News-Record.com

This was no child's play with crayons.

This was genuine, unsolicited graffiti, painted in the darkness of the night on the side of a building belonging to the Greensboro Children's Museum on Church Street downtown.

A "crew," as police call graffiti spreaders, must have worked up a sweat posting three letters in white paint that appeared to be "BTH."

They had to climb the roof of one building, then elevate themselves to reach the wall of a higher connecting building.

Both buildings are on a back street behind the museum's main building.

"It was far from primitive," museum director Tim Goetz says. "Someone put a lot of time into it."

Officer Tim Tepedino, the Greensboro police officer who tracks graffiti painters and who occasionally catches them in the act, says crews seek out places to make their esoteric work obvious.

The museum graffiti could be seen from the platforms next to the railroad tracks behind the Galyon Depot, more than six blocks away. It was easily visible from cars going north on Church Street.

Goetz got no amusement out of the defacing, but he is delighted that despite the large size letters, few people noticed.

Two of his staff members shook their heads Tuesday when he asked if they had seen the letters. They didn't know what he was talking about. He says he received only one call and that was from a reporter.

So, he says, if it was attention the graffiti crew was after, they failed.

Goetz is not delighted, however, about having had to pay someone to come obliterate the letters with black paint. The letters appeared on the morning of the Christmas Parade Dec. 10 - when thousands would be lined up along Church - and were gone by last week.

A city ordinance requires that property owners remove graffiti within 18 days. If not, the city will do the removing and bill the owner the costs.

While gangs sometime use graffiti to signal territory and to tell other gangs to stay away, officer Tepedino doesn't believe the museum letters were gang work.

He says it was probably just a crew of kids looking for something to paint. He defines kids in a crew as 16 to 29 years old. The older members teach the younger ones how to do it.

He says crews nearly always do their work before dawn.

That would seem to indicate they are committed, if they get up that early.

"No, they don't get up early," Tepedino declares, "They've stayed up all night."

He says if the lettering makes no sense to the public, there's a reason.

"The crews are looking for something that no one else has," he says. "They want it to be unique."

Why don't these people use their artistic skills and do art for pay? There's no money in graffiti.

"They aren't artists," Tepedino responds. "That's one of the biggest misconceptions about graffiti - that it's art. It's not art. It's vandalism."

Even if there was strong evidence to the contrary, they blamed the Yankees.

That was how some Guilfordians reacted to the thieving and rowdy ways of vanquished Confederate troops at the end of the Civil War. In the spring of 1865, Union troops occupied Greensboro and thousands of Confederates roamed the city and country side looking for food and a way home.

Lee Kennett, a retired historian at the University of Georgia and Civil War authority who lives in his native Pleasant Garden, writes in a letter Jan. 3 to the newspaper:

"My widowed great-grandmother and her five children were visited by a party of pistol-waving Confedrates who took some sweet potatoes, but nothing else. For two generations, the family claimed the rowdy visitors had been Yankees."

Kennett was responding to a story in the News & Record on Dec. 26 about what Greensboro was like in 1865, when South Elm Street turned blue because so many Yankees guarded the street.

Relations between occupiers and townspeople were reasonably cordial.

But out in the countryside, the "Johnnies," as the Yanks called Southern soldiers, created trouble for the very people who had cheered them during the war, although Guilford had voted overwhemingly in 1861 against leaving the Union.

Kennett has studied dairies, memoirs and letters that Union soldiers wrote. They indicate, he writes, "the almost immediate decline or even collapse in discipline among the 'Johnnies,' who disregarded orders and argued with or even threatened their officers. There was also a rash of thievery that spread in the countryside."

Kennett says most paroled Confederate troops had to walk home. The war had destroyed parts of many rail lines. The Rebs looked for free transportation by stealing horses and mules from farmers.

"And, of course," Kennett says, "local farmers needed those same animals for spring plowing."

In Pleasant Garden, Kennett says, a woman named Letitia Ross "gained local fame when she stabbled her horse in a widowless room in her house."

She survived and no doubt helped continue the line of Rosses and related Hunts in Pleasant Garden.

The familes would produce, in 1961, a speaker of the state House of Representatives, Joe Hunt of Greensboro; and later a governor who served a total of 16 years, Jim Hunt. He was born in Wesley Long Hospital, when his parents lived in Pleasant Garden before moving east to Wilson County.

If John Hiatt had known he was dealing with two future American literary lions, maybe he would have paid more attention.

He remembers, nevetherless, right much about a 1946 encounter with young, then-unknown writers Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell.

Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for his book "A Summons to Memphis," and Jarrell, the National Book Award for a book of poetry. He also occupied the position now known as National Poet Laureate.

Hiatt, 85, is a selt-taught, self-educated construction man. In 1946, at his second job in a construction business he had started, he bought a rundown house at the corner of Spring Garden Street and Holliday Drive.

He remodeled the house into a duplex, which he put up for sale. He lived in one unit while he built a house for himself on Springwood Drive in nearby Lindley Park.

Jarrell and his first wife, Machie, and Taylor and his wife, Eleanor Ross Taylor, bought the duplex. Both men pooled their G.I. Bill loans.

Hiatt doesn't remember if he knew they were writers. He saw them as two ex-GIs getting on with their lives after the war. He may have known they had teaching positions at the Woman's College, now UNCG, just down Spring Garden, but he's not sure.

Under the terms of the sale, Hiatt and his wife got to stay in one unit until their house was completed.

They meant the Jarrells and Taylors had to bunch up and live together in the other two-bedroom unit. Hiatt says these tight living arrangements continued for about six to eight weeks. After that the Taylors and Jarrells each had their own units.

