The Kneverest Hall of Fame

Elk Knob beckons from my bedroom window (I need to call the tree-trimmers).

 I've had my eyes on Elk Knob since we built our mountainside house in Boone in 2005. On Thursday, March 26th, I celebrated my 300th hike up the mountain.
 In 2007, I answered a call for volunteers to help build a hiking trail to the summit. My first climb followed a steep old Jeep trail where realtors once tried to sell mile-high views. Thankfully, the lots were never developed, and the state of North Carolina acquired the land in 2003 to become Elk Knob State Park.
 The original superintendent, Larry Trivette, envisioned a walkable trail to the top, and we agreed to build it by hand, rather than scarring the mountainside with a bulldozer or backhoe. I was among the volunteers who came every Saturday to carve out the trail. Each year, we completed about a half mile of trail. On fall Saturdays, I brought a radio and we worked to the tune of Armanti Edwards as hacked stumps, leveraged boulders, and poured gravel on the muddy spots. After quitting time, if I wasn't too sore or exhausted, I trudged up the old jeep road to reward myself with the hundred-mile view.
 We completed the trail on Sept. 4, 2011, which was my 29th ascent. I reached No. 100 in 2019, No. 200 in 2023, and No. 300 in 2026. Could I reach 400 this year? Why not, now that I'm retired? Why not do two a day? I know of a Holocaust survivor in Phoenix named Sam Wagman, who climbed Camelback Mountain three times a day, six days a week, for 37 years, setting a world record with 34,000 climbs. His record is safe with me. 

I had the honor of dumping the last load of gravel on the Elk Knob trail in 2011.

 "Groundhog Day" is celebrated at Gobblers Knob, and Elk Knob has become my personal #GroundhogDay. Wake up and do it again. With a few excuses, I've missed only four months for the past 10 years. My streaks reached 48 consecutive months before the park was closed in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic, then another 54 months before we were gutted by Hurricane Helene. Until that seven-week shutdown, I was on pace to tally 70 hikes in my 70th year.
 Why, you ask? That's what they asked George Mallory in 1924 before his ill-fated climb of Mount Everest. "Because it's there," he declared.
 Why do I come back, month after month? Elk Knob is not Everest, but it's high enough—one of the 52 highest peaks in North Carolina. The view is always nice. Hiking is healthy and seems to keep my diabetes at bay. (If you want to impress your cardiologist, send him a summit photo five days after he put stents in your heart.) I like to stay acquainted with the wildflowers. I feel a sense of ownership in the park and trail. I confess to being obsessive. 

The elevation is actually 5,558.

 And I'm over halfway to a Hall of Fame. The International Poly-Baggers Hall of Fame recognizes peak-baggers who have climbed the same mountain 500 times. This is an online club based in Wales. When and if I get there, maybe they'll let me rename the club into something that fits in an obituary. My favorite so far is the "Neverest" Hall of Fame. Or in the case of Elk Knob, we could borrow the silent K and call it Kneverest.
 Elk Knob is a 4-mile round trip with 1,000 feet of elevation gain from the parking lot. By mountain-climbing standards, it's a humble ascent. My usual round trip takes a little over two hours. Some people can run a marathon faster than that. My fastest climb was 52 minutes at age 57. I've walked over 1,200 miles on "my" trail.
 Do I have the record for Elk Knob climbs? Maybe. There is another man who hikes as often as I do, but he does not keep count. Others have done more on other peaks, like Mount Le Conte. 
 If hikes were stackable, like shoeboxes, my 300 would rise 300,000 feet, which would approach the Kármán Line, the brink of outer space, over 10 times higher than Everest and a quarter of the way to the international space station. 

Laundry's last hurrah

 

 It's hard for me to watch college sports anymore.
 I used to enjoy following Clemson, because that's where I grew up, cheering for the likes of Buddy Gore and Butch Zetazelo, in the days before the Tiger Paw was invented. As a teenager, I could ride my Schwinn 10-speed on the backroads from Anderson to Clemson and treat myself to peach ice cream at the Ag Center.

