North Carolina People; William Mangum, Artist

Ladies and gentlemen and I don't North Carolina people are doing something very different. Five of us are going to sit here and talk about a wonderful new book. North Carolina the whole bit. You were sat with you in just a few seconds but duction of North Carolina people is made possible by a grant from what could be a bank a symbol of strength stability and service for over a century. Friends I first want to introduce this galaxy of talent that's sitting here tonight on my right is William Mangum who is the artist who produced North Carolina build its beauty a wonderful new book Bill. C.J. Underwood who many of you on the network will know from WB TV days many years there. Charlie get it known to all the mid section North Carolina people working Licata WFM white TV who got us up so early for so many years on Good Morning. Thanks Gentlemen it's great to see you thank you. Bill what did

you do to bring all this assemblage together. My goodness this is great but 100 years of talent here it really is amazing that it culminated into this. It's a lifelong dream for me obviously to create a book on my paintings of North Carolina. But to bring the talent that these gentlemen had to offer into a story in Texas really makes my paintings come alive. Well it's a wonderful wonderful book. I've looked through it read all they've had to say and I want to ask you two or three questions I've made notes here and you want to do that painting drive falls. What went on in your mind how did you decide to make that particular scene. Well my brother lives up in Highlands North Carolina and that is where Dr Falls is located. The beauty of dry falls is that as you wind down a path that's about 100 yards long you can actually walk behind it and you stay literally dry. But it's the harmony of the season that I like most about it was early spring in the road right intentions were popping out and the contrast of

that brilliant water cascading those brilliant dark blooms was fascinating but then another painting of yours and you went to the other end of the state down to Southport. Now it's on the market there moment. Take a look and you can tell us your vision. Where was that particular scene. Well it's right down there on the harbor south port. It was about six o'clock in the morning and the fishermen were just beginning to head out and coming back actually and the beauty of that particular scene was the early morning light as it was just shimmering across the water you can see how equally balanced it is between the sky and the water. So A.J. You said that North Carolina is the ultimate studio for artists. Is that because of what you saw as you traveled all over western North Carolina. Indeed I have been very fortunate in my background to have been able to talk them into the assignment I had for so long Karolina camera and it was really sort of a poor man's Charles Kuralt you know. Up and down the road and just seeing what you'd find and the beauty of course western North Carolina in particular

not having anything negative to say about the rest of the state with these fellows Joining me but it is a special place and I'm sure you've noted our quote from Sam Irvin which I think said it all when when the good Lord restores the Garden of Eden Earth. He'll put it in North Carolina. So few changes left to make to keep it perfect. One of those places is a county and build it one of those paintings with the flip up on the monitor here. You spend a lot of time up there. Ash what Allegheny. You know from Grandfather Mountain to Deep Gap where Willard Watson was and will talk about I'm sure but I have seen that scene there many times in many ways. Another one of Bill's creations is called Appalachian country I believe it is a very beautiful scene. How do you get the inspiration. I was commissioned a gentleman's form Dr. Baxter Caldwell. That's his residence matter fact right there and so on the New River up in Ashe County and. It's interesting. I actually my

radio went right here or went out in my Jeep and I got stuck. And that's the same that I was stuck at with a sense no that's a second oldest river in the world that's what you mention the Watsons and that Mrs. Watson was a quilter but Mr. Watson had a very unique record he did. He was such a legendary moonshiner in whataburger County that the sheriff's department even let him keep his old still in the attic and when we were there he got it out he put it in the woods and he lit a fire and he boiled water and simulated a moonshiner you know all over again doing his thing and I ask him how you would feel when you drank some of that stuff he used to make. He said Son you can hit a wall with a handful of us. But he obviously wanted to be the best but what little way to tell you Mr. Lu well away well she was an 86 year old lady who painted not probably quite in the realm of just making them here but she did some mighty fine work. And her comment when I ask her about how she could

explain her talent she said son talent ain't nothing in the world but wanted to bad enough. And I think all the kids today would say pay attention to it. You wrote about this school having two barbers in a barber chair you one up on my hometown of Dallas we didn't have but one man. Everybody get the same haircut on Saturday everybody got the same style haircut the little boy all the way up to Grandpa white sidewalls if you remember that and the tonic the wonderful colors of the tonic you know there was green and red and purple and you got to choose one color of tonic you water on your hair but also build the salsa. You had one policeman one fire truck and did you race to get see who would drive it would alarm but oh well you might do that. Honest to goodness everything is updated now and I'm talking about talking about a long time ago. The fire truck sometimes would start. And