"During that time we all became friends," Hiatt says in a letter to the News & Record, prompted by a story that the state will erect a highway historical marker to honor Jarrell.

"Randall and wife...had a Siamese cat. They would sit in the side yard on a stump parts of everyday with the cat. Randaell and wife were very friendly. I'd sit with them on lots of occasions.

"Peter and his wife was not as friendly. They stayed to themslves most of the time."

He can't remember what he and the Jarrells talked on that stump. But he's certain it wasn't about poetry and prose.

Hiatt says he had never heard of Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren and other contemporary writers that the Jarrells and Taylors knew and who Jarrell often reviewed.

The relationship between Taylor and Jarrell may have been testy. Taylor may have admired writers that Jarrell dispised.

Regarding Taylor, "his first sojourn here," writes the late Randolph Bulgin, who taught English at UNCG, "was marred by the acerbity and condescension of Jarrell's too frequent criticism - he said it was like living in the YMCA with Saint Ignatius..." Ignatius was considered a contentious saint.

Told that Jarrell loved fancy cars, Hiatt says he doesn't recall discussing autos with him. But come to think of it, he said, Jarrell had a weird looking car parked behind the duplux.

It may have been an MG, which Jarrell drove before buying a gold-colored XKE.

Jarrell and Mackie Jarrell would eventually divorce, and he remarried. His widow, Mary Jarrell, 91, still lives in Greensboro. They settled in a house off New Garden Road near Guilford College.

Except for sabbaticals and time off to serve as poet laureate, Jarrell stayed at UNCG. He was killed when struck by a car in Chapel Hill in 1965.

Taylor left Greensboro for other teaching jobs, returning in the 1960s, before leaving again. He died in 1994 in Charlottesville, Va., where he had taught at the University of Virginia and lived in the house that William Faulkner had occupied when he taught at Virginia.

Hiatt says he thinks of Jarrell and Taylor and their wives when he passes the house at Spring Garden and Holliday, where up Holliday Street another celebrity of sorts grew up, Mayor Keith Holliday. The street is named for his father, a merchant and World War II survivor of D-Day.

Hiatt says he never read anything either writer wrote. He prides himself on just being a simple construction man, still working five days a week running a one-horse company in which he says "I'm the horse."

He specializes in remolding, and the older the house the better. He says the house at Spring Garden and Holliday was a dump until he fixed it up.

Not much has changed about his routine since then. He's now performing renovation magic on a run-down two-story house on Phillips Avenue.

Few people ever get to meet a "discover," a person who find objects or theories that change the way humans view life and the universe.

In 1989, a group of Wake Forest University students met and listened to Clyde Tombaugh, then 83.

Fifty-nine years earlier, Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto, the smallest and ninth planet in the solar system.

The Wake Forest lecture visit came to mind last week when NASA sent the New Horizons spacecraft speeding 36,000 miles-an-hour on a 9-year voyage to Pluto, which is 5.9 billion miles from the Sun (compared to 93 million between the Sun and Earth).

Tombaugh discovered Pluto as a 24-year-old astronomer who had not yet earned a college degree. He was working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.

"It's kind of brutal, I tell you," Tombaugh said in an interview at Wake Forest, recalling those cold desert nights at Lowell photographing 15 million objects in sky. "You work in a cold, unheated dome. You are sitting still... You are not not exercising. You can get cold very fast."

But the uncomfort paid off on the night of Feb. 13, 1930. He spotted a speck of light amid millions of other objects. Tombaugh's photos showed the speck was moving while the other objects - stars - stayed still.

That tipped Tombaugh that he had found the elusive "Planet X" that scientists had long believed existed. The tiny speck was rotating around the Sun. Pluto takes 248 years to complete the rotation)

"In one second I knew I had gone from an obscure country farm boy to a famous world astronemer," he said in Winston-Salem, laughing.

Lowell Observatory astronomers voted to name Tombaugh's discovery Pluto.

No,Tombaugh said the honoree wasn't the Walt Disney cartoon dog, Pluto. By coincidence, the dog made his screen debut in 1930. The staff was saluting the mythological brother of Jupiter and Neptune, for whom planets had already been named.

According to his biographiers, Tombaugh was one of those gifted youth in a pre-TV age who at 12 developed a fierce interest in outer space. He explored the skies outside his parents farm in Kansas using a Sear Roebuck telescope. He later built a more powerful scope using parts from his father's 1910 Buick, from a lawn mower and a straw spreader.''

He made drawings of what he saw through the scope and sent them to the Lowell Observatory. The staff was so impressed they hired him.

After his Pluto discovery, he went on to earn degrees from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. from Northern Arizona Univeristy. He worked at Lowell until World War II. After the war, he spent the rest of his career teaching at New Mexico State University, where he founded the astronomy program.

Tombaugh continued probing the skies and discovered a comet and other objects. In 1992, some scientists challenged his discovery of Pluto, arguing it might be a comet or some other space object instead of a planet. But International Astronomical Union ruled that Pluto was a planet.

Tombaugh said he still had the telescope he made with car and lawn mower parts and "use it a quiet a good deal" in his back yard.

He died Jan. 17, 1997 at 90. At last week's New Horizons launch to Pluto, his widow, Patricia Tombaugh, was present. The spacecraft also carried some of Tombaugh's ashes.

If he thought it was cold in Arizona in 1930, wait till he arrives in spirit near Pluto in 2015. The days there are long - one day equals six earth days and 9 hours - and temperatures average 382 degrees below freezing.