Walk Across Rowan - The journey continues

Glenn Hudson leans against his 1967 pink colored Ford Mustang. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Wanda Weeks walks along Henderson Street to check on her car that is being worked on in a nearby garage. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Salisbury Post columnist Mark Wineka waits for a long freight train to pass at the Main Street crossing in Salisbury. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Realtor Ted Aurora waits on homeowners to arrive at a lawyers office on North Main Street in Salisbury to close on a home that was sold. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

A freight train laden with coal makes it way slow across Main Street on Monday Morning. A car passes over the Shober Bridge far off in the background. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Looking Southward along Main Street in Salisbury. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Todd Peeler and Mary Deal enjoy lunch at Hap's Grill. Hap's, along North Main Street in Salisbury, is a popular place around lunch time. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Sam Blackwelder picks out a drink from the cooler at Koco Java on North Main Street. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

Looking North along Main Street in Salisbury. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

By Mark Wineka

mwineka@salisburypost.com Read Mark's blog as he updates it throughout the week here.

Ted Aurora stood outside the F&M Professional Center on North Main Street and waited.

“As long as I’m not in front of the courthouse, right?” Aurora laughed, referring to the Rowan County Courthouse across the street.

It was a good morning for Aurora, a Realtor/broker for B&R Realty in Salisbury.

He was closing on the sale of a house in Covington Heights. His buyers had just left the attorney’s office. Now he was waiting for the sellers to arrive.

“They should be here in 5 minutes,” he said.

Aurora shook his head when asked about these tough days for folks in his business.

“After April, everything went south,” he said. That’s when the federal tax credits for first-time homebuyers disappeared. Since then, “it’s like we unplugged” the lights, he said.

A native of Queens, N.Y., Aurora moved to Salisbury about 17 years ago. He had a job then with Wachovia in Winston-Salem. His wife had a job in Charlotte, so Salisbury seemed like a good place in the middle.

When he had a chance to move to Richmond with the bank, Aurora declined, opting to stay in his adopted Salisbury.

“We moved down here for quality of life,” he said, describing things as friendlier and cleaner than what he was used to in New York.

Meanwhile, his father-in-law and mother also have moved close by.

When he goes back to New York for visits, three days of “noise and chaos” are about all he can stand, Aurora said. When New York friends visit him in Salisbury, they complain that it’s too quiet.

Aurora shrugs and tells them one thing: “You get used to it.”

***

If there was a theme to Monday’s segment of a five-day walk Post photographer Jon Lakey and I are making through the heart of Rowan County, it started with New York.

It’s as though Frank Sinatra were singing in the background, because every person we met for awhile, seemed to have Empire State connections.

We met Nancy Noto on her way to work as a secretary at North Main Baptist Church.

She hails from New York state and has been living in Salisbury about nine years.

Noto made a good point:

“I was never called a Yankee until I moved here. We don’t call each other Yankees.”

Noto came South on her own, driving a U-Haul and pulling a car behind it. A friend of hers lived here, and she decided to stay. Why?

“The weather, and the people are friendly,” she said.

Noto’s week will include working on next Sunday’s bulletin and the newsletter, filing and fielding the telephone calls that come with a 200-plus member church.

In September, she plans to travel back to New York for a week after her daughter’s baby is delivered. But she’ll return to her home and job in Salisbury after the New York visit.

“I’ll be here for awhile,” the Yankee promises.

***

Wendy Beeker opened her Grayshores Trading Co. store last Friday, so Monday was her third day in business.

The “Grayshores” name comes from a lakeside road where she grew up in New York state.

Located where Literary Bookpost was before it crossed the street, Grayshores Trading Co. offers an eclectic mix of things, including new and used painted furniture, interesting photographs, other home decor items and a few books.

Beeker and her husband lived and worked in Salisbury long ago, before moving to Brunswick, Ga., where Wendy owned both “a place like this” and a bookstore. She sold both, and they moved back to Salisbury to be close to family, while also selecting a city they were familiar with.

“We didn’t want to start completely over,” she said. “... Since Deal (Safrit, who runs Literary Bookpost) does such a good jobs with books, I thought I’d do this again.”

***

Artist Michael Kirksey lived in New York City from 1981 to 2000 after his graduation from N.C. A&T University.

Family connections brought him to Salisbury, where his latest project has been painting some urban landscapes of the city. He’s hoping to be ready for a show this fall.

Kirksey had just been to the Rowan Public Library, where he checked out four different art books.

“Staying refreshed,” he said.

***

Glenn Hudson isn’t from New York. Dallas, Texas, will have to do.

An accomplished writer, especially in the field of sports, Hudson freelances these days. He knows a lot about fishing and likes his role as house husband, taking care of the kids.

But what caught the attention of Jon and me Monday was Hudson’s pink 1967 Mustang convertible.

Playboy pink, Hudson said in describing the color. It has only 66,000 original miles, owing to its 18 years in storage.

