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This blog is going dark for awhile, perhaps permanently, as Jim works on a book of Greensboro history. Thanks to all the visitors and commenters.

The man who broke into attorney Thomas Worth's house in Lindley Park last Sunday, only to be wrestled to the floor and subdued by Worth,
was lucky the incident didn't happen during the first half of the 20tth century.

The accused is free on $4,000 bond. In the old days, he would be in jail without bond facing a possible death sentence.

Until the 1960s, breaking into an occupied home was a capital offense in North Carolina, even if no one was killed or injured during the burglary.

Between 1910, when the state took over executions from the counties, and 1957, ten men died in the state's electric chair and gas chamber for burglary.

They included, Arthor Morris of Raleigh, nicknamed the "Grey Mouse," executed in Sept, 1939, for breaking into the home of a Raleigh physician and stealing 20 cents and a check that he couldn't cash. Gov. Clyde Hoey, in refusing clemency, said Morris had committed 50 other burglaries.

James Marshall, 30, went to his death in 1938 for entering a home in Wayne County and taking a straw hat and a fountain pen. News stories said he had previously kidnapped and robbed a man. That may have led to his getting death for the unrelated burglary.

On Oct. 27, 1939, Willie Richardson of Nash County, died for a burglary in which he stole an empty pocketbook and a pack of cigarettes. Richardson told authorities he didn't know his age but it was guessed at 21 or 22.

Between 1939 and 1957 only two executions took place for burglary. Juries and judges apparently decided burglaries without injuries didn't merit a death sentence.

The last execution for burglary, 30-year-old Ross McAfee of Alexander County, Nov. 22, 1957, involved injury to a 17-year-old girl whose throat was slashed during an unsuccessful rape attempt.

Rape also was a capital crime. Numerous executions for the crime took place through the 1950s in cases where the victim was not killed.

In modern times, the state has limited capital punishment to first-degree murder.

Even if it had been the 1930s, the Lindley Park burglar may have been in line for a life sentence instead of death. He is white. All of those executed for burglary were black.

It must have been some kind of ruckus if it caused church to be called off the next morning.

As the saying goes, there's nothing worst than a church fight, even among peace loving Moravians.

Read about it in the 13th edition of "The Records of the Moravians in North Carolina (1867-1876)," just published by the N.C. Office of Archives and History.

The volumes compile diary entries of Moravanian ministers starting with the early exploration of Moravians in the area in 1752 and the eventual establishment of Old Salem and other Moravian communities in Forsyth County.

The records from diaries and church minutes are easy reading, but sometimes the ministers leave out facts vital to understanding an event, such as what happened on Dec. 21, 1867.

"Owing to the difficulties that took place last night in reference to the singing, decoration, etc, there was no preaching today,'' said a diary entry. "Brother Solomon Transou called on me about 10 o'clock to see what could be done to mend up matters, as certain parties had determined to tear down the decoration tomorrow morning.."

The minister writing the diary suggested that the best way to resolve the matter was to call the church committee together that afternoon and "try and make some adjustment of the unhappy affair."

The committee met, the writer said, "and after talking the matter over it was concluded to ring the bell and get the people together, and I should set the whole matter before them, which was accordingly done, and in half an hour everything was amicable arranged to the satisfaction of all parties, and on separating good feeling again prevailed and thus ended one of the stormiest scenes it has ever been my misfortune to participate in, and I hope I may never witness the like again."

And that was that. No explanation was forthcoming about what got everyone so worked that church was canceled the next day.

Daniel Crews, archivist of the Moravian Church, Southern Province and co-editor of the volume, says he can't answer what happened.

He guesses that the Christmas decorations were put up differently than previous years and some people liked them, others didn't.

Crews said it is little things like that that can lead to ugly quabbles in a church.

He said whatever happened, it made sense that church wasn't held that Sunday before Christmas.

As Moravians and brothers and sisters in Christ, Crews said, if a dispute breaks out "we ought to work it out before we come into the house of the Lord and glare at each other."

The book also contains entries about dealings between white and black Moravians, about the founding of Kernersville, about snow storms and other daily events in the Forsyth area and about life in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

The 13th Volume, Crews said, will be the last in a series that began in 1922. The project was important because for decades Moravian ministers wrote entries in German. A translation was needed.

He says other books and records in English are available about church history since 1877.

Of course, he recalled, Volume 11 was supposed to be the last. Then n it was decided two more volumes were needed to carry the records through the Civil War and Reconstruction

Crews says as a hitorian he has learned never to say never. A 14th volume could come about, but he doubts it.

