Robbing the Land of its Memory

 [From August 27, 2007]

"Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future." The Ministry of Truth, in George Orwell’s 1984.

After a long day’s ride down the Valley River Valley, nothing hits the spot like a bottle of Moet’s Champagne. 

That’s what one old geologist would tell you. 

During the summer of 1837 George Featherstonhaugh meandered around the mountains of Western North Carolina. On the morning of August 26, he left Franklin and took a difficult trail across the Nantahalas. Eventually he reached the Valley River Valley near present-day Andrews:

At sunset we stopped at a very indifferent place called Whitakers about thirty-two miles from Franklin. Here we got a very humble supper, about which I was less anxious than to get a mattrass to myself. The setting in of night always brings its anxieties on this point to me, my travelling companions were more sympathetic, and seemed to prefer "turning in" in pairs.

Featherstonhaugh awoke the next day and continued down the Valley River:

August 27.--A most beautiful morning found me at early dawn dipping water out of the stream to make my ablution saperto cielo, preparatory to a very scrubby breakfast. The method the Indians adopt of taking fish in this stream is a very destructive one. They cut a channel parallel to the stream, and damming this last up, turn the water into the new channel, seizing all the fish that are left in the shallow pools of the old bed. We continued our course S.W. down the valley on the right bank of the stream, the valley enlarging to a mile of rich bottom land surrounded by lofty and picturesque hills covered with fine woods.

This was the Paradise of the Cherokees, their wigwams being built on graceful knolls rising above the level of the river bottom, each of them having its patch of Indian corn with indigenous beans climbing to the top of each plant, and squashes and pumpkins growing on the ground. The valley now contracted as we advanced, but contained a great many thousand acres of the most fertile land. Any thing much more beautiful than this fine scene can scarcely be imagined; two noble lines of mountains enclosing a fertile valley with a lovely stream running through it. The whole vale has formerly been a lake.

I’ve read Featherstonhaugh’s account several times in the past without giving much thought to his statement that the whole valley had formerly been a lake. Featherstonhaugh was a geologist and it may be that any student of geology would recognize that the valley had contained a lake many thousands of year ago. I just don’t know, and my cursory research on the matter hasn’t provided an answer.

"The whole vale has formerly been a lake." Did he hear this from the same sources that told of Spanish gold mines in the mountains? Unfortunately, Featherstonhaugh left no other clues to explain the remark.

In an archaeological study of the Valley River Valley, Trawick Ward observed the valley’s modern farmers growing corn and soybeans and hay:

Obviously this environment represents a drastic alteration of prehistoric conditions by modern man. Prior to these modifications, areas within the valley floor that were subject to intermittent flooding were most likely ensconced by willows, cottonwoods, sycamores, silver maple, boxelder, and sugarberry…From ethnohistoric accounts and the archaeological record, it is evident that the animals occupying these habitats were not only plentiful but also varied, including some species that are locally extinct, e.g. elk, wolf, mountain lion, and bison.

But, alas, no word on any possible lake. Ward studied the Valley River floodplain in the 1970s after construction had begun on a new route for Highway 19-129 between Andrews and Murphy. Ward and his fellow researchers identified 23 sites that were partially or wholly within the highway right-of-way. The sites represented human occupation from the Early Archaic through the Late Woodland Period. 

Before detailed archaeological surveys could be completed, though, road builders disturbed or destroyed or paved over all of the sites, spanning an area 160 feet wide and fifteen miles long.

Thirty years ago, Trawick Ward watched the evidence of ancient civilizations bulldozed away in the name of progress. One hundred seventy years ago today, George Featherstonhaugh traveled the same route and witnessed the preparations for the impending removal of the Cherokees:

Leaving the river, we met in a defile, at no great distance, a company of mounted Franklin volunteers moving to the mouth of the Nantayáyhlay, a part of the North Carolina State troops employed in a surveillance over the Cherokees until their evacuation of the country should take place. They would have been perfectly in character in the uplands beyond Terracina, on the road to Naples, for I never saw any fellows in my life that came so thoroughly up to the notion entertained of banditti. …

About 2 P.M., we ascended a hill to Fort Butler [near Murphy], a temporary camp with a block-house built for the State troops upon this occasion: from hence we rode a mile to Hunter's, a tavern kept by a person of that name who had been long in the Cherokee country; it was most beautifully situated upon an eminence commanding a view of the Hiwassee, gracefully winding through the hills, and of the lovely country around. There was a clever little hut in a retired part of the garden belonging to this house, and beds being placed in it, it was assigned to us exclusively, so that we had some prospect of comfort. Perceiving some ladies in the house, one of whom was the wife of an officer of the United States army, we made our toilette rather more carefully.

The dinner was excellent, good soup, and a fine large trout from the river. We seemed restored to civilization, an idea that lost nothing by the introduction of a capital bottle of champagne, of which Hunter had brought a basket from Augusta, thinking the officers of the State troops would not sneeze at it; but either the price or something about it did not please them, and there Monsieur Moet was likely to have remained for some time "unknowing and unknown" but for our appearance. As it is not every day that Moet's champagne, and in the finest order, can be drank on the banks of the Hiwassee, in the Cherokee country, we formed the virtuous resolution of appropriating the whole basket to ourselves, and lost no time in putting a taboo upon it.

