Category Archives: Winston-Salem

Silver Tunas

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Recently I offered the Winston-Salem Journal some free advice (remember, it’s worth what you paid for it) and while I hope it was constructive, much of it was criticism.  So I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight what I think is a good blog post for a newspaper.

Managing Editor Ken Otterbourg has been hosting a blog for the Journal for a while now and I think it’s beginning to show.  His post today, How to bag an auto plant, is a great example of bringing a personal voice to his blog while staying on topic in regards to his blog’s mission and informing his readers beyond the pages of the "paper."  Here’s an excerpt to help me explain what I mean:

When it comes to car factories, North Carolina appears to be a
perennial bridesmaid. As we noted today, Toyota chose Tupelo, Miss.
(yes, it’s the whole Elvis thing) over a bunch of other places,
including a site in Davidson County.

Despite Detroit’s problems, car factories are still silver tunas, especially Toyota plants. One of my favorite sites, the Rural Blog,
which is run out of the University of Kentucky journalism school has an
interesting piece on the role the newspaper in Northeast Mississippi
played in the recruitment effort. The paper is called the Northeast
Mississippi Daily Journal, and it’s goal for the past 50 years has been
to tie that corner of the state together into a viable region for
growth…

The news pages of newspapers (as opposed to the opinion pages) have
always done a balancing act when it comes to being a part of economic
recruitment. I look at the Journal’s coverage of Dell’s move here, or
more recently, The Charlotte Observer’s reporting on the Google
incentives. We certainly understand that growth means—or has the
potential to mean—more readers and the like, but being a cheerleader is
a difficult role for many of us.

What I really like about this post is that Ken isn’t afraid to share his opinion, he shares a little background re. his favorite blog, he writes about something he’s obviously very interested in (the role of newspapers in the community and the future of newspapers), and he ties it to events that are of interest to his audience (economic development in the region).  On top of all that he gives me a great title to this post, although when I think of "silver tunas" I get this disturbing image of a silver plated statue of Bill "The Big Tuna" Parcells in "The Thinker" pose.  WAY too much coffee today.

Triad Tennis Nirvana

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Today’s a big day for tennis lovers in the Piedmont Triad and Winston-Salem in particular.  Andy Roddick beat Tomas Berdych to clinch a win for the US over the Czech Republic in the first round of the 2007 Davis Cup.  That means the US team will be playing its quarterfinal Davis Cup tie against Spain at the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum from April 6-8, 2007 in Winston-Salem.   Tickets go on sale Thursday, February 15 at 10 a.m. for US Tennis Association members and on February 19 for the general public.

For those of you not familiar with the Davis Cup, it is similar to the Ryder Cup for golf except that it doesn’t pit America against a European team, it’s played every year and it’s the US vs. the rest of the world.  In other words it’s a big deal.

Even if you’re not a big tennis fan you should look into getting tickets for this one.  It’s the best chance you’ll have to see some great American players (most likely Andy Roddick, James Blake, and the Bryan Brothers) and some very impressive Spanish players (Rafael Nadal, David Ferrer, Fernando Verdasco, Feliciano Lopez).  On top of that you really have to see professional tennis live to appreciate what these guys are doing.  The ball is hit harder and the players move faster than you can imagine until you see it up close and personal.

I’m a tennis fanatic so this is about as exciting as it gets for me.

More on the Church Thing

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I’ve often commented on the differences between DC and Winston-Salem.  In particular I’ve written about how in DC the first question anyone asks you at a party (or some other social situation) is "What do you do" or "Where do you work" and in Winston-Salem it’s "Where do you go to church" more often than not.

Fellow DC-to-Winston transplant Esbee wrote something similar today and one of her commenters seemed to find the idea of asking someone where they go to church to be rude.  Personally I don’t have a problem with it, and honestly I’m glad to get away from being classified by my job status and perceived earning power.  As Esbee notes what is more remarkable than asking where you go to church is the assumption that you go to church at all.  If I had to guess I’d say maybe 25% of the people I knew in Northern Virginia went to church regularly, but here it’s probably 75%.  It’s an interesting difference between the communities.

21st Century Neighborhood Watch

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Over at Life in Forsyth Lucy has a post titled "Another White Van" that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of a vigilant neighbor armed with email.  It seems that a man was seen trolling their neighborhood in a white van.   A neighbor noticed him, did a little research on the tag numbers, got a name and thought they found evidence that the driver was a registered sex offender.  They fired off an email to warn the neighbors and the neighbors forwarded it to their friends and pretty soon everyone was on the alert.

Well, it ends up that there the person they spotted had the same name as a registered sex offender but he himself had a clean record.  In addition, he was in the neighborhood with his girlfriend to pick up a dance student and since he’d never been there before he was slowing down in front of houses in an effort to find the right house.   Unfortunately the person who knew this wasn’t part of the email loop so didn’t know what was going on. Luckily one of the people in the loop found out the truth and let everyone know.