 Friends who associate me with Clemson are sometimes surprised to learn I only attended classes there for the spring semester of 1976, to get the credits I needed to transfer from Anderson College into journalism school. When Chapel Hill waitlisted me, newspaper friends persuaded me to pursue Mizzou.
 So I never got a student pass to a Clemson game. As a kid, I got in free because my uncle had IPTAY passes and my mom's cousin was a Coke vendor who needed help unloading the steel soda cannisters. In 1970, I watched the South Carolina game from a tree in the southeast corner of the stadium..
 In my 40s, I covered Clemson sports for The Greenville News, and I suppressed some old-fashioned affection for the place. There was no cheering in Bob Bradley's press box, but there was little to cheer about in the Tommy West era.
 After I left Greenville and the newspaper business, I still enjoyed following Clemson football. I liked what Tommy Bowden and Dabo Swinney stood for. When the Tigers conquered Alabama for national championships in 2017 and 2019, I had the perspective of remembering the year after I enrolled at Clemson, the Red Elephants beat the Red Parkers 56-0. How far "we" had come!
 Up here in Boone, I rarely miss a Clemson football game on TV. We even splurged on the ACC Network. My boss at Samaritan's Purse is an Auburn man, so we treated each other to road trips when "our" teams played in 2016 (snap infraction!) and 2017.
 But when Clemson played Penn State in the Pinstripe Bowl after Christmas, I opted out, went hiking, and missed the first quarter.
 It's hard to feel invested in players who have no investment in the place that once meant so much to me. Several players skipped the bowl game because they didn't think it would help improve their NFL career. I'm glad that Dabo can brag about his graduation rate, but I wish he could recruit players who bleed orange and sweat loyalty. 
 Living in Boone, I started following Appalachian State. I missed the Michigan game in 2005, but I was at Penn State in 2018 when the Mountaineers nearly upset Micah Parson's team. Now, dozens of App players have "entered the transfer portal," giving Boone the cold shoulder after much prayer and delusion. (And what does it say about Clemson, that Appalachian gave Penn State the better game?)
 The heartache here is not about the demise of Clemson or Appalachian football. It's that so many players don't stay long enough to learn the alma mater or savor the ice cream. If they don't care, why should I?
 In the times we live in, I don't have an answer. Money ruined the game as soon as coaches started making millions. We should not be surprised that players became mercenaries. Conferences like the ACC have sold their soul to the likes of ESPN. They have no boundaries, geographical nor ethical. Clemson once benefitted from that in 2015, when the ACC had a vested interest in protecting the Tigers in the ACC championship game.
 So who am I cheering for anymore? Empty shirts? Jerry Seinfeld offered some wisdom on that: "We're cheering for the laundry."
 Pliny the Younger foreshadowed Seinfeld by 2,100 years when he covered Roman chariot races: “I am the more astonished that so many thousands of grown men should be possessed…with a childish passion to look at galloping horses and men standing upright in their chariots. If…they were attracted by the swiftness of the horses or the skill of the men, one could account for this enthusiasm. But it is the color of the tunic they favor. And if during the running the racers were to exchange colors, their partisans would change sides and instantly forsake the very drivers and horses whom they were just before clamorously cheering by name.”

'Laundry money'

 In my sportswriting days, "laundry money" was a euphemism for an NCAA misdemeanor. In those seemingly innocent times, a college team could be punished for a financial gift from a coach to a student-athlete. The stereotypical excuse was that the student couldn't afford to wash his clothes, so a sympathetic coach gave him a roll of quarters for "laundry money." Or the coach could get a wrist-slap for giving a kid a jersey or other laundry.

 If $10 could bribe a player back then, then college football is our worst example of inflation.

 I was reminded of "laundry money" when Trinidad Chambliss sued the NCAA, saying he will lose millions of dollars if the NCAA "makes him turn pro."

 Chambliss seems like a fine young man and an excellent college quarterback for the University of Mississippi, which likes to be called "Ole Miss." He might have been playing in Monday's national championship game against Indiana, except for an official who swallowed his whistle on a dramatic last-second play that might have been a Mississippi touchdown if not for the interference of a Miami defender. (We wouldn't be raving about Indiana so much if Carson Beck had been as clutch as Chambliss on their final collegiate plays.

 College football fans got to know Chambliss on an AT&T commercial, where he's on a couch with family and friends as he answers a phone call: "I'd like to transfer to AT&T." Then he turns to a friend and wisecracks: "What did you think I was talking about?"

 We thought you were transferring colleges, not carriers. We thought you had just sold out. (I'm disappointed in my sportswriting heirs who have failed to document how much he earned for that spot).

 The gag pokes fun at the "transfer portal," where a player goes to restart his college career elsewhere. Chambliss, 23, has been there through the portal previously, and he might have gone there again this year, if not his eligibility questions. This is his fifth year in college, and he is not happy that the NCAA has denied his appeal to play a sixth year. College athletes are term-limited to four seasons, though the NCAA has made exceptions for COVID-era players, and there is at least one vagabond quarterback who has been approved for a seventh season (at a seventh different school).

 Chambliss started his career at a Division II school in Michigan, Ferris State, where he won a national championship before transferring to Ole Miss. He was unable to play his first two seasons because of tonsillitis, so he is appealing for what would be his fourth season of competition.

 For those who are wondering if Chambliss is more of a student-athlete than Carson Beck, he claims to be an A student on track to graduate in May. 

 Despite Chambliss' success on Saturdays the past two seasons, NFL scouts doubt that he's ready to compete on Sundays. College quarterbacks of his caliber earn $5 million or more. As an NFL rookie, he'd probably make only $2 million. 

 As they chant at Ole Miss: "Hotty Toddy!" 

