LANDIS ó I’ve seen pictures of them in front of their garden, little dog Cleo at their feet, admiring their tomatoes and roses and towering, giant sunflowers.
Aunt Margaret and Uncle Mack ó you’ll remember him as Post columnist Mack McKa ó lived in a little house on Ryder Avenue.
It’s what they call a shotgun house, three rooms, side by side, one after another. Aunt Margaret had the front bedroom and Uncle Mack slept on a sofa bed in the middle. On the other end was the kitchen.
The house ó indeed the entire corner lot ó was owned by D.C. Linn.
As I recall, two Chinaberry trees stood sentry. I think they’re still there, but I’ll have to ride by and check just to make sure.
Someone wrote into the Post recently, wondering why the house had never been restored.
I’ll tell you why. It probably would cost more than the little hovel, as my dad called it, is worth. Mr. Linn died last fall, but his daughter, Susan Norvell, told me that at some point he stopped maintaining the house.
Aunt Margaret lived there after Uncle Mack died, and Mr. Linn never charged her any rent after that.
“She never said one way or another,” Daddy said of her living there.
“She just took whatever she got.”
When she was about 80, she came to live with us. Until she married Uncle Mack ó late in life ó she helped raise Daddy while his parents, my grandparents, worked in Cannon Mills.
She lived with us for 10 years, and then in a retirement center for another decade, until her death at nearly 102. She read the Post until the day she died.
I know the two would be pleased about plans for a new park on the site of their former home.
The Linn family is giving the property to the town of Landis. Plans drawn by architect Bill Burgin call for several buildings to be moved over from next to the railroad track, Susan told me. They include the depot, an old doctor’s office, the old fire station and the old jail.
The project will encompass an entire city block and include other buildings and an amphitheater.
“It’s going to be a beautiful place,” says Reed Linn, town administrator.
Susan said that her daddy met with Bill on the Friday before he died, so the park will have his hand on it.
For Uncle Mack, the town of Landis was the center of his universe.
If he was writing about a football game at Catawba College, for example, he’d be sure to mention in the lead that it was only a few miles up the road from Landis.
And then he had this mythical creature called the Wampus Cat, which showed up at farms and other places all over Rowan County, fairly terrorizing the citizenry before Old Man Hurley finally made him kill it off.
Daddy and I know that the park will be a lovely place ó if we can just keep that darned Wampus Cat away.