I don’t know how ceremoniously George Featherstonhaugh lifted a glass, but he could have dedicated this old Irish toast to any who would rob the land of its memory:

May you have the hindsight to know where you've been,
The foresight to know where you are going,
And the insight to know when you have gone too far.

George William Featherstonhaugh was a geologist and linguist who traveled through the mountains of Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina and compiled A Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor based on his diaries.

Woodland Mysteries

 [From August 25, 2010]

A walk through the woods this time of year yields some interesting sights.



For instance, this fungus on a tree trunk resembles wet noodles…or mucous membrane.

I wish I could tell you what it is.

One pretty, but rather unassuming, wildflower from this past weekend also has me mystified. The feature that caught my attention was the spiral arrangement of the blooms running up the stem.

You might not know this, but in the Northern Hemisphere, such blooms always run in a clockwise pattern. If you go wildflowering south of the equator, however, you’ll see that any spiral of blooms runs in a counter-clockwise pattern.

Amazing, eh?

But back to the weekend mystery flower. I’ve decided that it is some type of goldenrod (Solidago genus). It is not what I picture when I think of goldenrod. Here's the typical goldenrod:

This large specimen from my pasture is the Common Goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis). Or at least I think it is. Upon researching the possible identity of my spiraling goldenrod, a much smaller plant, I considered and then ruled out some possibilities like the Roan Mountain Goldenrod (S. roanensis) and the Blue-stemmed Goldenrod (S. caesia).

At times like this, I really need to move beyond the wildflower guides and start using a key to help with identification. Maybe next year.

By the way, I was only joking about the clockwise and counter-clockwise arrangement of blooms…in a lame attempt at some wildflower humor. On this subject, I did find a reference to an article by H. A. Allard, The Ratios of Clockwise and Counterclockwise Spirality Observed in the Phyllotaxy of Some Wild Plants, (Castanea, The Journal of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Club, March 1951). http://www.jstor.org/pss/4031467

That’s certainly one citation to add to my library list and perhaps I’ll pick up a copy of the article this week. Comparing Allard’s information with some of my texts on sacred geometry sounds like an evening’s entertainment to me.

Concerning the spiral goldenrod, I felt a little better about my trouble identifying the plant after finding this note in Gray's Manual of Botany:

Solidago is one of our most difficult genera. Natural hybridization frequently occurs. For proper study, full specimens, showing subterranean parts and basal leaves as well as the whole flowering stem, are essential.

.

Paradise Gardens

Talk about convergences!  Earlier this month, I posted a story with a brief mention of Joe Hollis.  Around the same time, I was feasting on a series of videos produced by Peter Santenello, the best documentaries I've seen online (or anywhere else) in a long time.  Peter's profile of "Titus" is splendid.  Then, just this week I heard about a viral video pertaining to a man with a garden in Yancey County, North Carolina.  I guessed that Peter had caught up with Joe Hollis, and I was correct.  Thirteen years ago, I spent some time at Joe's and shared this story...

[From August 22, 2010]

If you ever have the good fortune to sit down with Joe Hollis, he might explain that the molecules of hemoglobin and chlorophyll share an uncanny similarity. Look around his place and you’ll see that Joe has found a thousand ways to honor the connection between plants and people suggested by that bit of biochemical lore.



Forty years ago, Joe Hollis moved off the grid and onto two acres of land bordering the Pisgah National Forest, where he started building a collection of useful plants. He didn’t stop with common plants or plants native to this area, but sought plants from similar habitats on other continents.

The closest analog to the botanical diversity of the Southern Appalachians is found in the mountains of China. The plants growing in a Smokies cove are mirrored by plants of the same genus, if not the same species, in a Chinese mountain cove:

Over 50 such genera of plants include magnolias, hickory, sassafras, ginseng, mayapple, skunk cabbage, several orchids, jack-in-the-pulpit, coffee-tree, stewartia, witch hazel, dogwoods, persimmons, hollies, sumacs, maples, and yellowood. Several animal taxa also show unique affinities with East Asian relatives, including copperheads (Agkistrodon spp.), hellbender salamanders (Cryptobranchidae family), some land snails, and paddlefish (Polyodon spathula).
[Source - http://www.eoearth.org/article/Appalachian-Blue_Ridge_forests]

In the course of gathering useful plants from around the world, Hollis put together what may be the richest collection of Chinese medicinal plants growing in the United States. On my quick tour of his gardens, I saw flowers and plants I’ve never seen and might never see again. He doesn’t merely grow the plants but has assembled a significant research library of books on the subject and has processed the plants into tinctures and dried form. For a small fee, anyone can pick and choose from the neatly arranged shelves of natural medicines grown onsite to fill a customized prescription of botanical remedies.

