The 20th Anniversary

On this date in 2003, I closed on the purchase of the Roediger House in the main offices of Piedmont Federal Savings Bank, accepted the keys that were handed over to me and the huge folder for the mortgage and deed papers, and happily took possession of this most glorious and grand old manse. The anniversary arrives with me in a mood of celebration but also of consternation: there remain too many unfulfilled hopes and dreams and plans for this place. And yet, it is still pretty marvelous. Now might be a good time for any readers of this particular entry to zip over to the main website for the house and tool through the galleries. Since I did a major website overhaul and redesign a few years ago, the photographic tour is much improved.

The Trenches Are Trending

The slow and plodding labors on the Roediger House irrigation system are proceeding, and it seemed appropriate to offer an update. First, the fun news: while I've mostly been digging up both live and dead roots, lots of broken bricks, chunks of mortar and concrete, and tons of Piedmont red clay, I have finally and at last actually surfaced an old coin, as shown above. Not a high dollar one and given its size, I almost missed it, but that there is a 1945 Liberty dime that turned up in the front yard.

Perhaps it's the dime one might have received for a bottle deposit, because in the back yard I dug up this very-nearly-intact old Pepsi "wave" bottle. A bit of internet research and an earnest review of the coding on the bottle's bottom suggest it might just be a 1948 vintage, or thereabouts. The labeling long ago wore off but the embossed glass design (common from around 1941 through the 1950s, I think) is still distinct.

Finally, here are a couple of shots of the state of the front yard as of this week, with most of the trenches dug and also some of the various zone lines laid and awaiting sprinkler heads.

Winston Theatre

I get why we need megamultiplexes with stadium seating and surround sound and digital projection and all that. But I also feel the loss of local downtown theatres and miss having the chance to catch fun films in those storied and intimate locations.

Fourth Street as seen from Spring Street.
The Winston is just down on the left in this photo.

As I've looked a bit into the history of the surroundings of the Roediger House, I found that just around the corner was once a 999-seat popular movie house called The Winston. The building still stands, but you'd never recognize it for what it once was. It has a new facade and is home to architects and other assorted offices. It's pretty non-descript, directly across the street from the steadily popular Foothills Brewery.

I'm sure that films were better when shown in the remarkable Ultravision:

A bit more about it, and the even more fantastic movie palace that was once the Carolina Theatre, can be found on the classicfilmtvcafe blog.

Paid in Full: End of the Mortgaged Manse

I bought the Roediger House in October 2003 with a 30-year mortgage and earnest hopes I'd be able to pay it off in 20 years. At mid-day today, exactly 15 years following the purchase, I paid off the remaining portion of the mortgage loan and the Roediger House is free and clear!

That's pretty exciting, if you ask me.

And We Was Swingin'

When the Roediger Family first lived on Spring Street, it was in the house just to the south of me, on the other side of the driveway. Today, that home is divided up into three apartments. On its porch is a swing that was recently incapacitated by a bolt that sheared in half. It turns out the old man from next door might be good for something still: I put in a pretty decent repair job on it and now it's back in service for the neighbors.

The Disaster That Is My Study

For 11 years now, I've had designs on the northeast front corner room upstairs to someday become my study. Ever since I moved into the Roediger House, though, it has been a storage and junk room. No small number of boxes (dated 1987, after I graduated from college, or 1996, when I left my job as a middle school teacher to begin PhD studies at the University of Virginia) had moved from one place to another place to another place, without ever being unpacked. Some of those boxes were moved from my faculty apartment at Wake Forest University and deposited in this room upstairs when I bought the Roediger House in 2003.

When I left my position at WFU to become a full-time educational consultant, I had to put all my accumulated files and books somewhere, and that also all went into my study. Here's what it looked like this past Saturday:

Philip Lamachio of Estate Plaster is ready to put the Mearns brothers onto this, once they finish the last rooms downstairs. And I want Ricky and Nubee Sneed of Clemmons Flooring LLC to also get going on these floors and the mantle in there. So I had to get all this cleared out this past weekend before hitting the road for Virginia Beach for a week of work. I did it, but it wasn't easy:

It had to go somewhere so, even though I just got the Van Gogh guest room replastered and the floors and mantles refinished, it's now had to become a new and every-bit-as-disastrous storeroom:

Moving all that stuff did allow me to stumble across a number of things that had been tucked away, including a stack of undeliverable returned mail that I'd sent out to former 7th grade students at the time of their high school graduations. Fortunately, a number of those folks are now on Facebook so I ought to be able to track down addresses so I can send those out again! That oughta be a blast from the past, since it includes an essay about the importance of education that they wrote for me as one of their first 7th grade assignments.