A record book for S.C. all-stars

Taking the top off the defense: DeAndre "Nuk" Hopkins, pictured at Daniel High, has scored more NFL TDs than any other South Carolinian (GreenvilleOnline photo).

 Back in 1992 when Sports Illustrated was an institution, the magazine ranked the 50 greatest athletes from each state. The South Carolina list was headlined by heayweight boxing champion Joe Frazier, who grew up in Beaufort as the son of a sharecropper.

 I never met Frazier but was surprised how many of the South Carolinians that I had encountered in my sportswriting career. No. 2 was Shoeless Joe Jackson, who died before I was born, so I wrote columns contending that his "lifetime ban" from baseball was no longer valid.
 No. 3 Pete Maravich I saw play in 1968 at Clemson (see Memoirs, 1968).
 No. 7 David Pearson and No. 14 Cale Yarborough drove in the first NASCAR race I ever saw, at Darlington.
 At T.L. Hanna, I was the scorekeeper for No. 9 Jim Rice's senior season, and saw No. 8 Alex English play for Dreher and No. 25 Stanley Morgan for Easley. We called him Ed Rice, and Ed, if you see this, I owe you an apology for a misquote 50 years ago.

 As a kid going to Clemson games, I watched an All-ACC receiver named Charlie Waters. SI ranked him No. 21 for his career as a two-time Super Bown champion with the Dallas Cowboys, making all-pro at a position he rarely played at Clemson.

 As a sportswriter for The Anderson Independent, I covered the emergence of No. 18 Larry Nance at McDuffie High School and No. 43 Willie Mays Aikens at Seneca, plus No. 33 Steve Fuller in the demise of his Spartanburg High School juggernaut.
 On my first road trip for the paper, I met No. 19 Bobby Richardson when I covered the 1975 College World Series. (Our paths crossed again in Boone, when Richardson shared his testimony at Deerfield United Methodist Church, and I won an autographed baseball by answering the trivia question of who replaced him at second base for the Yankees. Answer: Horace Clarke).
 At The Greenville News, I crossed paths with No. 15 Kevin Garnett during the 1999 NBA lockout and No. 24 Xavier McDaniel. I presented No. 31 William Perry with his all-state plaque at the Easley Football Jamboree, and followed the career of No. 41 Tony Rice from Woodruff High School to Notre Dame to the Fiesta Bowl. Before No. 47 Anthuan Maybank was an Olympic Gold Medalist, I saw him run for Georgetown High School, and his name inspired the Antwan Index (see my memoirs for 1991).

 I'm sorry I never met No. 48 George Webster—the story of his underground-railroad recruitment from Anderson to Michigan State would have been an enlightening peek behind the curtain of segregation.
 If SI had asked me, I would have told them they overlooked Camden's Larry Doby, a 1998 Hall of Famer who was the Jackie Robinson of the American League. Neither SI nor I were aware of Anderson's Ben Taylor, a Negro League baseball star who was inducted into Cooperstown in 2006. 

 Other worthy nominees might have been Greenville basketballer Clyde Mayes (another barrier-breaker from Jim Rice's generation); Fountain Inn golfer Chris Patton; and Textile Leaguer Earl Wooten of Pelzer. 

 If SI had survived, this list eventually might have included Stephen Davis of Spartanburg (who had three times more NFL yardage than his Auburn predecessor, Bo Jackson); DeAndre Hopkins (who has surpassed Morgan for the most TD catches by a South Carolinian), golfers Dustin Johnson and Lucas Glover; and baseball's Preston Wilson. I saw Wilson homer for Bamberg-Ehrhardt in a 1992 playoff game at Walhalla, shortly before he became a Top 10 draftee in the same class as Derek Jeter. 

  I'm reminded of the Names in the News column in The Greenville News, where we compiled accomplishments of South Carolinians. 

 As I reflected on South Carolina's favorite sons, Google and I compiled the big-league records of athletes born or schooled in my home state. These names are off the top of my head, so these lists may not be all-inclusive. Let me know anyone I've overlooked. Stats updated through 2025. I've included Negro League stats, which have been counted since 2024 by Major League Baseball. #borninsouthcarolina:

(Listed with birthplace and high school)

MLB HOME RUNS
382 Jim Rice, Anderson Westside/T.L. Hanna
305 Reggie Sanders, Florence Wilson

294 Larry Doby, Camden
268 Gorman Thomas, Charleston James Island
196 Justin Smoak, Goose Creek Stratford
192 Al Rosen, born Spartanburg (raised in Miami) 

189 Preston Wilson, Bamberg-Ehrhardt
153 Dan Driessen, Hilton Head Hardeeville
146 Matt Weiters, Goose Creek
139 Brett Gardner, Holly Hill Academy

131 Ken Harrelson, born Woodruff (raised in Savannah)

110 Willie Mays Aikens, Seneca

  94 Whit Merrifield, born Florence (raised in N.C.) 

  67 Mookie Wilson, Bamberg-Ehrhardt
  60 Matthew LeCroy, Belton-Honea Path
  54 Shoeless Joe Jackson, Greenville
  54 Willie Randolph, Holly Hill