it's been the minute Biscoe been seen pushing the fire truck literally pushing the fire truck to a fire and then Dallas did that. You lived in the peach country and build it a marvelous painting in this book on Peaches. Is that a great season of the year when the when the cold doesn't get the crop. I say in the in the story the sand hills are jumping the crop is fat and everything is moving in. The peach trucks rolled out of Norman all night long de witts orchard down there and and as a kid I would I want to be one of two things I either want to be a band leader or I want to be one of those peach truck drivers because I knew they were going to cities that I had not seen and so my boy heart wanted wanted to do that. You write about going out in the back of the horse and back and you come up on a great tradition at dinner time you know in those days. Then it was 12 o'clock and you had Yass peas and beans and cornbread and all this but then you till the old

gentleman taking a glass of sweet milk and Granny's corn bread up in there. Oh my that is Mr. Ernest Johnson and Mr. JOHNSON. He was very neat about it but that was his favorite dish and he would crumble up that homemade baked bread and his milk and he would mix a little sugar with it and then that allowed us to do it we were at his table. So he did that. We could do it too and so as you said the women went out on the porch and sat on the porch and shelled pieces. He did a painting on a cold southern comfort in this book that I think is one of the great is that what you saw. Yes. How many of us grew up in North Carolina have seen porches like that and seen our mothers and the women in the neighborhood sit together and with a little pan in their lap and Shelby's and talk and share the news of the community. Yeah well you tell a story about Piedmont North Carolina when you and

your buddy ran off and jumped in the creek to take a skinny dip one day and you ran into a bunch of baby moccasins what happened. Well I tell you we couldn't wait for summer time to come around and so I think that was one February that Quincy Collins and I got out of choir school snuck off down on my grandfather's farm. This particularly deep swimming hole in the three mile branch there was about knee deep you know and so we wandered around an ad for a while and then went on up the creek and all of a sudden look down there between our toes and here were these baby moccasin squirming around and you never saw a bunch of boys jump in your life. We never reach in for every branch we can find over you right. So wonderfully about Saturday morning baking at home and mom I reach you know and get a broom and break it off one of those straws test and it fits the bill. Can you taste it today. I surely can. And marvelous pound cakes they never had any sad story in them. And while my grandmother why McAuliffe was doing that she would tell me

stories of her family in the past got me interested in history and the stories of North Carolina. Well it's just an experience that you don't ever ever find another way. You just relive it over and over again. When you moved into the Good Morning show you you did a lot for the city of Greensboro but. Remember Silvers 5:00 a.m. that the opening of the boat I can really do and we're looking at it and when I came to Grays Warren 56 and started the Good Morning Show in 1957. The downtown of brains moral was beginning to lose its soul it was beginning to gray at the edge the strip shopping centers were coming in. It became a sad and lonely place. We did a documentary back in the 60s with Attorney Mike Neal Smith and I know you know about how to restore parts of downtown brings moral and old Greensboro so these have great memories. So as the old people over at Gilford station went on and you know you think of the Legion Gilford College students

who matriculated right through that train station that we see there in the snow and of course it's been removed so it's away somewhere else now I guess comfortable and safe on somebodies farm but you can see it for a loan for Lauren on a day. The trains are leaving the students have probably all gone away. You go to Charlie when you went to Guilford the station where I went to get over to the station with it was still there but not a lot of people came out on trying. Let me add that if I may for a second the generosity that Mr. Mangum had with all three of us in allowing us to really basically write about what we wanted to. Ask him what he wanted me to write about. I said do you want me to write about your art and he said Well I hope you'll enjoy the art I think you will but you don't have to write about each picture you write about what you want. And it was a marvelous when they had all three of you and build you up in your small town North Carolina. That's what you all of us are products of this way of life. Look at that wonderful

way we look at it today. The neighborhood raised you. You had a baby. We were certainly children of the community and other people could discipline us just as well as our parents and they were interested in us. I think it was different. And they say when you know they say oh man when they you know men when they get older I just start welding on memories but I think it was a different time and it was a warm time and a protected time don't you T.J.. Patriotism For example you saw something up there in that old soldier's re-union every year is that the way it is today. Well not exactly. They they managed to recreate some incredible memories they put the old tanks on the curb and let the kids crawl up on a million and. It is a time when they they really do remember and Old Glory flies and people wear badges and red white and blue and some of the guys dress up in their old war uniform some of whom are re-enactors of