Interns initiate and carry out many projects at the gardens, including the construction of yurts and graceful earth-sheltered cob dwellings fashioned from little more than sticks and mud. Some might say Joe Hollis lives in the past. I would say he is a pioneer of our future.

But enough of that. Here’s more from Joe, in his own words:

Although I am always up for 'reasoning together', because only upon the bedrock of a solid understanding of where we're at will we be able to build a new world (the Greeks called this ataraxy), my real purpose here is to reach out to like-minds and reason together how to get out of this mess.

Because we are all part of the cancer.

We were born into it, it is our world, even more real to us than the real world Gaia. For all of us, 'making a living' means 'making money' - and money is the life blood of the cancer. We turn to nature for beauty, inspiration, solace; but our life support system is civilization, the State/Economy, which grows by eating away and poisoning Gaia. To recognize this is one thing (actually, a very big thing), but it's not the answer; it's just accurately defining the problem.

All we can do is walk away from it, which means, at the simplest and most obvious level, making less money every year. Without being any less (actually, in my experience more) happy and healthy. This is accomplished by fulfilling the needs formerly satisfied with money directly from the earth, like every other living creature. This activity, properly conceived, I call Paradise Gardening. In the world which I imagine, each family or, better, band, or even small village, would be the nucleus of a Paradise Garden cell.

I believe we are right now at a point where we change - or bust. We began as hunter-gatherers, from which happy and healthy state we were shanghaied by greedy men ("Civilization begins in conquest and continues in repression" - until by now most have no idea how repressed they are). Since then we have come a long way and done a lot of damage - to Gaia, to each other, to ourselves. New York City perhaps approaches in complexity the disappearing Amazon rain forest. But at least some of us have learned a lot from our mistakes.

So now, or never, the next step in human evolution, the New Age. Hunter-gatherer (who we really are) plus what we have learned from Civilization generates Paradise. The gradual development of a Paradise cell around you equals your gradual withdrawal from the cancer. I'm not talking about a way to live on earth, I'm talking about the way to live on earth, the way that is in our bones and genes: occupying our rightful and ordained niche. Of course these Paradise cells will be all different, varying with bioregions and topography and personal proclivities. What they will share is richness of diversity and fertility.

This, at the simplest and most obvious level, is the 'purpose' of Gaia: ever increasing diversity and inter-connectedness, an ever denser web of life woven around the planet. (Of course there are many other levels on which to consider the 'purpose' of Gaia, and of humans within her, and in the future which I imagine many of us would devote much of our abundant 'leisure time' to such considerations, and to practices opening ourselves to conscious communication with Gaia, but right this minute the house is on fire.) We must walk - don't run - away. Calmly, considerately, and immediately, we must begin to walk away.

We must begin to get and spend less (it wastes our powers anyway) and enjoy life more.

Grass of Parnassus

 It is the ideal time now (at least in these parts) to seek one of my favorite wildflowers, Grass of Parnassus, a flower that would be the star of any bog. I have one particular place to visit it each year, but do you think I would divulge that location on this website?  Of course not!  Instead, I offer a photograph that I took several summers ago:

Grass of Parnassus, or Bog-Star, Parnassia asarifolia, Haywood County, NC, 8/23/18  

       Grass of Parnassus

Pale star that by the lochs of Galloway,

   In wet green places ’twixt the depth and height

Dost keep thine hour while Autumn ebbs away,

   When now the moors have doffed the heather bright,

   Grass of Parnassus, flower of my delight,

How gladly with the unpermitted bay—

Garlands not mine, and leaves that not decay—

   How gladly would I twine thee if I might!

The bays are out of reach!  But far below

   The peaks forbidden of the Muses’ Hill,

Grass of Parnassus, thy returning snow

   Between September and October chill

Doth speak to me of Autumns long ago,

   And these kind faces that are with me still.

p. 1

 - Andrew Lang, ca. 1888

A Landscape of Neurological Nets Underfoot

 [From August 19, 2009]

The universe, and in particular planet Earth, is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
-Thomas Berry

I love a challenge and saving the Planet seems like a good one....I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes.
-Paul Stamets





I’m still sorting through the many wildflowers I’ve photographed this year, and intend to devote some study time this winter to be a better taxonomist next year. Even so, I recognize that learning to identify individual plant species unlocks only a few of the secrets of the Southern Appalachian forest.

This week I hiked a couple of miles on the Sugarland Mountain Trail, between Newfound Gap and Clingman’s Dome. In a place like this, it’s not unusual to find an abundance of epiphytes like mosses and lichens growing on trees. But at one point on this trail, you can look up and see red spruce trees that have sprouted and are growing from the broad limbs of the yellow birch trees.


Twenty feet up, red spruce trees have sprouted on the limb of a yellow birch.

That’s just a tiny example of the complex, and sometimes unexpected, relationships among the organisms of the high elevation forest. If I didn’t already recognize how little I know about forest ecology, the various mushrooms that I observed along the trail were constant reminders. As I learned only recently, mushrooms are no longer classified as plants but are included in the separate and distinct Kingdom of Fungi.