  44 Pokey Reese, Columbia Lower Richland

  43 Del Pratt, Walhalla (raised in Alabama)

  41 Don Buddin, Olanta

  37 Bill Spiers, Orangeburg Wade Hampton

  36 Marty Marion, Richburg (raised in Atlanta)

  34 Bobby Richardson, Sumter Edmunds

  32 Chino Smith, Greenwood 

  31 Doug Strange, Greenville Wade Hampton

  31 Dewayne Wise, Chapin

  27 Red Smith, Greenville 

  26 Ben Taylor, Anderson

  26 Gene Richards, Monticello McCrorey-Liston

  26 Candy Jim Taylor, Anderson

  20 Eli White, Piedmont Wren 

  19 Herm Winningham, Orangeburg-Wilkinson

  17 Chick Galloway, Clinton

  16 Neil Chrisley, Calhoun Falls

  16, Billy McMillon, Bishopville Lee County

  14 Steven Duggar, Spartanburg Byrnes

  14 Reggie Taylor, Newberry

  12 Tripp Cromer, Lake City

  10 Mike Sharperson, Orangburg-Wilkinson

NFL TOUCHDOWNS

85 DeAndre Hopkins, Daniel 
73 Stanley Morgan, Easley
70 A.J. Green, Summerville 
69 Stephen Davis, Spartanburg
66 Jimmy Orr, Seneca

63 Roddy White, Charleston James Island  
57 Freddie Solomon, Sumter

50 Ben Coates, Greenwood

47 Alshon Jeffery, St. Matthews Calhoun County

35 Bobby Engram, Camden
34 Duce Staley, Columbia Airport
32 Robert Brooks, Greenwood

32 Mike Williams, Holly Hill Lake Marion

31 Troy Brown, Barnwell Blackville-Hilda

30 Sidney Rice, Gaffney

29 Jerry Butler, Ware Shoals

28 Steve Fuller, Spartanburg (born in Enid, Okla.)

27 David Meggett, Charleston Bonds-Wilson

27 Deebo Samuel, Inman Chapman 

25 Charlie Brown, John's Island St. John's

25 Kevin Long, Clinton

22 Cordarrelle Patterson, Rock Hill Northwestern

20 Bennie Cunningham, Laurens Seneca

20 Stanford Jennings, Summerville

19 Clarence Williams, Moncks Corner Berkeley

16 Rico Dowdle, Gaffney (raised in Asheville, N.C.)

15 Andre Roberts, Columbia Spring Valley

13 Harold Green, Stratford

13 Maurice Morris, Chester

13 Greg Jones, Columbia Battery Creek

10 Brian Quick, Columbia Ridge View   

10 Keith Jennings, Summerville 

10 Andre Ellington, Moncks Corner Berkeley

Millions of words in the rear-view mirror

My original typewriter, awaiting restoration (GoFundMe, anyone?)

 Words come easily to me. I've been fortunate to make my living composing them. As my retirement day (Dec. 31, 2025) approaches, I'm counting them down. 
 In my newspaper career, I averaged about 300 bylined stories per year. Reckoning all the unbylined stories I composed from called-in events, I was turning out more than 100,000 words per year. That would be 2.5 million words in 25 years at The Greenville News,  The Anderson Independent, the Columbia Daily Tribune, and The Missourian.

 My pace has relented at Samaritan's Purse, but I can confidently estimate 50,000 annual words for almost 27 years, or 1.3 million.

 Books are 100,000-word projects. I've written two centennial histories: LeConte Lodge: A Centennial History, and Mountain View United Methodist Church. I'm thousands of words into my next project, Centennial of our Sentinel Parks / How the Great Depression Wrought America's Favorite Parks. The Stoneman Gazette is book-length, so we'll call it 100,000 words.

 Then there are my memoirs, the rest of my blog and the two iterations of my Mount LeConte blogs (LeConte Log and the more elegantly named LeContest.com). Not to mention my quarterly county high-pointers column in the Highpointers Club journal, Apex to Zenith, nor my daily contributions to USA Today's old-timey Around the USA column. 

 So these fingers have pecked out close to 5 million words. Maybe 25 million keystrokes. 

 Here I offer 1,200 more, typed free of charge for your amusement. 

 "Ma" Ashley was my typing teacher at T.L. Hanna High School. I'd like to dedicate my prose to her memory. Mrs. Ashley bore with me in after-school practice sessions, wielding a yardstick as she insisted on proper military posture—feet flat on the floor, wrists off the table. 

 The star students in her typing class were piano players. We had a piano, but I never took lessons, and we didn't have a typewriter at home. But all the after-school practice paid off, and in a race, I could crank out 100 words a minute. My daughter Marta is twice as fast. 

