November 9, 2008
He doesn’t need the Labor Department to tell him unemployment hit a 25-year high. Reginald Draughn’s fiancee could have told him so. That was her just now, on his cell. “She heard about some jobs at Lorillard. Got to get a jump on it,” said Draugh...
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November 7, 2008
At a candidate breakfast the other week, I happened to sit next to congressional challenger Teresa Sue Bratton, who was pressing the flesh in an unsuccessful bid to unseat Howard Coble. She had a question. “With all the news and everything going out on...
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November 2, 2008
We all get old; we all get sick. Lifelong factory worker Dorothy “Dot” Williams planned for that. She saved, signed a will with durable power of attorney, set up a $300,000 annuity and took out home health insurance to avoid having to go to a nursing...
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October 31, 2008
The two of us were accidental cell mates for a long, idle day at the High Point courthouse this week, called for jury duty but rejected out of hand. She’s in her last year of criminology at Guilford College, giving her an amount of knowledge considered...
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October 29, 2008
This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Chain saw-wielding maniacs chasing the drunken visitors through the corn. Burned-out Gothic cathedrals, baroque tombstones, Egyptian mummies, voodoo bayous, grotesque zombie nurses in charge of the asylum. And p...
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October 26, 2008
They were just shops, after all. Nothing indispensable in what they sold, nothing a body can’t survive without. Printed pages sewn together, glued to a spine, cloaked in a jacket, arranged a certain way on a shelf. But in the city that gave the world O.
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October 22, 2008
The pewter Revolutionary cross-belt buckle belonged to a member of the Cold Stream Guard regiment, and there are only two like it in the world. One is in a museum in London. The other? It was dug up in the 1980s next to the Hedges Apartments on Lawndale......
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October 19, 2008
The morning after the last GOP convention to propel that party to defeat - Dole-Kemp, San Diego, '96 - I ran into Eddie Mahe, an old-hand Republican consultant, after a talk he gave Elon students interning at the convention. Rumpled, bleary-eyed, he'd bee...
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October 15, 2008
There ought to be a warning, come October, before TV commercial breaks: "Viewer discretion advised. The following message may contain not a single shred of truth." A case in point, whether you live in Alamance County or not, is Rick Gunn's N.C. Senate spo...
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October 12, 2008
Bobbing around in a tidal wave of news, all bad, what does the fate of one dog amount to, after all — one ailing, brown-eyed mutt named Bunnie, whose owner can’t keep her? It means, I’m guessing, the world. At least, it looks like the world when Mar...
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October 10, 2008
For my money, it was always “The Twilight Zone” segments starring Billy Mumy that were scariest. Remember the episode when Grandma gives him a toy phone just before she dies, then uses it to call the boy “long-distance,” cajoling him to join her o...
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October 5, 2008
STOKESDALE - There are no loaves or fish in sight, nothing biblical about this ramshackle tobacco barn down the road from Gideon Grove. Unless, that is, you consider the size of the jumbo sweet potatoes, fresh picked and curing in the shade. Nearby, in w...
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October 3, 2008
Bad luck has followed Mark Hoffmann, the longtime homeless man who left Greensboro on foot earlier this year, only to turn up at his home church in Maryland, 325 miles away. Our friends at St. Mark’s, the Catholic church where Hoffmann, 50, attended gra...
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October 1, 2008
The e-mail from Wachovia this week might have been funny for its impeccably bad timing. Had it not been so sad. "Now there's another great reason to tell someone why you're with Wachovia," the chirpy message began. "For every person you refer who opens a...
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September 28, 2008
In fatter days, this was Custom Jewelers, supplier of tennis bracelets and engagement rings on layaway for Christmas, on a rule of thumb that seemed impractical, even then: Sink two months’ pay into that diamond to punctuate the question popped under th...
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September 26, 2008
I heard from an irate reader this week — which is always preferable to hearing from my credit card company — and he was complaining about the state DOT’s decision to change the new green I-40 signs back to the old red, white and blue ones. The surpr...
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September 24, 2008
The ranger who brought us firewood as evening fell over Hagan-Stone Park gave a wink."You picked the right weekend to camp," he said, but he wasn't talking about the cool, starry September night. "The High Lonesome Strings are camped out all weekend. I'll...
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September 21, 2008
He has trust issues, you might say. Just off a hospital stay at Moses Cone Behavioral Health, he refused to go to assisted living or a shelter, choosing to live under a bridge instead. If “choosing” is the proper term. When it’s time for his communi...
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September 17, 2008
Now and then, Laura Strickland can’t help climbing the front porch steps and peeking in the window of the big 1920s house, remembering summers with her grandmother, picturing her grandfather sitting in his easy chair and reading the paper. The house at...
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September 14, 2008
Years ago, artist Bill Mangum befriended a homeless, mentally ill man who then turned up for his Sunday school class — to a mixed reception. Some church members embraced Michael Saavedra, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia; others were repulsed, w...
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September 12, 2008
If you blinked, you missed it. There was a moment of silence Thursday by the presidential candidates, respectful but brief. Otherwise, this campaign is starting to feel like a 12-hour car trip with two children in the back seat fighting. Over what? As if...
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September 10, 2008
It’s great to say, “I told you so.” But even for the most vocal critics of corporate incentives, there will be no glee if Dell closes U.S. computer manufacturing plants, including the barely three-year-old Forsyth County operation, as a Wall Street...
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September 7, 2008
He was mowing the grass last week, finally drying out from the big rains, when Larry Simmons noticed something missing: About six feet of his backyard. A sinkhole had caved in overnight at the back of his lot in Adams Farm, and Simmons was looking down in...
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September 5, 2008
To think that all these years I’ve denied myself reality TV shows, only to be sucked in by the Republican convention. No “Project Runway.” No “Dancing With the Stars.” Not even vintage reruns of “Being Bobby Brown,” pre-Whitney breakup. I sa...
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August 31, 2008
In Greensboro, you can't walk very far in any direction without tripping over racial history. Even those who know the history are sometimes doomed to trip over it anyway. That threatens to be the case with a protest expected this week outside Greensboro C...
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