Sports Mania!

Look out! Sports fans go to extremes in October, when there’s football, baseball, hockey and basketball.

 

I do know women sports fanatics: one female friend has watched a game in every major league baseball park. But I am talking mostly about men.

 

A hypothetical conversation might start with the woman saying: “Let’s talk. About us. What are your real thoughts? How are you really feeling?”

 

The man’s response? “I desperately want the 49ers to make the playoffs.”

Most men I know share their true feelings best while watching sports on TV. And of course, they talk about sports.

 

It can affect their lives. I used to have an employee who was worthless at work after an old Washington Redskins loss. It was as if a relative had died.

 

Sports mania translates into money. I once had a Hank Aaron rookie baseball card until my mom gave my cards to my cousin. It would be worth $700,000 today if I still had it. A baseball card?

This fanaticism reminds me of my son-in-law, Lance, who was with me watching Virginia Tech win a decisive ACC basketball tournament game on TV last spring.

 

I didn’t know he was that excited. With little notice, he jumped in his car the next morning and drove the 446 miles from South Boston to Brooklyn, NY, to see Virginia Tech in the ACC finals.

To placate his unhappy wife and mother-in-law, he took his 6- and 7-year-old children with him and dropped them off at their other grandma’s house in Arlington, then drove the rest of the way to Brooklyn to see the game with his brother, who lives there. Grandma was quite surprised. The kids weren’t too happy—the TV in the car didn’t work.

 

Fortunately, Virginia Tech won the tournament and Lance picked up the kids on the way back the next day and returned to South Boston.

 

Everyone was disturbed by this stunt—except me. I understood. I wished it was me. My inner sports fan came through vicariously. Next time I saw him, I sneaked $100 in cash to him for gas money.

 

He is my bro!!!

Tiny Town's Famous Figure

 

The amazing achievements of a free black craftsman in the area have been known for a long time. But in coming years, many more people may learn about Thomas Day, who became the largest furniture manufacturer in North Carolina before the Civil War.

 

Little noticed in the most recent North Carolina state budget was $800,000 allocated to restore the Thomas Day House and the bank across the street in Milton, N.C., a few miles from the Virginia border. The house is scheduled to become a museum and a state historic site and restored to its original state as in 1850. It will include the family quarters, a showroom, an office and a workshop.

 

 If the governor gets his way, money will be found in future budgets to hire docents to staff the museum five or six days a week. Currently, the house is semi-finished and only open by appointment. “Then we won’t have to call somebody up and get him off his tractor or something to let people in,” says Joe Graves, a member of the Thomas Day House/Union Tavern Restoration Inc.

 

The restoration group will donate the house to the state, and the owners of the NC State Bank site are willing to sell their building to the state. To get the state more involved, several members of the group met with Republican State Sen. Phil Berger, the powerful Senate president pro tem, in his Raleigh office, and got bipartisan support from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. The beefed-up project should help the little town, full of historic buildings, many of them also being restored.

 

Graves, who has Thomas Day woodwork in his Alton home, says many Southside Virginia homes have furniture or architectural elements designed by Day, including the restaurant at Virginia International Raceway. We have a number of them at Oak Grove, as well. Day’s work is very distinctive with mantel pieces, stair brackets, newel posts and door frames using curves and elongated scroll shapes.

 

Occasionally a tobacco leaf shape can be seen, reflecting the region’s agriculture. Day didn’t just create these works himself.   His shop had both white and black workers and he even owned slaves. North Carolina’s governor back then packed some Thomas Day furniture into his mansion.

 

How did an African-American accomplish so much at a time when slavery was rampant? The prosperous clientele that liked his work bent the rules somewhat to let him create his masterpieces. They waived a rule barring new free blacks into the state when he wanted to bring his wife from Halifax County, VA, to live with him.

 

Day grew quite prosperous, but the Panic of 1857 forced him into bankruptcy, even before the Civil War. His achievements were appreciated more in the past 25 years, and many of his works are on display at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh.

 

People can still get a tour by calling a phone number on the sign in front of the house.  But in a few years, expect the site to be open regularly just like other historic museums.

 

The Writer Behind an Extraordinary Play

 

The popular “The Four Freshmen,” which sold out three times in Cluster Springs last month, was written and directed by a Halifax County native. The one-act play recalls the historic sit-in at a Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter in 1960.

“As a 4 or 5-year old living in Nathalie I recall listening to news reports of sit-ins at lunch counters and boycotts of public facilities,” says Diann Crews, the writer and director.. “At the time, I thought the protesters were being mean and disrespectful for breaking the law.”

 

As an African-American herself, “I vividly remember Jim Crow Laws as a child. I recall standing at the end of a lunch counter with my parents or a sibling to order food at Newberry’s and Roses five and dime stores, using the “Colored” restroom in Leggett’s Department Store and attending the Halifax County Fair on Thursdays, the only day we attended.” 

 

Times have changed, due in part because of the sit-ins and boycotts that led to the desegregation of lunch counters across the United States, including many southern states.

 

Crews sat down to write this play at the end of 2019 to commemorate the upcoming 60^th anniversary of the bold efforts of four freshmen: David Richmond, Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, and Franklin McCain, students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, (known today as A&T University.) The play was performed for a high school audience near her current residence in Prince William County Virginia in 2020 with an all-high school cast. 

 

“I wanted to write the play from the perspective of an 18- or 19- year-old male, full of energy, believing that you can conquer the world, living in the most powerful nation on the planet, and yet experiencing the public treatment of a second class citizen,” she says.

 

Without the backing of any theater company, she asked young men in the area practically at random if they could take one of the lead roles. Others she found through word of mouth and eventually enlisted Ronald Lipscomb, Maquis Berkley, Kennedy Miller and David Pyles. Unfortunately, no encore show is planned now because they can’t find a common date to perform again. I didn’t know much about the sit-in and found the play informative and the acting quite good.

 

The 15 actors in the short, one-act play were predominantly African-American of varying complexions except for a white waitress played by Kathy Fraley. T­­he varying complexions of African-Americans allowed Crews to cast them in white roles, as it was extremely difficult for her to recruit whites.  

 

For years, Crews wrote plays intended for church audiences, but then she penned “A House Divided: The Desegregation of Schools,” based on the 1967 case of Betts v. County School Board of Halifax County, Virginia. The setting is a school board meeting, opened to the public, to discuss the highly contested topic of school desegregation.  The play, which was held at the Meadville Center on Chatham Road in 2017, drew an extremely large audience.  I would sure like to see this.

 

She took the play of “The Four Freshmen” to the TJM Community Center board, which readily approved the idea. “We thought it would be educational,” says Dale Miller, who owns the center’s building. “We thought it would benefit a lot of people who are not familiar with the story.” Miller purchased the former Cluster Springs Elementary School building from the county in 2019. “I decided to turn it into a community center to give back to the community,” says the retired corrections lieutenant, who is from Virgilina.  Proceeds from the show were divided by the center and the L.E. Coleman African American Museum.

 

Miller and others had fixed up the building and have hosted a seniors lunch with bingo and guest speakers once a month. There is also an exercise room and space for special events and the nicely finished auditorium.

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