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My mother wanted to be independent so as soon as she could she bought a lot in Lewisville and built a house with an attached beauty shop. She bought the lot from Uncle Joe Styers. We were a Styers family living on Styers Street no far from Styers Ferry Road which was named after the ferry across the river run by my great grandfather Abe Styers. While Abe was gone, his wife Millie lived next door to us. One of my jobs was to run over and peak in the window of her little house to see if she was still alive. Every time I looked she was sitting in her rocking chair next to her wood stove with the newspaper in her lap. She died a year or so after we moved. In those days, the viewing was help in the home. Great grandmother Millie was viewed in Uncle Joe’s house. She was the first dead person I had seen.

Lewisville was my first experience with school. Not many people have the privilege of going to first grade and finding out their teacher is a first cousin who has been teaching first grade for longer than anyone can imagine.  Miss Conrad was my first grade teacher, and she was as tough as they come.  I had no choice but to shape up and be a good student even as a first grader.  I think my mother got daily reports or at least it seemed that way.

My first year in the Lewisville School was the last year that the school was a complete grade one to grade twelve school.  The first and second grades were isolated on the bottom floor of the school near the cafeteria.  I guess that protected us from all the high school students, but I seriously doubt that anyone would have messed with one of Miss Conrad’s charges.

I remember surprisingly little about my elementary years.  I guess time mellows those memories.  I can remember the “ah hah” moment of learning to add two columns of numbers in the second grade.  I think we played a lot of dodge ball and kick ball during recess.  I can remember some school plays where I had to memorize lots of lines, but most of it is sort of a blur.   A few teacher names spring to memory, O’Daniels, Jenkins, and Greer.  I remember Mrs. Greer because I had a crush on her.  She was the youngest of the teachers that I had.  I can remember baby sitting for her.  I suspect that was my only baby sitting job ever.  I can still remember the old white Volvo that she drove.  

I had only one male teacher in my seven years at Lewisville. His name was something like Lasley, and I do remember that he used to drive the activity bus in the summer for those two wonderful weeks when we got to go to school sponsored swimming lessons at Tanglewood Park.  That was truly a dream since we would go to one hour of swimming lessons in the morning, swim the rest of the morning, have a hot dog at the snack bar, and then play putt-putt until the bus took us home in the afternoon.

It did not take long to get through all the swimming classes, but we kept going because it was such a treat.  Swimming pools were rare commodities in the fifties in North Carolina where almost no one had an air conditioner much less a swimming pool.

I must have been almost ten years old when we finally got an air conditioner that handled one room.  We choose the living room.  When it was hot, I would sneak in there and sleep on the sofa.

Television came to our neighborhood when I was six or seven, but I think I was more like eight by the time we got a TV.  We would have been classed as media novices since the color film strips and the old reels of movies at school were a true wonder to us.  Beyond those few enhancements, books and the blackboard served us well.  In the end I think we mostly had to learn on our own.

Going to the movies required going to Winston-Salem which was a rare treat. I can remember the long winding two lane road which got replaced with a four lane road by the time I was a teenager.  When finally there was a Saturday night at the movies on television, we were enthralled.  A color television did not make it into our home until I was a teenager.

I do not remember homework being a burden during elementary school.  In fact I can remember going home most days and playing outside until dark and finishing my homework after dinner. We had a huge cedar tree, a cherry tree, a plum tree, a persimmon tree, and a row of new planted white pines. Mother also planted some Japanese Weeping Cherry trees. There is a picture of me standing by a newly planted cherry tree. In summer of 2023 I took a picture of the same trees over 67 years later. They are pretty gnarly at this point.

I often rode my bicycle to school. When I got older, I got to be a member of the safety patrol and eventually was the Captain in the sixth and seventh grades.  There were actually a couple of ways that I could get home from school.  One took me through the back of our church and the other took me by the general store which other than the dry cleaners and furniture store was the only commercial entity in our end of town.

There was a great mysterious grove of tall bamboo growing behind the general store in a marshy area.  It was a little scarier than the big woods where we often played.  It was scarier mostly because it was nearly impossible to penetrate the center of the bamboo grove because it grew so close together.

Towards the other end of Lewisville there was a feed mill, another general store, two gas stations, a hardware store, the fire department, and eventually what passed as a grocery store and a small snack bar which kept going out of business.

The hardware store was my favorite place in town because they sold fishing tackle.  I loved to fish and probably drove my mother crazy asking her to take my friend, Mike, and me fishing.  My Uncle Henry had fishing ponds ten to fifteen miles away in Yadkin County.  We eventually got to the age probably around ten that we could be left there.  We spent many a day fishing those ponds.  We caught everything from bream to bass.

I can remember learning how to run electrical current with two screw drivers through my mother’s flower beds so that the worms would crawl to the surface.  Fishing was my favorite thing to do, but there were few other things that Lewisville had to offer.  You could go watch softball games in the evening during the summer at the school for twenty-five cents.  There was small parade on the Fourth of July.  Other than that, you were on your own with your imagination.  We lived in the world of forts we built and dams that we created.  Eventually we got to the age that we could hunt. We would sometimes wander the woods with shotguns looking for squirrels, rabbits or quail.  In those long ago days, deer were hardly known in the area.

