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Just like it used to be . . .

Slices of hooped cheese sits on the counter along with pieces of watermelon on ice at the old Reno Shape Store near Goldston. The store was open recently for a music festival on the grounds there and provided those there a chance to see what an old country store looked like. With snacks, drinks and other items, folks scurried in and out, eating those snacks as the music played.



Randall

Reflects

By Randall Rigsbee


The old library was nice, but new one looks great

A number of years ago, I wrote an editorial for the Moore County newspaper I was working for at the time critical of the Southern Pines Town Council’s plan to build a new library.

More out of a youthful desire just to be contrary than from any heartfelt stance, I gently expressed the point of view that while a new, bigger library would be nice, the old library was just fine.

The mayor took me to task for this, especially a line I wrote saying the old library was good for, among other things, "doing a little research." A little research, the mayor countered, was precisely all you could do in the cramped, inadequate old facility.

After the mayor himself gave me a guided tour and pointed out – at nearly every turn — exactly why a new library was needed, I wrote a follow-up editorial to say the mayor was right, because he was.

I took from the experience an important lesson: no matter how attached I may be personally to a building, nostalgia for a piece of architecture isn’t necessarily the best basis for an argument against progress.

Which brings me to another new library.

Soon, the new Chatham Community Library will open, replacing the much smaller Pittsboro Memorial Library.

In no way am I critical of the new library. Though I haven’t seen the inside of it yet, I’ve heard it’s a wonderful new facility and the photographs I’ve seen only reinforce this.

And even if I was inclined to write a piece, as I did years ago in Southern Pines, critical of this new facility, I don’t know how I’d manage to do so since it’s obvious to anyone who has used the old Pittsboro library in recent years that it simply is no longer sufficient to meet contemporary needs.

But as patrons prepare to begin using this nice new library and as library staff make the switch (Pittsboro is temporarily without a library now through September 12 while the switch is made) I’ve got a nostalgic library itch I’d like to scratch one more time.

Simply put, I love the old Pittsboro library, a facility I’ve used and enjoyed for many years beginning in the mid-Seventies when my father took me and my siblings there on a handful of summer evenings to watch the free movie screenings they had there at the time.

I don’t know if libraries do that sort of thing anymore, but between the library in Chapel Hill (which has also since been replaced by a bigger one) and the one in Pittsboro, I got a decent education in silver screen classics. I’ll never forget seeing the eerie silent film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" projected onto a small movie screen in Pittsboro. It was a fun night.

I mentioned this a few years ago to librarian Pat Rounds and she pointed to the wall to show that the screen, so many years later, was still there, which I thought was cool.

A couple of decades later when I came to work in Chatham County, the Pittsboro library was like an old friend and, being new to the area, I naturally gravitated to it.

The library quickly became a hangout for me. It’s where I went when I needed to get out of the office for a while. I made friends there. I read the daily newspapers there. It was there I caught up with the crazy doings of the rich and famous through my weekly People magazine fix.

I checked out many books there and there’s no telling how many books I bought there during the twice-yearly book sales conducted by the library’s very dedicated Friends group. But even those book sales outgrew the small facility and have long since been conducted in the Pittsboro Kiwanis Building.

Those dedicated Friends, by the way, were enormously helpful in getting a new library built, raising more than $700,000 for the new building.

I could go on, but the point is that the old library has served us well all these years.

But things – libraries included – change, which is as it should be, and I’ll be among those welcoming the new library when its official ribbon cutting is conducted at 5 p.m. on Monday, September 20.



Movin' Around

by Bob Wachs


Time of year to note whether weather ugly

We’re now into a significant period of the year, having sort of eased into it on the calendar but make no mistake: it’s here.

I’m not speaking of "back-to-school," although we’re still in that general time frame. Actually we’ve more or less been in it since July 4th. And it’s not the start of college football, which lately seems to be more and more about semi-pro and less and less about "student-athletes." And it’s not so much Labor Day, the last hurrah of Summer, or even the get-ready period for the State Fair and all its Polish sausages.

It’s hurricane season . . . and I don’t mean that hockey team that used to live in Connecticut.

Much has been said and written in the last few days about the fifth anniversary of what Katrina did to the Gulf Coast in general and New Orleans in particular. The pictures were graphic and the accounts intense and I can only imagine what that was like, although I still can’t understand why when the authorities told folks five days ahead that a really big storm was going to pound the city, which was already well below sea level that everyone didn’t start out.

Anyway, some did but not all took that advice and warning and the loss of life and property was significant.

