Catherine Mitchell, a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill, checks the list of groceries for a local mother and her two children at the IFC Food Pantry on West Main Street in Carrboro. Photo by Emily Burns

By Emily Burns
Carrboro Commons Staff Writer

Every year, the Inter-Faith Council for Social Services’s Holiday Meals program provides hundreds of disadvantaged families in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area with food and supplies for their own Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

“Food is the issue of the day,” said Kristin Lavergne, community services director for the IFC. “If someone has taken that step to come see us, they are usually really in need.”

During the holiday season, the IFC accepts donations of food and money to provide traditional dishes such as turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, rolls and pies to clients who enroll in the Holiday Meals program.

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Three of Paul Green’s children, Byrd Green Cornwell, Betsy Green Moyer, Paul Green Jr., and his grandson, Paul Green III get their picture taken at the unveiling of the Paul Green historic marker just south of town on U.S. 15-501. 

By Valarie Schwartz

PAUL GREEN
1894-1981

Playwright, teacher, &
humanitarian. Awarded
Pulitzer Prize, 1927. His
16 outdoor dramas in-
clude The Lost Colony
(1937). Lived 1 mile E.

Not too many years ago, the sign erected last week with the above words would have stood in the front yard of an old farmhouse.

Today, it lends stability at the corner of US 15-501 and Old Lystra Road, next to the UNC Park & Ride that opened there earlier this year, in a stretch of road where change has been continual over the past decade.

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A corroded cast iron drainpipe leaked sewage from Wendy’s into a drainage ditch on Old Pittsboro Road. Photo by Kirk Ross

By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer

A corroded pipe that runs from Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers to the sanitary sewer underneath Greensboro Street leaked an as yet undetermined amount of sewage that found its way into storm drains and then to the drainage ditch that runs along Old Pittsboro Road and eventually connects to Morgan Creek.

Residents in the area started complaining about the smell earlier this month and in early November the town investigated a spill of oily, opaque water coming from the pipe.

After tracking down the source, officials say they’re confident they’ve found the problem and that Wendy’s is moving quickly to fix it. Meanwhile, a mobile containment system has been installed at the end of the storm drain where the problem was first discovered.

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By Susan Dickson
Staff Writer

The Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously last week to re-launch the search process for a new solid-waste transfer station site.

In addition, commissioners decided to contract with a consulting firm to identify and evaluate potential transfer station locations.

Earlier this month, the board reopened the search for a waste transfer station site, citing social justice reasons and outcry from the community. Commissioners had voted in March to locate the transfer station on Eubanks Road, near the site of the county’s 35-year-old landfill, which is expected to reach capacity in 2011.

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Wreath of bay leaf branches woven into grape vine. Photo by Ken Moore

By Ken Moore

Back in the mid 1970s, UNC botany professor Dr. C. Ritchie Bell got an idea while teaching an Economic Botany class. In addition to teaching, Dr. Bell liked to cook, and he discovered that the leaves of a native plant were every bit as fine as those exotic bay leaves from California and the Mediterranean.

That plant, Carolina Red Bay or Swamp Bay, Persea borbonia, is an evergreen tree of the coastal plain from Virginia all the way to Louisiana.

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Preservation photos
The Orange County Historic Preservation Commission and the Historical Foundation of Hillsborough and Orange County are sponsoring a photography competition.

The theme this year is “Heritage Corridors” and includes photographs of old roadbeds, scenic byways and street landscape scenes throughout Orange County.

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It was around this time last year that we made a commitment to begin publication of The Carrboro Citizen. And though it took until spring to gear up and actually start printing, this is a good time to thank the many people who have kept us going.

To start, on the back page of this publication you’ll find a heartfelt thank you to the many businesses, organizations and individuals who have helped sustain this paper by placing advertisements with our enterprise. Since this newspaper and its online counterpart are distributed free of charge — and since our approach to home delivery is as a courtesy, and the costs are roughly equal to what we charge — our sole source of support is through advertising.

