warm weather. It overlooks the fountain and pond below. JoAnn points to the moss growing on what was once Lola Hudson’s cement table. “There’s plenty of moss around this house. It’s beautiful, like an enchanted garden,” she muses. She says she and Bill have added little to the yard since they uncovered it all those years ago. “Gosh, we must have 70 or 80 English boxwoods,” he says, expressing concern about a blight that’s currently tearing through Virginia. Understandable, considering the blight could imperial an unusual feature, an arched hedge on the opposite, east side of the house that shields an open side porch.

“It’s exciting to watch the family put the gardens back,” says Benjamin Briggs. “It’s much appreciated. So appreciated, that JoAnn was invited to join Lola Hudson’s old stomping ground, the Mid-Week Garden Club. But then, things have a way of coming full circle. On occasions when Penn Wood or his brother, Chuck, are hosting visiting relatives, “we take them through the house and yard,” says Bill. “They think somewhere in the backyard is a fish pond. I’ve never turned it up. That’s why we built our own little pond in there.” The Owings stopped stocking it with goldfish years ago, because, “the cats in the neighborhood ate those,” JoAnn explains. But no feline would dare enter the premises with Baxter patrolling it, charging around the boxwood hedge, down the brick walk to the fountain and across the lawn, pausing to roll on his back on the cool carpet of grass. Who knows? Maybe one day he’ll turn up a four-leaf clover. And if he does, no doubt the faint strains of a ragtime duet will echo up and down Parkway and through the towering shelter of trees.  OH

Nancy Oakley is the senior editor of O.Henry.

Just in time for April Fool’s Day, our naturally funny correspondent takes a look at the past, present and future of comedy in the Gate City

By Billy Ingram   •   Photographs by Sam Froelich

Have you heard the one about a city that didn’t take itself too seriously, so much so that it launched many a comedic career?

Greensboro may not exactly be perceived as a hot bed of hilarity, but over the years, a lot of first-rate acts have originated in the Gate City. In fact, it is where one of the greatest comedy routines of the 20th century originated as this magazine recounted in December 2015,  “What It Was, Was Football” by Andy Griffith, was recorded live at the Plantation Supper Club in 1953 and perfected at a little-known recording studio atop the original location of Moore Music Co. on Market Street. That cornpone-infused 45 disc catapulted “Deacon” Andy Griffith to superstar status, remaining to this day one of the best-selling comedy records of all time. It was influential as well, inspiring generations of comedians from Bill Cosby to Jeff Foxworthy.

Two decades later, in October of 1973, Gate City native Rick Dees rocketed all the way to No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with the novelty tune “Disco Duck.” The very next year writer Harry Ruskin wrote a book entitled Comedy Is a Serious Business. He was right and in coming years it also became big business. Beginning in the late ’70s, nightclubs featuring standup comedians began to flourish in big cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Within a decade there were thousands of Laugh Factories, Improv Asylums, Punch Lines, and Catch a Rising Star–style rooms scattered around the country. Especially in those larger markets, club owners discovered that societal misfits with a warped worldview and an overwhelming desire to express themselves on stage could prove to be a cheap source of labor.

It wasn’t until 1996 that our city was blessed with a proper comedy venue. That’s when Paul Talley opened his nightclub for yuks on Holden near Spring Garden. Not that it was his plan. “Out of the blue, two guys come knocking on my door and say they were with the Comedy Zone circuit, a chain, a very loose chain, and asked if I had considered doing comedy in this vacant building I had here.” Talley was already operating Arizona Pete’s located across the parking lot. “I said, ‘Sure.’ I had no idea what I was doing,” Talley admits.

The enterprise proved a great deal more involved than owning a country-western themed dance club like Arizona Pete’s, “There’s far more management and execution needed for a comedy club,” Talley says. “You’ve got the reservations, showtimes you need to adhere to, performers have to be here on time, you’ve got hotels. . . after a year or two we kinda figured it out on the fly.”

