Another snowy birthday after so many years

I'm looking out  the window watching the snow fall softly and gently in Wilson and thinking back to another March 2 when it snowed like this. It was 49 years ago, and I remember it well because it was my 11th birthday.

Now, unless you're a victim of The New Math or simply have forgotten how to do simple addition, you can figure out that today is my 60th birthday. To the best of my memory, it has not snowed on March 2 at any place I have been living at the time since 1960.

That day 49 years ago stands out because I was looking forward to a great day. My parents would not allow their five children to have birthday parties every year, but, if we were moderately civilized in the weeks beforehand, we might be allowed to invite a friend or two or three over for the afternoon, and our friends would get to eat the homemade cake my mother would always bake. But birthday presents were discouraged.

In 1960, I had invited two or three friends to come over after school. When it began snowing, we saw no reason to change plans. My friends boarded the school bus with me when school let out early. Oh boy! We'd have even longer to play, and the snow would be great fun. It never occurred to any of us, so far as I can remember, that there was a connection between getting out of school early and treacherous road conditions. My friends lived a mile or two away and didn't ride my school bus. When the bus reached my driveway, one of the parents of my guests was waiting, more than mildly upset at having to brave slippery roads to retrieve a child who couldn't quite understand what was the big deal. I spent my birthday afternoon playing with my siblings in the several inches of snow that fell.

That March 2 was also significant because it marked the first of the Wednesdays that month that it snowed. All month long, the snow would begin to melt, then it would snow again. My memory is that it snowed every Wednesday in March, but because there were five Wednesdays that March, perhaps it snowed only the first four. The first snow, on my birthday, was deep, close to a foot, as I recall. Then it sleeted on top of the snow, and I was able to walk on top of the frozen snow. Even when school resumed, only to be canceled the next Wednesday, icy spots remained for sledding and skidding.

Chances are, this is not the beginning of a repeat of the snowy March of 1960, but I have reached the age when I'm allowed to say, a little too loudly, "You whippersnappers don't know nothin' about snow. Why, I remember the Blizzard of 1960, when it snowed every Wednesday in March, and a fella couldn't even have a decent birthday celebration."

Sunday lunch at a country buffet

I ate Sunday lunch at a genuine, honest-to-God country restaurant today. How do you know you're in a genuine, honest-to-God country restaurant? The fried fatback on the buffet is a dead giveaway.

As I dug into my second helpings of sweet white corn and pork-seasoned field peas, I told my wife it was appropriate that we'd be enjoying these delicacies on Carolyn Carter's birthday. Carolyn was my mother's younger sister. After my grandparents died, Carolyn and another aunt volunteered to host the family Christmas breakfast and dinner each year. Their small houses, next door to each other, were jammed with people every Christmas from sunrise to mid-afternoon for around 30 years. As new generations, including my own children, were added, my aunts steadfastly continued the family tradition that had begun with my grandparents before I was born.

The cuisine on those wondrous Christmas days were distinctively country. Breakfast included country ham, sausage, eggs, grits and homemade biscuits. Dinner would include turkey and ham with pork-flavored green beans, dressing, rice and gravy and more desserts than a glutton could ever consume at once.

Today's lunch took me back to those meals that would leave me feeling about to burst but still eager for one more morsel of food so delectable that its flavor is still distinct on my tongue so many years later.

Basketball is no longer a non-contact sport

The News & Observer is reporting this morning that Duke basketball player Nolan Smith is out of the lineup indefinitely as a result of a concussion suffered in a game. Smith is not the first basketball player to suffer a brain injury this year. UNC All-America Tyler Hansbrough suffered a concussion in a game and missed practice as a result. Oklahoma star Blake Griffin suffered a concussion in a game against Texas and is still out of the lineup, the last I read.

Does this strike anyone (besides me) as contrary to the basic rules of the game Dr. Naismith invented?

Basketball was intended to be a "non-contact" sport, one in which skills, not brawn, would prevail. Fouls would be called for the act of placing your hands on an opposing player to impede his progress or interfere with his actions. The ball could be slapped away, but a foul would be called if you slapped a player's hands or forearm instead of the ball. It was a finesse and tactics game, at least into the 1960s. Since then, basketball has become more and more violent.