 I bought a couple of cheap typewriters, a lightweight portable that I found in a pawn shop in Columbia, S.C., and a heavyweight desktop model that I used at the University of Missouri. 

 When I started my newspaper career in Anderson, they assigned me to a 1938 Royal Magic Margin model, with a defective F key. We typed our stories on reams of newsprint, and I was known for typing several paragraphs and then ripping off the copy and starting over. It was wildly satisfying to complete a paragraph, hear the end-of-line bell, and sling the carriage return bar. We used bottles of rubber glue to paste our prose together, whiffing all the way.

 When we finished a story, we typed 30 or ###, which was a code that the composing room understood to mean "THE END." 

 It was a noisy business. The Associated Press teletype clattered endlessly with wire stories and pre-internet alerts: "BBN: NO-HIT ALERT: Nolan Ryan has a no-hitter through seven innings."

The ECRM terminal

 By the time I returned from college, Anderson's newsroom was computerized. We had ECRM terminals that had a speaker under the keyboard to imitate the busy sound of a typewriter. 

 It was a poor and annoying imitation. It was also simple enough to raise the hood on the terminal and clip the wires to the speaker, which probably short-circuited the entire system.

 The old manual typewriters were retired into the attic. (Hey, we might need them someday, if computers turn out to be a dead-end fad.)

 Anderson's newspaper office had a suspended acoustic ceiling, so there was no attic, just planks placed through the steel roof girders, where the typewriters were shelved.

 For years, staff meetings were held in that room under those typewriters. The building rumbled when the printing presses ran, and I wondered if those dusty 40-pound bombs might rattle off their perches and plunge through the ceiling tiles onto unsuspecting journalists below. When the newsroom rebelled against our managing editor, we might have eliminated him by poising an old typewriter over his seat.

 As far as I know, the typewriters are still up there today in the derelict newspaper building, mouldering on the edge of the Rocky River swamp.

 I didn't want my dear old typewriter to rust up there in the rafters. So before I left Anderson, I rescued it from the attic and brought it home to rust under our basemen stairs. For my retirement, I want to get it restored. 

 Maybe I'll type an old-fashioned book on it someday. 

Hey, Hey, It's the Monkeys

 Have you heard of the Infinite Monkey Theorem?
 It was a prehistoric vision of AI. What if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters? Eventually they will type out every literary possibility. Shakespeare? "Wherefore art thou?" The King James Bible? "Verily!" Bill and Gloria Gaither? "Because He Lives." The headlines in the Stoneman Gazette? Blame malnewstrition!
 The odds are infinitestimal. An Arizona man named Shane Lewis Stone pondered his 48-key keyboard and figured the odds against a monkey successfully typing his name was 1 in 38 septillion. That's 38 followed by 24 zeroes. And that's not expecting proper capitalization or punctuation. Even on the planet of the apes, it seems there will be work for editors.
 Out of my millions of words, the odds were pretty good that a few of them would win awards, and there might have been more if I had been more diligent about entering contests.
 The South Carolina Press Association gave me a plaque in 1992 for a column about Smitty Danielson, an irrepressible Greenville High School coach whose football teams went 0-22:

 This is an Easter Story of a coach with an all-too-perfect record. In 31 years of teaching at Greenville High School, Smitty Danielson has only once been absent from a day of class. In two seasons of coaching football, though, his teams never had a Good Friday.

 My finest lines passed almost without notice. Please let me recite a couple of passages here. 

 Once I wrote a story about Lonzy Jenkins, a visually impaired athlete at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, who was recruited to run for the state champion cross-country team at Spartanburg High School. 

 Lonzy trained at Croft State Park, a former Army training base. He ran shoulder-to-shoulder with a guide runner, but he also was able to run shoulder to shoulder in another sense, as he followed the lateral bevel of the graded dirt roads. He explained to me that he had a sixth sense that enabled him to correct his own course, keeping his steps between the shoulders of the road, safely out of the ditches. 

 Lonzy inspired my first burst of poetry: 

Shoulder to shoulder,
That's how he goes.
With wings on his heels,
And 20-20 toes.

 I had a similar inspiration when working on my book about the birth of national parks in the Southeast. My generation remembers barn roofs painted with the slogan, "See Rock City," advertising that you can see seven states from Tennessee's Rock City. That was an overstated myth, but at least you can see the first national military park in the Southeast: Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. But did the dramatic cliffs of Rock City and Lookout Mountain have the makings of an actual national park? 

Rock City is nice to see,
but it’s not quite Yosemite.

 When words snap together like that, I think maybe I could have been the next Paul McCartney: 

Michelle, my belle,

These are words that go together well.

 Or at least a monkey, if not a Monkee like Michael Nesmith:

Theater is life.

Cinema is art.

Television is furniture.

My LUCKY day

 

 A first-grade vocabulary is not much to brag about, but for the sake of WORDLE, please indulge me. And please hold your applause. 

