Greensboro and High Point– Part Five

Of course I would never have been in High Point had my father not gotten a job there. This is him in that picture above on the right. He used to take me to Greensboro to see the Greensboro Yankees (including Mel Stottlemyre, Tommy Tresh, Bobby Mercer), but today they are…. wait for it, the Greensboro Grasshoppers! At least they have a nice little minor league park downtown, and you can hop right on the bus to get there or back again 🙂

And of course I was a child of the 60s and 70s, who loved playing my guitar and singing. Here were some of my Chapel Hill heroes. This is a rare performance of the whole clan of Taylor siblings…Alex (the oldest), James, Livingston, Kate and Hugh.

Their dad was a big wig in the medical school at UNC when I was there in the 70s. Music and story telling is at the heart of the culture in the middle of N.C. for example, there was the famous short story writer from Greensboro– William Sidney Porter otherwise known as O. Henry. Here’s a painting of him in the hotel in Greensboro named after him.

Real Books were and are big in Greensboro and High Point and Chapel Hill, though they are endangered species elsewhere. Do you remember the Christmas story— ‘The Gift of the Magi’? It was written by O. Henry.

The people of the Piedmont were creative folk, sometimes in a grandiose way. How about a concrete water feature in your front yard, featuring Greek gods! Can’t you just imagine this whole deal next to your mailbox in the front yard?

And here are my father and his brother Pat, who turned out to be as big a story tellers as the Taylor boys….