I haven’t been there and I don’t want to start now. But thanks to our own little adventure on 9/6/96 I can’t get into the start or duration of hurricane season with the same nonchalant attitude I once had.

Lying awake in the dark of night listening to Hurricane Fran do her impression of a mad runaway freight train has forever left its mark on my tender and fragile psyche.

That evening started innocently enough, with the weather folks saying a storm was coming but they didn’t exactly know how bad it could or would be.

It didn’t take long to find out.

The power was out by 10:00 or so; the wind was howling; and the rain was coming down not in buckets but in barrels. I found my little transistor radio and found WPTF on the AM dial. By then it was about 1:00 in the morning and I’m holding prayer meeting in our living room. We’d hear a tree snap and hold our breath, waiting to see if it would soon be joining us in that room. There was no way to judge depth perception and distance in the dark. I still remember the all-night radio personality saying that the National Weather Service was predicting the storm would be by at about 2 A.M. and I’m thinking if what we’re having now isn’t the storm I don’t think I want to be here.

I finally crashed about 4:00 after the wind died down to just a mild uproar. And in a few hours I had sort of an idea about what Francis Scott Key meant when he talked about seeing things in the dawn’s early light.

It wasn’t pretty. Eventually I counted 20 trees down in the front yard. Pasture fences were on the ground but it didn’t matter since the cows couldn’t get around the downed oaks. Our 8-passenger van I liked so much and which the two thirty-somethings who used to be teenagers who lived at my house jokingly referred to as "the party wagon" was squatting down under the weight of a tree across its roof. A tree was on the house and so on and so forth.

We also eventually went nine days without power, which meant I had to watch television in the dark and also meant showers were at a premium. I’m pretty sure my Right Guard broke down a couple of times during that week and a half.

Eventually most things got put back together, for us and countless others. The Party Wagon gave up the ghost and the 20 trees couldn’t be put back but most things returned to normal . . . except my tender and fragile psyche. Soon afterwards I discovered the National Hurricane Center on the Internet and after a period of time sort of learned how to read and understand their advisories and kind of keep up with what’s going on out in the Atlantic.

I know I can’t control tropical storms and I can’t keep low pressure systems from acting ugly but I am going to try to keep up with them.

But I still don’t understand why folks would name a sports team after a thing as devastating as a hurricane. I guess folks in Connecticut have never lived through one.



A Little Perspective

by Alyssa Marcus


Rest homes not so restful

I wrote a story last week about the walkout of employees at Hill Forest Rest Home in Bear Creek and the subsequent removal of the residents by the Department of Social Services.

I drove to the facility last Monday to check the story out, not knowing what to expect when I got there. But what I didn’t expect was what I found when I walked into the building, which is set at the top of a long driveway off northbound US 421.

The best way to describe what the home looked like inside is an abandoned elementary school, dingy and cheerless. It was not a place I’d want to spend an afternoon, much less live in.

The next day, I learned that the owner, Warren Gold of Rocky Mount, had had his license to run the facility revoked in March.

My immediate thought: why was the rest home still in operation?

The answer is because Gold has appealed the decision to revoke his license and, as explained to me by the director of Chatham County Department of Social Services, when a business is in appeal status to keep a license, "everything must be kept the same until the appeal is heard and there’s a decision at the appellate level."

So despite the license being officially revoked, Hill Forest remained open.

This makes no sense to me. A business owner certainly has the right to appeal a decision to have his license revoked, but why does he also have the right to maintain his business despite the decision to shut him down?

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services sent Gold a letter detailing the reasons for the license revocation, with more than 50 pages describing both the way a rest home should be and the violations noted at Hill Forest.

Just a few of the issues with Hill Forest that resulted in the revocation of the license: lack of privacy in the bathrooms; ant poison stored in the food pantry; thick buildup of dirt on all floors in the facility; mold and mildew covering the floor of the shower and roaches and other bugs crawling freely throughout.

Since March, this facility has been allowed to remain open and people have lived and worked in this environment for the five months since.

It’s bad enough this is the case with one facility. But there could be and probably are others operating under similar circumstances.

Many of the now-former residents of Hill Forest are mentally disabled and were unable to stand up for themselves and many, likewise, have no families to stand up for them.

As a community, we need to take care of those who cannot help themselves, and the appeals process doesn’t seem to allow this to happen in the timely way it should.

The silver lining in this case may be that, while it will be a hard adjustment for the former residents to make, they have been moved, hopefully to better places to live.


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