Lucy, who is also a 2004 transplant from the DC area, points out the the Beltway Snipers were originally thought to be a white guy in a white van, but in fact were two black guys in a blue sedan.  Her point is a good one: while it’s always good to be vigilant we can often be led astray by half truths and speculation. This case also points out the inherent flaws of email; just ask anyone in the working world to tell you stories about someone left out of the loop for a project or meeting because they were accidentally left off the "cc" list.

Luckily no one got hurt in this case, and it seems that at least one of the neighbors did the right thing by contacting the police instead of handling things themselves.  The police were the folks who figured out it was a case of mistaken identity.  I’m assuming they contacted the driver and found out why he was there  so he might have gotten a little fright when they called, but that’s infinitely better than getting a beat-down from a bunch of scared neighbors.

Out of NoVA by the Skin of our Teeth

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As I’ve written many times before I grew up in Northern Virginia.  My family moved there in ’72 when I was in first grade and I lived there until we moved here in ’04.  Celeste’s family moved to Northern Virginia in ’79 and she lived there until we moved.  We both went to college at George Mason University in the heart of Fairfax County so we didn’t even leave the area for school. (Well I spent my freshman year in Nebraska at Concordia College-Seward, but that was really like an extended vacation).

We had several reasons for moving, but probably the most prominent was that we just couldn’t stomach the craziness anymore.  What had once been semi-rural suburbs had been fully developed and it seemed that just about every open space had been paved over and rush hour had grown to an all-day affair.  Hell, there were even traffic jams on Saturday.  If Northern Virginia had remained as it was when we first got out of college we probably would have stayed, but we just couldn’t take what it had become.  We could see first hand that growth in the area was out of control, and each year it seemed the NoVa counties were announcing astounding population growth.  So we got out.

Today I came across this article on WashingtonPost.com that makes me even happier that we left when we did.  Let me give you some numbers and excerpts from the article:

  • Loudoun County has added more than 100,000 people since 2000, increasing its population by 59 percent
  • Prince William County, where Celeste and I lived from ’96-’04 has added 88,000 people since 2000
  • "Fairfax County, the state’s largest jurisdiction, has packed in nearly
    47,000 more residents. The next fastest-growing counties — Stafford,
    Spotsylvania and Culpeper — are on the edges of the expanding region."
  • Overall, the state’s population has grown by 560,000 since 2000
  • "The study also found that 33 cities and counties have lost residents in
    the past six years — older urban areas such as Richmond, Petersburg
    and Roanoke, as well as rural counties in Southside and southwestern
    Virginia. Many of those residents seem to have migrated north, along
    with workers from other parts of the United States and the world who
    have been lured by the Washington job market."

That last item doesn’t surprise me.  Southwestern Virginia, along with northwestern NC, is actually served by many of the media outlets here in Winston-Salem and they are suffering the same economic fate as the rest of the region, with huge chunks of jobs in the furniture and textile industries going overseas.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re heading to places like Northern Virginia for jobs.

Speaking of jobs, here’s another tidbit from the article:

No other region in the country, however, has created as many jobs in
recent years as the Washington metropolitan area. Between 2000 and
2005, the region added 359,000 new jobs, said Stephen S. Fuller,
director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason
University, citing Labor Department statistics. That was 75,000 more
jobs than the nation’s No. 2 job engine, Miami.

"We’ve been
adding jobs faster than we’ve been able to add resident workers," he
said. "Had we been able to produce more housing, we could have added
more people." The Washington region is the eighth most-populous in the
United States, Fuller said, but is fourth in the number of total jobs,
trailing only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The imbalance
probably means more congestion on Northern Virginia’s already-choked
roads. "The downside [to growth] is pretty clear," said Corey A.
Stewart (R-Occoquan), chairman of the Prince William Board of County
Supervisors, who was elected last year on a pledge to curb residential
development. "Increased tax bills. Crowded schools. Public services
stretched and overwhelmed."

I can’t argue that the job market in the DC area is great.  The problem is that housing is so expensive that all but the highest earners end up moving to the outer counties in order to afford a decent place to live.  Public transportation is expanding, but it can’t keep up with the pace of growth so that puts more people on the road and makes an already bad traffic situation almost impossible.

Now that things are getting ugly in places like Prince William and Loudoun the local politicians are starting to tighten up on development.  Unfortunately they didn’t listen to their constituents who were shouting for limits ten years ago.  Instead they gave the developers free reign and now they’ve got a mess.

The leaders here in the Piedmont Triad are pushing hard for more economic development, and in the wake of the exodus of all the textile and furniture business it’s hard to blame them.  I hope, though, that they take a long hard look at what happened in Northern Virginia and control growth from the beginning with a comprehensive growth plan.

