Winter’s Gifts

A Paean to the pleausure of January

By Terri Kirby Erickson

“Winter, a lingering season, is a time to gather golden moments, embark upon a sentimental journey, and enjoy every idle hour.”   — John Boswell

Iíve heard people say that January is a dreary month. After all, Christmas has come and gone, and what few decorations remain in our yards and homes look a little tired and forlorn. The New Year’s Eve toasts have all been made, the midnight confetti swept away. And in cities and towns across the country, merchants are already stocking their shelves with heart-shaped boxes of candy in preparation for Valentine’s Day.

Of course, we do have New Year’s Day with its special “good luck” cuisine.  Here in the South, we traditionally serve some kind of pork, collard greens, black-eyed peas and cornbread. Then comes several hours of lounging in front of our television screens, trying to digest it all and making New Year’s resolutions we’ll probably break on January 2, if not before.

After that, however, the cold winter days stretch before us without much in the way of celebrations and traditions to warm them up, at least until the third Monday of the month when we honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But the beauty of our natural world, available to us winter, spring, summer and fall, is something we can savor every day of the year. And it doesn’t require a national holiday or any focused celebration for us to enjoy it. In fact, even in the “dead” of winter, wonders await us at every turn, from frost that frills the hard ground like lace, to the ever-changing and seemingly endless sky, cloudy or clear.

And although the emerald green of summer leaves, or trees painted fiery red and butterscotch yellow by autumn’s brush are magnificent to behold, bare branches offer us a much clearer view of the cardinals, mockingbirds, bluebirds, waxwings, woodpeckers and the occasional hermit thrush that briefly land upon them.

Red-shouldered hawks often spend a few moments resting on the hightest limbs of our tallest backyard oaks. And when they lift their feathered bodies into the chill air, a ray of sunlight can turn their outstretched wings to glistening gold.

Meanwhile, back on the ground, scattered herds of shy deer forage for food, groundhogs trundle from one end of our yard to the other and greedy squirrels scamper from feeder to feeder when they aren’t chasing each other around, flicking their furry tails and chattering like teenagers with their friends at the mall.

As to “wintry” weather, a forecast of snow can be a great bother what with salting and perhaps plowing the roads, potential power outages and slippery sidewalks. But I have to admit, I love snow. When those fluffy flakes begin to fall from an ever-purpling sky, I feel exactly the way I felt when I was 5 years old. It seemed to me, then as now, that when it snows anywhere, the whole world grows hushed and silent as if we’re in the presence of something sacred.

Perhaps what I love most about January and every winter month, is how the windows of houses in our neighborhood light up on late afternoons as the sun slowly sinks below the horizon, making way for the moon as well as billions of icy stars. I like to imagine the people inside, everyone safe and warm — how their faces glow as they switch on the lamps, one by one. 

I picture families talking and laughing throughout chilly winter evenings, our more solitary neighbors reading good books, listening to music or planning the next day’s outing with someone they love. At our house, my husband likes to “play” on his laptop while I read mysteries by favorite authors, such as Anne Perry and Elizabeth George.

Call me an idealist, a romantic — but it hurts no one for me to go on believing that most people are caring and good, the world in which we live,
a magical place.

It’s all in how we look at things. What some would call “dreary,” I consider a backdrop against which, any minute, light will shine. I look at bare trees and refuse to lament the loss of their leaves, choosing instead to focus on birds more colorful and vibrant than the brightest foliage. I walk on frosted ground and relish the crunch of my heavy boots against the frozen grass. I watch snowflakes fall and think of how a fresh blanket of snow makes everything look new again.

So, don’t wait for spring to be happy. Be happy now! Put on a coat, gloves and scarf. Take a walk. Visit a friend. Listen to the quiet of a cold winter’s day in the country, or in the hustle and bustle of a city, the sound of cars rushing by, high heeled shoes clicking along a crowded crosswalk. Live your life, whatever the season. Treasure “every idle hour,” each golden moment gathered.  OH

Terri Kirby Erickson is the award-winning author of five collections of poetry, including Becoming the Blue Heron (Press 53, March, 2017)

Sweet Joy Ride

Champange wishes, cavier dreams and the chicken dance

By Astrid Stellanova

Oh, what a good time to be a Capricorn! Money! Fun! Champagne on a beer budget! You bask in the sunshine of a benevolent Universe. And . . . If you don’t go broke trolling the racks at Victoria’s Secret, you will have one fine time with all things sensual and pleasurable and dee-lightful. Actually, with the Sun in your money house, this is when you bank a lot of cash and good times keep rolling. For the rest of the sun signs, we just hope we are in the back seat for this oh-so-sweet joy ride. Ad Astra — Astrid

Capricorn (December 22–January 19)

Now, Astrid is not always right about everything, but I’m going to mix my metaphors because I feel oh-so-very right on this star call: If you don’t make the best of this astrological joy ride then you sure have missed the bus. Given all the good fortune you enjoy in January, take some time for an attitude of gratitude and pay some of that forward, Birthday Child.

Aquarius (January 20–February 18)

Since the year’s end, you’ve been locked in a dilemma. And Honey, one is right and the other one is you. It won’t take you more than a hot minute to figure out for yourself exactly what ole Astrid means. The jury is still out on whether you will get away with something you know was dicey. Not too late to renege, sweet thing, and set it right.

Pisces (February 19–March 20)

When things get rough, some of us run and hide. Some, like you, know how to let loose and be hopeful even when they feel the bus tires are bearing down and about to roll over them. They don’t feel sorry for themselves — no, baby, they feel a chicken dance coming on. This is the beauty of your true self. Dance that chicken dance, Child.

Aries (March 21–April 19)

If you struck gold, why would you look for brass? Somebody you admire has put that question to you about a choice you made. That choice is going to be one of the most important ones you will make. If you feel you cannot choose, then don’t. Sit on your hands. Wait. If your first choice won’t fit, don’t force it.

Taurus (April 20–May 20)

You have the constitution of an ox, and when you get sick, you get mad. Consider your choices. Consider you haven’t necessarily done a healthy thing in too long to remember. And the health nuts don’t mean an apple a day will keep the doc away — but only if you aim it right.

Gemini (May 21–June 20)

Sugar, you’ve been through a lot of challenge. How much of that was your durn fault? Did you show your appreciation when somebody gave you a helping hand? Did you repay the favor? Try remembering to dance with the one who brought you to the dance and get back out there.

Cancer (June 21–July 22)

It is true you got some bad blowback. It may be because a confidant of yours uses a phone like a DustBuster, just to get the dirt. Take a good look at who you trust and be sure they are worth all the fuss. Then sweep up the mess and move on, Sugar.

Leo (July 23–August 22)

Recent events have left you upside down and bassackwards. You don’t know whether to scratch your watch or wind your backside. Will it help you if I tell you this is good training for you? Despite always giving the appearance you are the One in Charge, you have bluffed and someone called it. Fix it.

Virgo (August 23–September 22)

Ever notice that the people who ought to be running things are either driving for Uber or giving manicures? Wisdom is going to find you in the most unlikely places. If you are wiser, you are going to keep an ear cocked for insights from people you might oughta listen to before you make that big decision.

Libra (September 23–October 22)

Well, hello, Sassy Pants! You put some steel in your backbone and stood up to somebody who needed it. Pushing back may just become one of your favorite activities this year, after a long standoff. You are going to find it easier to be true to your own ideas, and don’t worry if it alienates your Mama.

Scorpio (October 23–November 21)

Big ole changes are in the chart for you, and despite all the secret nail biting you have done, it is going to be just fine, Sugar Pie. If you only knew how many helping hands are making good things possible, you would sleep better at night. You would also sleep better if you stopped sleeping with your cell phone.

Sagittarius (November 22–December 21)

The rumor is, you have finally broken off with the lunatic fringe and found yourself. Or was it that you found religion? Whatever you found, don’t forget where you put it. You have an easy transition into the New Year, and an easy opportunity to renew some old acquaintances. They didn’t forget you.  OH

For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.

January Almanac 2017

By Ash Alder

What a severe yet master artist old Winter is . . . No longer the canvas and the pigments, but
the marble and the chisel.

John Burroughs, “The Snow-Walkers”

lavender and sage isolated on white

Begin Again

In many cultures, the first day of the year is considered to be a sacred time of spiritual rebirth and good fortune — a time to cleanse the soul and reopen one’s mind to the notion that anything is possible. Draw yourself a lavender salt bath. Light a beeswax candle. Indulge your senses with woodsy and earthy aromas such as cedarwood and sage, noticing how they recharge, calm and nurture you.

Be gentle with yourself on this first day of January. Celebrate exactly where you are — in this moment — and allow yourself to imagine the New Year unfolding perfectly. Look out the window, where the piebald gypsy cat drinks slowly from the pedestal birdbath. Notice the bare lawn, the naked branches stark against the bright, clear sky. Experience the beauty of this barren season, of being open and willing to receive infinite blessings. There’s nothing to do but breathe and trust life.

Breathe and trust life . . . 

Slice the Ginger

The Quadrantids meteor shower will peak on the night of Wednesday, January 4, until the wee morning hours of Thursday, Jan. 5. Named for Quadrans Muralis, a defunct constellation once found between the constellations of Boötes and Draco, near the tail of Ursa Major, the Quadrantids is one of the strongest meteor showers of the year. Thankfully, a first quarter moon will make for good viewing conditions.