As a chain, Comedy Zone has its own booking agent with a stable of comedians who rotated throughout its various franchises. A system with national booking agents allows Comedy Zone to host name acts like Norm MacDonald, Andrew Dice Clay, Chris Tucker and Chris Rock. “We’ve had on the bigger guys, we get them on occasion,” Talley notes. “If they want to do a smaller club on an off-night, we’ll have them once a month or so.”

Jennie Stencel is the proprietor of the city’s most intimate comedy club, The Idiot Box. After bouncing around in different locations, it appears to have found a niche on Greene Street next to craft-beer provisioner Beerthirty.

Why a comedy club? “My husband [Steven Stencel] and I performed together in Chapel Hill,” Stencel replies. “We started having children and were working for somebody else, so we took a few months off from doing comedy and thought ‘This is horrible.’ So we moved here and opened Idiot Box.”

As for their mission, “The Idiot Box exists to grow the local comedy scene,” Stencel says. “So we book a lot of locals and we do trainings and bring in national acts also. We have improv on Saturday. When we started having Open Mics, we had five or six new comics and now our Open Mic sells out a lot. We do one on Thursdays always and we do one on Friday nights sometimes.”

Comedy Zone also emphasizes homegrown humor. “We do very few national acts here, once a month maybe,” Talley says. “The price is only $10 a ticket which is insanely cheap. If you had a national act it would be 30, 40, 50 bucks. Our acts, they’re all funny as can be, they’re just not quite famous yet.”

Talley also understands the importance of priming the pump. “We do have an amateur night once a month,” he says. “We get 150, 175 people in a crowd, which is strong for a Thursday night. We do about eight to 10 locals then we put on a bigger act up there to close the show. The problem is, from a club’s perspective, it’s a little tough to make money on it.”

Comedy Zone’s amateur nights have led to some major talent rocketing to shooting star status. “Jourdain Fisher [back-to-back winner of The Ultimate Comic Challenge] started here. He’s now writing for Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show monologue,” Talley tells me. “Chico Bean got his start here as an amateur. He’s now very big on Wild ’N Out, the MTV show.” B-Daht (102 JAMZ’s morning show) and A&T alumnus Darren Brand, who goes by Big Baby, were also featured on Wild ’N Out.

Chemistry nightclub drag performer Heidi N Closet will join 12 other contestants on Ru Paul’s Drag Race this year. Cee-Jay Jones, Ben Jones and King David all tour extensively, each owing their careers to our comedy scene. As for some of the up-and-comers, just tune in to ROCK 92 every Friday morning to “2 Guys Named Chris.” Their presence on the airwaves, says Talley, “is tremendous for us.”

The 2 Guys Named Chris Comedy All-Stars are all Comedy Zone alums.

Chris Wiles is another well-known working comic with local ties, “I’ve been with Carnival Cruises since 2001,” Wiles tells me from somewhere in the Caribbean.  “It’s been my main source of income since 2009. With multiple television appearances, including season 3 of Last Comic Standing, his way up the laughter ladder was not atypical — just get up in front of folks and start slinging jokes.

“I was a junior in high school,” says “A teenage nightclub called Islands in Winston-Salem was opening up in 1989. I went in to audition as an actor and spent about an hour with the owner and he goes, ‘Man, you’re really funny. Have you thought about doing standup?’ I said, ‘Look man, if you’re going to pay me and put me on stage I’ll do anything.’”

The owner of Islands and the high school student sat down and wrote what they thought was five minutes of the greatest standup comedy ever. “It was a really strange setup,” Wiles says of Islands. “The music would be playing, kids would be dancing, then three times a night the DJ would stop the music and go, ‘OK, it’s time for comedy’ and I would be on the stage. They’d put the light up and the kids would gather around the stage. I would do five minutes of comedy and then they’d go back to dancing and playing video games.”