Driving around in a pink Mustang takes a strong, confident man, we all agreed.

Jon blurted out the obvious question before I could: Was it one of those Mary Kay cars?

“I get that Mary Kay crap all the time,” Hudson said, “and, honestly, I get tired of it.”

Hudson said the original color of his Mustang was dust rose — something he would like to return to some day.

“But right now, the family wants it to stay Playboy pink,” he said.

As we said, it takes a confident man.

***

Gary Trosper parked his Honda Gold Wing motorcycle on East Fisher Street while he was running a couple of errands for his wife.

“Every day’s a pretty day on a motorcycle,” Trosper said.

Trosper is a longtime resident, but he grew up in Cincinnati. Shocker: He’s a Reds fan.

“I grew up on Johnny Bench and Pete Rose — the real baseball players who did it for the love of the game, not the money,” Trosper said.

Having recently returned from Taylorsville, where he said cruising has successfully returned as an effort to revitalize the downtown, Trosper suggested that Salisbury consider the same tactic.

“I think it would help the city a lot,” he said.

***

Not everybody Jon and I talked with came from somewhere else. But I must mention Heather McMurray and Betty Clement, a mother-daughter duo from Mocksville who were outside The Literary Bookpost looking over some titles as part of their shopping in the downtown.

We also ran into Bill Snyder, a West Virginia native who’s a supervisor for the N.C. Department of Transportation. He was sitting on a roller, waiting for the arrival of a load of asphalt.

His DOT crews were patching the right northbound lane of South Main Street Monday. I asked whether it’s tough, working on a street as busy as Main Street.

“If we get out here early enough and get our work cones set up, it’s not too bad,” Snyder said. “More aggravation for the drivers than us.”

***

At mid-morning Monday, we rested at Koco Java on North Main Street, where Clyde graciously treated us to coffee, a sticky bun and cheese danish, while we filed some reports and photos for our website.

It’s always good to visit the Koco Java owners, Arturo and Berta Therecka.

In the corner, the finance committee of the 95-member-strong Delta Kappa Gamma Society of teachers was meeting.

“I think we need to plug this place,” Edith Alcorn said of the coffee shop. “It’s wonderful.”

The ladies, who included Alcorn, Dr. Elaine Stiller, Dr. Mary Frances Edens, Suzanne Cox and Dot Luther, said they were meeting to simply decide one thing: How should they spend the money.

***

You’ve probably seen the contractors who perform death-defying high-wire acts while they paint the outside of municipal water towers.

Every now and then, those same elevated water tanks have to be painted inside, too.

Monday afternoon, Jon and I talked to the men blasting and painting the inside of the 300,000-gallon city water tank at the triangle formed by South Main and South Fulton streets.

Jeremy Mabe, second-shift foreman for Hazelwood Paint Co., told us he was part of a 15-man crew which has been working for about two weeks on the “inside job.”

“It takes some time,” Mabe said, as he showed us the blast hose used to clean the tank with “black beauty” dust.

Imagine hanging inside a tank, pretty much in the dark, suspended from a line while blasting away with highly compressed air and sand.

Some people, no matter how strong they think they are, can’t hold a blast hose, Mabe said.

“You’ll be wupped at the end of the day,” he told us.

***

I must mention three other people we ran into Monday.

“We had more Eagle Scouts the other day,” said my old Troop 443 Scouting buddy Henry Trexler when he saw me at the corner of Main and Council streets.

Of 108 Eagles Troop 443 has now produced, Henry has been Scoutmaster for 74 of them. He is now in his 50th year of Scouting.

“I must love it,” he said.

Wanda Weeks, who lives at Henderson and Lee streets, left her truck at Salisbury Automotive & Diesel Service on North Main Street Monday morning, but she made the mistake of leaving the wrong set of keys.

No problem. She easily walked the right set of keys from home to the shop. Her truck, she said, needed some new rear shocks.

Our waitress for lunch at Marlowe’s on South Main Street was Tiffany Turner.

I asked how she liked the beautifully designed tattoo that banded around her upper left arm.

“It’s me,” she said, “and I wouldn’t change anything about myself.”

***

I want to end this report at the free thrift store Kevin Bost has established on North Main Street, not far from Henderson High School.

Bost, a bishop at his World of Faith Church, gives away the store’s clothes to anyone in need. Yes, he gives them away. He’ll take donations, but it’s not necessary.

“We’re clothing a lot of people,” Bost said. “More people should open up their hearts because times are tough right now.”

It’s not always easy for Bost to hold regular hours at the store. He works as an in-home care provider, and Monday morning he was waiting for a volunteer to relieve him so he could start his shift.

Bost said he’s not looking for any glory, just a chance to help someone else.

“Somebody’s got to do it, buddy,” he said.

Wineka and Lakey will continue their walk across Rowan County today by heading south out of Salisbury on U.S. 29, ending the segment at Webb Road.