Speaking of Twelfth Night (January 5), the eve of Epiphany marks the end of the Christmas season and commemorates the arrival of the Magi, who honored the Infant Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Indeed it is a night of merrymaking and reverie. That said, if you’re seeking a hangover cure come Epiphany (January 6), ginger tea is an excellent and delicious home remedy.

A glass mug full of hot ginger tea. Isolated on white.

Here’s what you’ll need:

4–6 thin slices raw ginger (more if you like a tea that bites)

1 1/2 ½–2 cups water

Juice from 1/2 lime, or to taste

1–2 tablespoons honey or agave nectar (optional)

And here’s what you’ll need to do:

Boil ginger in water for no less than 10 minutes. You really can’t over do it, so load up on ginger and simmer to your heart’s content.

Remove from heat; add lime juice and honey or nectar.

Sip slowly and allow your world to recalibrate.

The days are short

The sun a spark

Hung thin between

The dark and dark.

— John Updike, “January,”

A Child’s Calendar

Mercury shifts from retrograde to direct on Sunday, January 8. It’s time to take action. Plant the tree. Tackle your garden to-do list. And since Saturday, January 28, marks the celebration of the Chinese New Year of the Fire Rooster, a little advice from the bird: Be bold; live loud; don’t hold back.  OH

A Thoroughly Modern Love Story

Finding the unexpected in High Point’s Emerywood

By Cynthia Adams     Photographs by Amy Freeman

Stephanie James Goldman, wearing fawn-colored slacks and knee-high suede boots, opens the door into the Vermont flagstone-floored foyer and welcomes visitors with a deep smile. She hasn’t lived in this remodeled midcentury home for very long, but for the first time in her life she feels very happily at home. She says this, her eyes moistening, as she launches a tour of the home of her dreams.

Further, as a newlywed of exactly one year, she blushes that her life now feels complete.

But none of this contentment of heart and home came without hiccups. Stephanie admits that given she and her husband, Michael Goldman, are both involved in the furniture industry (she is a designer running her own dedicated studio within Furnitureland South; he owns Goldman & Company, a business that supplies glass, stone, metal and wood components to furniture manufacturers), both husband and wife have strong ideas about aesthetic matters. The refurbishment and furnishing of this particular house, her first contemporary residence after living in traditional ones, grew into “one of the bigger challenges of my life.”

Getting to the finish line involved a marriage of tastes for the newlyweds. Outfitting the house — now a study in elegant restraint, with luxe finishes, subtle and organic materials and soaring spaces — was nearly as challenging as finding the Hillcrest Drive home to begin with. “We rode around and around and looked and looked for a house of this type,” says Stephanie. ‘My husband grew up with modern style, and he lived it and loved it.”

The Goldmans knew what they wanted. They simply couldn’t find it. When the couple finally did spot it, the house was occupied and not on the market. What they saw were the externals — the house’s good midcentury bones, the great setting, the wonderful neighborhood. They were largely unaware of some of the challenges the house posed — such as a long-term leak that was going to pose a significant uh-oh.

They just saw their true home waiting for them. The Goldmans approached the owners and worked out a deal.

The house has inspired devotion in its previous owners for nearly seventy years.

The residence, known as the R. Frank Dalton House, was built circa 1949. The builder, Frank Dalton, was a key figure in the Snow Lumber Company. This High Point company was vital to the city’s quickly developing lumber and furniture industries both of which took off in the late 1880s and emerged as powerhouses together. Snow Lumber would make its fortune supplying lumber to an industry that was swiftly expanding — and growing High Point right along with it exponentially.

With his success in the lumber trade, Dalton could build a showplace and use the finest materials. He chose to build a standout of a home in High Point’s poshest neighborhood, which was now the well-established Emerywood rather than downtown, a location that captains of industry had once preferred. As for Emerywood, most of the existing architecture was strictly traditional. Yet Dalton and his wife, Margaret Haywood, (who had a fascination for California style), were interested in building something quite different — something completely modern.  When finished, The High Point Enterprise explained in 1951, that it was “a modern home, done with grace. . .”  Its grace was derived from the fact that it was meant to be subdued and organic — to blend with its natural setting rather than stand out.

The Dalton’s one-story modern residence is of a style that was popular in the 1930s to the 1940s. As an architectural style, Modernist was a departure, a pronouncement: The times, they are a’changing. Although it was subtle and low-slung, the house drew attention as it was such a deliberate contrast to Emerywood’s dominant, traditionalist style. 

“I included the house in the Architecture of High Point book, where I call it ‘likely the earliest example of Modernist architecture in High Point,” writes Benjamin Briggs, director of Preservation Greensboro. According to preservation records, the Dalton’s Modernist house, when it was constructed, featured three Crab Orchard stone chimneys. It was built with board-and-batten redwood siding, and Crab Orchard stone veneer was applied on certain lower portions. 

It was, both in exterior and interior, recognizably progressive. The interior featured unusual and avant-garde touches — an indoor “grilling area,” for example, and bar in one den that was intended to impart the feeling of camping out. Many of the interior floors were covered in Vermont flagstone, with under-floor heating installed. The Daltons created extended storage areas for hanging and rotating artwork. While much of the house featured flat roofs, portions had been designed with a sloping roof that allowed for clerestory windows and interior ceilings that seemed to soar.   

The Dalton residence was further enlarged in a subsequent renovation in 1959 with the enclosure an open patio adjacent to the kitchen. This renovation achieved a U-shape interior. A former breezeway and greenhouse (added in 1978) were also incorporated into the house. The enclosed breezeway connected both the garage and greenhouse. Additional living space now approached 5,000 square feet; to say the house was spacious was an understatement. In time, it also occupied two lots, thanks to a twist of fate. Fortunately, a relative had sold the Daltons the lot next door, doubling the size of theirs — unusual for an in-town residence. The additional lot enhanced the Daltons’ desired plan, to create a deeply wooded setting and harmonious landscape for their showcase, albeit discreet, home. 

While Stephanie is a true fan of the Modernist house, she admits this is a departure for her. Michael Goldman was the impetus for finding a midcentury dwelling, Stephanie explains. He heavily favored the sparseness of the period and wanted it for the couple’s first home together. Midcentury was also part of his own past; he had lived in modern houses elsewhere as his parents moved to various states wherever his rabbi father was assigned to a synagogue. “He grew up with modern,” Stephanie explains, “living in places like Philadelphia, Colorado.”

Stephanie liked the idea of midcentury, saying it would be challenging and fun for her to design, offering a clean canvas. “Designers lean towards straight lines,” she says. And she had no trouble with selling her traditional home, rebooting her life, and going for the Modern.

She also admired the spans of glass that Modern offered — and the effective blurring of outdoors with the interior. “I work inside all the time,” Stephanie says. “I love that we are integrating the outdoors.” The Dalton house offered a parklike setting and heavy plantings provided ample privacy despite the walls of windows.

The Goldmans are only the third owners of the Dalton house. “And the people who built it (the Daltons) were enamored of California architecture,” says Stephanie. In fact, the Daltons had such an interest in and emphasis on the California touch in all things, that they imported redwoods from the West Coast for planting in their new home’s landscape. Eventually, the Goldman’s architect, Peter Freeman, would even uncover the original landscaping plans for the property, something of special significance for an avid gardener like Stephanie.

According to the conversation between Stephanie and the Daltons’ son, Frank, his parents were fond of the work of Harwell Hamilton Harris, an architect transplanted from the Golden State who was known for his work in Southern California. “He practiced a more international style with a California bent à la Richard Neutra,” says Freeman. Neutra, an Austrian-American architect, spent much of his career also working in Southern Calfornia.

In remodeling their new home, the Goldmans were determined to use High Point resources and talent.

“We stayed with (using) local people,” says Stephanie. Fortunately for them, Freeman, of Freeman Kennett Architects in High Point, happens to be not only a local talent, but especially well-versed in the style of the Goldman’s new midcentury jewel as well. He owns a home of the same vintage and type only a short distance away in Emerywood, one that had once belonged to his parents that he and his wife, Amy, had bought and restored. Freeman also has been long active in High Point’s Historic Preservation Commission.

He researched the Daltons’ house and found the original plans, eliminating all guesswork — Freeman had the proof needed to know exactly what had been done in the prior renovations.

“I have a couple of actual blueprints of the original 1949 drawings for the house. The architect is Charles A. Kendall of
High Point as noted in the title block. I also have a print from the later addition designed by Mays & Parks Associates architects of High Point,” says Freeman. Here was the Dalton house, revealed.

“It is easy to see that the original architect, Kendall, as well
as the subsequent architects, William Mays Jr. and Robert Parks, understood the modern concept of blurring the lines between interior and exterior through the use of expanses of glass, clerestories and daylighting,” says Freeman. He was interested in how the prior architects synthesized the exterior and interior designs as a whole.

“The organization of the house on the site was arranged in an ‘L,’ focused on a grand terrace on the north. The later addition, made possible by the acquisition of another lot to the east, provided an opportunity to define the grand terrace as an ‘outdoor room’ creating a more intimate scale and allowing more privacy for outdoor living.”

