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Remembrances of things past keep rolling in like putts at Forest Oaks Country Club, site of one of the PGA Tour's oldest events, this week's Chrysler Classic of Greensboro.

It's fortunate the sponsoring Greensboro Jaycees chose Mike Haley as this year's honorary chairman. He's watched the tournament - known as the Greater Greensboro Open, the Kmart GGO, the Greater Greensboro Chrysler Classic and the current CCG - for decades. Since the Jaycees, who founded the tournament in 1938, issued a call recently for tournament artifacts, items have been arriving to join the impressive trove collected during the past two years.

Haley presented the archives this week wirh a putter embossed "GGO, 1977." That was the first year the tournament moved 15 miles or so to Forest Oaks in southeast Guilford County. It was at Sedgefield Country Club from 1961 to 1976, and before that at both Sedgefield and Starmount Country Club.

Haley, whose family started the McDonald's outlets in Greensboro in 1958 (the year Bob Goalby won the tournment), also has turned over a tournament scrapbook from 1971, the year he was tournament general chairman and the event winner was Vietnam veteran Bud Allin.

Kevin von der Lippe, a former Jaycee president who with another former president, Randy Harris, are collecting items, said the scrapbook will be scanned and returned to Haley.

The two collectors encourage others with photos and film they don't want to give up to do like Haley. Let the Jaycees scan and return them.

Another man called to say he had a watch from a GGO of long ago. He wanted to know how much it was worth. The Jaycees weren't sure what, if any value, it has. Finally the man said, "I'll just give it to you."

Von der Lippe says the Jaycees received word that an estate in Sedgefield may contribute a treasure of tournament artifacts. The Jaycees and Sedgefield Country Club are starting a tournament museum. For at least the next year, items will be placed throughout the Sedgefield Club House. The goal is to convert a nearby cottage, once the pro shop, into a permanent, public museum.

At Forest Oaks, many items are on display in a history tent that spectators must enter to get into the merchandise tent. For those who still getty dreamy eyed about the tournament's Sedgefield days will love photos that flash onto a big-screen TV showing scenes of GGOs at the old club.

Tim Crosby, a PGA official here this week who toured the tent with tournament director Mark Brazil Wednesday, said of the 16 PGA Tour events he works he's seen nothing like the CCG's history tent.

"It makes this golf tournament unique," he says. He says looking back helps tells us "we can't lose sight of what we love" about this tournament.

He loves items from golf's past and says the Jaycees have hit upon something as the tournament gets ready to move to new dates, in August, and a new name, Wyndham Championship, in 2007.

"This kind of thing tends to snowball," he said. "People start finding things in their attics."

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The year 1958 illustrates the generational connection to the tournament. Goalby, the winner that year, is the uncle of Jay Haas, who played in the tournament from 1973-2005 and now plays the Champions Tour for those over 50.

Haas's brother, Jerry Haas, now golf coach at Wake Forest, played in three CCGs. And now this year, a third generation, Bill Haas, Jay's son and Jerry's nephew, is playing. He's considered a sure bet for stardom on the PGA Tour.

Being a retired Methodist preacher, John Kincaid can not tell a lie. He chopped down the cherry tree. It was dead. He had no choice.

He seeks to be truthful, too, by adding conditions to the following claim: He can't prove it, but he's convinced the Monarch cherry tree in his yard was the oldest of its type in Rockingham County.

"I was told it was the oldest,'' he says. "I don't know of any other Monarch cherry that's older"

William Fillman probably planted the tree in 1870 when he built the house Kincaid now owns at Main and Woodrow streets, across from Annie Penn Hospital. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is in the Reidsville Historic District.

Kincaid and his late wife, Nancy, bought the house in 1997. Nancy Kincaid spent hours making drapes and doing other chores to make the house beautiful and inviting.

By Kincaid's count, the groomed yard contains 150 large box woods, two huge walnut trees, three pecan, two magnolias, two maples, four hollies, one crab apple, one Bradford pear, one oak, 12 white pines and one man-made water fall.

The setting and grounds are a contrast to the mill village where John Kincaid grew up in Greensboro.

He lost the cherry tree and now he must prepare to rid himself of the house and lawn. He has the property listed with a real estate agent. He hopes to rent a smaller house he's eyeing in Reidsville.

He doesn't need the big house anymore. Their children are grown. Her death in 2002 has left him alone there.

The house's furnishings come from the couple's travels and moving place to place when he was a circuit riding Methodist minister. He also was an official with the Christian Rural Overseas Program (Crop).

He has called on a Greensboro auctioneer to sell the house's contents. An auction date hasn't been set.

Before Kincaid became a Methodist minister, he pastored after World War II a non-denominational church on Franklin Boulevard in Greensboro. He and some helpers built the church, which still stands. Kincaid also built houses along Franklin Boulevard and some on Pisgah Church Road.

His life also includes five years as a mail carrier in the White Oak mill village, owned by Cone Mills.

"I had the longest mail route in Greensboro, Route 30," he says. "If I delivered mail to every house on the route during a day, I walked a total of 18 miles."

When the auction is held, the offerings won't include the cherry table.

It hasn't been built yet. Kincaid saved enough wood from the tree for a craftsman friend in Lake Lure to build the table. He may use the piece of furniture to write letters - he writes many - and to do other work.