Looking at the forest as a mere collection of trees and flowers is to overlook the crucial role of saprobes and mycorrhizae. Paul Stamets calls the web of fungi that pervades the forest "a neurological net."

Recently, I read an article on myco-forestry, or “the cultivation of fungi as part of forest agriculture.” In the New Life Journal story, Zev Friedman drew the connection beween fungi and the hemlocks disappearing so rapidly from the Southern Appalachians. One mushroom, the Appalachian Reishi (Ganoderma tsugae) grows on dead hemlock trees.

According to the Friedman, the closely related Chinese Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) is known as the "mushroom of immortality" because of its pharmacologic value:

Clinical trials have verified many effects of reishis, including potent anti-tumor (sarcoma and hepatoma) action, adaptogenic and immune stimulating qualities, and spleen cell regeneration. Reishis also seem to possess anti-hypertensive and anti-allergenic properties.

He explains how Ganoderma tsugae could be cultivated in the forest garden:

Dying hemlocks can be cut down, inoculated with reishi mycelium in May or June, and staked along the topographic contours of hills as retaining edges for paths or native medicinal plant beds, simultaneously decreasing erosion and runoff while building topsoil. The fungus decomposes the log more quickly into mulch and soil than would occur without human intervention, while producing highly valuable medicinal and edible mushrooms for many years.



The entire article is at:
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/It's+good+to+grow+mushrooms%3a+Zev+Friedman+dishes+the+dirt+on...-a0199193902

Paul Stamets has a fine article on "Permaculture with a Mycological Twist" at https://fungi.com/blogs/articles/permaculture-with-a-mycological-twist

A visionary mycologist, Stamets is one of the heroic geniuses of our day:

I see the mycelium as the Earth's natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape.
-Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Foraging for Sochan

 [From August 8, 2010]

Eventually, the food movement had to go this far. As soon as a lot of people started buying organic, locally grown farmers'-market fare, food snobs had to do something else to feel superior. They had to look down on the masses' reliance on the whole modernized "growing food on purpose" thing. They had to go back to a more honest, preagricultural method: foraging.
Time Magazine, July 26, 2010

I was on my way home from a weekend of permaculture study.

With no reason to be in a hurry, I turned from the Blue Ridge Parkway at Craggy Gardens and walked the trail to the summit. Always one of my favorite short hikes, it was no exception this time. I nibbled on wild blueberries and watched the roiling fog obscure and reveal range upon range of mountains, looking like waves in the ocean.

When I got to the observation deck at the top, a man and his teenage son were enjoying the sky show. One second, the quickly dropping sun gilded a row of clouds, and then the fog would take away the view of the sun completely.

They both had some good stories, and the three of us talked for a while. I mentioned “permaculture” and explained it in brief, and that I’d just been briefed in the culinary potential of native woodland plants. Coincidentally, the dad had just read a Time article on high-end chefs using foraged ingredients. I told him I’d look it up and read it, and he said he’d find out more about permaculture. After I got home, I did find the Time story, Joel Stein’s “Into the Woods.”

…searching the woods or parks or even cracks in the pavement for edible plants has become the latest culinary obsession. In June, forageSF's Iso Rabins gathered 70 vendors and 2,000 customers in San Francisco for his once-a-month Underground Market for foraged food. There's a restaurant in Los Angeles called Forage that lets people take in stuff they find (or, for slackers, grow in their gardens) to exchange for credit toward their dinner. Meanwhile, menus across the land are listing wild leeks, fiddlehead ferns, stinging nettles and berries you've never heard of.

Chris Hastings of the Hot and Hot Fish Club in Birmingham, Ala., often goes foraging and explains its appeal: "You can pursue a bunch of b_______ cooking like sous vide this or sous vide that or foam this or foam that, but to celebrate wild, foraged things and get back to an elemental place is an intellectually much more interesting place for me as a chef." In early summer his customers can order a completely foraged dessert. "It freaks them out," he says. "The flavors are intense. They're unique. They're not like a cultivated strawberry."

…Tyler Gray of Oregon-based Mikuni Wild Harvest sometimes rides the New York City subway with $50,000 worth of foraged truffles in his backpack. "It's such a crazy subculture," he says of food finders, who speak in "traveling-gypsy code," as he puts it. "You don't want anyone to know where you're foraging," says Gray, whose truck has been shot at while he was out searching for food.

Ava Chin, who blogs about urban foraging for the New York Times, won't say where in the city she once found nearly 100 morels. She recently tapped a maple tree near her Brooklyn apartment, which upset her neighbors. "In New York, everyone freaks out and figures you must be hurting the tree," she says. "I don't know where they think maple syrup comes from."

Even with its many jumps around the map, the Time article leaves out a lot. The story succeeded in bringing a worthwhile topic to broader awareness, while it came close to trivializing the subject.

Actually, foraging can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it. We could talk about it from the perspective of anthropology, biology, spirituality, economics, ecology....or as a pop culture fad.