 For more than two years, I used the same two seed-words, ABIDE and LOUSY. Abide is my favorite Bible verb, and Lousy is essentially the opposite of abiding in Christ. When played together they tell me all the possible vowels.
 On March 19, 2024, the winning word was ABIDE. So my WORDLE became flesh. John 15:4, y'all. 
 Since then, I've led off with LOUSY, knowing that it would eventually be a first-guess winner.

 August 16 turned out to be my lucky day. That afternoon in Albemarle, we Hall and Amber revealed the gender of our grandson, Robert Ruskin Layton. That night, I logged on to WORDLE and entered LOUSY.
 Bingo!

 The day after LOUSY won, this granddaddy needed new seed-words. So I looked up IDEAL and YOURS, and found that neither has been used by WORDLE. 

 On Oct. 19, IDEAL won.
 So now I start with AROSE and JUICY. Eventually those will be winners. At the very least, they tell me all the vowels. If the U is not in the second place, I can safely rule out Q. And E and Y narrow down the possibilities for the final letter.
 WORDLE says IDEAL was the seventh time I've gotten the first guess right. Other than ABIDE, I don't remember any of the others. Seventeen times I've needed only one or two guesses.
 Mary points out that solving WORDLE in one guess is pure luck, and that two guesses is the height of discernment. AI says the odds against a one-word guess are 1/2,315.

 The ones I remember are the ones I missed, or when WORDLE missed  me.
 On July 31, riding a streak of 666 consecutive games, I solved DAUNT. But a couple of days later, I noticed that the streak had reset after 666. Evidently, WORDLE never recorded that answer. If you miss a day, it's as if you missed a word. (Or maybe WORDLE halts streaks at the mark of the beast.) 
 So I had to start over.
 A few days later, I had _I_TY, and for my last guess I tried NIFTY, when it should have been MINTY. When the streak was intact, I was always careful about cross-checking my final guess. If you're a serious player, you're familiar with lists of all the words WORDLE has previously used, as well as lists of the unused words. If I had checked those, I could have ruled out NIFTY, and MINTY would have been self-evident. But without the streak, I was lazy.
 Honestly, I think the streak would have ended a few days later with KEFIR, a word I've never encountered. I'm told it's some sort of yogurt. Not sure I could have ferreted out that one.
 The streak of 666 began after I had _ADDY and guessed PADDY rather than DADDY.

 A more recent streak died when I had to choose between HOLLY and HOTLY. (Should have played the T earlier in the game.)
 The trick of keeping the streak alive is to never miss a day. I was able to play every day when I traveled to Romania earlier this year.

 Bless its heart, WORDLE avoids obscure and archaic words. The trickiest ones I remember: PSALM, POLYP, SPASM, ABHOR, FUGUE, and GIZMO.

 Thank you for your applause. I want to thank my Mrs. MacLean and Mrs. Shanklin, my teachers in first and second grade at Concord Elementary School in Anderson.

Before LeConte Lodge was born

The 1923 pioneers: guide Wiley Oakley, Gertrude Schwass, Frank Freels, and Jennie Russ were "like drowned chickens" when they made it back to Gatlinburg. Gertrude's hat had been nibbled by a mouse while she slept, and their hiking boots were ruined by the mud. (Orpheus Schantz photo, Appalachian State University archives)

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 16 marked the 100th birthday of LeConte Lodge. As the co-author of LeConte Lodge / A Centennial History of a Smoky Mountain Landmark, I was invited me to speak at supper July 17 (as I did last August at Myrtle Point to mark the centennial of the 1924 national park commission hike). —Tom Layton

Professor Orpheus Schantz
(Appalachian State University archives)

 On July 11, 1925, the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association authorized Paul Adams to establish a camp on Mount Le Conte. He hired some local boys and erected a tent not far from the Basin Spring.

 Five days later came the first guests, as Professor Orpheus Schantz brought a group of tourists and students from Chicago. Schantz paid $32 for his group to stay two nights. Since then, there's always been a human and commercial presence on Mount Le Conte.

 That winter, Adams built a crude cabin, and in 1926 Jack Huff opened the original 32-bed LeConte Lodge cabin. 

 Professor Schantz may have been first at the lodge, but that wasn't his first time atop Mount Le Conte. He climbed the mountain back in 1923, with three friends from Chicago. I recently located a scrapbook that details that adventure—long before the lodge was born.

 Schantz was a professor at the University of Chicago, president of the Illinois Audubon Society and a member of the National Geographic Society. His scrapbook reveals a playful and poetic spirit. He first visited the Smokies in 1918 and was a 49-year-old widower on his fifth trip in June 1923.

 He hired guide Wiley Oakley, "the Roamin' Man of the Smokies, " and enticed his entourage (Gertrude Schwass, Fred Freels, and bank secretary Jennie Russ) to hike up Mount Le Conte. The trail-less mountaintop was owned by Champion Fibre Company, which intended to harvest the balsam forests, churn the timber into pulp, and sell trainloads of newsprint to papers across the country.