I’ve always loved tilting at windmills.

Traffic in the Triad

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What passes for traffic here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina would be considered a great traffic day back in DC (or in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc.).  Yet we do have traffic reporters and since they usually have one accident a morning to talk about they have to fill the time somehow.  WXII’s traffic reporter, Jenny, has had some memorable moments.  Here’s her most famous, the Traffic Rap:

Well I’d rather have a traffic reporter with time on her hands than to have actual traffic. I think.

Are We Living in the New Appalachia?

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Dana Blankenhorn has written an interesting piece called "The New Appalachia" in which he argues that the abject poverty we used to associate with Appalachia has shifted to the areas between the mountains and the coast.  From his post:

Appalachia had resisted all attempts to bring it prosperity. Places
last western Virginia, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and western
North Carolina were as poor as they had ever been. There seemed to be
no solution.

But there was a solution, right around the corner. These are now
"the mountains," that fabled far-away magical land where lowlanders
dream of retiring to. This is now the east’s vacationland, an
alternative to the beach, where rafting and hiking and mountain biking
rule the summers, and skiing the winters. The resort and retirement
economies have transformed these areas into, if not greater prosperity
spheres, at least something resembling the rest of America.

But a new Appalachia has developed in our time. It’s the river
bottoms, the swamplands, the vast middle between the mountains and the
seacoast. Millions of people live there, in grinding lives of poverty
or of faded wealth. And it’s getting worse.

The farm economy that once sustained these areas has collapsed. The
factories that once dotted the landscape have moved overseas. Much of
the land now consists of tree farms, and the people who are left are
steadily losing ground.

The biggest difference between today’s Appalachia and yesterday’s is
more stark, however. It’s the color of the victims. (That’s the point of the chart at left, from the Knight Foundation.)  Because in the
South, the new Appalachia is often the "black belt," land share-cropped
for some generations, then lost to the trees.

This hit home because Winston-Salem and the Piedmont Triad are situated to the east of the mountains and have been hit hard by the meltdown of the furniture and textile industries.  My first inclination was to disagree with Dana’s assertion that this is a disproportionately black phenomenon since at least in this area the hit has been taken be people of all colors, but if you think of it in comparison to Appalachia, which was predominately white, then I guess it makes sense.

The good news here is that the local leadership has been very proactive in trying to convert the local economy from a manufacturing base to a more "intellectual" base of biotechnology and design services.  The success has been mixed but it looks promising for the future.  To me the question that remains is "Will the jobs be filled by re-trained locals or by outsiders who follow the jobs here?".

And Dana’s bigger point about the lowlands is a good one.  While the Piedmont seems to be on the upswing all you have to do is drive to the beach through literally hundreds of dying or dead small towns to realize that your seeing an economic wasteland of immense proportions.

Finally, let’s not forget that the evolution of Appalachia to the "fabled far-away magical land" has not come without some negative effects within the mountain communities.  For instance in this article in the Raleigh News & Observer we see that while local leaders in the western North Carolina mountains welcome the influx of tax dollars and service jobs that come with the development of luxury second-home communities local residents worry about how their going to pay the taxes on their suddenly soaring property valuations.  And of course some people aren’t going to be happy with the influx of carpetbaggers no matter how many jobs it creates.

For the most part, though, I agree with Dana’s post.

Where I’d Like to Position the Missionaries

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Something I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions since moving to Winston-Salem is that when I was in the DC area most people would ask me "What do you do?" when they met me but here they ask "What’s your church?".  And it’s not confined to parties or other social situations.  It happens at the grocery store, the barber shop, and just about any other public forum.  It’s also interesting to me that people here will unabashedly share their religious views with total strangers and will invoke religion in discussions of things like schools.  Let’s just say that school prayer is still a hot issue here.

It has never really bothered me that people profess their religion so publicly and it also doesn’t bother me when they ask where I go to church and then invite me to attend theirs.  The public square is as much theirs as it is mine and I’ve always felt that if it made me uncomfortable I could just ignore the question or brush them off.  Although I’ve never done it I’ve had in the back of my head a plan to say "I’ll come if you let me sacrifice a chicken on the altar like I do in my basement".

What does bug me is when members of various churches knock on my door and try to sell me on their church.  This is my sanctuary after all and I don’t like it being invaded.  I understand that most Christians believe it is a necessity to recruit (I don’t know where it is but there’s apparently a passage in the New Testament that invokes people to play Coach K and recruit for Jesus’ team), and as I said before I don’t mind if they use the public square to do it, but when I’m at home I want to be left alone. 

Quick side note: Whenever I hear people talk about the part of the Bible where they’re instructed to go out and recruit I always wonder why they assume it means for their particular church?  I mean if I’m Christian then I’m Christian, so what does it matter where I go to church?  Two words: collection plate.