Euell Gibbons told us how to fry up a batch of elderberry blossom fritters. The question is, why would you want to? A new generation of wild foodies is advancing the concept of knowing when to pick, and how to prepare, native plants so they aren’t merely edible, but delicious. Among the books to emerge from this new wave is Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods From Dirt To Plate, by John Kallas.



Green-headed Coneflower

Here in the Southern Appalachians, one wild plant that happens to be blooming right now, is considered by many the number one native plant deserving a place on the plate. If you know it by the flower, you might call it green-headed coneflower. But if you treasure it for the spring greens from the young plants, then you might call it sochan. Several years ago in the Smoky Mountain News, George Ellison described it.

Sochan (“Rudbeckia laciniatum”), called green-headed coneflower by non-Indians, is one of the most prized spring greens the Cherokees gather. They sometimes call it “sochani.” Many of their gardens have semi-cultivated patches of the plant in protected areas. Closely related to black-eyed Susan (“Rudbeckia hirta”), it grows to 10 feet tall in wet areas and along damp woodland borders. The flower heads that appear in mid-summer are about three inches wide with drooping yellow rays and a center disk (unlike the purple disk of black-eyed Susan) that’s greenish-yellow.

The Cherokees recognize sochan as soon as it comes out of the ground in mid-spring by its distinctive irregularly divided leaves and smell. Consult your wildflower field guides for flower and leaf-shape diagrams of green-headed coneflower. Then you will be able to locate the plant this summer along backcountry roadways when it’s in full bloom. Mark the spot and return next spring for greens. Prepare the young shoots and leaves (boiled with several changes of water) have a rich texture and zesty flavor. It’s even good cold as a snack with a little vinegar added. In the opinion of many - this writer included - sochan is the very finest of the traditional potherbs gathered in the Blue Ridge region.

Though you certainly would not have to go that far to find it, the walk to the top of Clingman’s Dome takes you through acres of green-headed coneflower blooms...or next year’s sochan patch. Considering how these things go, I wouldn’t be surprised to find sochan on the menu of any hip restaurant in Asheville or Sylva come next spring.

As permaculture makes more inroads into the culture, what’s old is new again. (After thinking further on this, I'm not sure it is a matter of permaculture making inroads. Permaculture reflects the deepest and most eternal laws of nature, and nature has plenty of self-correcting strategies to deal with anyone who would defy those laws.)

For more links on this - http://lifeisfare.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/the-latest-culinary-obsession-foraging/

Black and White

[From October 4, 2007]

A dusty box of old family photos attracted my attention recently. I’ve been taking some time to scan the photos and identify people and places pictured in the old prints. I’ve found a few photos that aren’t your usual family portraits or vacation snapshots. Here’s the story for one of those pictures....

click on photo for better view

It was a thrill to play for the Padres. The fans cheered and my feeling was it was because I was a San Diego boy making good. It had nothing to do with race. – John Ritchey

At first glance, nothing is particularly remarkable about the black-and-white photograph, a simple portrait of a visiting team, waiting to play in the World Series of the American Legion baseball league.

Growing up in Albemarle, North Carolina some years later, I knew that one of the most exciting and memorable events in the town’s history was winning the 1940 national championship in front of the home crowd. To prepare for the finals, a crew of 100 carpenters added bleachers to the little ball park. All the stores and schools in town were ordered to close early on game days. Governor Clyde R. Hoey came from Raleigh to throw out the first ball.

Thousands thronged to the games. Albemarle’s star pitcher would be known as "Lefty" for the rest of his life.

That was the legend I knew.

But only after finding the photograph of San Diego’s American Legion Post 6 team did I learn there was much more to the story. At the instant that my father, Frank Eury, snapped the shutter, one player on the second row was partially obscured from view, cap pulled down, chin in hand. The player’s name was John Ritchey.

A powerful hitter, Ritchey was 15 years old when he propelled San Diego’s title run in 1938. The team advanced to the national semifinals in Spartanburg, SC, where officials barred Ritchey and another African-American player, Nelson Manuel [second row, second from right] from the game. Nevertheless, San Diego managed to overcome the racist chicanery and took the national championship that year.

Ritchey’s coach, Mike Morrow, was a San Diego legend whose high school teams included whites, blacks and Hispanics. Well into a successful season of American Legion play in 1940, Morrow wanted to prevent a repeat of 1938's player ban. For the national semifinals played in Shelby, NC, officials did allow Ritchey and Manuel to take the field.

Following their semifinals win, San Diego moved on to the finals against Albemarle. Anticipating problems, Coach Morrow threatened to take his entire team back to California if his players were ruled ineligible.

Two days before the first game, the Charlotte Observer reported it was "understood" that officials would allow them to play. One day before the opener, the newspaper (under the headline "Colored Boys Will Start for Pacifics") added:

A telegraphic poll conducted today by a Charlotte sportscaster brought replies from many North Carolina and out-of-state towns, all requesting that the colored lads be allowed to play.

