north carolina

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Ten years ago this summer I packed up my car with the bare essentials and my dog Tammy and I left our hometown of Reidsville, North Carolina.  I didn’t know where we were going.  We were headed toward literally only God knew where.

We spent the better part of an entire year crossing America, looking for a new place to call home.  When we got to California I decided that we had gone as far from our old home as we could, so I spent a few months looking for work there.  That didn’t happen.

I didn’t want to go back to Reidsville a failure, but that’s pretty much what happened.  And I was there for a couple of months while I tried to figure out what my next course of action should be. That didn’t go so well.  Concerned friends came up with a plan: to let Tammy and ...

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Earlier today Pam Sutton, the widow of legendary moonshiner and American icon Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, shared the following photograph on the official Facebook page for the annual Popcorn Sutton Jam.
This is the very last photograph that was taken of Popcorn.  It was made the morning before his passing…
Pam Sutton elaborates: “This is one of the pictures that I don’t like to share very much. You see, this was taken the day he left this world. This was my last image of him. I loved him so. If you look at his feet, you will see the jars that would become his first legal run. He was the first moonshiner to go legal in East Tennessee.”
I will forever be lamenting that I never got to meet Popcorn Sutton in person.  Having come to meet and know several people who were in his life, I can’t help but
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Phil Berger (left), Sam Page (right)
Image courtesy WRAL.com

Look, I really don’t have much of a dog in this hunt.  I don’t even live in North Carolina anymore, much less live back in the state senate’s 26th district.  But I did spend most of my life in Rockingham County and I maintain strong connections there.  I visit back there every so often.  And I’ve met Phil Berger and Sam Page at various times over the past two decades.  All of that, and the political commentator that’s been inside me for well over thirty years now is just aching to weigh in on this mess.  So that being said, here it goes…

For those who haven’t known, the 2026 race for North Carolina State Senate District 26 has been thrown into beyond the singularity: a place where future events cannot be estimated.  What happened is that Phil Berger, who has ...

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Okay, maybe I’m more than a little biased.  But as long as I am on God’s green earth I will never believe that there was ever a meteorologist who was as accurate and honest and entertaining as Earl Burton.

Earl Burton was born in Reidsville, North Carolina in 1940.  Two things happened in his young life that wound up spinning him into someone legendary: his love of broadcasting, and the volumes of weather records that he began keeping as a teenager.  Eventually he came to be an announcer on WREV AM-1220 out of Reidsville.

His flair for radio and his vast knowledge of local meteorology collided one fateful afternoon when Earl was about to relay a forecast from the National Weather Service to his listeners.  He was set to read the report calling for rain when he stopped, paused for a moment, and told the audience “Folks, I think ...

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I’m going to come out and say it:

It is absolutely shameful what is happening right now in Rockingham County politics.

Regardless of distance in its various measures, I have still been proud to be a son of Reidsville and the surrounding area.  But what I’m seeing lately from afar is utterly heartbreaking.

Twenty years ago I was a candidate for public office in Rockingham County.  I didn’t win my race but it still became one of the greatest experiences of my life.  My campaign was an honest, sincere, and upbeat one.  It was FUN!  When the results came in, there was no bitterness at all for not getting a seat on the school board.  There had been too much enjoyment from coming to meet new people, hearing and talking about ideas, harnessing creativity to make signs and shirts and television ads.  I didn’t run against anyone per se.  I ...

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The sad news is coming out of Asheboro, North Carolina this evening that Jerry Bledsoe, the prolific author who among other things hit the bestseller list with his true-crime book Bitter Blood, has passed away at the age of 84.

In my formative years, Bledsoe’s columns for the News & Record out of Greensboro were must-reading.  It seemed that there wasn’t a subject that he couldn’t write about and make it a rollickin’ good respite from one’s typical daily life.  He was a gifted humorist who brought with him fresh insight into practically everything he wrote about.

But Bledsoe’s biggest claim to fame had nothing to do with humor.

In the summer of 1988 came the publication of Bitter Blood.  It remains one of the most disturbing true-crime books ever written.  Bledsoe’s book attempted the impossible (something he admitted in its final pages): trying to make sense ...

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I first heard about this about a week ago and it didn’t seem possible.  There were photos though that proved it was true: Pennrose Mall, what might be the worst shopping establishment in the southeastern United States – it’s definitely the worst in the state of North Carolina – is getting some much-needed cosmetic attention.

Here is a pic of what Pennrose Mall has looked like for the past few decades:

The blog Sky City: Retail History has many other photos of Pennrose.  Those are from circa 2011 though.  I paid a brief visit inside the mall in 2017 and it was MUCH worse by that point.

Pennrose Mall used to be a happenin’ place.  It had many good retailers, some big-name anchors but also quite a few small businesses that brought real local charm to the downtown area.  But the last time it was anything like that was
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For the past ten months the number-one question that has been asked of this blogger has been: “Do you know when the Short Sugar’s barbecue sauce is going to be for sale?”

It was back in January that Short Sugar’s Barbecue in Reidsville, North Carolina closed after almost eighty years of business.  It was news that shocked a lot of people.  I know.  For weeks it was THE item that spun the most traffic to this blog.  Folks as far away as Ireland, Australia and Brazil were coming to this site.  But that was nothing compared to the reactions that I saw on Facebook, among the people who for most if not all their lives had Short Sugar’s in the town they grew up in.  It was an institution, not just of Reidsville but of the entire state of North Carolina.

I could go on all night about that. ...

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That was one of the very first thoughts that came to mind this morning.

My heart felt like it broke into a hundred pieces yesterday afternoon, upon hearing of the passing of my very good friend Tim Talley.

Tim was many things to many people.  I suppose the first aspect that comes to the minds of lots of folks is that he was an amazing photographer.  For more than forty years Tim made his mark not just in Reidsville and Rockingham County, but throughout the Piedmont region.  Tim was blessed with an incredible vision and sense of composition.  The man worked with light the way that the finest sculptors work with clay.  Tim came up with seemingly countless ways of staging photos and he would go to whatever lengths it took to pull them off.  He also had a way of bringing out the best of his subjects.  Everyone ...

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A short while ago I got the word from her daughter that Nell Rose, one of the most enthused and energetic and especially dynamic people who I have ever had the great pleasure of knowing, passed away yesterday.

Nell was the embodiment of model leadership.  She would see things that could have been better and she threw herself into it, no questions asked.  This was especially noted in her myriad of activities involving education.  She spearheaded a number of initiatives when she and her family moved to Charlotte.  And then some years later when they moved back to the Reidsville area, she brought that same vision to bear.  The woman was nigh unstoppable.

I knew Nell from a variety of situations.  The first time we met, it was during our high school swim team’s weekly meets.  Her two daughters were on the team and Nell often came to ...

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