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Anyone who follows the PGA Tour knows tee shots of 300-yards or more are routine for players such as Tiger Woods, John Daly, Phil Michelson and others.

The credit goes to equipment technology - drivers with oversized metal heads and titanium shafts. Some suspect the modern golf ball is juiced up, too.

If equipment accounts for the extra yardage of today's long hitters, how do you explain what happed at Sedgefield Country Club in 1929?

That wasn't the sound of the stock market crashing that day. It was persimmon-headed drivers attached to shafts made of hickory making contact with a ball that would be considered primitive by today's standards.

According to a story in the Greensboro Daily News, Herman Atkins, a Sedgefield professional, belted a drive that measured 411 yards on the 503-yard par-5 5th hole.

Granted, the fairway is downhill and a favoring wind blew. Still, a 411 drive in 1929 with the kind of gear available then can only be described as a fanastic feat.

No, the ball didn't get a boost by hitting and bouncing along the paved cart path. They didn't have golf carts or paved paths back then.

Raymond Atkins, Herman's brother, playing in the same foursome stepped off his tee shot on the same hole at 390 yards.

On the next hole, the par-four 6th, the news story said, amateur Charlie Baker hit a 350-yard tee-shot.

The story didn't say what score the Atkins brothers recorded on the 5th after those marathon drives. And it didn't say if Baker's drive on the 6th flew the creek that crosses the fairway a good distance down the fairway.

The Bennett College campus, the UNCG Chancellor's and a long-ago school house in rural Guilford are among the 10 winners of Preservation Greensboro Inc. preservation awards for 2005.

In the spring issue of Landmarks, the preservation's group's publication, Bennett is recognized for a campus restoration plan started in 2004. Financed with a Getty Foundation grant, the plan singled out 12 buildings for renovation and the grounds for reverbishing.

Preservation Greensboro says the progress is highlighted by the restoration of Wilbur Steele Hall as an art gallery, improvements to Race Administration Building, Pfeiffer Chapel and the Holgate Library.

"With careful planning, Bennett College is an example by institution across the country for care of their historic buildings."

The relocation and restoration of the Chancellor's House came after much controversy involving preservationists and UNCG administrators, who at first wanted the 1922 Georgia-style house demolished.

After months of wrangling, a compromise was reached. The two-story house, designed by the late Greensboro architect Harry Barton, was moved a few blocks west on Spring Garden and now serves as Jane Harris Armfield and Emily Harris Preyer Admissions and Visitors Center. Preservation North Carolina raised the money to make the relocation possible.

Before their deaths, Armfield and Harris pledged money to save the house, along with 850 others that enabled Preservation Greensboro to finance the move. All of UNCG chancellors, save founder Charles Duncan McIver, lived in Chancellors House.

Pinedale School is one of the few surviving examples of an early 20th century rural school house in Guilford County. Located in eastern part of the county, the school eventually became a rental house. Preservation Greensboro salutes Daniel Shoffner, who grew near the school house, for carefully restoring the building and making it his home.

The other honorees are:

- 315 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The house, once known as the Bernard house, dates from the era when MLK Jr. Drive, then known as Asheboro Street, was lined with many of Greensboro's finest houses.

The house was in ruins when the city sold it to Bob Isner, who was developing the Southside project at the northern end of MLK Jr. Drive. He has renovated the Italianate-style house, which was built in the early 1890s.

- Lyndon Street Townhouses. These are believed to one of the few rowhouses in North Carolina, a style found mostly in Washington, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Located on a back street on the eastern side of downtown, the row houses were built for well-to-do white residents in 1905.

They remained whites-only even after a black man, school teacher Daniel Suggs, bought them in the 1920s. Eventually, the row houses became run down and the four original units - each with an upstairs and downstairs - were subdivided into eight units.

The Preservation Society hails Milton and Debby Kern, who bought and renovated the rowhouses starting in 2003. The houses have attracted artists who have studios in the neighboring Lyndon Street Artworks.

- 801 Woodland Drive, designed by Charles Hartmann (who also did the Jefferson Building, Grimsley and Dudley high schools) in 1917, the house was occupied for years by Buick dealer Hunter Galloway and his family. More recently, the Mediterrean style house in Irving Park, across from the ninth green of the Greensboro Country Club's Ross Course, has been lovingly restored by Denise and Rodney Speight.