Wiles was managing Dominos Pizza and Papa Johns when our Comedy Zone opened in ’96, another local comic introduced him to Paul Talley and he ended up becoming the house emcee there for the next 13 years. “I’ve got a neat following [in Greensboro]. They always show up,” Wiles says. “This Valentine’s weekend I had the fastest sellout of any of my shows. They’re from all walks of life, all ages, I’d say the average crowd is between 23 and 60 years old.”

Shared laughter unites people, at least you’d think so. Then again, it may be true what George Orwell once famously said: “Every joke is a tiny revolution.” Fifty years after Lenny Bruce tested the limits of performance art, in today’s pearl-clutching atmosphere, where scolds and trolls garner attention for themselves not by creating something but via expressing outrage over the slightest slight, what are the limits to what can and can’t be expressed in public?

“It’s much worse now than it was in 1996,” Talley says. “Before, there were just some things that were offensive. Everything now is offensive. Twenty years ago, you could tell a joke without offending people. There are certain things I tell my comics to avoid. Politics, religion — you’re gonna be funny to half the people but you’re going to piss off the other half.”

“The world is definitely different,” says Jennie Stencel of The Idiot Box. “For our improv shows, our goal is for people to come and have a night out and have fun. Nobody really wants to talk about politics. They yell it out, they think they want to hear about it, but you have to agree with everyone 100 percent now. We could be the same political party, we can mostly agree, but I like this candidate and now we’re not friends anymore!”

“We kind of figured it out,” Talley says. “Some people might say, ‘He offended me, he said this. . . ’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s reasonable.’ Everything was a surprise when it was all new.” While there’s no desire to stifle a performer, “There are certain things, certain words that, in this market, we really don’t want them to say.”

Stencel has noticed a seismic change in the national sense of humor over time. “If you go watch comedians in the ’80s,” she offers, “Famous people, the terminology that was P.C. then is just not OK now. They weren’t terrible people in the ’80s. Now they’re great people, but what you were allowed to say was different and how you said it was different as well.”

Disparate age groups even think different things are humorous. “You could have amateurs come in and make fun of millennials,” Stencel says. “Well, if it’s an audience full of millennials they’re like, [‘Ugh’]. We have a lot of young people come here to have a good time and if it’s not really funny, it’s just insults.”

Surely college campuses, those bastions to an open-minded understanding of the world writ large, would be a safe haven for the free expression of ideas. On the contrary, it’s been more than a decade since comedians like Chris Rock, Larry the Cable Guy and Jerry Seinfeld swore off doing shows on college campuses lest they find themselves buried in an avalanche of grievances from butt-hurt snowflakes.

“The college crowds have become overly sensitive,” Chis Wiles notes. “I think they forget they’re coming to a comedy show. Without tragedy there is no comedy, without conflict there is no comedy.” The last place Wiles played a college gig was Virginia Tech. “That was about six years ago and even then they were becoming a bit sensitive,” he says. “You can’t talk about homosexuality, can’t talk about race, you can barely talk about sex on a college campus which is weird because, you know, outside of going to learn something I thought that’s what college was for, sex.”

Another factor, Stencel believes, “It’s just easier to perform your comedy in a venue that’s intended for comedy.”

This level of selective outrage is a worldwide phenomenon. In 2015 almost two dozen staffers at the French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo were gunned down by religious fanatics because of a cartoon they published.

Numerous studies over several decades consistently inform us that a fear of public speaking is an American’s worst nightmare . . . more terrifying than death, financial ruin, or (shudder) clowns. Besides being an effective way to improve one’s oratory skills, I’ve been told that The Idiot Box’s weekly improvisation classes are highly entertaining. “Comedians are a fun group of people to be friends with and work with,” Jennie Stencel insists. “That part of my job is way more fun than probably a regular job. Everybody’s cool and interesting and smart.”