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Steve Peha & Margot Carmichael Lester

No Child Left Behind is up for reauthorization. Those in favor of NCLB say it’s improving public education; those against say it’s ruining public education. Upon closer inspection, neither position seems right. And the fact that we have but two extremes to choose from indicates that we have closed ourselves off to more promising solutions.

As NCLB heads into its seventh year, no one can say for sure whether schools are better or not. State test scores are up, but national test scores aren’t nearly so rosy. Instructional consistency has improved, but that improvement has come at the cost of an insidious teach-to-the-test mentality that could be making teaching worse. For each positive, there seems to be a corresponding negative. And the issue of NCLB’s effectiveness may be no less cloudy seven years from now than it is today.

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Louisa Warren

Soaring crude oil prices don’t just mean an increase at the fuel pumps; they also will result in bigger utility bills for many North Carolinians this winter. Some of us can afford to cut the bigger check and avoid draping ourselves in blankets and wool socks indoors. But for the more than 200,000 elderly, disabled and low-income households that depend on the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to pay their heating bills, it may be a long, cold winter.

LIHEAP is a federal program administered by the states that provides heating and cooling assistance to very low-income folks. The one-time cash assistance may be small change to many North Carolinians and only covers a fraction of monthly energy bills (LIHEAP assistance averages $82 per household), but it’s warmly received by those who are faced with the difficult choice between paying their heating bills or food, medicine and other essential needs.

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By Chris Frank 

The citizens of south Oak Avenue have good news and bad. What’s good for some is bad for others. Or, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”

Closely following the “Town of Carrboro Residential Traffic Management Plan for Speed Control,” a neighborhood group of us jumped through the hoops toward the goal of making our sidewalk-less, popular cut-through street safer for our kids, bikers, walkers, strollers — all of the “transportation” that shares this 20-foot wide road. Our focus was the two-block run with the slight curve, running from Weaver Street to Poplar Avenue.

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By Meghan Cooke
Correspondent

Sitting at a picnic table in front of Weaver Street Market, Lori Hoyt sipped on ice water and chatted about her grandchildren, church and friends.

But this 73-year-old from Carrboro is not the average grandmother. She’s a Raging Granny.

Hoyt, a retired social worker, is a member of the group of Carrboro and Chapel Hill women who sing politically charged songs at rallies and protests in support of their progressive ideology.“This is a wonderful empowering model for older women,” Hoyt said.

The Raging Grannies began in Canada in 1987 as a group of women who wore bright clothing and sang satirical songs to protest various issues. The group’s popularity drifted south, and new chapters, known as “gaggles,” formed throughout the United States.

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UNC News Services

The UNC Board of Trustees on Wednesday presented four alumni with the William Richardson Davie Award, the board’s highest honor.

Chancellor James Moeser and the trustees honored the following recipients at a Carolina Inn dinner: Rep. Joe Hackney of Chapel Hill; Mike Overlock of Greenwich, Conn.; Ken Thompson of Charlotte; and Patricia Timmons-Goodson of Fayetteville.

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Innovation Center
Alexandria Real Estate Equities and UNC staff members will present drawings of the proposed Innovation Center for the Carolina North campus to the community at a meeting Nov. 29, 5:30 to 7 p.m., at the Robert and Pearl Seymour Center, 2551 Homestead Road. The public is invited to attend this meeting. Free parking is available and refreshments will be served.

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Colonial Day at Rashkis Elementary
On Nov. 15., Rashkis Elementary School students celebrated the first Rashkis Colonial Day.

Fifth graders recently completed their study of the American colonial period. As part of the colonial unit, students wrote reports, made presentations and created other projects.

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Wednesday Nov 21

Cat’s Cradle: Jon Shain, Kenny Roby, Jule Brown, Michael Holland, Big Medicine, Edsel 500. 7:30pm. $10
Nightlight: Film Extravaganza: Troma presents Aiden Dillard’s Meat Weed America. 9:30pm. $3

Thursday Nov 22

The Cave: 30th Annual Thanksgiving Potluck Dinner & Open-Mic. 5pm

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