We might have ended up more committed hunters if deer had been around, but as it was, we did  better fishing so hunting mostly dropped off the radar. I think that by the time I was fourteen I had given up hunting.

When we were about eleven or twelve years old, a few of the parents got together and started taking us to a  Boy Scout troop in a nearby town.  I think there were five us, Mike, Skip, Russ, Cary, and me.  After a year, we splintered off and formed Troop 752 in Lewisville.

Troop 752 became the focus of most of what we did.  We were lucky to have a troop campground at the far end of town.  Often we would plan a trip on Thursday and spend Friday and Saturday nights in tents.  It was a great way to learn about camping and leadership.  I became a Patrol leader and then the Senior Patrol leader for the troop.

In the summers we enjoyed Camp Raven Knob and Lake Sobotta which happened to be named after my father who still was only in my life a Saturday once a month or so. Every time he visited Lewisville, he would stop at one of the general stores and get a pound of sliced boiled ham. I still associate boiled ham with him  I think it was in the Boy Scouts when they started father-son camp outs, that I first really missed having a father.

Still the Boy Scouts was a great organization to be part of in the fifties.  I became a member of the Order of the Arrow and the next level Brotherhood. I lacked only a couple of merit badges in chasing the Eagle Scout award until I got shipped away to military school.

But before military school, I had one more educational experience that had a huge impact on me.  I was selected to be one of thirty gifted  seventh grade students out of Forsyth County to go to a summer school program at the Graylyn Estate in Winston-Salem.  That summer they taught us how to type among other things and the next year I joined the other students in a special class at the Old Town School.  My mother had to drive me there every day before her work.  It was exciting being with people as smart or smarter than me.  I enjoyed the year immensely, but there was even more challenge in the wind.

My mother was an amazing lady, she worked harder to keep us going than could be imagined, and I never heard her complain.  She often worked so late that I had to start supper or fix something for myself.  How she managed the burden of forty minutes of driving morning and afternoon that year I was in the eighth grade, I will never know.  She was also always ready to a haul a car load of Boy Scouts anywhere.  She was a great driver, and she took us to many camping spots. Most of my friends in Scouts considered my mother a better driver than the men.  There was always competition to ride with her.

In September 1963, back when President Kennedy was touting hiking as good for your fitness, our troop decided to hike the 20.3 miles of Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap. We did a number of five mile hikes to prepare us, but only our youth saved us.  We should have done a couple of ten mile hikes first.  We hiked all 20.3 miles in a day. I know that I was never that tired again until I farmed. I was lucky because instead of spending the night after the hike in a tent, mother hauled me back to a motel where I got to soak in a tub. It was the last spoiling that I would get for a while.

It had been decided that I needed more of a manly influence in my life, so my mother and father apparently picked McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee to be the school where I would get my high school education. Not long after the Wilderness Road hike, I was in the car headed for Chattanooga, Tennessee.  The first trip to Chattanooga we picked absolutely the worst way to get there going all the way through Murphy and emerging into Tennessee at Ducktown.  That route took us through a mining area which had lost all vegetation. We quickly learned that it was best to go north into Virginia and then follow the valleys down to Chattanooga.

There are few pictures of me from this period.

Next Chapter, McCallie, “Honor, Truth, and Duty”

Our daughter recently chose North Carolina’s Piedmont for her wedding. I was tasked with writing up some interesting nearby places.

Our families have a long history in the area.  My mother’s family, the Styers show up on the 1790 census.  Glenda’s family, Snodys and the Haymores, have been in the area so long, my family is consider newcomers. However, my great grandfather ran Styers Ferry across the Yadkin River in the days before bridges and there is even a road in nearby Forsyth County called Styers Ferry Road.  I also grew up in the area and lived on Styers Street. My childhood home there is now a restaurant which is probably not a coincidence considering how good a cook my mother was.

North Carolina’s Piedmont is very unique among the places we have lived. It is a vibrant, growing place that is still blessed with lots of small farmers and plenty of farmers’ markets.  Small farmers are an endangered species in these days of combines with 50ft headers.

There are restaurants here that are closely connected to the land and the farmers who care for it.  You do not have to explain why homegrown tomatoes are better. People here know how to cook food from scratch- from beans to homemade jams. They also know everything you need to know and some things you don’t want to know about using all of a pig.

This is the land of country sausage and country hams, and of course true pit cooked pork barbecue.

We know farmers whose families have been farming the same land for five generations. Food is important here and it is how North Carolina welcomes its guests and keeps them coming back.  We can teach you all you need to know about pork, fried chicken,  chicken pies -Moravian or otherwise, pimento cheese and even cobblers or sonkers. 