The next day, reporting on the outcome of the first game, the paper stated that Ritchey and Manuel watched from the dugout because national Legion officials made the request not to use black players.

San Diego took the first two games over Albemarle by scores of 6-5 and 3-2, but Albemarle came back to tie the series with 6-3 and 7-5 victories against the California team.

In the fifth and deciding game, Albemarle held off a frantic San Diego rally to take a 9-8 win and claim the title. Although he was not allowed to play in the finals, John Ritchey was awarded a trophy as the tournament’s leading hitter.

In a wrap-up on the series, September 7, 1940, Observer sports writer Jake Wade addressed the controversy:

A crowd of something like 12,500 wrote history, with frenzied emotion such as has never been witnessed in a ball park in the Carolinas.

The crowd did not always behave so nicely. Parts of the crowd, I should say. The boos for the San Diego colored boys, when Coach Mike Morrow of the Coasters ill-advisedly had them warming up, was brutal. No credit to those who were guilty in this baseball crazy, partisan-mad assembly that overflowed Efird-Wiscassett Park.

Wade concluded:

Albemarle grasped it. Lisk flicked his pitch-out. The runner on third was nailed flat-footed. The ball game was over. Albemarle’s young men were junior champions of the world. The house came down, and tonight the bells were still ringing, the horns blowing, hoarse voices still whooping. The little kingpins were being accorded a rousing salute, and no kingpins deserved one more.

Art Cohn, sports editor for the Oakland Tribune, took a harder line against the ouster of San Diego’s players:

A great club, that San Diego team. It waded through the local, State, sectional and National play-offs and loomed as a cinch for the title. Until it hit Albemarle. Then hell broke loose.

Once below the Mason and Dixon, the most un-American of prejudices, racial discrimination, reared its ugly head, and, as a result, two regulars on the San Diego team were ruled ineligible. It seems that John Ritchey and Nelson Manuel, the two boys involved, had been found guilty…of being Negroes.

Ritchey and Manuel were good enough to play with and against their white brothers in California, Arizona, and even in Shelby, North Carolina, but it was a different story in Albemarle. There the good citizens had not yet learned that the Civil War recently ended.

So San Diego took the field for the first time without Ritchey and Manuel, and San Diego was beaten for the first time. It was a great triumph for Albemarle. The village should be proud of its contribution to American tolerance.

In a 1995 interview, John Ritchey recalled his life in baseball and his disastrous trip to Albemarle:

My earliest memories are of playing baseball, because there wasn't anything else to do. Most of my friends were White. Peanuts [Henry Savin] was a Mexican kid. The others were Nelson Manuel, Billy Williams, William Indalecio, Tom and Luis Ortiz. We played sandlot ball and the San Diego Police sponsored the league. Nelson was easy going and one time he got a job selling ice cream. It only lasted for one day, because he ate too much of the ice cream he was supposed to sell. He didn't get to eat much at home. They were good times playing with my friends....

With Post 6, I was taking batting practice in Albemarle and I hit a couple of line drives over the fence. They wouldn’t let me play for the National Championship game!

During World War II, Ritchey served as a staff sergeant in the Army Corps of Engineers and earned five battle stars from duty in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and Berlin. After the war, Ritchey returned to baseball and led the Negro American League with a .369 batting average in 1947. The following year, he broke the color barrier in the Pacific Coast League when he joined the San Diego Padres, had seven hits in his first 11 at-bats and finished the season with a .323 average.

Although he never played in the major leagues, Ritchey enjoyed a successful baseball career until his retirement from the game in 1955. After baseball, Johnny and his wife Lydia raised a family in San Diego, where he worked as a deliveryman with Continental Bread Company for twenty years. Ritchey died in 2003 at the age of 80.

Two years later the San Diego Padres paid tribute to the "Jackie Robinson of the West Coast" by unveiling a bronze bust of John Ritchey. Tom Shanahan writes about what happened when family and friends raised money for the sculpture:

San Diego baseball historian Bill Swank came across some stories that tell us about John Ritchey as a man. "One guy said Johnny Ritchey didn’t know him, but he knew Johnny," Swank said. "He donated $200 because every time he saw Johnny around [San Diego State University] he would smile and say hello. He said he never forgot what a nice guy he was, and he knew what Johnny had been through in North Carolina."

Swank said a woman donated money because Ritchey had once rescued her from being taunted on campus by some bullies. Think about that for a moment: In 1940, Ritchey, a black man, stopped white bullies from tormenting a white girl.

"She said Johnny Ritchey’s bust should be made out of gold," Swank recalled.

Looking again at the photograph, I see nothing particularly remarkable in the image. Young ballplayers, far from home, looking a bit distracted. A team photo, not so different from thousands of others. Light and shadow of one split second from a September day, creating a picture of victory and defeat, pride and shame, back in my home town.

