By Valarie Schwartz, columnist

Last week brought a visit with five women who have spent long lives knowing each other. Their relationship started in 1929 as they entered first grade at Chapel Hill Elementary School (where University Square is today), where they continued their schooling until graduation in 1940 (there were only 11 grades at that time), as part of the last class to graduate from the school before it burned to the ground.

“It was a very small place,” said Edith Crockford Welch, who grew up on Park Place. “[The school] was divided by the kids who lived in Chapel Hill, in Carrboro and in the county.”

It wasn’t that any group itself themselves superior; but as is always the case, students congregated based on experience – and at that age, the experience that mostly separated them was lunch. More »

By Valarie Schwartz

Taking the “perp walk” might have been the best thing that happened to Travis Kukovich, owner of William Travis Jewelry, during this recession. Such a humiliating walk generally ends with doors slamming behind one; for Kukovich, some pretty marvelous doors opened.

This story twists together many threads, but in its simplest telling begins about six months ago, More »

By Valarie Schwartz, columnist

With a Chapel Hill-located antenna and a reservoir of volunteer sweat, Carrboro has hosted WCOM, its own nonprofit 100-watt radio station for five years. At 103.5 on the dial, the low-power FM station has proven the power of grit and gumption, providing 24/7 programming without an ounce of corporate control or advertising.

We can thank Ruffin Slater, general manager of Weaver Street Market, for getting the station started and for bringing in Chris Frank (of the Red Clay Ramblers), who was the only person ever on the payroll, serving as part-time station manager for a short while. More »

By Valarie Schwartz, columnist

As a board member of the OCRCC, Miriam Slifkin’s words resonated as I walked into her living room and she said, “Welcome to the place where the Orange County Rape Crisis Center was formed.”

Many meetings and 36 years later, Slifkin still supports the center that she founded.
“If I had a priority list of things I’m glad exist, it would be number one on my list, after my family, of course,” she said. More »

By Valarie Schwartz, columnist

There used to be words that people simply did not say in “polite company.” The “C-Word” was one of them. But it’s pretty much unavoidable, now, in these days when the latest statistics show that during the course of a lifetime, one in four people will get the C-Word — cancer. More »

By Valarie Schwartz, columnist

The Carrboro Farmers’ Market continues bridging divides, as it brings the dream of a new locovore paradigm closer to reality. Thanks to a woman who was willing to be the axle, a wheel of food for the needy began to spin 15 weeks ago, but a new revolution began last Saturday. More »

By Valarie Schwartz
Columnist

Several times over the years, Mildred Council, aka “Mama Dip,” has been the subject of a story I’ve written, but last week was the first time in over a dozen years that she could actually sit down and talk to me about it. Now that she’s turned 80 (her birthday was April 11), she takes more time to sit in her restaurant, where people wanting to update her on their lives sometimes engulf her. More »

By Valarie Schwartz
Columnist

Survival sometimes makes death look easy.

Catherine DeVine, the Carrboro writer, organizer and frequent WCHL commentator, didn’t say as much, but after learning what she has survived since cancer rocked her world in 2007, the thought arises.

She and her husband, Berkeley Grimball, owner of Grimball Jewelers in Chapel Hill, moved to Carrboro from Durham in 1997, and DeVine immediately immersed herself in the mill town’s activities. More »

A sitting room to dream of is tucked outside the master suite designed by Robin Dubeau. Photo by Valarie Schwartz.

Robin Dubeau could write the book on how the closing of one door leads to the opening of another. In 2002, her 10-year-old company, Magnolia Manufacturing, was destroyed when the roof collapsed onto her inventory of permanent botanicals, florals and trees, forcing her to lay off employees and close the Hillsborough-based business that had become increasingly popular with furniture showrooms from Dallas to High Point and retail stores across the nation.
More »

By Valarie Schwartz

As has become a Fourth of July tradition, last Saturday included a trip out to Bolin Brook Farm in the Calvander community, where the Earnhardt family has for many years hosted a blueberry pancake breakfast for friends and neighbors.
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Jerry Salak sits in the living room window seat of the Heritage Hills home that may become the first Charles House ElderCare home. Photo by Valarie Schwartz

Something’s going on in the Heritage Hills neighborhood that may be the wave of the future. Two years in the process, movement afoot indicates that perhaps the neighborhood will soon be welcoming residents of the first Charles House Association ElderCare home.

Since 1990, the Charles House Eldercare Center in Carrboro has provided daytime care for the elderly of our community who remain vital enough to get out (with assistance), but who, for whatever reason, require some degree of supervision to avoid injury or confusion. Charles House has provided many loving families the respite and peace of mind needed to keep their aging relatives living in the home, offering safe daytime stimulation and socialization.
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Nerys Levy cooly checks her notes before presenting at the Ackland Art Museum. Photo by Valarie Schwartz.

It could have been the refrigerated air pulsing into the upstairs room at the Ackland Art Museum. Or the effect of Nerys Levy’s paintings of the Antarctic. Either way, the chill was appropriate during Levy’s discussion “The Process of Time and the Problem of Cold.”

The first in this summer’s series of “Out of the Studio” salons was presented during the Ackland’s free Art After Dark program held monthly in conjunction with the 2ndFriday Art Walk.
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Kevin Dixon, who has been cartooning since childhood, will debut a fourth edition of Gilgamesh in New York City on June 6. Photo by Valarie Schwartz.

Chapel Hill became a mainstay for Kevin Dixon long before he moved to the area in 1983 at age 18, though he was not born here.
His mother, artist Beverly Dixon, was raised in Chapel Hill. She met Kent Dixon at UNC and they married then moved to Baltimore, where he studied medicine at Johns Hopkins (until discovering that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood) and Kevin was born. They moved to Iowa City, Iowa, where Kent began teaching creative writing, and two years after Kevin, his brother, Laird, was born.
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By Valarie Schwartz

During our lives, we are introduced to countless people, some whose names we never catch or quickly forget, others who seem to instantly become a part of our circle. For me, Elaine Jerome became the latter when we met last December at a Seymour Center event. Her vibrancy and enthusiasm belie her age, making her seem far younger than the 81 years she claims to have lived.

At that introduction and in every phone conversation or meeting since, she has spoken of the concern that has become her driving force — finding a way for this community to provide more offerings for its young people. More »

By Valarie Schwartz

This story needs to be heard — really — I wish you could hear this story. As I climbed the steep steps to the second floor of the Ballet School of Chapel Hill, I could hear it — the sounds of the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble (NCYTE) calling me into the studio. The percussive sound of metal tapping on a wooden floor rates up there with rain on a tin roof in my book.

The 33 young people of NCYTE (they pronounce it “insight”) auditioned to become part of the troupe, and their dedication and ability determines when and if they get to tour when their agent books them gigs like the one coming up in Chicago this summer, or the one in California (Ojai and Torrance) next winter, or the one they took two years ago to China. Since it began in 1983, NCYTE has been all over, including Germany, Mexico, Russia and many points in between. More »