When our daughter asked us to research things for visitors to do,  the obvious place to look was nearby Lexington, North Carolina. It is around fifteen minutes from the Finch House and has plenty to entertain visitors. It is also the home of the Holt House which some of you will visit.  Most importantly, Lexington is the barbecue capital of North Carolina and hence the world.  That is settled fact.

As the holidays were getting in gear in December, we decided to see what we could find to entertain us in Lexington for an afternoon.  Obviously, we first had to decide where to eat. I found  a nice place, Rustic Roots,  in a building that used to house an old hotel on Main Street.  We arrived just before the lunch rush.  I ordered the BLT and Glenda got the lunch special, a chicken pot pie.  My BLT was delicious with hand-sliced sourdough bread and a little twist with melted cheese on the ham.  It was accompanied by homemade chips. Glenda’s pot pie was obviously not from a  sous vide bag.  It was topped with some beautiful puff pastry.

Next we wandered down to Bruce’s Tuxedos, the largest supplier of tuxedos in the region.  I was hoping for some advice on where to get a suit for Erin’s and Tim’s wedding.  True to my hippy-adjacent roots (I had to look it up), I do not own a suit at least yet. Bruce gave me a great recommendation but it was in Winston-Salem, thirty minutes away.  Exploring Lexington took priority.

Next, my other persona, that of being a cattleman running two hundred  head of Angus cattle in New Brunswick,  caused us to head down the block to visit the Butcher Block. I had read of their high quality meat and wanted to see the place in person.  While I have made and eaten a few soy burgers, I still favor a good steak on my plate at least once a quarter.

It turns out that the Butcher Block goes well beyond great meat.  They have a wonderful selection of oysters, and other interesting items like pineapple flavored rum cake.  They get fresh grouper and flounder from the coast on Fridays.  I had a great time and brought home some really nice pork chops with a test batch of house bacon.  I expect to be a regular customer.

Next we wandered back by the car to stick the meat in a cooler and visited the Conrad Hinkle Food Market just across from the old Courthouse which is now a free local museum.  Conrad Hinkle sells a lot of their brand pimento chesse all across the Triad (Winston-Salem, High Point, Greensboro). Their store is an old-fashioned grocery store and has a mother lode of  their own pimento cheese, but please don’t buy any. I would be happy to teach you how to make your own and it will be twice as good as what you can buy there.  I was tempted to buy our daughter a can of spam at Conrad Hinkle, but she has yet to eat the one I gave her for a Christmas present in 2005. Without a doubt, it is still “safe” to eat.

After the grocery store which has the smallest shopping carts that I have ever seen, we wandered over to the Candy Factory.  It was crowded with holiday shoppers and we were a little overwhelmed.  There was no shortage of candy had we desired any.  Next trip we plan to go farther down Main Street and see the actual factory where the famous red bird mints are made. My addiction to those mints leads me to try to not buy more than a handful at a time.

After the over stimulation from the candy store, we headed to the visitors center back by the Courthouse.  Mostly, we needed to find some public restrooms since we had been hiking around the same few blocks for over three hours.  Beyond clean historic restrooms, we also got lots of recommendations about where we should eat next time and the things that we missed during this visit. 

Lexington has an amazing number of interesting restaurants, small shops and boutiques. There is a coffee shop, a bookstore, a bagel shop, and even an Army-Navy store which appears to have the jeans’ market cornered.  I don’t think anyone will be disappointed it they park on Main Street in Lexington near the old Court House, find something to eat, and wander around for a while.  There is plenty to choose from with just a short walk even by our aging standards.

According to the ladies at the visitors center the Hampton Inn in Lexington is the newest hotel in the area and it is only 15 minutes from the wedding venue. If you are having trouble finding a spot, you might want to consider it.

I was planning on getting barbecue from Smiley’s for dinner after our trip.  After some testing a year ago, Smiley’s had emerged as one of my favorite barbecue destinations. One of the welcome center ladies told me that Smiley’s had been torn down because of a road construction project.  Losing one barbecue restaurant in Lexington is not a problem.  The ladies gave us a list of ten others.  We picked the closest one, The Barbecue Center.   We brought home a great dinner, coleslaw, potato salad with some of the freshest buns on earth.

Here is a link to pictures I took during our afternoon in Lexington.

Thirty minutes after leaving Lexington, I was fitted for my suit for the wedding and headed back to Mocksville where we live.  Now about that hippy-adjacent comment.  Yes, I went back to the land, but I always preferred working the land with a big green John Deere tractor or a huge red  International one and that was a long time ago. I will admit that Erin had two Labrador retrievers as baby sitters occasionally. That might explain a few things.

I have worn my fair share of suits walking through DC humidity but that also was a couple of decades ago. The moths got my last DC suit. Rumors that I planted them are not true. My daughter will likely admit that I am closer to a geek with dirty fingers from gardening than anything else but that is a very long story. If you need a really fast fiber connection for work while in the area, stop by Mocksville. We’re likely faster than what you have up north.