The house, once jammed with art and artifacts from John Philip Couch's life-time of collecting, is now almost bare.

Crowds at an estate sale last Saturday and Sunday bought more than 300 paintings, thousands of classical and opera albums and CDs, hundreds of art-related books, pottery, china and a model railroad collection that also included train books and videos.

Couch, who died earlier this year at 78, used every inch of space int he house for his collections.

"We had a tremendous crowd,'' says Carla Butler, whose appraisal firm of Butler and Associates conducted the sale.

Butler estimates the items brought in more than $100,000. She says as best she can recall $4,000 was the highest price paid for a painting.

Couch, a retired French professor at UNCG, specified before his death earlier this year at 78 that proceeds from an estate sale go to charities and institutions.

Friday night, the house was opened to Couch's family to review the items.

As the family was leaving, members encountered two people in lawn chairs out front. They spent the night there to be among the first 45 admitted when the door opened at 9 a.m. to the house at 628 S. Mendenhall St.

Butler says the stream of buyers was without let up all day Saturday and for the four hours the sale was held Sunday.

Couch loved art and trains and had independent wealth to buy what he wanted. He favored local artists and those who had studied artat UNCG, such as the renowned Maud Gatewood. Two her works were available at the sale.

When Couch, a Chapel Hill native, came to Greensboro in 1958 to teach, he bought a house at the end of Joyner Street next to the railroad. He later moved behind the Joyner Street house to an older and larger Queen Ann house on South Mendenhall. In both places, he wanted to live near the railroad tracks.

Those who visited him - he often entertained with gourmet meals he cooked - said the challenge was finding a place to sit. Practically all open space contained art or artifacts.

Everything inside the house was for sale Saturday and Sunday. So was Couch's faded, old Chevy Cavalier outside. Butler says it went for $300 to $400.

The only item not included in the estate sale was the house. However, it is for sale through Century 21 Realtors. The price is $275,000.

As thousands of motorists discovered Wednesday, when the president comes to town, movement stops. Green lights no longer mean go.

Traffic backed up on West Cornwallis Drive as far as the eye could see as President Bush's motorcade neared the intersection of Cornwallis and Cleburne Street, a block from the Louis DeJoy house, site of the Republican fund raiser.

As people who have been caught up in presidential visits before know, logic doesn't prevail. One would assume once the motorcade passed and reached the DeJoy home, officers would wave their arms for traffic to resume on Cornwallis. Nope, cars didn't budge.

U.S. 220 South was said to be a nightmare Wendesday when the Bush motorcade traveled there to Victory Junction near Randleman.

The inconvenience and the expense of all those Greensboro police officers, sheriff's deputies, state troopers and Capitol police posted evrywhere could have been avoided, with help from the Marines.

Where was Marine One, the president's chopper? If it had been here, the president could have flown from Piedmont Triad International Airport to his first stop, lunch with the common folk at Stamey's Barbecue across from the Greensboro Coliseum.

The helicopter could have landed in the Coliseum parking lot, with Bush and his entourage of gun-toting Secret Service agents crossing High Point Road to Stamey's.

Afterward, instead of driving, he could have taken the helicoper to his next stop, Waldo Falkener Elementary School, across town on Franklin Boulevard.

The school stands across from a National Guard Armory, which for many years was home base of a helicopter outfit. Choppers in those days stayed parked on a grassy hill that slopes from the armory to Franklin Boulevard.

From Falkener, the president could have whirliebirded down to Level Cross to Victory Junction, then flown back to Greensboro and landed on the golf fairway across from the DeJoy home.

Perhaps, the White House strategy was to tie up traffic so people could stand in yards - and they did - to watch the motorcade.

But what was there to see? The two presidential limousines - one is a decoy - had tinted windows. It was hard to see who was inside.

The motorcade moved fast, too, passing in the blink.

One on-looker who stood next to the curb near the DeJoy home for several hours waiting for the motorcade, summed it up perfectly once it had come and gone.

"Pretty, anti-climatic, isn't it?"

What else would a trucker's nickname be other than "Speedy?"

Mary Carter Hackney, 92, of Greensboro, responding to a story in Monday's News & Record about the 75th anniversary of Epes Trucking Co., says she knew company founder Wilfred G. Epes Jr. as Speedy Epes.

She says a little known fact about Speedy was his brother-in-law was Albert Benjamin (Happy) Chandler, the former governor of and U.S. senator from Kentucky. Chandler is best remembered as the commissioner of Major League baseball from 1945-51. During his tenure, he presided over the integration of the Big Leagues when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Hackney quibbles with an assertion in booklets Epes trucking has published commemorating its anniversary. She has always believed that Speedy Epes founded the business in 1931 not in Blackstone, Va., as the booklets say, but in Blacksburg, Va., home of Virginia Tech.

"I'm sure Speedy and his wife were living in Blacksburg about the time," she says.

The company's history booklet mentions Blacksburg, noting that Epes attended Virginia Tech. He got the idea for starting a trucking company while hitching rides home from Tech to Blackstone with a trucker who hauled tobacco. Epes' father, a promiment businessman in Blackstone, helped his son get started in trucking.

Th company's headquarters was in Blackstone in 1988 when a new owner moved it to Greensboro.

"I might be wrong,'' Carter says of Blacksburg versus Blackstone, "but I have an excellent memory."

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.