 A logger named Andy Huff had opened a boarding house in Gatlinburg, which became the Mountain View Hotel. He sent a few of his loggers up Le Conte Creek (then known as Mill Creek) to "swamp out" a rough trail. When Knoxville newspaper columnist Carson Brewer investigated the history of Le Conte cabins in 1962, Ranger John Morrell, Paul Adams, and Harvey Broome told him  that this lean-to was the first habitable structure on the mountaintop. It became the base camp for the federal national park commission that Adams hosted in 1924. And the year before that, Schantz' soggy hikers spent a Saturday night there. 

 Our book includes a shadowy photo of the lean-to, but it is better illustrated on this poem by Professor Schantz. 

Click to enlarge. (Appalachian State University archives)

 Jennie and Gertrude composed lengthy reports that are enclosed in the Professor's scrapbook. They described the 600-mile journey from Chicago, starting June 16, including 30 miles from Knoxville to Sevierville on a rail-bus called an interurban and 15 miles to Gatlinburg in Andy Huff's Ford. As they waited for a break in the weather, they explored the valleys and delighted in the mountaineers' accent, the fireflies and the luxuriant rhododendron. One day they were amused to find a swimming hole with a sign that said: "When bathing here, you must wear a bathing suit or other clothes, if you have none you must stay out." On one trip to Elkmont, their driver was 19-year-old Jack Huff.

 "The trip up LeConte* was postponed from day to day on account of weather conditions," Jennie wrote, "but one morning we decided that as our time was growing shorter, we had better risk going or we might miss it entirely."

*The Professor spelled "LeConte" without a space. That's also how Huff painted it on the original lodge sign, which explains why LeConte Lodge is spelled differently than Mount Le Conte.

 

 Here's how Gertrude headlined the hike in her journal:

THE NEVER-TO-BE-FORGOTTEN
--June 23rd and 24th, '23.
The Hiking Shoes can tell a story-

 

 "The Jolly Four," as Professor Schantz called them, trudged through the rain up the road to Cherokee Orchard, took shelter in a deserted cabin, and then proceeded up Mill Creek (now the Rainbow Falls route). At the waterfall, they climbed a makeshift ladder to the top of the cliff, and pressed upwards past suppertime. "The twilight was deepening," Jennie wrote, "when we saw the black outline of the lean-to just ahead. The guide soon had a roaring fire made and our supper cooked." The ladies were too tired to eat much.

 "We laid on the sweet-smelling balsam bed with the stars very near and bright," Jennie wrote. 

 Gertrude wrapped herself in a blanket. At one point she reached for her flashlight and was surprised to feel a bristly patch of bear fur that Wiley had put there as a prank. A mouse scurried under the bed frames, and during the night it chewed up Gertrude's hat.

 In the morning, they freshened up at the Basin Spring, ate breakfast, and climbed up to Cliff Top. "The government had put a tablet in a rock at the summit indicating the height as 6,685 feet*," Jennie wrote. They registered their names in a notebook—perhaps the same one that C.L. Baum had placed in a Prince Albert can in 1922. 

* If this elevation had been correct, Cliff Top would have inched ahead of Mount Mitchell, 6,684, as the highest point in the Appalachians. And High Top is even higher than Cliff Top.

 Rainclouds spoiled the sunrise view and then poured torrents as the Jolly Four climbed down the slippery path. When they got down to Cherokee Orchard, they found that someone had sent two horses for the ladies to ride the final miles into town.
 "When we arrived at the hotel, all of the guest were on the porch to greet us," Jennie wrote. "They were mildly astonished as the two girls of our party ate their supper as usual. Their astonishment increased when they appeared the next morning for breakfast. It had taken the last young woman who climbed Le Conte three days to recuperate."

 The ladies' hiking boots were casualties. "Our hiking shoes came to a sorry end, soaked and marred, we were unable to wear them again while in Gatlinburg," Gertrude wrote. 

 "Le Conte shall never be forgotten by the 'Jolly Four,'" the Professor said. "A tale we can be proud to tell our grandchildren."

 Presumably, Wiley told Jennie and Gertrude that women had made this climb before. Back in 1916, he had guided Maisy Graves and Mollie Kimball up the old Bear Pen Hollow Trail. They also got soaked and, lacking a cabin, slept under a ledge.

Wiley Oakley's children at his cabin on the slopes of Mount Le Conte. (Appalachian State University archives)

"Long may you stay, Leconte, unspoiled as now" —Professor Schantz

 

Found! The Holy Grail of LeConte's Centennial

Schantz (fourth from left) with stylish University of Chicago students on a 1927 ecology field trip to the Great Smoky Mountains (University of Chicago archives)

 Orpheus Schantz was one of the original Smoky Mountain tourists and is remembered as the first paying guest at LeConte Lodge. His 1951 obituary in The New York Times described him as "one of the group instrumental in establishing the Old Smoky Mountain National Park."

