November 5, 2009
GREENSBORO — Some 65 years ago, he wasn’t known as Dick Behrends. He was simply called Bugs, the adventurous kid from Chicago. At age 17, right after high school, he hitchhiked from his hometown to California because he and his buddy wanted to...
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November 3, 2009
WINSTON-SALEM -- We live in a test-it-to-death culture when it comes to education. Sit down with any public school teacher, and they’ll rattle off the ordeal of teaching to the end-of-grade tests mandated by the state. Their students, they say, turn...
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November 1, 2009
Y’all, we’ve changed. Walk into almost any grocery store, and you’ll catch folks with plastic cups of Dead Guy, Dogfish or something you can’t even pronounce. It’s maybe two fingers’ worth. Two ounces. But show them you...
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October 29, 2009
GREENSBORO — Two voices, two parallel lives. Gucci Mane is 6 feet above ground. He’s 29, a hard-core rapper capitalizing on his hard-knuckle upbringing in east Atlanta. He raps about dealing crack, packing guns and running with the street gang...
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October 27, 2009
JAMESTOWN — Every Friday night, when our star-studded sky looks as clear as blown glass, they come across Lake Katherine at GTCC toward the Cline Observatory. Sometimes, it’s a handful. Sometimes, it’s as many as 100. They come to see th...
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October 25, 2009
GREENSBORO — Count the swallows on Tim LaFollette’s left forearm. There are 23, all different sizes, flying from his wrist to his elbow. It’s from a sticker on a Quaker song book his mother used, a design he had tattooed on his arm to re...
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October 24, 2009
John Hart really wanted the dagger. For years, the Crime Writers Association has awarded top writers one of those long, scary, scramble-your-brains knives that British Secret Service agents used during World War II. Now, Hart has one. But his knife is enc...
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October 22, 2009
You know it’s her. It’s that voice, as distinctive as a signature, one that’s stopped people all over Greensboro and coaxed them to ask the same question. “Aren’t you the costume lady?’’
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October 18, 2009
GREENSBORO - Buddy Gist doesn’t wear his suit anymore. He rests in a single bed at the Golden Living Center, in a hospital gown, surrounded by posters that remind him of the people he knew when he was the King of New York. Comedian Bill Cosby. Actre...
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October 15, 2009
GREENSBORO — Go to the front lines of swine flu. Talk to a classroom teacher or someone who runs a preschool. Spend some time in a pediatric emergency room with a sick 6-year-old clutching a stuffed dog named Fluffy. You hear about this fear of the...
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Rickie Lee Jones says she needs to sing like she needs to breathe. She learned her phrasing from her father, that slower-than-Sunday-morning delivery she made famous 30 years ago. Now, at age 54, she starts a 14-city tour that will take her overseas. And......
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October 11, 2009
GREENSBORO — In three housing complexes run by the city, you’ll see residents as old as your grandmother with all kinds of ailments.
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October 8, 2009
GREENSBORO — Austin Modlin and his classmates came from Kinston, all 25 of them, driven for three hours in three vans to see a show at the Carolina Theatre and spend the night here at the O. Henry Hotel. It was free, arranged by Jim Perry. He&rsquo......
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October 6, 2009
It’s a big concrete canvas, this beveled wall underneath the railroad trestle at Davie and McGee. Nine feet high. Seventy-five feet across. It’s a constellation of drawings and words, scrawled in white chalk. From across the street, even in th...
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October 4, 2009
GREENSBORO — Head north on South Elm, and from a half-block away, at the dip of East Bragg, you can make it out — the green of the United States and the Popsicle orange of Central America.
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October 1, 2009
GREENSBORO — I was back in Harvey’s kitchen the other day. This time, I asked the questions. I had been there before. The last time, Harvey Robinson stood behind his camera, parked me by his sink and asked about all things Greensboro for &ldqu...
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September 29, 2009
GREENSBORO - The photos are telling. Look at them and you’ll see things you’ll recognize around our city. There’s the familiar, like the frozen figures of Bicentennial Gardens. But there’s also the vice and violence of any city, an...
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September 27, 2009
GREENSBORO — In this half-acre garden, surrounded by our city of concrete, you’ll find just about everything. Tomatoes and eggplant. Sweet potatoes and squash. Cantaloupes and okra. And some leafy thing called stevia that you can slip between...
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GREENSBORO — Lucinda Williams has told folks she loves playing the Carolina Theatre. It showed Friday night. She played for more than two hours and dipped deep into her songbook that spans 30 years of writing about love, sex, death and redemption in...
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September 24, 2009
The curves. The elegance. The grace. She’s a gem in front of the camera. You can see for yourself this weekend at the Carolina Theatre. She’ll be on the big screen, along with a gaggle of young actors and the man hired by Walt Disney to make g...
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September 15, 2009
GREENSBORO — The benches behind Bilbro Street were meant to spark conversation, not confrontation. But now they’re doing just that. Later today, Warnersville residents are expected to ask the City Council to remove those five benches bolted in...
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September 13, 2009
GREENSBORO — He’s Stevo, the kid with the big shoe. He can bowl, golf, swim, play pingpong, throw a change-up, deliver a sweet serve and hit a jumper from beyond the 3-point line drawn in fuchsia-colored chalk on his driveway. He loves nothing...
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September 10, 2009
This week, we’ll remember through a T-shirt, a birthmark and a pair of shoes. Walk into The Claddagh, High Point’s only Irish pub, and you’ll see it just beyond the wooden beam: the makeshift shrine of helmets, badges, photos and T-shirt...
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September 6, 2009
There’s some kind of commotion along West Lee. Harry Im, in his sunglasses, has turned a corner beside Highland Avenue into his own personal gym. At lunch, he shadowboxes, stretching, kicking and punching the air. Meanwhile, Heather Watson loo...
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September 3, 2009
GREENSBORO — Mary Hopkins promised them a ceremony. And she kept her word. She spent $400 of her own money, booked the auditorium at the Greensboro Historical Museum and lassoed a school board member, even the mayor, to help herald the accomplishmen...
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