More at:

A Baseball Legend Worth Knowing

Interview from The Journal of San Diego History

Addendum 

After documenting this story, I contacted two distinguished aficionados of San Diego baseball history, Tom Shanahan and Bill Swank.  As a result, John Ritchey's family received a print of the photograph that prompted this article.  Also, the following year, Tom published the following article on the Voice of San Diego website:

Johnny Ritchey’s Silent Protest

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 | A little-known page of San Diego sports history, spoiled by the shameful era of Jim Crow America, resurfaced recently when a guy named Perry Eury in North Carolina dug through a dusty box of old family photographs.

Frozen in time, like a clip taken from a Ken Burns baseball documentary, is a black-and-while photograph snapped by Eury’s father. It shows a broken-hearted pose struck by Johnny Ritchey, San Diego’s least appreciated athlete in our region’s pantheon of sports legends.

The year was 1940 — seven years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The team photo was taken in Albemarie, N.C., a town below the Mason-Dixon Line. The event was the American Legion baseball national championship between San Diego and Albemarie.

At the time, Ritchey was a 17-year-old kid that had led the San Diego’s American Legion Post No. 6 to the national championship series. He would take home a trophy as the tournament’s leading hitter, even though he was barred from playing in the finals, a best-of-five series.

Ritchey would go on to become an historic figure as the “The Jackie Robinson of the Pacific Coast League.” And that makes this a good week, with the Padres’ Salute to the Negro Leagues Saturday night at Petco Park, to tell a story about a man not enough San Diegans appreciate.

He broke the PCL color line in 1948 for the minor-league San Diego Padres at old Lane Field. It was a year after Ritchey, a catcher, was the Negro Leagues batting champion with a .381 average for the Chicago American Giants.

A loophole in Ritchey’s contract with the American Giants, and Robinson’s barrier-breaking season, allowed the Padres to sign a hometown hero.

Ritchey had played baseball at San Diego State before he earned five battle stars in World War II. He served as a staff sergeant with the Army Corps of Engineers at Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and Berlin.

But barriers still stood in 1940, even for a kid accustomed to playing on lineups with white, black and Hispanic teammates that were typical of legendary coach Mike Morrow’s rosters for American Legion ball and his San Diego High teams.

Upon dusting off the photo, Eury did some research, and he subsequently sent a copy to Bill Swank, a San Diego baseball historian.

At first glance, the photo appears to be a case of Eury’s father snapping the camera shutter when the players weren’t ready. Ritchey looks down, the bill of his cap pulled low to hide his face, with his chin buried in his left hand

Swank, who knew Ritchey and his personality, is convinced the pose is more than a case of an impatient athlete bored with the photographer’s pace. Swank believes Ritchey’s forlorn look was the deliberate pose. It was his way of protesting this shameful time in America.

It would be another generation before black track and field athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos struck a defiant pose at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

In 1940, the exclusion of Ritchey from the championship series wasn’t an event that caught people off-guard. Before San Diego traveled below the Mason-Dixon Line, Morrow had gained assurances that there wouldn’t be a repeat of 1938 when Ritchey and teammate Nelson Manuel, another black player for San Diego, were barred from American Legion finals. That was the year San Diego beat Spartanburg, S.C., in Spartanburg.

But a decision by national Legion officials to bar Ritchey and Manuel from the finals came after they had already played in San Diego’s semifinal victory in Shelby, N.C.

In the final, San Diego won the first two games before Albemarie won the next two and the decisive fifth game, 9-8. Ritchey and Manuel, both regulars, watched from the dugout.

Eury’s research included an account of the series published on Sept. 7 in the Charlotte Observer that was written by sports editor Jake Wade.

“A crowd of something like 12,500 wrote history, with frenzied emotion such as has never been witnessed in a ball park in the Carolinas. The crowd did not always behave so nicely. Parts of the crowd, I should say. The boos for the San Diego colored boys, when Coach Mike Morrow of the Coasters ill-advisedly had them warming up, was brutal.”

Eury’s research also found this story written by Art Cohn, sports editor for the Oakland Tribune:

“A great club, that San Diego team. It waded through the local, State, sectional and National play-offs and loomed as a cinch for the title. Until it hit Albemarle. Then hell broke loose. Once below the Mason and Dixon, the most un-American of prejudices, racial discrimination, reared its ugly head, and, as a result, two regulars on the San Diego team were ruled ineligible. It seems that John Ritchey and Nelson Manuel, the two boys involved, had been found guilty…of being Negroes. Ritchey and Manuel were good enough to play with and against their white brothers in California, Arizona, and even in Shelby, North Carolina, but it was a different story in Albemarle.”

The man known as the Jackie Robinson of the Pacific Coast League should also be the kid that led San Diego’s American Legion Post No. 6 to two national titles in 1938 and 1940.

Tom Shanahan is voiceofsandiego.org‘s sports columnist. He is the media coordinator for the San Diego Hall of Champions and an occasional writer for Chargers.com. You can e-mail him at toms@sdhoc.com. 

https://voiceofsandiego.org/2008/06/17/johnny-ritcheys-silent-protest/

Tripping Through the Valley of the Green Bird

One a recent walk along the Little Tennessee River, I encountered a tree with heart-shaped leaves and long pods hanging from its branches.  An ID for the tree did not come to mind immediately, but then I saw a large green caterpillar munching on one leaf and it all started coming back to me.  