"With this careful restoriation, yet another architectural jewel of the roaring twenties has been saved in Greensboro,'' Preservation Greensboro says.

- 612 Simpson St. Yet another example of a lovely old home being divided into apartments, it was blighted when purchased by Allison and Matt Butwinski. They have restored the Fisher Park house to its 1918 look.

"Neighbors on Simpson Street are extremely grateful for their efforts, which have turned Simpson Street's most disreputable-looking house into a handsome house," Preservation Greensboro says.

- 908 Fairmont St. Located in Westerwood, just west of downtown, the house was chopped up into apartments years ago. Page and Tim Cox purchased the colonial revival cottge and restored it for single- family use. "Today, the home stands as an example of preservation at work in Westerwood, and an inspiration to other future projects," Preservation Greensboro says.

- 707 Blair St. Designed by modernist architect Edward Loewenstein in 1965, the Irving Park house was in danger of being demolished and replaced by a larger house when purchased by Sara and Tom Sears, fans of the Loewenstein style. They have updated the house's infastructure. It was a stop on a tour of Loewenstein-designed houses last fall.

- 1207 Lakewood Drive. This neoclassical mansion was built for A.M. Scales, who went bankrupt trying to develop what's now Hamilton Lakes and Starmount Forest. The house's rear, with lofty columns overlooks Lake Hamilton, one of three lakes that Scales created in Hamilton Lakes. After Scales lost the house, it went through a series of owners. In 2004, Laura and Ron Hahn purchased and renovated the house.

Ralph Hodgin, playing for the Chicago White Sox in 1948, remembers standing near the dugout in old Cleveland Stadium and hearing a voice yelling from the stands. It was Al Lochra thanking him for the free ticket.

Lockra, who had been stationed at the Greensboro's Army Air Corps base during World War II, had met Hodgin's niece here and married her.

The couple moved to Cleveland, but they soon moved to Greensboro, where Lochra began a long career with the public schools and Guilford Technical Community College, where he still works part-time though he's officially retired.

Hodgin always returned when the season was over to his native Guilford County. He had grown up on a farm near Piedmont Triad International Airport.

At 91, he and Red Hayworth, a former St. Louis Browns (now Baltimore Oriole) player, are believed to be the oldest ex-major leaguers in the Greensboro area.

He and Lochra have vivid members of that '48 game. Hodgin believes the legendary Satchel Paige may have been pitching for the Indians, which would later win the American League pennant.

Lochra remembers Hodgin, a left fielder, hitting the ball three times that night, but it was either caught or picked up on the bounce. Hodgin was out all three times.

What stands out in Lochra's mind was a Cleveland batter hitting a ball deep to left field. It was going, going ... and just before a radio announcer could say gone, Hodgin, running at the fence full speed, reached up and robbed the batter of a homer.

"He kept twisting and turning around and he caught the ball at the fence," Lochra says, adding the catch was so sensational Cleveland fans applauded Hodgin even though he was in the enemy's uniform.

Hodgins laughs. It was unusual for the Cleveland fans or those anywhere to appaud a player for the opposing team.

Lochra remembers that Hodgin rarely stuck out. His batting average in 1943 was a hefty .314 and .295 in 1944.

Judging by that catch in Cleveland and his respectable .266 batting average that season, he had a solid year for the Sox. But the team dumped him. He spent the last three years of his career playing for Sacremento in the Triple A Pacific League. He came home and managed the Reidsville Luckies for several years in the old Carolina League.

Later, he worked for a Greensboro trucking company for 30 years, rising to terminal manager.

He gets a pension from Major League Baseball. He said the most he ever made in a season was $15,000. That's what some major leaguers today make playing a single game, and many of those lack Hodgin's batting statistics.

Since his wife's death, he has lived alone on Farmington Drive, behind Smith High School.

He keeps his hand - literally - in baseball by signing baseball cards collectors send to him.

A Boston sports writer called him last week wanting to know if he was the guy on the White Sox bench in the 1940s that kept yelling at a Boston Red Sox pitcher over some perceived injustice.