Open to the outdoors, verdant and yet private, Freeman explains, were all factors attracting the Goldmans to the style of residence and contributing to the lifestyle the property represented. The synthesis of indoor/outdoor living in the house’s and grounds’ original design that the Goldmans found so inviting was more common on the West Coast but had found its way East.

In 1959, the redesign of the Dalton house had allowed for a new entry and living space, “but conceptually, further blurred the sense of indoors and outdoors by creating additional gateways between. The concept also called in question the formal notion of the front entry, and casual living, in contrast to the traditional revival styles prominent in the Emerywood neighborhood,” says Freeman. He set out to open the house further as the couple preferred, respecting and enhancing the original design.

Freeman’s firm removed interior partition walls and refashioned previously covered clerestory windows to provide daylight. Light flooded spaces where needed, just as hoped.

The kitchen remodel was integral to lending a historic, yet dated home a sense of new functionality and livability and all-important flow. “The feature I like most about the house is the flow, the U shape,” says Stephanie, “the symmetrical sense.”

Yes, the layout is fluid, and the house also whispers something that is rarer to find: subtlety. Freeman opened the kitchen up and made it a polished, luxuriously refined, space. It is sleekly upscale, with understated black cabinetry and gleaming white surfaces. A local High Point firm, Muckridge Custom Kitchens & Baths, was engaged.

“Our rearrangement of the kitchen for instance, included organic treatment of the cabinetry including waterfall countertops to blur lines but arranged on a formal axis flanking the terrace to enhance the existing plan,” Freeman says. The kitchen hood became something of a sculptural element, he says, marking the axis of the kitchen itself, but also providing a focal point where the couple can entertain family and guests, and where Michael can pursue his love of cooking. “Obscured views into the kitchen mean that food preparation is not highly visible from the front entry areas, but bleed into the adjacent living spaces.”

Freeman designed a bar within the kitchen and teamed with Michael to build a unique feature it comprised. “The new bar area is very visible from the original entry. It was treated like furniture, very finished and includes a backlit, contemporary wine rack designed by Freeman Kennett and built by Michael’s company.”

Both the interior and exterior planes of the house benefited from large new windows for which Stephanie insisted on sharp, crisp lines. The result, notes Freeman, is better visibility as well as aesthetic punch.

In the private areas, luxurious surfaces and material refinements (such as sculpturally beautiful spa baths) give the house an air of calm and understated beauty. Freeman explains that the design for the enlargement of the master bedroom “incorporated a more private sleeping alcove and additional seating space to take advantage of the light from an expanse of windows from opposite sides of the room.” And just as he hoped, Freeman says the replacement of covered-over clerestory windows in the master bathroom “provides a flood of light to the well-detailed bright and airy space.” The materials employed are a range of calming neutrals in tones of oyster and beige.

The master bathroom also features the work of a local cabinetmaker: a low-slung walnut cabinet that appears to float. “This,” Stephanie says with pride, “was my idea.”

Stephanie acknowledges, “I listened to Peter a lot, but I also had my own vision of everything [looking] as clean as possible.” She is a successful designer, of course, and so is her husband, who fabricates furnishings. And so, too, is the architect, who designs on a daily basis, just as his father and grandfather did before him. Yet the trio managed to honor each other’s strengths. And the outcome, this updated stunner of a vintage home, is a manifestation of their best.

Workmen arrive to deliver furniture, and Stephanie says she is still hanging artwork. Making decisions for the furnishing of her own home — this massive job that was so personal for the couple — has been among the most difficult ever, she confesses. She deliberated everything and edited everything again and again. With access to virtually everything, she had to curate carefully.  “I didn’t want it to look like a furniture store!”

It is almost done — apart from some tweaking to the greenhouse interior. And she is still involved with the grounds themselves. The original plans for the grounds’ plantings inspire her to wander around the property and think about what is needed. Stephanie loves to grab her clippers and head outdoors to work whenever she has time off. She has been so aggressive in cutting and weeding that “Michael has taken my clippers away,” she laughs — her appetite for clipping is a running joke between them. 

There is a special quality that the Goldmans have found here; a sense of peace. Michael travels extensively with his work. Stephanie is constantly working with clients around the globe. In the space of a week, their travels have taken them in different directions, him to Asia and her to Florida. So coming home takes on a deeper significance for the couple.

“I love where I live,” says Stephanie. Given the serenity brought indoors, thanks to enormous windows importing a million dollar view, what’s not to love?  OH

Cynthia Adams writes for O.Henry and Seasons.

A Man of Moral Fiber

On the fortieth anniversary of his Rug Business, High Point’s Zaki Khalifa shares the story of an American Dream that almost wasn’t

By Maria Johnson     Photograph by Amy Freeman

He came to High Point to visit.

He ended up staying.

That was forty years ago.

In that time, Zaki Khalifa — all 5-foot-10, 167 pounds of him — has become a pillar of the community, widely respected and honored.

He has accepted every business and humanitarian award that the city can bestow.

He has built a successful business, Zaki Oriental Rugs, which claims the largest selection of fine handmade rugs in the United States.

Zaki’s customers dot the globe, but there’s only one place they can buy his rugs: a 100,000 square-foot showroom on South Main Street in High Point.

Zaki has shared the bounty. A native of Pakistan and a naturalized U.S. citizen, he has given his adopted hometown money, time, real estate and, perhaps most important, friendship.

For many of his American friends, he is the only Muslim they know, their go-to guy on all matters Islamic.

They describe him as humble. Kind. Brilliant. A good listener. A man with an open heart and mind.

You can hear the affection in what they call him: Zaki. Just Zaki.

Recently, Zaki, 71, reflected on his life before and after he landed in High Point.

In a soft and measured voice, he spoke plainly, at times bluntly, at times tearfully. He recounted his privileged upbringing in Pakistan, where he witnessed mutual admiration between Christians and Muslims, and his decision, under the influence of a dear friend from High Point, to leave behind a comfortable life for an uphill slog in a different world.

He also talked about the two nonprofit organizations backed by him and his wife, Rashida: an Alamance County health clinic for low-income people; and a foundation that educates and feeds poor children in Pakistan, partly an attempt to keep them from falling in with terrorists and becoming suicide bombers.

Both organizations echo the philanthropic efforts of Zaki’s grandfather, the lifetime president of Pakistan’s largest social welfare organization.

“It’s keeping with the family tradition,” says Zaki.

He was raised by his grandparents, not because his parents couldn’t care for him, but because his paternal grandfather declared it would be so.

Zaki was the first child of a first child, a prized slot in the family hierarchy, and his grandfather decided, even before Zaki was born, that this special grandchild would enter the world in his home and stay there.

Zaki’s mother lived with them, in the bustling city of Lahore, away from Zaki’s father, who worked as a government official in a nearby town. When Zaki was a year old, his grandfather announced that Zaki’s mother could stay or she could return to her husband. She joined her husband. Neither she nor Zaki’s father protested the grandfather’s decree.

“His word was law,” says Zaki. “Granted, my grandfather’s authority was unusual, even for that part of the world, but still grandparents generally have much more say in the life of their grandchildren than they do here in the United States.”

Outside of the family, Zaki’s grandfather’s opinions were equally weighty. He was a prosperous attorney, politically connected. When India won independence from Britain in 1947, two years after Zaki was born, his grandfather represented his homeland at roundtable discussions in England to divide the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. He was elected speaker of the house in Pakistan’s new Parliament. Zaki grew up learning the social graces that came with living among educated and influential people.

“I was taken to the most formal parties hosted by the government in honor of visiting heads of state. I would have a separate invitation in my name,” he says.

His grandfather required Zaki to sit in the gallery of Parliament one day a week and watch him preside from the speaker’s chair. The discipline and civility of the proceedings made a lasting impression on young Zaki.

“One day, when the deputy speaker of the house raised his voice, I remember distinctly that my grandfather warned him to mind his tone. He lowered his tone. A few minutes later when his voice was raised again, my grandfather threw him out. He could not enter again until he gave an unconditional, written apology. Only when it was accepted was he allowed to return — something you don’t see in the world today,” says Zaki.

Zaki’s grandfather was a strict Muslim, schooled from a young age by orthodox scholars. He had memorized the Quran by age 7. But he also studied Christianity and the Western world. He earned a master’s degree in English by age 18, then his father — the director of education in British-ruled India at a time when few native Indians held key government posts — sent him to Cambridge University in England, where he pocketed three more degrees, including Doctor of Law.

Zaki received diverse schooling, too. His grandfather could have sent him to any private school, but he enrolled Zaki in Pakistan’s best public schools, which employed both Muslim and Christian teachers.

Zaki studied for two years at Islamia College, where one dean was Muslim, one Christian.

After Zaki’s grandfather died, his parents sent him to Forman Christian College, which was run by Christian missionaries. The teachers went to lengths to learn more about their Muslim students.

“Most prominent amongst them was my honorable professor of political science, Dr. Carl Wheeless,” says Zaki. “He even went to the villages to see the students’ families. It would be difficult for Americans to imagine how primitive living conditions were in the villages, especially in the ’50s and ’60s, but Dr. Wheeless was happy to visit, even when it involved an overnight stay.”

Sitting on a cloth-covered sofa in his simply furnished office, Zaki reaches for his handkerchief as he talks about his former professors. They did a better job of promoting good relations than any American embassy employee, he says.