In college basketball today, opposing centers routinely push, shove, knee, grab, pull, elbow and swat at each other to gain position near the basket. Shoulders and elbows are used by offensive players to gain operating space against a defender. Defensive players push, lean against, grab and shove ball carriers. The flagrancy of these tactics has grown in recent years. In some games, television commentators praise the officials for "letting them play" instead of calling fouls for the mayhem beneath the basket.

Sooner or later, someone's going to get hurt. Oops! Someone already has. A number of people have. Basketball isn't like football, where concussions are to be expected by the physical violence and speed of the game. Football players wear protective helmets and pads. Basketball players don't because basketball is supposed to be a non-contact sport. This year's concussions are just the latest evidence of a game that has gotten out of hand and could easily lead to tragedy.

NCAA officials, college coaches and game officials had better rein in the violence before basketball turns into hockey without the skates.

Newspaper's closing looks like domino falling

A venerable newspaper has bitten the dust. The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition today after 150 years of publication. The fear is that this is just the first of many dominoes to fall.

The news out of the newspaper business isn't good. Advertising revenue is declining. Fewer people are subscribing. Profits are down. Losses are up. Employment is down sharply, by half in some newsrooms. Americans are losing the reading habit and deceiving themselves into thinking they can keep up with the important news of the day by watching a few minutes of television's entertainment-oriented, shallow newscasts or by searching the Internet for the few topics they find of interest in their insular lives.

The decline of newspapers is a sad day for news junkies and former journalists like me, but it is also a sad day for American democracy. Newspapers are the essential nutrients of democracy. Without them, without the investigative capabilities of a well-funded newsroom, without the broad-ranging array of local, state, national and international news, without the community-building knowledge base of shared experience and concern, democracy is in jeopardy. Thomas Jefferson said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be." It is because newspapers provided the free expression and the knowledge that inoculated against ignorance that the Founding Fathers instituted the First Amendment.

A recent New York Times column addresses the importance of newspapers to the success of democracy and the prevention of corruption, both in the United States and around the world.

Despite the danger to society that the financial decline of newspapers portends, Americans, except those who own newspaper stock or depend on newspapers for their paychecks, are blithely ignoring the collapse of fundamental reporting and watchdog journalism.

Readership of news is actually on the increase; it's just that fewer Americans are reading newspapers in print. Internet aggregators are posting links to newspapers' reporting and providing this information free to readers. The aggregators profit from ads on their Web sites, which owe their popularity to the news they provide, but the newspapers receive no added revenue from the eyeballs their efforts attract. If newspapers keep losing ad revenue to Internet aggregators, they soon won't be able to finance the reporting that is as essential to readers as it is to the aggregators.

A variety of solutions have been proposed to solve this dilemma, ranging from charging for access to newspaper Web sites to higher charges for printed newspapers to financing newspapers through philanthropic foundations. I don't know what the solution to this dilemma is, and I don't expect to return to the newspaper business where I spent most of my life, but I do fear for what will happen to society and to democracy if the Rocky Mountain News is just one of many falling dominoes.

Goldsboro shows off preservation strategy

The city of Goldsboro turned out its top brass for a presentation to an entourage from Wilson Wednesday afternoon. Mayor Al King, City Manager Joe Huffman and Police Chief Tim Bell were all on hand as Downtown Goldsboro Development Corp. executive director Julie Thompson presented a series of slides showing Goldsboro's amazing success in turning abandoned properties and vacant lots into taxpaying assets while attracting millions of dollars in private investment.

Preservation of Wilson board members watched the impressive presentation jealously. POW would like to repeat Goldsboro's success in Wilson. One of the keys to their success, the Goldsboro officials said, was having everyone involved, from city staff to city council members to enthusiastic private citizens who are investing in the downtown Goldsboro restoration. If broad support is essential, the turnout Wednesday in the Goldsboro City Hall Annex was not a good omen.

Only one Wilson City Council member — Doris Jones — attended. Mayor Bruce Rose was also there, reiterating his support  for historic preservation. City Manager Grant Goings and city historic preservationist Lu-Ann Monson were there. POW executive director Kathy Bethune had invited all of the Wilson City Council members. Only Jones came; the other six council members missed out on seeing the benefits Wilson's neighboring city has reaped from a philosophy of preserving, reusing and renovating historic properties.