The thick volume, costing $57.80, can be ordered through the Historical Publications Section, Office of Archives and History, 4622 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, 27699-4622. Credit card orders can be placed by calling 919 433-7442. Purchases on-line can be made through the Publications Section's online store, http://store.yahoo.com/nc-historical-publications/

Copies should be avaiable soon at the Moravian Book Store in Old Salem.

Charles Cranfield, superintendent of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, and his rangers no longer smile when they show up. It has become too common.

Last week, three men who announced they were part of the Triad Para-Normal Investigators, came to the park visitors center asking permission to do some exploring. Permission granted.

Para-normals are also known as ghost hunters.

"I didn't pay any attent to them," Cranfield says. "Two or three times a year we get people who want to look for things in the park. As long as they don't bother a resource, we have no objection."

Park historian John Durham said the three asked about different aspects of the 1781 battle that took place over land that includes the park. They wanted to know where certain events happened. They then took off into the 223-acre park.

They carried no equipment, such as cameras and tape recorders. Maybe the next time.

Al Profitt, a professor at Western Carolina Univeristy and a ghost hunter, visited UNCG's Aycock Auditorium and Greensboro College last May to look for spirits.

He came first without equipment first trip, but returned with cameras and recorders. His photos and those taken by others showed "orbs," little particles on film or digital prints. Professional photographers believes orbs are dust particles. Ghost hunters believe they are evidence of spirits or psychic energy.

Durham says the park's ghost hunters departed without saying whether they found anything out of this world.

Hundreds of British and American troops were killed on the battlefield, part of which includes the park, during the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

Former Mayor Jack Elam said a feature in last Monday's News & Record about the Green Bay Packers training here for a week in Greensboro from 1955-59 brought back memory of an nnstance he witnessed 47 years ago.

It involved the Packer's violatile coach Vince Lombandi, who in 1959 became coach of a Packer team that won only one game the year before.

During that annual week in Greensboro, the Packers worked out mostly at War Memorial Stadium on Yanceyville Street.

One rainy day, Elam, who was an officer in the Navy Reserves, had business at the Naval-Marine Corps Reserve Center next to the stadium. The building is now the city-owned Sanford Smith Center.

When he entered he heard the "damnest racket and screaming I have ever heard."

Elam looked into a room and saw a group of Packers. Lombandi, who was short, stood on a stool, in the face of a tall player. He was letting him have it for a poor performance on the practice field.
"He was really telling him what he thought of him," Elam remembers.

When coaches explode at players these day they get criticized for too harsh. But bluntness worked for Lombardi.

He took a woeful team and led them to five National Football League titles. His Pack also won the first two Super Bowls. At his death in 1970 from cancer, he had never experienced a losing year.

The words "take a step back in time" get overused when historic places promote tours and open houses.

But the words still have meaning in neighboring Caswell County, which really does look in places as in the early 1900s.

See for yourself Sunday, Dec. 10 from 1-6 p.m. The Caswell County Historical Association will sponsor a tour of grand homes, a one-room school house, an old jail, a former hotel, the courthouse, a church and 1835 law office will be on display in one of the state's most perplexing counties.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Caswell ranked as one of the state's wealthiest counties. By mid 20th century, it was one of the poorest.

Still, the large homes built in prosperity surivived. Outsiders have bought many for restoration.

Cy Vernon, the tour director for the Caswell County Historical Association, says Caswell's heyday came from being in the heart of flue-cured tobacco country. Another form to tobacco, brigh-leaf, was invented in Caswell in 1837 by a slave named Stephen.

The county also borders the Dan River,which was navigatable in the 19th century and connected to the Roanoke River, which connected to the sounds on the North Carolina coast.

Vernon, a retired agriculture teacher at Bartlett-Yancey High School in the county seat of Yanceyville, says Caswell's decline came from continued dependence on agriculture after other counties such as Guilford and Rockingham diversified economies. The county was not aggressive about going after business and industry, Vernon says.

Burlington Industries and a few others built plants in the county, but still, "We haven't done a good job of attracting business," Vernson says.

Poor or not, Caswell remains beautiful and pastoral.

One of the tour homes will be the Holderness House on U.S. 158 West, a Greek Revival structure featuring a porch with Doric columns. According to an association press release, the house's "voluptuous mantels and stair rail'' may have been the work of Thomas Day, a now revered 19th black furniture maker who lived in the small Caswell town of Milton.

The association says the Holderness Home "represents the ancestral roots of the prominent Greensboro Holderness family, and over the years with other old Caswell County families."