civil war and Revolutionary War days so they're remembering all wars when they do this. And the ladies dress up in the bonnets and the long skirts and they sell Taffy and I mean if this is a day that really does a pretty good job of bringing back what it used to be like in the days when you know patriotism was number one on the list everything else was second place. And I unfortunately think that most of the youngsters today don't quite understand that kind of feeling. It's a good thing they do it because it keeps it alive. Lee in reading about your experience at night. When you left home at midnight hearing the storm of smoke coming on and you got there about 6:00 a.m. before you had to go with the weather cast that's that's using the word duty in the characterization that came about from being raised that way too didn't it. Well yes. I had a good role models. My grandfather was a farmer and a businessman in Concord and my father managed the Woolworth store and he managed by walking around before it ever Tom Peters

ever got on to the idea. And I looked up to these gentlemen and I was taught that if you had a job you were supposed to do the job right and nobody laid down any rules and regulations that our company didn't provide a way for us to get there. I didn't make enough money to have decent tires on my car. And then I bought a cheap house too far out in the country and man I'm in trouble I got to walk to get to work you know and so. But but I am did worry that morning of the mornings whether or not I was going to make it through the snow. He has a wonderful painting in here of Fisher park where you had a lot to do with that drive a beautification and preservation and Greensburg. I know that gave you a lot of satisfaction but I bet some of that came having to work that garden in the early childhood. Well you know we had a victory garden during World War Two and I didn't. I got really interested in plants and growing things. Fisher park is is the heart of Greensburg. It is really the. The center

of Guilford County folks were really nice to me. Boots Hankel of. Used to be with keep greens were a beautiful told me the other day remember you got a little part down town with a plaque with your name on it there so I got my spot back and go to you go back and watch over there you said that you wished your children could have these kinds of experiences. I see it in your artwork you Cumbers corn tomatoes rabbits whatever. Well I also had the good fortune of growing up in a small little village it was called manners. Yes people have no idea where that is but it was outside of Lincoln and I lived with my aunt uncle and aunt for a period of time and many of what these gentlemen are talking about was instilled into me as a youngster and there is no way that I could have been as eloquent with the stories that they have passed on and as I listened and I read what was presented to me.

There was just this bath in the stouter that I can recall and I've had just a delightful time sharing it with my three children. But you know I affiliate with them because we are depression children. World War 2 children. They said down in Wilmington when they were celebrating the immortal showboat the other day on the 50th anniversary of the J Date that we would a crab you know we won the war we got the country back on its feet. Was that your experience when you came home you just so glad to get home it was ready to do anything you get a chance to do or get back to college. I was took a little bit too young for world war time so the impressions that I had and wrote about as a boy and disco in that community of disco had to do with the feeling of that time had him and the older boys going off to war and and the fact that some of them didn't come back. But that friend of yours goes you to sneak off over to the airport and you did something your mother would have never approved.

That's right and it was very enticing and I've you've made some money on the beaches. And James Johnson a fellow who came back from the war and couldn't get flying out of his so he had an old airplane down there and he would take people out for $5. Trip could only take one at a time so my buddy and I down the Kander airport as we called it then hike down there and wanted to time James Johnson took us and we were fly he was flying us over Biscoe and he said you couldn't hear in the thing and he was screaming back is there's your house. I finally spotted my house and I realized that there wasn't anybody in Biscoe who knew I was up there flying over Biscoe which would have three when we did that. My mother would have been upset and you said you didn't realize how small Biscoe really was from 1000 feet up that I did. James by the way not to put a sad ending on it but it is sad he later was killed while flying and he was a wonderful man. Big smile on his face and we all loved him and we missed him a lot.

Later when you would live in the Charlotte Observer getting up that early in the morning was that preliminary training to do in the good show. Oh it's so early. I don't know if it probably was Bill though. My grandfather lived just down the street and had horses and cows and I loved to go down there and watch him work with the animals in the morning and in those days in Concord you could keep cows in the city and watch my milk and taste the fresh milk the Charlotte Observer gave me Ernie Pyle who became one of my journalistic heroes. I read Ernie Pyle every morning before I carried those papers down South Union Street and Spring Street in Concord. C.J. I went to something that you wrote about as a little boy and I don't yet understand it Falls Creek campground Oh yes you need go as a discipline as a reporter Well I went but it turned out a little bit of both actually. But camp meetings you know are sort of unique to this part of the world and every year these people come together for a couple of weeks and these

old little cabin like structures and there's a great big place out in the middle of the little village they have where they all gather two or three times a day for preaching and what have you. And some of the interesting things about that is these people that have done this so long and they own these little cabins and they pass a moan to other generations. And if anybody offers them anything to like to buy one from them they will never sell it. And but they do. They do get out there and worship and you know that old fashioned kind of way they ring the big bell to herald that it's time for the preaching to start. And one fellow told me that he and his wife they met there at the campground and he said something about the fact that he gave her a kiss and she never forgot. And she agreed. That was the thing at the beginning of their lives together. But anyway they used to have a jail sometimes the youngsters might get rowdy and even some