“I’m getting emotional because this is starting to run before me like a movie,” he says. “These educators commanded the level of respect that is beyond the imagination of my American friends here.”

He arrived in the United States on July 4, 1976, the day of the country’s Bicentennial. Tall ships bristled in New York Harbor as Zaki’s plane descended.

He jokes now that he thought the ships had assembled to welcome him. The reality was starkly different.

Two immigration officials interrogated him for ninety minutes. They did not believe he was here to explore business opportunities.

“They said that young people like me, who were from poor Asian countries, had no idea how to explore business opportunities,” says Zaki.

The officials recommended him for deportation and shunted him to another functionary, who pulled everything from Zaki’s two suitcases. He stopped when he came to a box that held a Pan American World Airways frequent flyer card, as well as a membership card for InterContinental Hotels.

“He started apologizing profusely,” says Zaki. “He thought I must be a gentleman businessman. I owe my first entry to the U.S. to those two pieces of plastic,” Zaki says.

The date of his arrival was coincidental, but the symbolism was apt. Zaki was making a declaration of independence. Fresh from visiting Switzerland and England, he was searching for a place to settle in the West.

His grandfather would never have allowed it; he would have insisted that Zaki stay in Pakistan and continue the family’s legacy of service.

But his grandfather was gone, and Zaki, who’d spent two years working as a management trainee in a bank in Karachi, the country’s biggest city, was ready to make his own way. He wanted to start a rug business, and he didn’t want to do it in his homeland.

“The army was taking over again and again. It was a military dictatorship. That’s what bothered me a lot,” he says.

While staying with a cousin in New York, he called his former professor, Wheeless, who, like most educators at Forman Christian College, had taught there for a few years, then returned to the United States.

Wheeless was chairman of the department of history and political science at High Point College, now High Point University. He invited Zaki to stay with him and his wife, Mary.

Zaki accepted. He knew nothing about High Point. He intended only to refresh his friendship with the Wheelesses.

It was summertime, during the holy month of the Ramadan, which requires observant Muslims to pray intensely and fast from dawn to dusk. The Wheelesses usually ate supper promptly at 6 p.m., but during Zaki’s stay, they never ate before the sun went down, when he could join them.

“I’ve never forgotten that,” says Zaki.

Another thing Zaki couldn’t shake: Carl Wheeless’ insistence that he open his rug store in High Point, the home of an international home furnishings market. The city also was a center of furniture manufacturing, and, at the time, had more retail square footage devoted to furniture than anywhere in the world.

Zaki had no money. Pakistan forbade the transfer of funds outside the country. Wheeless had an answer for that, too: an introduction to Fred Alexander, the president of High Point Bank.

Zakis friends and family thought he was nuts to consider High Point. He understood why. He was a big-city kid, used to the depth and breadth of culture in cities like Lahore and Karachi. High Point was, by comparison, a tiny village.

At 31, Zaki was a single man and a devout Muslim. His social life in High Point would be severely limited. He knew of only one other Pakistani or Muslim in town, a professor at High Point College. There were no mosques around.

But he had the Wheelesses and their friends.

And he had a financial backer.

He took a chance in 1977.

Zaki secured a loan from Alexander, rented a store on Main Street and moved into an apartment.

He had no furniture. He slept on a bare floor. His softest rugs were for sale, not for sleeping.

He prayed at home. At work, he worshipped behind a closed door.

He ate lunch at Holiday Inn downtown. A bowl of vegetable soup with bread cost a dollar. For supper, he went to the K&W Cafeteria, where he bought three cups of vegetables for 25 cents each. A biscuit was 10 cents.

“My dinner cost 85 cents, plus tax,” he says. “That went on for a long, long time.”

Lithe and spry for his age, Zaki glides around his showroom with ease. An inveterate walker, he says he has ambled through every section of High Point to familiarize himself with the town.

“I have never felt threatened,” he says.

He burns more calories by walking around his cavernous showroom, where the inventory of 12,000 to 15,000 handmade rugs lie in short stacks.

When customers want to see the goods, Zaki and his assistants stoop, grab and flip the edges of rugs like dense pages of gigantic books.

Zaki personally selects each piece during buying trips to Pakistan, India, Iran and Turkey. His rugs range in price from $29 for a 1-by-2 foot wool rug, to half a million dollars for a 16-by-26 foot silk masterpiece.

Approximately 7,000 rugs fly out of the showroom every year. Ninety percent go to American addresses, 10 percent to foreign countries.

Zaki won’t divulge his customers’ names, but he says they include business executives, politicians, entertainers and other celebrities, many of whom have referred their friends.

In forty years, Zaki’s High Point customers never have accounted for more than one percent of annual sales.

But Zaki says he never thought about setting up shop in a bigger city.

Rug merchants, he knew from the beginning, had a poor reputation. An iterant lot, they often skipped town, leaving behind frayed rugs and nerves.

Zaki’s plan was to stay put, be accountable for what he sold, and educate people about Oriental rugs.

“I tell my customers, ‘You know, there is a salesman who is more dangerous than a used car salesman, and that’s rug salesman.’ There is a reason: There is nobody as ignorant of cars as they are about Oriental rugs, and that ignorance is likely to be exploited.”

Zaki survived by attracting out-of-town customers, mostly by word of mouth.

“I was invited to speak to many groups from many towns and states on many subjects: religion, culture, rugs, business ethics, the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian crisis after the shah was overthrown, the subdivision of the Indian subcontinent, the standard of living in poor countries compared to the standard of living in the United States,” he says. “Maybe that helped.”

So did his customer service and the quality of what he was selling.

In forty years, the Central North Carolina Better Business Bureau has received no complaints about Zaki Oriental Rugs.

“To be in business forty years and never have a complaint filed with the BBB – yeah, it’s a rarity,” says Kevin Hinterberger, president of the local BBB.

Zaki has been Mr. Main Street U.S.A. in more ways than one.

When he outgrew his first store at 138 South Main Street, he built a bigger one at 1634 North Main Street. When he outgrew that location, he donated the building to the Chamber of Commerce and built his third and current showroom at 600 South Main Street.

He donated yet another Main Street building to High Point Community Against Violence, an agency that works with High Point Police and the state prison system to give job training and support to people who have been convicted of violent crimes.

His faithfulness to High Point has won him many friends. They regularly seek his gentle advice on business and personal matters.

“I have a cousin who pulls my leg. He says, ‘You should charge $200 an hour for consulting, you’d make more money,’” Zaki says, laughing.

His specialty since 9/11: Answering questions about Muslims abroad and locally.

Zaki isn’t as rare as he used to be.

He estimates there are 700 Muslim households in High Point and the surrounding smaller towns. High Point is now home to two mosques. A third is under construction.

Many local Muslims work for textile and apparel businesses. Their bosses flock to Zaki with questions about situations involving cultural differences.

“Just about every time, I find out it’s the result of them having no communication with their Muslim employees,” says Zaki. “There’s no conversation. I’m glad they come to me; it’s part of my mission to help promote understanding between people of different ethnic backgrounds, but for God’s sake, talk to your employees. Ask them.”

By age 55, Zaki was a confirmed bachelor in the eyes of everyone but a rug merchant friend in India. He kept introducing Zaki to candidates.

Nothing took.

Then, in the year 2000, his friend flew him from Calcutta to Mumbai to meet Rashida Wawda. She was 37, older and less flashy than the other women his friend had introduced him to. Also a Muslim, Rashida was a schoolteacher and a yoga teacher.

“She wasn’t a stay-at-home girl waiting for a proposal,” says Zaki.

They lunched with a throng of relatives and friends. After lunch, they talked for three hours, always with chaperones hovering, never sitting closer than arm’s length. By sunset, Zaki proposed.

“I thought she would be a sincere life partner and that she would be good to my family. It turned out that way. I am fortunate,” he says.

The two of them are dedicated to helping others.

Rashida’s focus is the Al-Aqsa Community Clinic, a health clinic that she founded with her friend, Amal Khdour. The clinic provides  care for people who cannot afford insurance or medical treatment elsewhere.

Thirty-four doctors and 100 other volunteers staff the clinic, which used to be located in Greensboro but moved to a bigger location in Burlington last year.

“A clinic run by Muslims providing services for all,” reads the Al-Aqsa website.

Zaki’s pet cause is a foundation called Friends of Aabroo, which he started in Pakistan several years ago. He registered the organization as a 501(C)(3) in the United States last year.

Aabroo is a Farsi word for dignity and integrity.

The foundation operates free schools for 4,000 boys and girls around Lahore. Many of the students are orphans. All of the teachers are women.

“They are more nurturing, especially with small children,” says Zaki.

Volunteers feed lunch to the students. Often, it’s the only daily meal the children get.

The challenge, Zaki says, is to persuade impoverished parents and guardians to let the children attend school instead of sending them to menial jobs for 15 to 20 cents a day.

He admits that low wages await the older teenagers and young adults who do the tedious work of hand-knotting the rugs he buys from vendors.

“At least they make both ends meet,” he says. “They’re a little better off.”

Those workers’ children would be welcome at the Friends of Aabroo schools, too, he says.

More education in that part of the world would make everyone safer. With no hope for a better life, and little exposure to outside ideas, children can become easy marks for terrorist recruiters, who literally promise them heaven for sacrificing themselves.