The Holderness family, which also has roots in historic Tarboro in eastern North Carolina, included the late Howard Holderness of Greensboro, president of what's now Jefferson-Pilot Corp. and his wife, Anilein Holderness, an early member of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors. Also, Willie Holderness was a prominent Greensboro attorney.

Another house, Dongola, will be on the tour for the first time. When Jeremiah Graves, a member of one of Caswell's most prominent families, built it in 1838 the house was called "the most pretentious farmhouse of the Piedmont."

Many modern-day Piedmonters may best remember Dongola as as assisted living facility owned by the N.C. Baptist Association. It later became a motion film studio. Faiger Blackwell, owner of Carolina Pinnacle film Studios, now lives in Dongola.
According to the association, Dongola has been carefully restored "and decorated to reflect its elegant history and present owner's love of Caswell history."

The Caswell Courthouse, built in the Romanesque style in 1857-60 by the famous English architect Sir Willaim Percival. The historical society says it has been called "the most beautiful courthouse in North Carolina."

The courthouse still gets talked about as the site where state Sen. John Walter (Chicken) Stephens, a post-Civil War carpetbagger, was shot dead. A death bed confession later revealed the killers as the Ku Klux Klan.

The Caswell tour, the first in six or seven years Vernon says, raises money for the historical association.

The tour will end with Christmas carols by Singers of Hope in the sanctuary of Yanceyville Presbyterian, built in 1849 or '50, and one of the tour sites.

Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 on tour day. Advance purchases can be made at the Richmond-Miles Museum or the Chamber of Commerce in the Gatewood House on Court Square in Yanceyville. Or ordered from the historical association, Box 278, Yanceyville 27379. Send check or money order.

Tickets will be mailed until Dec. 3 and after that picked up at the Richmond-Miles Murseum. On the day of the tour, tickets will be sold only at the museum, Holderness House and Dongola.

For more information call Vernon at 336-421-9493 or email him at cyveron@hotmail.com; or association president Karen Oestreicher, association president, 336-562-5083 or Karen@ncccha.org; or tour publicity chair Lib McPherson, 336-694-4450 or lib@clanmcpherson.com

How in the blazes could you be so infernally dumb?

Several readers called or emailed, including Rep. Howard Coble, to say more schools have burned in Guilford County than mentioned in a story Monday in the News & Record. That story about previous fires was prompted by the conflagration last week that destroyed Eastern Guilford High School.

Coble said he was a sophomore in 1945 at old Alamance High School, which had grades 1-12, when a malfunctioning boiler sent flames spreading through the brick building.

Approximately 200 students got out uninjured.

Margaret Moser, also an Alamance student at the time, said before some students left the building they stood at windows heaving out books, desks and whatever else would be needed to resume a school elsewhere. She says a former classmate told her recently he and some other boys lifted the school piano and rescued it.

She was downstairs near the boiler when the fire started. She crawled out a window to safety.

She can't remember who, if anyone, fought the fire because the Alamance community in southeast Guilford County didn't have a volunteer fire department then. A news story at the time said the Greensboro Fire Department sent a truck to the rural school.

Within a few days, students had a new school, Alamance Presbyterian Church aross the road. Moser remembers the rooms were so small that one class used two rooms. The teacher stood in the hall speaking to students in both rooms.

A new Alamance School was built at Alamance Church Road and what's now Southeast School Road. The school remains in use as an elementary school.

Royce Cox, who attended grades 1 through 12 at old Curry School on what's now the UNCG campus, missed the fire that destroyed the original Curry in 1926. He enrolled some years later, but the fire was still being talked about.

Each year, tradition required students to file across the UNCG campus to view the brick ruins of the old school. Built in 1902, it stood near the now-vanished bridge college students used to cross Walker Avenue. In those days, Walker ran through the entire campus.

Curry was a laboratory school that trained UNCG students to become teachers. The school had a faculty of veteran teachers who worked with student-teachers.

Fortunately, the fire came as a new, imposing Curry School was being completed on a hill overlooking Spring Garden Street. Curry School went out of business in the late 1960s, but the building on the hill remains. It's used by the School of Education.

The most costly fire, at least in consequences, occurred in 1971 at the private Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute, a black preparatory school in Sedalia. The school was suffering financial woes when the main building, located in the center of the long campus, burned to the ground in February. Palmer managed to stay open until the end of the school year, then never reopened.

The Palmer campus, minus the main building, now forms the Charlotte Hawkins Brown State Historic Site on U.S. 70 in Sedalia. Brown founded the school in 1902 and ran it until her death in 1961.