of the older ones when they slipped a little something into the drink in the evening hours that Mr. Watson but they actually had a little jail that they used to tell some folks and to teach them you know to do better. Well now speaking of that point of your early years what was school like for you. Did you really have a great experience in elementary school. Great teachers. How did you feel what I would have had I have disciplinary ins which I badly needed because I think looking back on I was a free spirit and I just wanted to be out in the woods below a lot and I want to be playing ball and I didn't want to be in school. But when in the fifth grade started talking about John Reed you know where this big chunk of gold just a few miles from my house in Congress County. I got interested in history became a geologist so I could write when I went to the ranch that afternoon I got my hands and commenced to sing. Do you always refer to your teachers Emma Connor was

my. I don't know she was so good to all of us and such an inspiration she would. She was my English teacher and taught us to say words properly and taught and taught us to get interested in words. That's how I first got interested in high school then I had a good college and English teacher. But to Emma Connor would even read Shakespeare to us. We dreaded going into Shakespeare. But when she read it to a she brought it alive and she even got up a bunch of people in the community put us in cars one time took us to Greensboro to see a Shakespearean performance put on by a professional group and that's how far she would go to to get a sense that you were fighting it all the way. Well she got there she was an inspiration. She was Nancy if you have one like that. Yeah he did indeed and as a matter of fact yes I was born in Johnston County but I want to be sure these guys don't overwhelm me here with these great stories of their childhood I grew up my first years were growing. We're outside a rally on the farm my

grandparents farm my mother and father were each one of 16 children and my grandmother would string up tobacco leaves all day and then go in and cook for 25 30 people. You know I mean how many people do this today. But I moved we moved in the Raleigh and I represent the western sections today but I was a relic I went to number one in my 10th grade teacher Mrs. Wooten. If she would hear the language that is spoken on the radio on television today and read what is written supposedly to be the language today she wouldn't scold a whole lot of people. She was she was a stickler for the language. And today we find that none has become plural complete can be compared. You know that cetera et cetera. And we need some more teachers like oh my goodness. I wonder where they all go. Well you said it this all of this wonderful expression of your talent began when somebody gave you a watercolor set at Christmas. Well I grew into something else and then they got a little bigger and you wound up going to Europe and Greece

all over to study art. It has been a fascinating career. What began with a 59 century of watercolors to do a painting for my mom for Christmas has turned into an occupation where I've created more than twelve hundred originals today and I feel very blessed and particularly with the combination of with these authors to create this book. I do believe there's going to be tough competition now and many of the paintings will pale in comparison to these marvelous stories that these gentlemen bring forward. Well it's a marvelous talent you have to translate from the mind and then through the hand to the paper and it's very rare indeed to see someone that can be that much of. Conveyor of the feeling about the place but now right. North Carolina today we say the whole of the beauty how are we preserving you know we doing the right thing. What do you think. John I think a lot's being done perhaps not enough. I think communities are going to have to take more interest in their own end Biscoe we saved our old wonderful old brick school building and turned it in to a community center with no

tax money. And I hope other communities especially smaller communities will look at the old things the brick depots instead of knocking them down you know take a look at them. Lee you had a good swing at this. Yes I think that Greensboro has done a splendid job greening the area because we have I guess the oldest Parks and Recreation Department in the conferee in Greensboro. But I am concerned when we fly over the triad now that in those green spaces I see more and more plants springing up. And you know I'm really torn about that because what is going to be the quality of our life in the future and will we preserve the forest as we should so that our children can walk through those glades in Glens or will we give it all over to cement and brick and aluminum and glass. He did it with oil city doing well I'll tell you the queen city is building one skyscraper after another. Charlotte has become a city of crawling with glass and marble. The people

still people with great hearts who do wonderful things for each other the culture and arts and all just bombing but I think of something again one of my idols Charles Kuralt said something about. We are rushing to pave the forests and subdivided the meadows and find substitutes for natural things and I think that's a little sad by the way William Langham has a Skylab and Charlotte with trees all around that will not folks looking for that in the book and a prince someday soon we hope. We've used up all of our time fellas but thank you for visiting today and going over this wonderful book. Ladies and gentlemen of North Carolina behold its beauty is part of your library should be a part of your library. Go to your local bookstore and take a look at the marvelous piece of work. Thank you Lee Crowder Charlie Getty C.J. Underwood and William bank. Thank you very much thank you. Production of North Carolina people is made possible by a grant from what could be a bank

a symbol of strength stability and service for over a century.