Oh, and I also found this article from the Sanford Herald, published October 10, 1975:

The Fantastification of the Front Doors

Last week, I got the front doors refinished, thanks to the good work of Ricky and Nubee Sneed of Clemmons Flooring, LLC. Here's a quick history:

August 2003
(before I bought the house)

The original screen doors are still up in the attic.

Just before refinishing began, July 7, 2014

Before refinishing, July 7, 2014

Ricky & Nubee Sneed at work

Ricky Sneed at work

After sanding, the restaining

And finally: the beautiful finished product, which I think just looks stunning (after 10 years of dingy dirty doors to come home to):

Shrove Tuesday, National Pancake Day, and Snow!

Meal No. 934: Pancakes

The reason I was actually home at lunchtime to make pancakes today is because winter is not yet done with us here in the northwestern Piedmont of North Carolina:

There was sleet and snow, enough to get schools called off so that I wasn't able to work next door in Guilford County today...

...and freezing rain that you can sort of see clinging to the basketball goal backboard above.

Update: The following day, I snapped the following picture of a bush at the corner of the house next door, which is (so far as I know) the house where the Roediger Family lived while they were building the house I now call home.

Christmas Eve Tradition

From the time my parents moved to Mingo, in Sampson County, they started a small Christmas Eve get-together with some of the other couples with whom they were close friends. It's a tradition that continued for about 50 years, in fact, because my mother continued it and made it a huge Buies Creek gathering each year up until around 2000 or 2002. Following the Memorial Baptist Church Christmas Eve service at 5 pm, most of the church and half of Buies Creek were welcome to come to her house and partake of the annual "Ham Biscuit Get-Together."

Anyway, I've been feeling Mother's absence rather acutely this holiday and it's led me to put together a small gathering of friends with some traces of those yearly Ham Biscuit Get-Togethers.

Seven-Layer Cookies
(haven't made these in forever!)

Sugar Peanuts

Date Nut Balls

Fudge: with nuts and without

A Second Batch of Eggnog
(thinner version: I used milk instead of heavy cream)

Beautiful Eliza Blake came with her moms, The Jens

And ham biscuits, of course!

License Plate Additions

My older sister Janice was once married to a dairy farmer and lived on a farm just outside Buies Creek. When license plates were changed out at the start of the new year (I think in 1976), and I was hanging out and running around, I started scooping them up. That was the beginning of my license plate collection, which has not continued as an ongoing pursuit, mind you.

However, when local friend Carol Eickmeyer posted an upcoming estate sale for her business Creative Transitions, my eye was drawn to the picture of some old license plates that were among the items being offered. I took my coffee "to go" that Saturday morning and came home with these four additions to my stored collection:

10 Years of RoHo Living

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the day I closed on and took possession of the Roediger House. What a great place to call home, and what an awesome first decade living in this wonderful place.

Winston-Salem's Finest Homes of Yesteryear

George and Laura Roediger built this house in 1905. I bought it just shy of its Centennial, in 2003. For most of this last decade, my knowledge of the Roedigers has been pretty limited and was gathered from bits and pieces and various sources, much of which is tucked away in my mix of files related to buying the Roediger House.

Near the end of last summer, I got this burst of interest in knowing more about the house and about the family. For a long time, I've operated under a hopeful assumption that this fine estate would naturally have been captured in various pictures buried in old newspapers or pictorial histories of Winston-Salem...that I had only to stroll the block and a half to the main branch of the county library and marvelous historial treats would be mine (after the anticipated digging and searching).

Another source of history is a website called DigitalForsyth.org. What has puzzled me so much is that my very beautiful old home doesn't show up in any pictures, ever. I mean: c'mon! It's a lovely and stately place and it's close to a main drag. How come it has never been caught in any street shots, parade photos, or even featured just on its own merits?

Well, the simple answer is this: my home may be a marvelous place to call home, and it may stand out beautifully against much of the rest of the neighborhood...but at the time it was built, it was modest at best. The homes that were worth a photographer's attention, whose stately presence is captured in sometimes fuzzy old black-and-white or sepia-toned prints, completely leave mine in the dust.

The following pictures should give you a clue as to what I mean.

It boggles my mind, though, that all those gorgeous old palaces of old are all gone. And my humble abode somehow endures.

How cool and simultaneously awful is that?