The umpire walked over to the dugout and gave Hodgin the thumb - meaning he was tossed from the game. As Hodgin was entering the club house, "the rest of the bench was behind me," he says.

The umpire had given them the heave ho, too, with the stipulation that if Chicago needed substitutes, they could be summoned from the lockeroom.

Hodgin insists he wasn't the one hollering.

His voice remains strong. He still drives and has become an Atlanta Braves fan from years of watching the team on TV.

The game hasn't changed too much, he says, except for the pitchers, who hurl every fifth day instead of four and rarely complete nine innings even if performing well. A special mid-reliever comes in and replaces him. In Hodgin's day, starting pitchers were expected to go the entire nine innings, unless the opposing team got too many hits and runs off him.

But he enjoys watching the game, even with its changes, including the commercials that make the inning changes seem like eternity. In his day, teams had about 60 seconds to hustle off or on the field between innings.

When it came time for lunch, Elizabeth Leftwich Murphy Christopher wanted to dine at the Jefferson Roof Restaurant on the top floor of the 17-story Jefferson Standard Building.

It had been a favorite when she grew up in Greensboro.

One obstacle: The Jefferson Roof closed more than 60 years ago.

Well, at least her house and church were still there.

Christopher is the daughter of Thomas J. Murphy, mayor from 1905-07 and again from 1911-17. He served a term in the state legislature, and commuted to High Point from 1917-19 as town manager. He also had a law practice and business interests.

Greensboro has had three forms of government: before 1911, an alderman system with a mayor; until 1921, a three-member commission with a mayor; and since then the present council-manager form.

Murphy is the only person to have served under all three. He got a taste of the council-manager system as a council member from 1931-33.

Christopher, 93, and her daughter, Sue Irish, spent two recent days Greensboro, while traveling from Florida to upstate New York. With her advancing age, Christopher wanted a last look at the place of her youth.

She’s hard of hearing and lets Irish do the talking.

"They were members of the (Greensboro) Country Club," Irish says of the Murphy family. "She had her coming-out party there. The family dressed for dinner. They had a housekeeper who would pop her on the back if she wasn’t sitting straight. She had a nanny."

They visited her former house on North Church Street at the corner of Leftwich Street. A soaring Gothic Revival house, it was built in the 1870s by man named Dixon, who sold it to entrepreneur A.H. Leftwich. Murphy married Leftwich’s daughter, Annie, and came to own the house.

A design firm is now there. The staff told Christopher to wander around. She found the library where her father’s casket had been placed after his death in 1939. The library is now an office.
She examined the double front doors and found them to be the same ones she had opened and closed long ago.

She looked across the street at the double railroad tracks. She told of the night the family went to Aycock School for a gathering. Afterward, Mayor Murphy’s car stalled on the old Leftwich Street crossing.

With the house nearby, Murphy told his wife and daughter to go on while he fixed the car. Later, the two heard a train whistle and a crash. A train had left the Murphy car a heap of metal. Mother and daughter were horrified. They thought Murphy was in the car.
When the smoke cleared, Murphy came walking across the tracks. Better to lose a car than his life, he said.

Christopher assured a worried woman with the design firm that the house was not haunted, as rumored.

She and her daughter rode through Fisher Park as Christopher ticked off who had lived in what house.

They also stopped at the News & Record. Her father had once owned the Greensboro Patriot. The Patriot was published under different owners from the 1820s until the early 1940s when what’s now the News & Record bought it and later ceased publishing it.

Christopher and Irish went to First Presbyterian Church in Fisher Park, where Christopher posed for a photo next to the portrait of Charles Myers, pastor when she attended.

Their last stop was Green Hill Cemetery, burial place for Thomas and Annie Murphy and one of Christopher’s sisters.

The trip was to have been Christopher’s farewell to her native city.

"Now, I’m hoping we can make one more trip," Irish says.

That possibility arose when they visited the Greensboro Historical Museum, whose buildings Christopher remembered as First Presbyterian.

The staff was excited at meeting a daughter of the amazing Mayor Murphy. They asked her to attend the city’s bicentennial in 2008.

"I told mother," Irish says, "that she has something to live for and look forward to."