I myself tried standup once, back in the mid-1970s, when I convinced club owner Bill Griffin at the Hilton Underground to let me go on before the band on a Friday night. The Underground was one of those darkly lit, smoke-filled, shag-carpet-on-the-wall joints but it never occurred to me that my 17-year-old self would get heckled by one of the seven drunkards right out of a W.C. fields movie scattered about the 20 tables at 7 p.m. in the evening. As a result, my five-minute act became a minute, 45-second routine. At least the hippie musicians liked it.

Who knows, had I succeeded at standup, perhaps I’d be cruising from one tropical sandy paradise to another just like Chris Wiles. “I’ve gotten to the point now that I’m not a big fan of beaches anymore,” Wiles confesses. “I’m more about the mountains because I’ve been on every beach out there.”

That’s the punchline. Say g’night Gracie.  OH

According to IMDB, Billy Ingram is an actor, producer and editor best known for “The Nathan Stringer Summer Music Show.” He’d like to think otherwise.

Classic lamps on display at Reynolda House

By Jim Moriarty

While on one hand it could seem as though Louis Comfort Tiffany was born with a silver glasscutter in his mouth, the son of the founder of Tiffany and Company created, over his lifetime, an entire genre of decorative art so ubiquitous, so singularly chic and stylistically distinctive that his name alone has come to represent the thing itself. It is the de rigueur description of any leaded glass shade. Say “Tiffany lamp” and you need say no more. All the rage one day, passé the next, fashion may be fickle, but the art endures.

The intimate gallery space at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem will house an exhibit of Tiffany’s finest work on loan from the Neustadt Collection at the Queens Museum in New York. The traveling exhibition opened in late March and continues through June 21. Tickets are $18 and available at reynoldahouse.org.

“The decorative arts are accessible to everybody,” says Phil Archer, Reynolda’s director of Program and Interpretation. “To have a gallery with the light actually shining through the works of art will be new for us and make it a very magical space. It just fits at Reynolda because of the natural setting of the gardens. We wanted the exhibition in the spring for that reason. Come and see all the flowers, then come inside and see all the flowers.”

The show comprises 20 of the most celebrated examples of Tiffany’s lamps and, interestingly, three forgeries that serve to demonstrate the difference between faux Tiffany and authentic works. There’s a display demonstrating the steps in the creation of the lampshades and biographical information on the key personnel at Tiffany Studios — chemist Arthur J. Nash and designers Clara Driscoll, Agnes Northrop and Frederick Wilson — who all made meaningful contributions to the artistry of the lamps.

Also part of the exhibit are five Tiffany windows and, separate from the exhibit, a display of Tiffany vases purchased by Katharine Reynolds on view in the Reynolda House itself.

The role of Driscoll, née Clara Wolcott, who was in charge of the “Tiffany Girls” in the glass cutting department and is responsible for the design of two of Tiffany’s most remarkable lamps, Wisteria and Dragonfly, only came to light in the first decade of the 21st century when Martin Eidelberg, an art history professor from Rutgers University, discovered her letters archived at Kent State University.

“She was an Ohioan, so her papers ended up at Kent State,” says Archer of the letters Driscoll sent home from New York. “The family evidently had almost a chain letter system where Mom would send a letter to Clara, she would send it to her sister who would send it to the brother and they would all add to it. It was better than group texting.”

While Tiffany may not have been solely responsible for every design, “The concepts were Tiffany’s,” says Archer. “The aesthetic was Tiffany’s. The kind of color palette and the combination of colors and details and opacities were Tiffany’s. It’s almost like Mozart writing a piece and then conducting the orchestra. He’s not playing any of the instruments. Everybody else is making the music but the original concept is his. They bring a lot of creativity to how they play it — though that may not be an exact metaphor because some of the concepts, like the Wisteria lamp, were Driscoll’s.”

Born in 1848, the slight, delicate son of Charles Louis Tiffany could have slid seamlessly into the family business. “He had every opportunity to take over from his father and be the lead jeweler and luxury goods maker in New York,” says Archer. “The primrose path was laid out for him.”

