Books that focus on, or have a relation to, Chapel Hill

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The hog processing plant is in Bladen County, Clinton is Sampson County. Plenty of hog and turkey farms throughout Sampson, Bladen, and Duplin counties. I worked at Prestige Farms making different feeds for different aged hogs and turkeys. The feed was then loaded into trucks that then went to farms. I did this around 89 or 90. It was mostly black and white folks running the trucks and working in the food mill at that time.

What I remember was feeling like a fish out of water. After three years of college my worldview had expanded so much and then I go home and work with admittedly hard-working high school graduates who'd never left home and had no intention or need to look farther than their community. The world I had grown up in (I grew up in White Lake NC) suddenly seemed so small and boring. Basically Thomas Wolfe said it best..."You Can't Go Home Again".
 
BoonetheAiredale said:
The hog processing plant is in Bladen County, Clinton is Sampson County. Plenty of hog and turkey farms throughout Sampson, Bladen, and Duplin counties. I worked at Prestige Farms making different feeds for different aged hogs and turkeys. The feed was then loaded into trucks that then went to farms. I did this around 89 or 90. It was mostly black and white folks running the trucks and working in the food mill at that time.

What I remember was feeling like a fish out of water. After three years of college my worldview had expanded so much and then I go home and work with admittedly hard-working high school graduates who'd never left home and had no intention or need to look farther than their community. The world I had grown up in (I grew up in White Lake NC) suddenly seemed so small and boring. Basically Thomas Wolfe said it best..."You Can't Go Home Again".
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I had a graduating class of 96 and I think 3 went to Carolina (1 was a baseball player) 2 went to ECU, 5 went to state (but only two lasted past Christmas), and 1 went to NCA&T (to play basketball). Throughout college I went back to help at my family's hardware store and on the farm...did a summer working construction but when my father offered to pass along his store to me a couple of years after I graduated he knew I was going to say no and he was right.

Twernt' no going back for me either.
 
donbosco said:
I had a graduating class of 96 and I think 3 went to Carolina (1 was a baseball player) 2 went to ECU, 5 went to state (but only two lasted past Christmas), and 1 went to NCA&T (to play basketball). Throughout college I went back to help at my family's hardware store and on the farm...did a summer working construction but when my father offered to pass along his store to me a couple of years after I graduated he knew I was going to say no and he was right.

Twernt' no going back for me either.
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Know what you mean. My Dad ran a store. While my two brothers and I all worked at the store growing up during the summers and during the school year on Saturdays and when he was shorthanded. (Spring of my senior year in high school for about three weeks I took afternoons off to make deliveries because my Dad was short-handed. It was great until some of my teachers started squawking about to my mother. It then came to a screeching halt.) My Dad started working in his uncle (active partner) his father's (silent partner) store after he came back from WW2 with a 100% disability. I don't know whether my Dad really wanted any of his sons to take over the store. But I do know he had a much happier retirement because he sold off all his merchandise, sold the building, and didn't have to worry about a store--whose concept had come and gone--hanging over his head.
 
nycfan said:
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It is trash but set in an alternate universe Chapel Hill and NC (in which NC State has a law school and UNC hospital doctors rush one of their own to Duke Hospital from Chapel Hill (where she was a few minutes from campus) because they secretly admit Duke is better).
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Didn't read the book but I did like the movie just because it was set in the Triangle.
 
I can't help but expand the subject. Another great UNC author....
Robert Ruark
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and Tim McLaurin, a NC native who taught at all the triangle colleges. "The River Less Run" is a particular favorite.
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BoonetheAiredale said:
I can't help but expand the subject. Another great UNC author....
Robert Ruark
1736532208264.png
and Tim McLaurin, a NC native who taught at all the triangle colleges. "The River Less Run" is a particular favorite.
1736532354841.png
Click to expand...
Only read eight of the Ruark books. The Old Man and the Boy particularly spoke to me. I lived with my grandfather after my dad was killed and 50s Duplin County wasn't that different from the Southport of his time.
 
finesse said:
Only read eight of the Ruark books. The Old Man and the Boy particularly spoke to me. I lived with my grandfather after my dad was killed and 50s Duplin County wasn't that different from the Southport of his time.
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Ruark's best for sure. I had a family friend who taught me the ways of hunting and its deeper truths. The hunting didn't stick, but the teaching did. Also loved Poor No More and The Honey Badger.
 
BoonetheAiredale said:
I can't help but expand the subject. Another great UNC author....
Robert Ruark
1736532208264.png
and Tim McLaurin, a NC native who taught at all the triangle colleges. "The River Less Run" is a particular favorite.
1736532354841.png
Click to expand...
@BoonetheAiredale - I believe you and I have discussed Ruark before. ‘The Old Man and the Boy’ stuff is magic.