Old timers remember the inferno that leveled most of McLeansville High School (it had grades 1-12) in 1950. V.F. Cobb, who was on the school's basketball team and was returning from a game in Stokesdale, remembers seeing a red glow in the distant sky.

After the fire, "they made classes out of every place you could think of,'' said Ann Deal, a student at the time.

She remembers the village's community building being pressed into service for classes. Cobb says the principal's house across from the school became a classroom. The agriculture and home economic buildings that the fire spared were reconfigured for more classrooms.

Cobb graduated that year, not at the school, but in a commencement held at Friedens Lutheran Church.

A new school, now Mcleansville Elementary, was built at the site.

Spencer Gwynn called to ask how the fire that damaged Lincoln Junior (now Middle) School could be overlooked when it was so recent, 1984. The blaze gutted an art classroom, damaged a section of hallway and caused minor damage to six classrooms.

School was in seesion but the art classroom was empty. Lincoln's 796 students evacuated without injury. A firefighter was treated and released from a hospital for heat exhaustion.

The fire, caused by a hot plate in the art classroom, gave students a a holiday the next day, a Friday. Monday, they were back in classes in the main building and other wings that the fire didn't touch.

Joe Stafford, who lives in southeast Guilford County, emailed to say a fire at Nathanael Greene School near Julian was conspicuous for its absence in the story.

He doesn't remember the fire. It was either before or after he was born. He recalls his mother, a teacher, and other old timers talking about it. It destroyed all but the library and home economics building.

School fires burn forever in the minds of students.

"When I saw on television Eastern Guilford on fire," Howard Coble said,
"my mind reverted to that fire at Alamance."

He has a souvenir. The building said Alamance High School across the front.

"I took," he said, "the 'H'."

Retro football uniforms, let's face it, help teams sell more merchandise in the team store and on the internet.

Still, the sight of the San Diego Chargers Sunday wearing throwback light blue jerseys and white helmets rekiddled memories for this old timer.

Back in late 1966, I took buses on weekends from Camp Pendleton down to San Diego.

One two occasions, I'd walked to Balboa Stadium, which was part of a municipal recreational complex known as Balboa Park. Seating only 25,000, Balboa was the home of the San Diego Chargers of the American Football League, four years away from merging with the NFL.

The team wore light blue jerseys, gold pants and white helmets with a lightning bolt across the sides. The Chargers were young. They were born as the Los Angeles Chargers in the new AFL in 1960. In L.A., the chargers tried to snare fan support from the more established NFL Los Angeles Rams (who had moved from Cleveland in the 1940s). Small turnout forced the team to move to San Diego in 1961.

The Chargers charged military people only a $1.25 for games. I saw the Chargers versus the Kansas City Chiefs and the New York Jets. New York and Kansas City, the same age as the Chargers, had undergone change, too. Kansas City started in Dallas but moved to Kansas City to get away from the NFL's Dallas Cowboys.

The Jets started as the New York Titans. They became the Jets in 1963 fter an ownership change that moved the team from the old Polo Grounds to Shea Stadium, near the airport were jets constantly took off and landed.

I don't remember the outcomes of the 1966 games, although an internet search says the Chargers beat the Jets 42-27 and lost to the Chiefs 17-27.

I recall the Chargers great end Lance Alworth making a catch in a horizontal position high in the air between two defenders. The quarterback who threw the pass was John Hadl, who went on to many great years in the AFL and NFL, as did Alworth.

Kansas City had a running Mike Garrett, who made several long runs.

The game against the Jets sticks out because I was seated next to a passage leading under the stadium. Two players, a Jet and a Charger, emerged from the passage before the game and stood chit-chatting. One was the Jets' quarterback Joe Namath. I don't remember the Charger player. They talked like old friends, not enemies. It was as if they were about to begin another day at the office.

The start of the unkept hippie era approached in 1966, but for the most part young men still kept their hair short and faces shaved. Namath, the trend setter, deliberately looked dirty and menacing. His hair was long and unwashed. He hadn't shaved in several days. He went against the image of the clean-cut football player of that day.
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Years later, the Chargers changed their uniforms to dark blue jerseys and dark helments. The lightning bolt remained, although it was changed to gold.

The Jets, however, look almost exactly as they did 40 years ago in their green jerseys with a large patch of white below the shoulder and white helmets with an oval logo saying Jets.

By to sticking to uniform tradition, Jets quaterbacks today look on TV like Namath, at least in the huddle and under center. The resemblance ends when they drop back and throw.