I had encountered catalpas in South Carolina's Eastatoe Valley and wrote about it January 10, 2009, and no, I didn't catch a catalpa buzz.  Catalpas and trilliums are still thriving.  Sadly, Bob's Place (the oldest tavern in South Carolina) burned down a few years ago.

 

Lighting the hallucinogenic catalpa. [For demonstration purposes only.]



I took a right turn at Bob’s Place, just before the Road Kill Grill, and descended into the Valley of the Green Bird.



Whenever I visit this place, I think of the trilliums that grow here, in abundance, thanks to an anomaly of Appalachian geology. I’ve been told that one hill alone hosts seven different varieties of the flower. Of course, that rainbow of trilliums is hidden underground for the next couple of months.

The "Green Bird" - the extinct Carolina Parakeet

Here are some things I’ve just learned – trilliums have a symbiotic relationship with ants. The fruit of the trillium matures, splits open, and releases its seeds in late summer. Attached to those seeds are nutritious, lipid-rich elaisomes, especially attractive to ants.

The ants carry the seeds back to their nests, where they eat the elaisomes and discard the seeds intact. Waste disposal sites, enriched by the carcasses of dead ants and ant feces, form fertile seedbeds. The seeds over-winter before germinating. The first year, they develop only a small root; the second year, a rudimentary leaf; a year or two later, a single true leaf. In a couple of more years, the plant produces three leaves and, after another year, the trillium finally flowers. The cycle can take six years or more from seed to flower.



Trilliums aren’t the only evidence of persistence in the valley. The old homesteads and farm fields still look like they belong here.

One of those patches of ground called out to me and I pulled over for a closer look. I could see this land had been farmed for centuries. A large pasture stretched out to the edge of the creek that runs through the middle of this valley. Between the pasture and the road was a garden plot lined by several gnarled apple trees and one cigar tree. Dark slender pods, a foot or longer, hung from all the limbs of that tree better known as the catalpa.



Supposedly, the tree was a totem for the Catawba Indians, and it was only due to a transcription error by a botanist that the name "Catalpa," rather than "Catawba" was applied to the tree. To my way of thinking, it’s one of those humble trees that doesn’t get its due respect. With a thick covering of heart-shaped leaves it provides a protected refuge for many species of birds.

If you want to catch catfish, remember this:

The tree is favored by the Catalpa Sphinx moth. The caterpillars of that moth eat the leaves of the catalpa, and are such an excellent live bait for fishing that some dedicated anglers maintain small groves of the trees, just to have a reliable source of "catawba-worms".

Indians smoked the catalpa seed pods for the hallucinogenic effect, which is why the tree became known as the "Indian Cigar Tree." I’d be more than happy to report on anyone else’s experience in this regard. I believe I’ll pass, but I do have a couple of pods for anyone who wants to give it a try.

Go ahead.

Light up.

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.

Who knows? Maybe the Green Bird will make an encore appearance.

After that 2009 account of Eastatoe's catalpas posted, I received a number of comments, including the following.  (It was always lovely to learn from the readers of these tales, "back in the day.")

From Joe:

Back where I'm originally from (the Chicago area) we had what I presume to be a northern catalpa next door, all throughout my youth (we called it a cigar tree). And after I moved away years ago, my dad convinced the neighbor to cut it down. You know, you can't really not understand, being the normal dude he is--what with the mess of flowers and pods it left all over the suburban lawn--but I always thought it was quite a mysterious tree. Had I known of its fish catching and hallucinogenic qualities, well, I might have been more adamant of its right to be. But it's good to learn these things later than never. 

And from Anonymous:

never heard about smoking a catalpa. i know someone who might try it.

trilliums are often inconspicuously absent from reclaimed old fields in the smokies. i would never have thought about this but a few summers ago a friend was looking for some trillium patches to study the ant dispersal of the seeds. if you drive above twin creek on the loop road above gatlinburg there are many old fields that still have remains of fence rows and terraces.

there are no trilliums.

none.

around the edges, in what had remained more or less intact forest, you may find trilliums. they have not managed to diffuse across the landscape via our formicine friends in the 75-80 years since the inception of the park.

what other wonders such as these are hidden from our view by the veil of ignorance, by not having ever watched an ant visit a plant.

Hill Billy Rave had the scoop on Bob's Place:

Bob's Place down off of the Pickens Highway is commonly known as "Scatter Brain's". Story is someone got mean and the proprietor blew his brains out with a shotgun. I don't know how far back that was, I heard it when I was a little kid.

And, like me, Duck Hunter knew Bob's Place as a landmark, rather than a destination:

On my way out to some waterfalls I always know to turn at Bob's Place. Not sure what road that is... just turn at Bob's.

There are always people sitting on the porch up there with a drink. Doesn't appear a place for a stranger to visit.