The week before last I went to Evening with 8 Plus Smitty at the Piedmont Club in the BB&T tower in Winston-Salem.  The speaker was Michael Miller, publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and there were about 30 people in attendance.

Mr. Miller gave a nice presentation and did a nice job answering questions and reacting to criticism of the newspaper, in particular the recent decisions to fold the daily business section into the local section and merge the Sunday Arts and Living sections.  I was lucky enough to sit at his table but to be honest I didn’t get a chance to speak to him because the other prominent person at the table was Phil Hanes, the former CEO of Hanes Corporation.  Let’s just say that Mr. Hanes ain’t shy.

Our table of eight was regaled with stories about Mr. Hanes’ efforts to build the Winston-Salem arts community, his involvement with the re-development of downtown Winston, and even some stories from his childhood growing up in the Hanes family.  The man is refreshingly blunt and earlier in the evening he hadn’t been shy in his criticism of the Journal’s op-ed page.  Essentially he called all of the Journal’s columnists nice people who live in the sticks and don’t ever write about what’s going on in the city.  Mr. Miller couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.

Well, I Googled Mr. Hanes and found that he’d written a book called How to Get Anyone to Do Anything and if you look at the reviews you’ll see that the first is from none other than Harper Lee who calls him an  "old friend."   Now if we were playing the Kevin Bacon game, otherwise known as six degrees of separation, that would put me only one step away from the notoriously reclusive author of one of my all-time favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird.  How cool is that!

I met a lot of other interesting people that evening, but I’ve been so busy lately it’s kind of a blur in my memory now.  The one notable I can mention is Smitty himself.  He’s the publisher of Smitty’s Notes, THE resource for happenings in Winston-Salem and he also does a fine job of putting together some interesting presenters for Evening with 8.  If you’re in the Winston area you should definitely try and attend one (the schedule is here), and I’d join you but unfortunately the rest of the sessions this fall are on Thursday nights and I’m committed to my daughter’s soccer team those evenings.  Maybe I’ll make more in the next session.