“Until we can bring those kids into school to make sure they are properly educated, properly trained, there is no way we can put an end to this terrorism,” Zaki says.

He aims to raise enough money through the foundation to construct school buildings for all Aabroo students and those on the waiting list.

He realizes that many Americans are nervous about strengthening relations with Muslims at a time when some Muslims are intent on harming the United States, but he sees hope in the numbers.

“According to some surveys, .016 percent of Muslims are willing to hurt non-Muslims, and, by the way, they’re killing more Muslims than they are killing non-Muslims,” he says. “If we are going to fight that, we need more than 99 percent of Muslims on our side, rather than staying away from them.”

Reach out. Branch out. Put your money where your mouth is. That’s Zaki’s advice on global and local issues. He wishes more High Pointers would invest in local charities and businesses.

“They don’t invest nearly enough in this town,” he says.

And he would like to see more people, especially affluent people, push themselves outside their normal confines.

“We all have an obligation to get to know something about the world today that we didn’t know yesterday, and the closer the area is to us, the greater the obligation,” he says.

“So, do we get to know something about our town, or do we stay very comfortable in our own very, very small comfort zone? If we have lunch and dinner with the same people, and if we go dancing in the ballroom and in the country club with the same people, we may consider ourselves sophisticated, but the reality is exactly to the other extreme.”  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry.

Our Shining City on the Hill

High Point’s wildcat of an economy keeps purring, but  the city struggles to up its curb appeal

By Billy Ingram     Photographs By Amy Freeman

“High Point is as complicated as the Bible,” proclaims my tour guide.

As we’re standing in front of 114 South Main street a scruffy 20-something kid on a bike stops in his tracks, pulls out his ear buds and turns to ask 80-something Charles Simmons if he’s still interested in purchasing one of his paintings. Known by many as the unofficial mayor of Main Street, Simmons describes himself as “low profile.” But practically everyone we’ve run across while he’s been leading me on a walking tour of High Point Landmarks over the previous four hours has stopped to greet him warmly, whether the delightful dowagers of the exclusive String & Splinter Club or the designers and planners populating Market Square.

Simmons enjoys less than six degrees of separation from any important person, place or thing associated with the Triad. He’s a globetrotting evangelist, you might say, whose faith in the future of High Point and its all-important spring and fall furniture market is unshakeable. His roots run deep. Simmons’ family acquired 35,000 square feet of land downtown beginning in the 1860s, including 114 South Main, a majestic, three-story brick-and-marble structure crowned with massive, impressively detailed cathedral windows. “My grandfather built this building in 1912 and it is still 95 percent original, because my granddaddy knew how to build buildings,” he says, with pride. When Jimmy Noble suggested opening a New Orleans style French restaurant here in the early 1980s, Simmons and his sister said they’d work with him. J. Basul Noble Restaurant became one of the area’s premier dining destinations. With low ceilings, exposed brick and an underground jazz cellar, Noble’s new eatery grew from sixty-five seats to one-hundred-fifty seats. “One night there was somewhere between three and five billion dollars sitting in that restaurant having dinner,” Simmons recalls. Two doors down, Gerald Washington of Mississippi opened an eatery with, “nine ugly sofas, nine ugly love seats, nine funky chairs, and in five years went from $8 million volume to $50 million.”

In 2009, after a remarkable twenty-five year run, the restaurant closed. “Jimmy moved out and we got more money out of it as a showroom than we did on a percentage lease on a highly successful restaurant.”

For Simmons, history lives on every corner of the city he believes is finally on the rise: in the nondescript factory standing on Broad and Elm where George T. Wood & Sons began their multigenerational heritage and the towering International Home Furnishings Center. “This was the first market building right here, 250,000 square feet of space.” Simmons swears that the Jamestown, New York, market is an exact replica of High Point’s iconic building. “Captain Charles Long went up there and either stole the plans or bought the plans from the architect,” he insists. “Everything was exactly the same.”

What makes Simmons an expert on the High Point Market? “I’ve been to 132 furniture markets, I never buy I just look,” he says. “The reality is, the High Point Market was and may still be the No. 1, money-making event in the United States ahead of the [Consumer] Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Kentucky Derby, the Masters, the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the World Series, and Mardi Gras.”

Andrew Brod, a UNCG economist, did a study on the market, he says. In 2004 the economic impact was $1.2 billion dollars a year. Mardi Gras was $900 million and the Super Bowl tapped out at $300 million. “Nobody talks about it,” Simmons continues. “In fact, we’ve got more tenants per capita than anywhere in the world. We’ve got our regular tenants, which is why the prices are so high, but we’ve got another 5,000 tenants that come here for the furniture market and, when they leave, they lock the doors behind them and they’re gone”

must confess a personal affinity for High Point. It was an integral part of my childhood in the form of WGHP, home of wise-cracking weatherman Frank Deal, legendary sportscaster Charlie Harville, Dialing For Dollars twice daily with Jo Nelson (“Do you know the count and the amount?”), Shock Theatre starring Dr. Paul Bearer. And who can forget Miss Libba’s Romper Room or Limbo the Clown? As soon as I got my driver’s license, I made weekly treks to Parker’s News Stand on Main Street. For some reason, a good number of periodicals would be on sale there weeks before they appeared in my hometown of Greensboro; it was the only bookseller in the county that carried Variety and Hollywood Reporter. In 1987, I was a performer in the first production shot at the then brand-new motion picture studio just off of Business-85. When I returned to live in the area in the mid-’90s, after fifteen years away, I found myself happily designing furniture catalogs at Omega Studios, run by the nicest and sharpest businessman I ever met, one of High Point’s leading lights, Sidney Gayle.

High Point is a great place to visit but not everyone is altogether enthusiastic about living there. A shame, really. In terms of savor and flavor, panache and gentility, infrastructure and magnificent 1920s Art-Deco architecture, the city possesses an undeniable allure.

With comfy PART Express coaches rolling into the gilded 1906 Depot every half hour from Greensboro and Winston (less than five dollars round trip, half that with a senior discount), there’s no excuse not to partake in a busman’s holiday strolling the dozens of showrooms compacted into the downtown area, which, unlike the larger cavernous spaces, such as the Natuzzi building, looking like an ocean liner ready to set sail, and Showplace, are actually open to the public.

Antiques & Interiors is one of the biggest sellers of antiquities in the country; The Blair Oak at 106 Oak Street specializes in cottage interiors and accessories, located in downtown’s oldest building, originally a private school for boys in 1879; Ashley Interiors’ indulgent beach house and exterior porch furniture boasts the largest display of wicker/rattan furniture in North Carolina; Zaki Oriental Rugs will dazzle you with its hypnotic hand-knotted designs; Asian Loft showcases exotic Chinese and Japanese imports that can accommodate any budget. Another must-see historic treasure, Market Square at 305 West High, is a sprawling designers enclave housed in the meticulously restored 500,000 square foot former Tomlinson Chair Manufacturing complex.

Jason Oliver Nixon and John Loecke’s conversion of a charming midcentury drug store (McLarty’s) into a Madcap Cottage of kitsch and decorative high fashion has commanded the attention of the world. Francesco Molon Italian Luxury Furniture is a stunning palatial setting with an elegant array of modern and baroque furnishings created for movie stars and kings. You half expect Nora Desmond in Sunset Boulevard to make a grand entrance, announcing that she’s ready for her close-up.

For all the grandiose and fanciful, High Point retains a distinct down-home vibe, especially among some of the centrally located eateries. May I recommend a few favorites? The spaghetti is great at Jimmy’s Pizza, where the atmosphere and zest of otherwise long-gone pizzerias from the 1970s lives on. Open only three hours daily, The Dog House is another 5-Star luncheonette (We’re talking Facebook rankings here) that serves burgers, hot dogs and fried bologna sandwiches — cafeteria-style, and cash only, please. Whether you go for just a dog and buns or all the way, it’ll taste better if you eat it at the worn leatherette stools at the lunch counter. Funky fresh Mi Taqueria on the corner of West Green Drive and Taylor Avenue plates the finest authentic Mexican food I’ve had anywhere. It’s Becky & Mary’s Restaurant on Washington Street that you really need to discover, not far from where favorite son John Coltrane attended high school. (Trane’s sheet music, complete with notes in the margins and his piano are on view — alongside American Idol songbird Fantasia Burrino’s choir robe — at the delightfully eclectic and inventive High Point Museum on East Lexington, by the way). With no signage out front, Becky & Mary’s is easy to miss but is alone worth a trip to High Point for bona fide — and fried, especially the chicken — Southern soul food.

Outside of downtown — or what High Pointers call Uptowne — young folks are flocking to Brown Truck Brewery for craft beer sourced from mainly local and seasonal ingredients. Some are rising professionals, others, students at nearby HPU, whose Cinderella story of sleepy little High Point College transformed into a self-contained metropolis in less than a decade has almost single-handedly kept local newspapers in business. On the southern end of Main Street sits Sir Pizza where for fifty years the Butler family has been serving the best pizza in the state, one square cut pie at a time. Those who remember Friendly Shopping Center in the ’60s and ’70s may recall the Sweet Shoppe Bakery located behind Fleet-Plummer Hardware. Our sense of smell, scientists tell us, retains its memory the longest and you’ll know that’s true when you step through the door of their High Point store at 2008 North Centennial Avenue. This family-owned bakery uses the same recipes they did half a century ago so your olfactory senses and taste buds will revel in sensory overload that spans generations.