The settings were primitive, with outhouses instead of indoor plumbing, and nine grades squeezed into small buildings. But somehow, students learned.

One of these black schools scattered through rural Guilford County was Goshen, located near where South Elm-Eugene Street and Randleman Road merge.

For the first time since the school closed in 1951, Goshen alumni will hold a reunion on Saturday, May 20. The first session, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., will be held on the grounds of the old school. The school building is now the fellowship hall of Goshen Church.

That night, the alums will gather at Stephanie's Restaurant on Randleman Road to hear alumnus Clarence Avant, one of the top music executives in Hollywood - "the perennial godfather of our business," singer Quincy Jones once called him.

Avant also has done some acting, including a role in the hit movie, "The Color Purple," filmed in North Carolina.

Avant ranks as the school's most famous alumni, along with the late Tom Alston. In 1954, Alston became the first black player on the St. Louis Cardinal baseball club.

It was on the ballfield behind Goshen School that the renowned Goshen Red Wings semi-pro baseball team was organized. Alston starred on the team until he began his climb to the major league.

The Red Wings eventually changed its name to the Greensboro Red Wings and moved to Greensboro's War Memorial Stadium. In a 1944, the Red Wings were tied with the Homestead Grays of the Negro Major Leagues going into the last inning. The Grays' Josh Gibson, the black Babe Ruth of his era, won the game with a long homerun over the centerfield fence.

Martha Donnell, who finished Goshen in the late 1940s and still lives near the community, says she expects 150 alumni for the reunion. They are coming from as far as Washington, D.C., Maryland, New York and, in Avant's case, California.

"Goshen School was a fun place to be," Donnell says, adding, however, that discipline was tough under F.B. Morris. He was principal from when the school opened in 1929 opened until it closed 22 years later.

To reach the school, many students endured long bus rides, with the longest from Climax, next to the Guilford-Randolph County border.

When Goshen closed, it was replaced by Rita Bullock School in Pleasant Garden. Rita Bullock disappeared in a wave of consolidations that came in the 1960s when the old county school system integrated.

Donnell says the outhouses remained at Goshen until the end.

With downtown traffic rules, change isn't forever, but making changes seems to take forever.

That's evident on South Greene Street, where work continues on making adjustments to restore Greene, between Washington and McGee streets, to a two-way thoroughfare.

It only seems like the work has been going on since shortly after the city made Greene a one-way street in the 1940s. Adam Fischer of the city's transportation department says the Washinton-Elm project should be completed by June 9, maybe earlier.

The restoration project includes a roundabout at McGee Street and Greene, the first since the early part of the 20th century. This new roundabout sort of makes up for the eye-pleasing traffic circle the city removed in the mid-1960s at McGee and South Elm streets, at an intersection locals call Hamburger Square.

"I think they are an effective way of managing traffic," says Fischer, adding that an even larger roundabout nears completion at Bass Chapel and Lake Jeanette roads in northern Greensboro.

He says he can foresee more roundabouts, although he says the upfront costs are higher than conventional intersections with traffic lights.

In the 1940s, traffic engineers believed abolishing traffic circles (as roundabouts tended to be called then) and turning two-way streets into one-way thoroughfares was essential to unclogging downtown traffic in Greensboro. And maybe those were the right moves for that era.

At the time, downtown was at its peak as a center of retail and commerce and even had some manufacturing, including cigar making on McGee, then known as Edwards Place.

Cars and trucks competed for pavement space with street cars until the 1930s and overhead electric trollies and gas-powered buses after that.

Four of the state's major highways, U.S. 220, U.S. 29, U.S. 70 and U.S. 421 converged at Jefferson Square, the Elm-Market intersection. It became known as Jefferson Square after the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Building opened on the northwest corner in 1923. The Lincoln Financial Group now owns Jefferson-Pilot Corp. Logically, Jefferson Square is now Lincoln Square.

In 1935, traffic became so tangled at Jefferson Square the city announced - in an A1 story in the Greensboro Record - that turns at the square would be prohibited starting the following week. Ministers were urged to preach that Sunday about the need for obeying traffic laws and to make downtown safer for pedestrians.