When the younger Tiffany was enrolled at Eagleswood Military Academy in New Jersey, he met and studied under the painter George Inness. The effects would be profound. By the age of 19, he had become a founding member of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors and had begun to exhibit his work at the National Academy of Design. He traveled to Europe and North Africa and would be particularly influenced by what, at the time, was called the “Orientalist” style.

“When I first had a chance to travel in the East and to paint where the people and the buildings are clad in beautiful hues, the pre-eminence of color in the world was brought forcibly to my attention,” Tiffany said later. One of his better-known paintings, Snake Charmer at Tangier, Africa, expressed Tiffany’s interest in the play of light and color. It was exhibited at Snedecor’s Gallery in New York in 1872 and later at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. It remained in Tiffany’s personal collection until 1921, when he donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While still painting, Tiffany drifted into design and decorating. At the same time, he had become enthralled by the possibilities of glass as an art form.

“Tiffany hated modern glass because it was too clean,” says Archer. “He wanted glass like archeologists were digging up in Syria and Lebanon. It was like opals. It had color and shimmer. He hired chemists to really develop all of these different colors and ranges. The beauty that he found in that glass and trying to replicate it becomes the story.”

Tiffany didn’t paint on glass — “staining” it only rarely, usually in faces — he painted with glass. The use of metallic oxides allowed for the development of the range of colors that distinguish his work.

“Standing by the glass workers, he had them fold the glass on itself and pinch in places to achieve the effect of magnolia blooms in a window of his library at the Tiffany Mansion,” writes Julia Tiffany Hoffman, a great-granddaughter. “A pulled rod of glass was slightly melted and scrolled on the glass to effect vines, stems and spiderwebs. Louis used just the right color combination of paper-thin glass bits to achieve a painterly quality . . . Molten glass was pressed thin and then stretched to effect the impression of light shining on snow. When working on a window, he would have his glass house make sheets of glass that had several colors running through them, then find the perfect area and orientation to express the petal of a tulip or the leaf.”

In addition to the inspired glassmaking, the creation of Tiffany’s lamps was aided by the innovative use of copper foil. “Instead of having heavy lead connectors,” says Archer, “they were able to use much, much finer connectors. There’s a lot of artistry in the creation of the glass, and there’s artistry in the cutting and piecing it together.”

Tiffany was also receiving commissions decorating American palaces for Gilded Age royalty like Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Henry and Louisine Havemeyer. He decorated Mark Twain’s house in Connecticut and the interior of the old Lyceum Theatre on Park Avenue South in New York. He collaborated with the famous — and infamous — architect Stanford White on a house for the Tiffany family. He did the Ponce de Léon Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, and Chester A. Arthur’s White House.

“Tiffany would design from soup spoon to chandelier,” says Archer. “He was creating almost complete works of art in these houses. But upper middle-class people could afford the lamps. They ended up propelling Tiffany Studios financially. In his lectures, Tiffany almost never referred to his lamps. He would talk about these huge projects and the large windows. The lamps were sort of the bread and butter.”

Tiffany believed nature should be the primary source of design. “Every really great structure is simple in its lines — as in Nature — every great scheme of decoration thrusts no one note upon the eye,” he wrote. Having outlived two wives and three of his eight children, in his final years Tiffany’s ultimate project was his estate on Oyster Bay on Long Island — Laurelton Hall, 84 rooms on 600 acres. He designed every nook, cranny and garden.

Punctuality and orderliness were valued traits. He owned seven white linen suits, one for each day of the week. A tennis player and avid photographer who never saw a speed limit he wanted to obey, the giant of Art Nouveau attempted to stick his finger in the dike of modernism with the establishment of the Tiffany Foundation, devoted to helping aspiring artists.

“Paintings should not hurt the eyes,” he cautioned them. By the time Tiffany died in 1933, much of his wealth had evaporated in the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Laurelton was sold in 1945, and the land subdivided.

In 1957, the largely abandoned great house, containing some of Tiffany’s finest windows, burned to the ground. It took two days to melt the art of a lifetime.  OH