Seeing as we’ve barely scratched the surface of the marvelous sights to see, why isn’t High Point experiencing a cultural renaissance in a manner similar to what is happening at the Railyard on East Lewis Street in Greensboro or the eastern edges of the Arts District around Sixth and Trade in Winston? As executive director of the Southwest Renewal Foundation, Dorothy Darr is supremely invested in making that happen: “If I were to make one critical remark about High Point, it is we don’t market ourselves well enough and we don’t emphasize our small town quality of life.” She cites the light traffic (compared to Charlotte, anyway), green spaces and a hoped-for urban greenway to inspire pedestrians and cyclists as potential selling points. Darr says the city needs to have a multimodal core city area to improve the look of its streetscapes. “We have no major highways going through the downtown area like I-40 in Winston-Salem and Wendover in Greensboro,” she says. With existing cool, old buildings, it’s a hipster-magnet ripe for attracting the creative class. Darr envisions a business incubator and an exploding design district. 

But, as fate seems to dictate, High Point’s high hopes are punctuated with urban challenges. Losing the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival after thirty-seven years was a cultural sucker punch, but around that same time the city gained an impressive Centennial Station Arts Center housed in the former 1930s’ era Norfolk Southern freight depot with a stage and hardwood ballroom dance floor where open mic nights last summer drew hundreds of performers and devotees. Still, for the most part, you can’t locate a crowd downtown at night with a Geiger counter. No need to roll up the sidewalks, they’re never fully extended when every other storefront is an unwrapped birthday present for fifty weeks out of the year.

What gives?

High Point has always been an entrepreneurial town, but it’s become a victim of its own success, where rents run as much as three times higher than similar spaces in downtown Greensboro That’s because a furniture showroom can take 2,000 square feet and do $50 million dollars in volume out of it. Around half a billion dollars a year is spent behind locked doors on exhibits for market. But it takes pioneers willing to be that lonely outpost serving customers on a block of papered-over windows. Trouble is, as the adage goes, “Pioneers get eaten by the bears.”

Miro Buzov is one of those brave souls. In 2013 he opened The Penny Path Café & Crêpe Shop (Look to the floor for the reason it is so named.) in the heart of town on East MLK near Main. As to why he’s been successful, Buzov explains, “Outside of Brown Truck, it’s one of the only places in all of High Point that consistently draws business from Greensboro, Winston, Advance, Kernersville . . . people come from everywhere. People make a deliberate decision to go out of their way to do what people here do on a daily basis.”

The Penny Path Café reminds one of a European brasserie. For Buzov, the century-old storefronts that are in abundance downtown are naturals for creating an intimate environ. “I wanted to do something fun and at the same time show it could be done. On a holiday weekend people from out of town, people who live Seattle, New York or Chicago, they always come here. From a monetary aspect, it’s incredibly difficult to make this work.”

Just two years ago, Buzov says there were fourteen storefronts in the two blocks around his business that hadn’t been affected by the market — empty buildings. “Nobody was buying them, they were dirt cheap, maybe a little more expensive than what they should be because of where they are, but still within the range for somebody to develop, because this is really the only street in High Point where immediateaction could have been taken and nobody did so,” he says. “I like living here—don’t get me wrong—but every time I see something cool coming up in Winston and Greensboro, I feel like a slap in the face all over again.”

Things might have turned out differently in Charles Simmons’ view. He mentions two events in High Point’s past that could have been major tipping points in providing a more diverse economy less reliant on furniture manufacturing jobs that largely evaporated after NAFTA. “In the late ’30s, Bill Blair, who was a stock car driver, his family owned a 900-acre farm and he built a one-mile, red dirt racetrack,” Simmons recalls. “It was the first time my daddy said he had ever seen a tunnel that went under the track to get to the infield, made from gigantic 12 x 12 timbers. There was no steel, just lumber from off the farm. Mrs. Blair was actually on NASCAR’s board in the ’40s, because she had this racetrack; Bill France [founder and later CEO of NASCAR] had her on the board.” But as always, fate had other ideas. “Right after World War II, the Jaycees had a motorcycle race out there and they had a wreck, some little boy ran out on the track and got killed. The Jaycees had no insurance, [Mrs. Blair] had no insurance but she had $75,000 in the bank to pave the track. So she couldn’t pave it. If she had, NASCAR might have been here instead of Charlotte.”

More egregious in the vagaries of High Point’s fortunes was what Simmons deems a “major, major error.” His take: “In 1927, the wealthy money in Winston, the Reynolds Tobacco people, could not get along with the nouveau riche money in Greensboro. They discussed having one airport on the Forsyth and Guilford County line but they couldn’t get along. R. J. Reynolds’ 17-year-old son was a pilot. He built Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem in 1927 so they built the Greensboro-High Point airport out there on Lindley Farm’s nursery.” As late as the 1950s, the combined counties could have easily constructed the longest runway in the world on undeveloped parcels that sold for just $1,000 an acre. “Can you imagine, on all that flat land out there, how many warehouses with access to railroad tracks they could have had?” Simmons wonders. “But they didn’t do it. If they had, I honestly believe that Greensboro, High Point and Winston would be bigger than Charlotte.”

While High Point coulda been a contenduh, there’s no reason preventing it from still becoming one. Just look at the well of talent and reserves on hand to launch the next Ralph Lauren or Martha Stewart; someone with vision could easily tap into the amazing resources at one’s fingertips here with the largest inventory of furniture and fabrics to be found anywhere in the world. As Simmons put it, “There’s more milk in the cow.”

And he maintains it wouldn’t take much for High Point to become the land of milk and honey. “We’re one of only four places in the country with access to four Interstates. Atlanta doesn’t have it, New York City doesn’t have it, Washington, D.C., doesn’t have it,” he says. The trick is to get creative young people to want to live in High Point, because, as Simmons points out, “We’ve got more Parsons, Pratt, RISD, SCAD graduates per capita than anywhere else in the world.”

One forward-thinking individual who recognizes the city’s vast potential is Ridvan Tatargil, owner of Chicago-based Eastern Accents. He’s putting the finishing touches on the restoration and expansion of Pandora’s Manor, a magnificent 6,000-square-foot home on West High Avenue that will serve as a bed and breakfast, and meeting place for social gatherings. Pandora’s Manor was built 111 years ago by furniture manufacturer Henry Fraser for his wife Pandora, who is depicted with their child in a lovely stained glass window. Tatargil also purchased the parking lot behind the house along with what used to be a NAPA Auto Parts store and a small bar, so the entire block can be transformed into a high-class luxury event space for the designer market. Spokesperson Connie Lineberry is excited by the prospects, “The plan is, on the corner of Oak and Green, to build a craft brewery and restaurant.” But, she says, it won’t be just another craft brewery: Tatargil, who is “sinking millions into High Point,” brings, not only capital but vision to the city, as well. “He truly is one of the most visionary and innovative people,” she says.

So the economy in High Point is percolating. Charles Simmons points to fifteen buildings that have been sold in the last fifteen months, one going for $6 million, all fetching a great deal more than similar units in neighboring cities would. But as we wandered around the centrally located Depot, we encounter almost no one. “Nothing but ghosts here,” he says. “Ghosts don’t buy much coffee, they don’t go to restaurants. On the other hand, twice a year, the most stylish women you ever saw are here. You’d think you were on the corner of Hollywood and Vine.”

We end our tour on Commerce Street, across from the Commerce & Design Building, where these words paraphrased from a sermon by John Winthrop are enshrined: “A city upon a hill with the eyes of all the world upon it.” It’s high time we all gave High Point another look.  OH

Billy Ingram plans to spend a lot more time in High Point this year, beginning with the buffet at Pizza Inn, whose departed GSO locations he has been mourning for years. His moveable feast, however, is dependent on your buying his book about Greensboro — Hamburger²2.

Magna Carta Man

“Little old bookbinder” Don Etherington held — and preserved — history with his hands

By Jim Moriarty
Photographs by John Gessner

   

Surrounded by thickheaded hammers, scalpels that look like they’ve escaped from an operating theater and a cast iron vice, Don Etherington sits on a stool in his bookbinding workshop and talks about the heart attack that led to his quadruple bypass surgery as if it was a trip to the Circle K. It was a delightful, warm November day a little over a year ago. He had turned 80 a few months before. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, took a nitroglycerin pill, waited five minutes and took another. The pain didn’t go away so he called 911. His house is four from the corner. By the time the paramedics got him to the end of the road, he was gone.

From the other side of the studio, his wife, Monique Lallier, a designer of artistic book covers as highly prized as Etherington’s own, picks up the narrative. “He said, ‘You know this nurse in the ambulance, she was sooo nice,’” she says, her French-Canadian accent making the encounter in the rear of a rescue vehicle sound just slightly naughty. “I said, ‘Of course she was nice, she was happy to see that you came back.’”

Etherington laughs. “So,” he says, “this is my second time around, actually.”

The first one wasn’t half bad.

“I’m just a little old bookbinder,” Etherington says. Indeed, he is. One who has laid his hands on the 1297 Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, to name just two. And it all started with a pair of dancing shoes.