The no-turn at Elm-Market was partially abolished some years ago. Left turns from North Elm onto one-way Market can be made at non-peak traffic hours.

What next? A return to parking in the middle of the street? It's about to happen. Among the changes taking place on South Greene is creation of center-of-the-street parking from Washington to McGee in front of the Carolina Theatre.

And keep your eye on other parts of Greene. The city already has restored to two-way traffic on North Greene between Smith and Bellemeade streets.

With coming changes on South Greene, that will leave Bellemeade to Washington as the only part of Greene still one-way.

And that might not be for much longer. Fischer believes North and South Greene will be totally two-way in a year or so.

It's almost over - National Preservation Month - but there's still time to enjoy two neighborhood walking tours sponsored by Preservation Greensboro Inc.

Wednesday at 7 p.m., the tour will cover Piety Hill, now known as the College Hill Historic District. It's boundaries are approximately between the Greensboro College campus and the eastern edge of the UNCG campus.

It was first called Piety Hill after the opening of Methodist-affiliated Greensboro College on a hill above downtown in the 1830s. Methodist preachers and lay people built homes in the neighborhood around the college.

Some of those homes remain, including the Troy-Bumpass House, now a bed and breakfast.

Many College Hill houses date to the early 20th century, with varying architectural styles, including an abundance of Queen Ann-style houses.

There's plenty of craftsman-style bungalows, plus the Spanish Colonial Revival Winburn Court Apartments on Tate Street. The Winburn was designed in 1929 by Lorenzo Winslow, a Greensboro architect who went on to become architect of the White House. He did the White House renovations in the late 1940s that resulted in the Truman Balcony.

The College Hill tour will be led by Benjamin Briggs, Preservation Greensboro's executive director. It will start in front of Tate Street Coffee Shop.

On Wednesday, May 31, also at 7 p.m., the tour goes to the Charles B. Aycock Neighborhood, named for the middle school on Cypress Street that is the neighborhood's largest structure.

Split by Summit Avenue, the neighborhood was developed early in the 20th century by a subsidiary of Cone Mills, with the many of the earliest homes occupied by managers and executives of Cone.

Members of the Cone and Sternberger families had large houses on Summit Avenue. The Sternbergers were partners with the Cones in establishing the former Revolution Mill that was part of a cluster of mills near the Aycock neighborhood.

Mill co-founder Ceasar Cone persuaded the city to build Summit Avenue to connect with his mills. The street car went up the middle of the street. For years, the rails were a favorite way for people downtown to get to Cone Athletic Park, where minor league baseball was played from 1902 until 1929. The park is now the site of the Oaks Motel.

The Aycock tour will be led by Ashley Poteat, curator of Blandwood Mansion.

Also on this Wendesday and next, Blandwood Mansion, former home of 19th century Gov. John M. Morehead on West Washington Street downtown, will be open for free tours from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The sight of a big house being carried down city streets draws a crowd.

This Saturday, indecision finally settled over who gets the two-story, 3,000-square foot at 620 N. Elm St., the dwelling will be moved slowly, oh so slowly, toward a vacant lot in the 200 block of West Bessemer Avenue.

The move will start at about 7 a.m. and will cover a distance of about four and a half blocks along North Elm, Fisher Park Circle, Carolina Street and West Bessemer, all within the Fisher Park neighborhood.

Ann Alexander, director of communications for First Presbyterian Church, which owned the house and offered to give it free to anyone who would move it, said the movers expect the journey to take about 12 hours.

The person who agreed to move the house is David Brossoit, who lives on West Bessemer across from the vacant lot where the house will be relocated. The church agreed to give him the house after Holy Trinity Episcopal Church on North Greene Street considered asking for the house, but decided against it.

Brossoit plans to renovate the house and sell it as a restored single-family home. For the past 25 years, the house, which stands across the North Elm entrance to the church, has been used for offices. The church wanted the house removed to create more church parking.

The move represents a partial victory for Fisher Park residents and preservationists. They would have preferred the house stay where it was constructed as a private home in 1930. It remained a home until about 1980.

Moving the house, however, is an acceptable option for most neighborhood residents. The house will fit with the architectural pattern of other homes along West Bessemer.