One night Clyde Egerton was doing a reading at The Hardback Cafe. I was tending and I probably wasn’t watching McLaurin closely enough. He had a few and got a bit out of hand.
 
Once again, moving afield of the initial topic. Speaking of nature authors. This little Yeti film is bad ass. Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane are two fantastic writers. Jimmy Buffet was friend of theirs down in Key West. God, what I would give to have been around that for a little while.
 
sringwal said:
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I enjoyed it mostly, but I think forcing the main characters to be high school students who happen to be attending UNC in a special program was very much an eyeroll. It has all the marks of a publishing company bullying a new author to pigeon hole books into a young adult drama. "See these are high school kids, just like you guys!" It was just this stupid contrivance that felt artificially brought back up again at random times.
 
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A Really Strange and Wonderful Time

***A FINALIST FOR THE 2025 SOUTHERN BOOK PRIZE*** THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF THE THRIVING AND INFLUENTIAL ROCK SCENE IN CHAPEL HILL, WHICH GAVE THE WORLD ARTISTS...
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I finished this two days ago and I tore right through it. I arrived in Chapel Hill in the summer of 96, so this era was fully in the latter stages, but familiarity with the location, the venues, some of the bands and even some of the people really kept me hooked. I am not sure a millennial will have the same experience reading it as I did. Retroactively I regret not being into the music scene then as I am now, when i had a chance to experience it and blew it. Going to high school in Raleigh a lot of these bands were on my radar as something that was out there, but didn't quite permeate the brain space. I would hear of things like the Veldt and Queen Sarah Saturday, but if the bands didn't make it to the Ritz I generally wouldn't have seen them and i don't think I was old enough to get in the Fallout Shelter. The Chapel Hill scene was just this thing that was just out of reach to a goodie two shoes kid who worked 36 hours a week at Harris Teeter in addition to school. When I finally got to Chapel Hill, the bands just were not part of my knowledge. It also doesn't help that the pressure of being the next Seattle was really breaking the scene apart. Many of the bands mentioned in the start of this book were giving up. People were succumbing to the addictions that fed on the lives of those that were touring musicians/ restaurant workers/ overall non-sleepers which describes nearly everyone in the book.

My biggest regret was neglecting to see three cradle shows that Ben Folds Five would have played at the peak of that band, despite fully knowing who they were. I mean at this point they had blown up thanks to Brick so I am sure some would argue that i was already too late, but after watching these videos last night: I realize the tight machine I missed out on.

It was also fun looking at the lives of two people I have come to know through the Inside Carolina world. One would help form the BoB (and I don't mean Gern, this book starts as the Pressure Boys cease to be) and one I am sure will come forth here if he wishes. I want to tread the dox line carefully, but reading this book you get the sense how he was one of the most beloved men in Chapel Hill, so Kudos to you.
 
altmin said:
I enjoyed it mostly, but I think forcing the main characters to be high school students who happen to be attending UNC in a special program was very much an eyeroll. It has all the marks of a publishing company bullying a new author to pigeon hole books into a young adult drama. "See these are high school kids, just like you guys!" It was just this stupid contrivance that felt artificially brought back up again at random times.
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I agree 100%. It was an unnecessary addition to the plot and didn't really add anything.
 
I've been beating my head trying to remember the book and author since we had Mann's Chapel discussion. Just now came to me.

Author is one of the guys who built the Mann's Chapel A-Frames. He writes about it and some other CH stuff in the book. From the review below you can get a pretty good feel of what he is like. (The bus was over taken by kudzu over the years.)


The counterculture of the 60s and 70s has been viewed as everything from naive to hedonistic. However, most of these views were formed by observing the movement from the outside. "Memoirs of an Ex-Hippie" offers a vastly different perspective, one developed from within.

After graduating college in 1968, Robert Roskind hit the road for seven years. Roskind's travels lead him into the heart of the counterculture--to Esalen Institute, Tassajara Hot Springs, Big Sur, Vancouver Island, the communes of Oregon and North Carolina, Altamont Pop Festival, Mt. Shasta, the Haight-Ashbury and the "motherland"--Northern California.

His personal odyssey, sometimes profane and funny, sometimes profound and serious, reveals this tumultuous era as a cultural and spiritual renaissance that birthed many of the solutions to problems humanity now faces.

81XB-uM-0GL._UF1000,1000_QL80_FMwebp_.webpAbout the Author
Robert Roskind is a writer and speaker. His ten books include "Rasta Heart: A Journey into One Love," "In the Spirit of Business," and "In the Spirit of Marriage," all traching unconditional love. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolna with his wife, Julia, and their daughter, Alicia.
 
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