Born in 1935, living in a Lewis Trust building — flats for the poor — in central London, Etherington was a child of the Blitz. His mother, Lillian, cleaned houses. His father, George, was a painter by trade who’d been a prisoner of war for four years during the War to End All Wars and came home a changed man. “He was a hard guy,” Etherington says.

With the exception of roughly half a year when Etherington was evacuated to a house in Leeds that lacked indoor plumbing, buzz bombs and shelters were what passed for a routine childhood. “I used to roam the streets with a bunch of guys,” he says. “I’d go around at night — I can’t believe this myself — with a shopping bag and pick up all the pieces of German shrapnel. I’m, what, 5? It’s beyond imagination. The Blitz, the only time it really affected me, was when the flats got bombed. That night 73 of my school chums got killed in that one air raid. I think it was a doodlebug (a V-1 bomb). It hit the corner of our apartment block, skidded into the shelters, where a lot of people got killed, and it bounced off there into the school.

“It was like part of life. You’d hear the drone coming over and then all of a sudden, it would stop. We could tell where it was going to hit. We’d say, ‘Oh, that’s going to hit Hammersmith or that’s going to hit Kensington.’ We didn’t have that feeling that it was awful and depressing. It was our life. When you go through that, certain things don’t affect you as much. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that we were very resilient and resourceful.”

After the war, barely into his teens, Etherington did two things that would change the trajectory of his life, and he doesn’t know why he did either one. First, at 13, given a list of potential fields of study at the Central School, he ticked off bookbinding, jewelry making and engraving. He was chosen for bookbinding and off he went, still in short trousers. “I came away that first day knowing I loved it,” he says. “From that day on, nearly 70 years, I’ve been happy doing what I’ve been doing, which is very special.”

The second was those shoes.

“I took myself off the streets,” he says. At 14, he bought a pair of dancing shoes, marched into a studio in what was, to him, the fancy Knightsbridge section of London, and took up ballroom dancing. Medals and jobs came his way. He met his first wife, Daisy, when he helped open a dance studio in Wimbledon. “To this day, I don’t know how I went from strolling the streets, getting into all sorts of stuff, from that to doing dancing. The only thing I could say is when I went to Saturday cinema, I loved watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I got enamored and thought, boy, I’d love to go to America.” Etherington danced his way into his 80s, including at Green’s Supper Club in Greensboro.

After a seven-year apprenticeship in binding at Harrison and Sons in London, followed by a brief stint restoring musical scores at the BBC, Etherington took a position as an assistant to Roger Powell, the man who bound the illuminated manuscript The Book of Kells into four volumes in 1953. “I went to Roger. He said, ‘What do you know about bookbinding?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely everything.’ For the next few years he showed I didn’t know a damn thing,” says Etherington. His work with Powell and his partner, Peter Waters, was followed by a position at Southampton College of Art, where Etherington developed a bookbinding and design program in addition to producing his own designs, the artistic covers he’s created throughout his life.

In the first week of November 1966, after a period of prolonged rain and threat of the collapse of several dams on the Arno River, a release of floodwater hit Florence, Italy, traveling nearly 40 miles an hour. The Biblioteca Nazional Centrale, virtually under water, was cut off from the rest of the city. The damage was incalculable. Powell and Wright asked Etherington to join the British team being dispatched to Italy to help. “They had 300,000 books floating in the water. Before we got there these student volunteers got them out of the water, out of the mud, out of the oil and put them on a truck to be dried in tobacco kilns up in the mountains. Not to blame them because nobody knew, but it was the wrong technique. Here you’ve got covers floating all around and you’ve got books floating all around. In those days, they weren’t titled. All these scholars were having to try to match up that cover with that book with no indication other than size.”

Out of this disaster, the field of book conservation was born. “We started to talk to German, Danish, Dutch bookbinders and restorers for the first time. We started talking about different techniques. Never would anybody share secrets — including England. All of a sudden, we’re talking together around coffee or whatever. It was just a whole different mindset,” says Etherington.

For two years, he spent between six and eight weeks in Florence teaching conservation techniques to the Italians. His first trip to Italy, at the age of 31, was the first time he’d ever been on an airplane. Etherington stayed in a pensione on the Arno River whose owner looked like Peter Sellers, and his fellow lodgers included two bankers from Milan, a prostitute who didn’t talk much, and a countess who had been married to a high ranking German general in the Weimar Republic who delighted in regaling her dinner companions with personal recollections of the Aga Khan.

Etherington would, himself, hit on a previously untried technique, using dyed Japanese rice paper in mending leather bookbinding to add strength unachievable with the leather alone, an approach that’s still used. “People give him a lot of respect for being one of the early conservators,” says Linda Parsons, who joined Etherington at the founding of what would become known as the Etherington Conservation Center (now the HF Group) in Browns Summit.

Four years after the Florence flood, Etherington was asked by Wright to join him at the U.S. Library of Congress as a training officer. He spent a decade in D.C. in various capacities. Among the projects he consulted on were teaching FBI agents about printing techniques, typefaces and paper characteristics to help them reassemble shredded documents found behind the Democratic party offices at the Watergate Hotel — some of which related to the scandal itself — and preparing Lincoln’s manuscript of the Gettysburg Address for display at the Gettysburg National Military Park. As if he had nothing else to do, Etherington penned a full-blown dictionary, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books, listing every tool, material and technique related to the field he’d help create.

From the Library of Congress, Etherington was hired to launch a conservation program at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. There he was asked by Ross Perot to supervise the care and transportation of the 1297 version of the Magna Carta.

“There’s about 17 versions in existence. The 1297 one was the version the Founding Fathers used to write the Constitution of the United States. Ross is a big collector of Americana. He bought it for $1.5 million, which was pretty cheap at the time. It was found in the archives of a family in England. I was very surprised that England allowed it out. When I saw it, it was in really, really good shape. The ink was very black. There was question whether it was legitimate. Many scholars looked at it and authenticated it but, boy, it was questionable at the time.

“When you have an early document, you have a seal — I think it’s Edward I — and a silk strap. Because of maybe packing it or making sure it didn’t hang loose, someone turned the tie and put it on the back and stuck Scotch tape on it. I know it sounds stupid but it was that way. At some point, it went up for sale. This guy bought it for $22 million so Ross didn’t do too bad.”

By 1987, Etherington had fallen in love with Monique on a trip to Finland. His sons, Gary and Mark, were grown, and he decided to rearrange his life and leave Austin. He and Monique moved to Greensboro to begin a for-profit conservation company in association with Information Conservation, Inc. It would morph into the Etherington Conservation Center. The company performed the conservation and display preparation for the Constitution of Puerto Rico. They prepared and conserved the Virginia Bill of Rights. And Etherington was asked to work on the Charters of Freedom exhibit — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — for the National Archives as the parchment consultant on the Declaration of Independence, helping to design how the badly faded document was to be displayed. Like a sure-handed heart surgeon, one concentrates on the process, not the patient.

“A lot of people who are not in this business, they think it’s a little bit scary,” he says. “I try not to think too much about the importance of it to history or to our country or whatever, because once you start doing that, instead of treating it with surety, you’re treating it with tentative hands, and that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to you.”

Etherington’s archive resides at the Walter Clinton Jackson Library at UNCG. “He’s internationally known,” says Jennifer Motszko, the library’s manuscript archivist. “He basically was there at the founding of his field where they started to come up with systemizing ways to preserve and conserve materials. But then he’s become a well-known entity in fine arts binding. You mention him in that circle, he and Monique define that area.”

In celebration of artists and their craft, the UNC Wilmington Museum of World Cultures has designated Etherington and Lallier North Carolina Living Treasures. Etherington has worked on everything from family Bibles to a 14th century Haggadah, from first century Chinese papyrus rolls to a rare copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, from personal treasures to national ones. Still, every day at 5 p.m., studio work ceases. It’s time for the Etherington Cocktail. One part gin. Two jiggers of sweet Vermouth and a splash of tonic water.

“I’ve been very lucky doing things,” says Etherington.

Now he gets to toast a second go-round.  OH

Jim Moriarty is senior editor of PineStraw magazine and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com

POSITIVE OUTLOOK

Preston McNeil met Don Etherington when the family’s Chi-Poo, Mali, a Chihuahua/poodle mix, gnawed the edges of the study Bible belonging to his wife, Brenda. McNeil, who moved to North Carolina from New Jersey in 1988, has owned businesses ranging from carpet cleaning to cookie stores, and dabbled in jewelry design. He decided he could add bookbinder to the list by taking the chomped-on Bible apart and putting it back together again.

“So, I did,” he says. “It was a book that worked.” All the new binding lacked was lettering. McNeil found a place where he could have it imprinted. When the man behind the counter made out the invoice he noticed McNeil’s address. It was the same street Etherington lived on. “He said, ‘Take this book and show Don what you’ve done,’” says McNeil. “So, I took it to Don and he goes, ‘Uh, I see some mistakes but you did pretty good.’ He invited me in. And I’ve been going to him from that point on.”

After a couple of years studying with Etherington, McNeil felt confident enough to redo a friend’s Bible. “Then I began to buy my own equipment. Now, I have a full studio downstairs,” he says. And another business, Gate City Binding. “I wish I had learned to do this when I was 36,” says McNeil, who’s actually three decades older than that. “I love it so much.”