Bethune had also invited Wilson County Manager Ellis Williford and all seven county commissioners. None attended. Wilson County has been indifferent or hostile to historic preservation, so their absence was not surprising.

Thompson and Huffman said that in talking to civic groups about Goldsboro's preservation efforts, they do not talk so much about the public good involved in preserving the city's historic architecture and neighborhoods. What they emphasize are the economic benefits of the program.

Like other cities (including Wilson), Goldsboro had been intent on demolishing abandoned, dilapidated housing. In 2005, the city appropriated $100,000 for demolitions, but the city planner estimated it would cost $1 million to demolish all the boarded-up houses. The shock of that number prompted the city to take a different tack. The city put $100,000 into a revolving fund that would option or buy historic properties and market them to new owners with historic preservation covenants in the deed. Seeing the success, the city added $50,000 to the revolving fund. Downtown Goldsboro Development Corp. marketed the properties through Preservation North Carolina, which options and sells historic properties throughout the state and has had phenomenal success in places such as Edenton Mill Village, where old mill houses worth $26,000 in 1997 are now selling for 10 times that. Scores of essentially worthless properties and vacant lots have now been returned to the tax rolls, generating millions of dollars in taxes.

DGDC and PNC have preserved and sold dozens of houses. DGDC now "controls" (not necessarily owns but has the right to market with protective covenants) 28 houses, Thompson said, just from the city's $150,000 investment. DGDC, a nonprofit tax-exempt corporation, options or buys properties; the city takes no ownership role, although it does pay DGDC's four-person staff.

In addition to preserving historic properties, DGDC has worked with Self-Help Credit Union to build low- to moderate-income "infill" homes on the lots where houses had been demolished. These houses are built from historic designs that complement the existing older homes, creating a consistent neighborhood streetscape. These infill properties have added additional millions in property values on lots that had been essentially worthless.

In 2007-08, Goldsboro's program generated about $6 million in public investment and $10.4 million in private investment, Thompson said. This kind of success has brought statewide attention to Goldsboro, which has restored (with public and private money) the downtown Paramount Theater (which is older than Wilson's Edna Boykin Cultural Center) and the historic city hall. The restoration of City Hall with its rooftop gilded statues and the construction of the City Hall Annex cost Goldsboro about $11 million.

Goldsboro is far from being finished. The old city train station will be restored to its past glory and is to be used as a stop on a planned commuter rail line that will take riders to Raleigh. Center Street, where a railroad track once ran down the middle, is to be renovated to create a broad pedestrian path in the median and wider sidewalks on each side.

In December 2007, my wife and I toured Goldsboro with her father, who had grown up there in the 1920s and '30s, on DGDC's Christmas homes tour. The restored private homes gave me some insight into what a good historic preservation program can do. Wednesday's presentation explained the finances and administration of this effort.

The Wilson participants at Wednesday's presentation were impressed and enthusiastic. It seems obvious that this strategy is transportable, that it can work in other places, including Wilson. The key, as several Goldsboro speakers emphasized, is getting public officials behind it. As Mayor King warned, "Don't listen to the nay-sayers." He said he had been repeatedly told that the city should "just bulldoze" the historic City Hall, but city management and elected officials ignored the vocal minority. City Hall's restored grandeur and the annex's seamless connection to the old building proves the nay-sayers wrong.

Wilson has a similar stock of historic buildings and vacant lots that Goldsboro has. Wilson can do what Goldsboro has done, if public officials get behind it. Unfortunately, the solitary Wilson City Council member (one out of seven) who attended Wednesday's presentation does not bode well for Wilson's capability.

Decouple utility fees from nonprofit funding

Wilson City Council has a proposal to terminate a program that has dogged council for years. If the plan is approved, the city will eliminate its contributions to the nonprofits by 2012. One of these nonprofits, the Arts Council of Wilson, would receive funding through the city's General Fund in recognition that the Arts Council operates a youth theater program that had been part of the city's Recreation Department.