A notable exception is the Mormons.  Yes this is very inconsistent but there’s a personal reason.  When I was a kid my family was Mormon and at an early age I was being prepared for the day that I would go on my mission.  I started saving money at around 8 years old, but when my parents got divorced we left the church so I never got much past saving $20 for the bike I was going to ride for God.  To this day I’m still on the books with the Mormons and they periodically send the boys in white shirts to my house to say hi.  It’s easy for me to see myself in their shoes so I’m inclined to be sympathetic.  And because they’re so young it’s also easy for me to steer them away from selling to talking basketball over a glass of water that they’re always thankful for, which means it’s almost always a pleasant 15 minutes.

The other churches tend to send little blue haired ladies who are not easily swayed from their topic.  They’re also stubborn and doctrinaire and exactly the kind of people I don’t much want to hang with, but because they’re little blue haired ladies I’m incapable of brushing them off. It would be too much like brushing off my grandmother.  I think if they sent someone younger I’d be able to invoke my chicken sacrifice ploy, but I just can’t do it with the blue hairs.

So I’ve started to think about how I can cut them off at the pass, as it were.  Some ideas include:

  • Putting a Buddha on the front porch.
  • Keeping a turban by the front door that I can don before opening the door.  They wouldn’t know a Sikh from a Shitzu, but they’d know that whatever I was I wasn’t Christian.  It’d probably scare ’em to death and I’m willing to bet they’d set a record for the 100 yard dash in the 80+ division.
  • Put a statue of the Virgin Mary on the front porch and a sign on the front door that says "We’re Catholic and One of Us Used to be Mormon".  This has the advantage of being true and thoroughly confusing.  What could they possibly say?

For the record we’ve been attending the Moravian church down the road for the last several months.  They’re great people, they never once knocked on our door and they spend an inordinate amount of time eating chicken pie and drinking coffee.  Exactly the kind of people I want to hang with.

In anticipation of those of you who I’m sure I’ve offended let me say this: I’ve spent a lot of time in various churches including Mormon, Presbytarian for a couple of months, Unitarian for one service, Baptist with some of my cousins, Lutheran High School for three years, Lutheran College for one year, Catholic for much of my adulthood, Methodist for several services and now Moravian.  There is much more similarity than difference between them, and almost all of the difference is in what I’ll call ceremony.  From what I can tell the doctrinal differences are more important to the church leaders than their congregations so where I choose to spend my time is based more on the people of the church than the doctrine.  That probably best explains my peturbation at being evangelized (I feel like a Verizon customer being cold-called by Cingular) and my inclination to be attracted to the Moravians’ honey-pot practice of "Food and Fellowship."

Esbee Hits the Bigs

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Fellow Winston-Salem blogger Esbee has hit the mainstream by being Piedmont Parent’s first blogger.  I haven’t talked to her so I don’t know if this is a paid gig, but either way she’s now part of the hated MSM (mainstream media). Lucky for us she’s going to keep up her personal blog.

Personally I’m holding out for the really big time, waiting on an offer from one of the big MSM players.  My first choice would be the membership newsletter for the undertakers’ association;  I think my sensibilities are perfect for their publication.

Congrats Esbee.

From Krakow to Winston-Salem with the ‘Devil’ in His Heart

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Here’s an interesting first-person account of a Polish exchange student who ended up with a host family of fundamentalist Christians in Winston-Salem.  The situation was a little awkward, to say the least.

"When I got out of the plane in Greensboro in the US state of North
Carolina, I would never have expected my host family to welcome me at
the airport, wielding a Bible, and saying, ‘Child, our Lord sent you
half-way around the world to bring you to us.’ At that moment I just
wanted to turn round and run back to the plane.

Things began to
go wrong as soon as I arrived in my new home in Winston-Salem, where I
was to spend my year abroad. For example, every Monday my host family
would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host
parents hadn’t had sex for the last 17 years because — so they told me
— they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know
whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They
told me I had the devil in my heart.

My host parents treated me
like a five-year-old. They gave me lollipops. They woke me every Sunday
morning at 6:15 a.m., saying ‘Michael, it’s time to go to church.’ I
hated that sentence. When I didn’t want to go to church one morning,
because I had hardly slept, they didn’t allow me to have any coffee.

One
day I was talking to my host parents about my mother, who is separated
from my father. They were appalled — my mother’s heart was just as
possessed by the devil as mine, they exclaimed. God wanted her to stay
with her husband, they said.

The kid bailed after six months and ended his year abroad with a young family who enjoyed spending his time with very much.  I don’t care what your belief system is, inviting a child to live with you and then informing him at every turn that he and his family are screwed up is no way to treat a guest.

Found via Connecting the Dots.