His seven-year apprenticeship with Etherington and his new skill set led to a delicate and difficult commission, rebinding the volumes of the Pinehurst Outlook, the newspaper that published continuously from 1897 to 1961, that reside in the Tufts Archives at the Given Memorial Library. The project is being paid for entirely with donations designated for that purpose.

“The majority of the Outlooks I’ve worked with are fully separating from the original binding,” he says. “The spine is deteriorating. Everything is dry-rotting on the interior. The books are all newspapers. If they need to be restitched, they’ll be restitched. If they need to be reglued, I reglue them. Then rebuild the whole spine. It goes from individual papers to a book again. It’s building a book from scratch, essentially.”

Just like his new career is built from scratch. “I take from his mind, put it into my mind,” says McNeil of his mentor, Etherington. “I take from his hands, and I hope it’s coming out of my hands.”

Poem

Wintry Mix

Without warning, you alter my day —

wanting more firewood before

it becomes soggier with morning snow.

I see no reason to disembark the sofa.

Horizontal before the fireplace,

I offer you a quilt that needs no tinder —

but your posture is stern and straight.

Rising, I moan like only I can, still unconvinced.

Children sled outside, asphalt’s black spine

revealed with each pass, down the block where

we sometimes stroll comfortable evenings,

or other everyday occasions when we leave,

yet return. Warm in a wool scarf I gave you,

you emerge smiling, extending leather gloves

to fend off spiders and splinters, and seize

some oak, encouraging me to hurry inside.

— Sam Barbee

from That Rain We Needed

Wandering Billy

By Billy Eye

“No friendship is an accident.” — O.Henry

They say what you’re doing when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, you’ll be doing all year. Getting a good night’s sleep sounds about right to me! I haven’t adopted a resolution in a long time; to be honest, I never expect to make it through the entire year. Surely, I console myself every January, my heavenly reward lurks right around the corner. I even know how I wish to depart this dusty jewel — spontaneous combustion — and with all I had to drink over the holidays, that’s a distinct possibility. The parties were too numerous to mention . . . the ones I wasn’t invited to, anyway.

What you couldn’t possibly know, dear reader, unless you are paying an unhealthy amount of attention to this column, is that your humble scribe Billy Eye got his start reviewing punk bands on the east side of L.A. back in 1980. Bubbling up from the underground came Red Hot Chili Peppers, Social Distortion, Minutemen and so many others; night after night, and more than a few afternoons, yours truly was knocking around in notorious dumps against a backdrop of ferocious music.

That said, I loathe to be clubbing when a punk band takes the stage. I was weaned on the real thing, so don’t even bother. That was how I felt for decades until discovering Robert (Cray Cray) Joyce and his meteoric ensembles. Rob gets what most punkers today don’t understand or can’t fully embrace. It’s a laugh. It’s a good time. It’s not a wail fest. With delirious lyrics steeped in ironic pentameter, this High Point native’s loopy onstage presence as the manic frontman for Robert (Cray Cray) Joyce is infectious. (No really, I think if you saw Rob you’d agree, he looks infectious.) I caught that group at Somewhere Else Tavern recently then ventured over to the edge of UNCG’s campus to Tuba House, a housing-code-busting crashpad that closely resembles Dorothy Gale’s farmhouse. After the tornado. That’s where Rob’s dramatic beats for Time Machine Drive-By tore through the crowd. They’re one hell of a party band.

Rob Joyce also organized a Battle of the Benefits to raise money for charity at New York Pizza that was supported by the area’s dynamic music community. It seems Tate Street is undergoing another renaissance of music and art, and at its core is Matty Sheets’ Tuesday night open mic at NYP that consistently attracts major talent. Always a good time, I had the pleasure of attending when Jennifer Millis, fresh off her world tour, wowed the audience and was summoned back for an encore, which is pretty unusual. But then she’s a truly amazing performer. Even more exciting was her impromptu living room performance for me and the titular star of my new groovy television program, The Nathan Stringer Summer Music Show, look for that on YouTube.

***

Not half a mile away from the aforementioned Tuba House is a home of a whole different sort, one that has welcomed doyennes and dignitaries for what will now be thirty-four Presidential administrations. Located on North Edgeworth, the Weir-Jordan House was built in 1846 by David Weir, one of the founders of what would become Greensboro College. This manse was once surrounded by 20 unspoiled acres with the nearest neighbor being Governor Morehead’s Blandwood House. History whispers that perhaps it was Alexander Jackson Davis, Blandwood’s architect, who designed this antebellum mansion just loaded with warmth and charm. In 1920 the Greensboro Woman’s Club bought the house for their meetings and the National Federation of Woman’s Clubs still own it. I pretty much ambushed superstar caterer Stacy Street there when I found myself at Weir-Jordan on unrelated business, and she couldn’t have been more gracious. For a decade now she’s been staging elegant functions for large and small groups in this Nationally Registered Historic Home, with all of the rent going to preserving this treasure so close to the center of town. Standing in the spacious drawing room I could almost imagine what it was like a century ago when the area was being developed as a residential neighborhood.

***

It was almost exactly twenty years ago that I moved three blocks west of Hamburger Square and would get the most curious looks when I told people this. They’d inevitably ask, “Why would you want to live downtown?”  I prefer apartment living and wanted a solid old place, up off the ground, with hardwood floors, thick plaster walls and lots of windows showing plenty of sky. Built around 1930, the place I selected, and reside in now, is a classic shotgun design, so evening breezes are a real treat when the weather’s nice. It’s snowy days I enjoy most though, when I can gaze out my front windows and see pretty much what someone would have witnessed in 1937 when this place was occupied by a Mrs. Margaret Clark, who worked for the Greensboro Overall Company, on Carolina Street near Northwood, Blue Bell Manufacturing’s main competitor in the 1930s.  OH

Billy Eye is laughing because you’ll never get the seven minutes back that you wasted reading this drivel.

Birdwatch

Splish! Splash!

Winter waterbirds have arrived

By Susan Campbell

The arrival of cold weather in the Triad means that our local ponds and lakes will become the winter home to more than two dozen different species of ducks, geese and swans. Over the years, as development has added water features both large and small to the landscape, the diversity of our aquatic visitors has increased significantly. Although we are all familiar with our local mallards and Canada geese, nowadays from November through March, observant bird watchers can expect to see ring-necked duck, buffleheads, loons, cormorants, pied-billed grebes and American coots, to name a handful.

Certainly, the most abundant and wide-spread species is the ring-necked duck, flocks of which can be seen diving in shallow ponds and coves for aquatic invertebrate prey, dining on everything from leeches to dragonflies, midges to mosquitoes, water bugs to beetles. They obviously get their name from the indistinct rusty ring at the base of their necks.  Also look for iridescent blue heads, black sides and gray backs on males. The females, as with all of the true duck species, nondescript: light brown all over but, like the males, have a distinctive grayish blue bill with a white band around it.

Perhaps the most noticeable of our wintering waterfowl would be the buffleheads. They form small groups that dive in deeper water, feeding on vegetation and invertebrates. The males have a bright white hood and body with iridescent dark green back, face and neck. They also sport bright orange legs and feet that they will flash during confrontations. The females of this species are characteristically drab, mainly brown with the only contrast being a small white cheek patch. Interestingly, bufflehead is the one species of migratory duck that actually mates for life. This is generally a trait found only in the largest of waterfowl: swans and geese.

There are several types of aquatic birds, similar to ducks that can be identified if you’re lucky enough to spot them; you’ll likely need a pair of binoculars. Common loons can occasionally be seen diving for fish on larger lakes in winter, and even more during spring and fall migration. Their size and shape are quite distinctive (as is their yodeling song; unfortunately, they tend not to sing while they are here). It is important to be aware that we have another visitor that can be confused with loons: the double-crested cormorant, which is actually not a duck at all. This glossy dark swimmer, along with its cousin the anhinga, is more closely related to seabirds (i.e. boobies and gannets) and is a very proficient diver with a sharply serrated bill adapted for catching fish. It is not uncommon to see cormorants in their “drying” pose, when their wings are almost fully extended. (It’s the slight droop that makes them look sort of comical.) Since their feathers are not as waterproof as those of diving ducks, they only enter water to feed and bathe.  Most of their time is spent sitting on a dock or some sort of perch trying to dry off.

Two other species of waterbirds can be found regularly at this time of year: pied-billed grebes and American coots. Pied-billed grebes are the smallest of the swimmers we see in winter, with light brown plumage, short thick bills and bright white bottoms. Surprisingly, they are very active swimmers. They can chase down small fish in just about any depth of water. American coots — black, stocky birds with white bills — are scavengers, feeding mainly in aquatic vegetation. They can make short dives but are too buoyant to remain submerged for more than a few seconds. Given their long legs and well-developed toes, they are also adept at foraging on foot. You might see them feeding on grasses along the edge of larger bodies of water or even on the edge of golf course water hazards.

In the coming weeks, if you find yourself at Lake Brandt Marina, Trosper Pond, the Lake Townsend causeway or even Yanceyville Marsh, scan the surface for rafts of floating waterbirds. Of course, you will most likely need your binoculars in order to better make out the shapes and color patterns. But if you can get a good look, take the time to enjoy some of these wonderful, web-footed winter visitors from the far north.  OH

Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photographs at
susan@ncaves.com.