This proposal from City Manager Grant Goings would get the city out of the business of funding nonprofits, but it will not eliminate the criticisms, as can be seen by online comments at wilsontimes.com. Some critics go apoplectic at the thought of funding the Arts Council or any arts-related organization. But funding of the arts in some form — programs, facilities or public art — is common among N.C. municipalities, which see these appropriations as beneficial to the community.

To understand how City Council got into this dilemma, a little history is necessary. Years ago, City Council made a business decision to impose a $10 late fee on utility bills paid after the due date. The late fee, despite its being a sensible and ubiquitous business policy, caused an uproar. (Try paying your credit card late and see what the penalty is!) To quell the criticisms, the city announced it would give away the late fee revenues to nonprofits. Thus, a standard business revenue stream became a charitable donation — and a political football. Council had difficulty each year dividing up the nearly half-million-dollar pool of late-fee revenues.

Who could blame City Council members for wanting this political hot potato taken off their hands?

Decoupling late-fee revenues from nonprofit funding should be the first step in fixing this simmering controversy. Late-fee revenues should be deposited in the utility fund and blended with all other utility revenues. Nonprofit funding, art funding, charitable funding should be based on merit alone. The city has no obligation to fund these services in the way the county, for example, has a legal obligation to operate a heath department. However, there is no legal barrier to the city funding nonprofits if it finds the nonprofit's services in the public interest and worth the cost.

I would suggest that the city (and county, if it's willing to go along) distinguish between local institutions that contribute to overall community assets and those charities that provide a worthy service. I would include in the first category the Boykin Cultural Center, the Arts Council, N.C. Baseball Museum, Imagination Station and the Round House Museum. These are assets that attract people to our community and contribute to the quality of life. Governmental funding is appropriate as a supplement to private donations and as a base for grant requests. The Tourism Development Authority should recognize the value of these assets and provide an annual revenue stream to them. Each attracts people to Wilson more consistently than the occasional events or interstate billboards in which the tourism group has invested the county's lodging tax.

Other nonprofits, which provide valuable services, might also receive some public funding. Wilson OIC, the Wesley Shelter, Hope Station, WCIA and other groups would fall in this category. But City Council is ill-equipped to judge which groups are most deserving or most in need of funding. If the city or county wishes to make contributions to local  charitable services, the decision of who gets how much would best be left to an organization such as United Way, which is geared to making those decisions and requiring financial statements that show both need and effectiveness. (And, by the way, to the critic at wilsontimes.com who claimed there were multiple six-figure executives at United Way, that might be true in some places, but not at Wilson County United Way.)

However the city spends its tax and enterprise fund dollars, there will be critics (many of them sadly misinformed or spewing malevolent disinformation). The city must decouple utility late fees from its nonprofit funding, then find a fair and defensible means of distributing the funds the people and their elected representatives find appropriate.

Men at work endure the cold

I spent the entire day Monday doing something I really didn't want to do — standing in a freezing wind while helping build a wheelchair ramp. I was one of a five-man work crew of volunteers, and all of us complained about the cold, even as we sawed, aligned and screwed together the boards that would make up the ramp. There was also the digging in the rocky soil of trenches into which the 2x6 supports for the ramp/boardwalk would fit.

The temperature was in the 20s when we began, and it didn't rise a lot throughout the day. The biting wind seared our faces like a fire and made every bump or misstep painful.

Still, we labored on to try to complete the job because the ramp was needed. It would provide mobility to a man whose infirmities confined him. Had the task been a backyard project at home, I would have postponed it until a warmer day. But when four other people are struggling and enduring with you, you're willing to endure more.

At the end of the day, I was grateful for any amount of warmth as I sought relief for sore muscles unaccustomed to chopping rocks out of the ground or twisting 2-inch screws into treated wood. The effort expended during that long day exceeded any aerobic exercise or weight training I have pushed my aging body through these past few years, and it strained muscles not used in bench presses or abdominal crunches or running. The invigorating feeling at the end of a good workout was missing as I drove home last night, replaced with the lingering shivers and a cloak of overall fatigue.

Even after all that, the job is not complete. I'll be back again today, hoping for less wind and more warmth. And at the end, the satisfaction of a job completed.