They don't get the same results as Broadway Joe, one of the best to ever play the position. Namath's uniform has changed. As approaches old age, his face is clean-shaven, his hair of moderate length.

What U.S. SEn. John Kerry said the other day about students with bad grades winding up in combat in Iraq sounded so true. At least it did 40 years ago.

Like so many of his generation, Kerry can't kick the Vietnam era. He compares wars fought since then with Vietnam.

In the Vietnam War, a young man who flunked out of college or didn't enroll became draft fodder. Uncle Sam soon summoned him for a medical physical. If he passed, he soon received a letter of "greetings'' announcing his induction into the armed forces for two years.

It was a rule of thumb draftees went to Vietnam for a 13-month tour of duty. An example was Phill G. McDonald of Greensboro, a non-college student who was one day short of his 26th birthday when drafted.

Had he made it to 26 he would have been exempt. McDonald was killed in the fighting, dying heroically while saving others. He was awarded, posthumously, with the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest combat award.

Once a young man entered the Army or Marines,he took a battery of tests. If he scored poorly, count on it: he was infantry bound. He became a rifle-carrying ground pounder, a grunt.

Those who scored high invariably wound up in safer jobs, such as operating the primitive computers of that era or as "Reminington raiders" - pounding typewriters in an office.

Testing may still determine the military occupation of a soldier or marine today.

But the major difference between now and then is if you flunk out of college or don't even enroll, Uncle Sam can't horse collar you into combat. A non-student can go shoot pool or play in a rock bank without worry the military will draft him.

There has been no draft since the 1970s.

Frankly, judging from what military people have said, good riddance to the draft. It put in uniform too many malcontents, quitters and even lawbreakers.

An area Marine recruiter once commented that in today's modern military too many speeding tickets was enough to turn away a potential recruit. A reporter accompanying a Marine recruiter in the Asheboro area some years ago watched him reject a former Marine, who had an honorable discharge from a previous enlistment.

Afterward, the recruiter said a code on the young man's discharge papers indicated his record had blemished that had caused the Marine Corps to sour on him. They didn't want him back for a second enlistment.

Lots of factors motivate young men to enter the military today, but one thing doesn't: the fear of the draft. Poor performance in school won't result in a plane ticket to Iraq.

Columnist Jack Scism who keeps track of the past for the News & Record in the Guilford Record points out November will be the 100th anniversary of the death of Samuel Spencer.

The name may stump many, except for railroad buffs and residents of the towns of Spencer and East Spencer. Samuel Spencer created those towns and a whole lot more. Through his railroad mergers, he helped pull the South from the economic dumps it had withered in following the Civil War.

After serving in war himself under Gen. Nathan Forrest, Spencer attended the universities of Georgia and Virginia and became a railroad man. He eventually became president of the Long Island and the Baltimore and Ohio railroads.

In 1894, with Spencer serving as an adviser, multi-millionaire J.P. Morgan and others bought the bankrupt Richmond and Danville Railroad, which included 3,300 miles of track in the South. The line connected here with the North Carolina Railroad from Goldsboro to Charlotte.

They buyers turned the R&D into Southern Railway and expanded the line by leasing and buying other railroads. Eventually, the Southern had a network of lines that, to use its logo, served the South.

As Southern's president, Spencer linked together an eastern main line from Washington to Atlanta through Greensboro. The company decided to locate its main repair shops half way between Washington and Salisubry.

The exact point was in Rowan County and two towns named for Spencer arose to supply workers to the shops. The shops remained busy until Southern quit using steam locomotives in 1953. The huge complex is now the site of the N.C. Transportation Museum.

The Southern prospered under Spencer and brought many travelers to Greensboro, who spent money on lodging and shopping while waiting for connections to other cities. After the merger of Southern and Norfolk & Western railraods in the 1980s, the old Southern main line has stayed busy with freight trains. By then Southern was out of the passenger business.

Spencer owned a hunting preserve in Friendship township, near what's now Piedmont Triad International Airport. In his private rail car, he occasionally brought wealthy northerners with him to Guilford County to hunt.

He was traveling here with four friends Thanksgiving Day, 1906, when the train, with his private car attached to the rear, stopped near Lawyers, Va., south of Lynchburg, to repair a broken drawbar on a coach.

An operator at a station about three to the north failed to stop another southbound passenger train. The flagman on Spencer's train was walking up the tracks to place flags warning a train was ahead. But it was too late. The other train roared by the flagman and rammed into Spencer's car. Spencer was killed, along with his guests and two porters.

The towns of Spencer and East Spencer continue on in his honor and a statue of Spencer is said to decorate a park in Atlanta.