New York Times proofreaders didn't catch 'Old Smoky' instead of 'Great Smoky'. That year, 'On Top of Old Smoky' was a popular song by the Weavers.

 

 Schantz' visit to Paul Adams mountaintop tent July 16-17, 1925, marks the birthday of LeConte Lodge. As Mike Hembree and I researched our book, LeConte Lodge, we knew that Schantz's pioneer experiences would be vital to the story. We tried to track down his journals, letters, or photographs, and even considered a wild-goose-chase road trip to the University of Chicago, where he taught.

 We had no luck before the book was published in January. Then recently, I stumbled across one of Schantz's scrapbooks right here where I live in Boone, North Carolina—in the library at Appalachian State University. I'd spent days in the special collections there, dredging up LeConte material and helping Mike research the university's NASCAR collection for his book, Petty vs. Pearson.
 Meanwhile, the Holy Grail of LeConte Lodge (acquired by App State in 2021) was keeping Schantz's secrets in an adjacent room.

Knoxville Journal, Nov. 1, 1925

 Schantz was raised on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron, became became a professor at the University of Chicago, married Carrie Flagler in 1889, raised two children, and was widowed in 1922.

 He made his first pilgrimage to the Smokies in 1918, when Andy Huff's Mountain View Hotel had only four rooms and the trip from Sevierville to Gatlinburg was by horse and buggy.  

 As a leader in the Audubon Society and a contributor to National Geographic magazine, Schantz led the 1932 Smoky Mountain Faunal Survey which identified 37 mammals in the future national park, including a rock vole that is found nowhere else in the world. "This region has been unknown zoologically," said E.V. Komarek of the Chicago Academy of Sciences. 

 Carlos Campbell, author of "Birth of a National Park in the Great Smoky Mountains," praised his influence: "Mr. Schantz has done more to boost the Smoky Mountain National Park project than any other person who is not directly connected with the movement."

 Our book documents a 1924 meeting between Schantz and Adams, who was commissioned in 1925 by the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association to establish the first public camp atop Mount Le Conte. They attended a scientific convention in Nashville, where Adams gave a presentation from his August 1924 climb with the Southern Appalachian National Park Commission: "Trips with the National Park Commission and Bird Check Lists Obtained." 

 The fellow bird-watchers had much more in common than we previously knew, since Schantz had camped on Le Conte in 1923. That was when Wiley Oakley guided Schantz, Frank Freels, Gertrude Schwass, and Jennie Russ up Mount Le Conte. Schantz, 49, wrote:

This is the tale of the jolly four
who spent the night on a balsam floor
on top of Leconte in Tennessee
above the clouds 'neath a balsam tree.

Hikers at the lean-to used by the 1924 federal national park commission. It's possible that this is where Schantz camped in 1923. (Dutch Roth archives)

 When I first read Schantz' description of the balsam bedding, it sounded so much like Adams' 1925 tent that I wondered if Schantz might have gotten the year wrong in his scrapbook. But the fact that he doesn't mention Adams indicates that these are two separate trips.

 On July 16, 1925, Schantz brought a larger group up to Adams' brand-new tent camp, paying $36 for 12 guests and two guides (Oakley and Will Ramsey) to spend two nights on the mountaintop.

 Schantz led dozens of excursions to the Smokies and climbed Le Conte at least 10 times. His son set up a travel agency that advertised "Springtime in the Smokies" to nature-loving friends from Chicago, and he often had enough guests to fill a Pullman passenger car for the two-day trip from Chicago to Knoxville.

Photographer Jim Thompson visited Paul Adams' camp on July 17, 1925. It appears that Professor Orpheus Schantz' group is seated in front of the tent. Adams is holding the ax. Uncle Ike Carter (standing at left in front of the tent) was once recognized as Le Conte's oldest climber; Dutch Roth is fourth to the right of Carter; and the men between them may be guides Wiley Oakley and Will Ramsey. The boys in the rear are probably some of Adams' workers (Levater Whaley, Earnest Ogle, and brothers Rellie and Bruce Maples). The structure at top right is a canvas lean-to where Adams lived. (Jim Thompson archives)

Archives at the University of Chicago include this photo of the original LeConte Lodge,

built by Jack Huff in 1926. This was filed as "Cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains," so it was easily overlooked.

 LeConte Lodge's centennial celebration will be low-key. The national park has not announced any plans for ceremonies at the lodge. I am planning to visit on July 17 (which will correspond to the second night of Schantz' 1925 trip), and we'll celebrate with guests and crew. 

Orpheus Moyer Schantz signed the lodge logbook after his 10th climb in 1938.

Notice how many of the early guests were from the Upper Midwest.

Remember Craig Kimbrel's ghostly home run?

Craig Kimbrel's 2015 Topps baseball card was his last in a Braves uniform. Saves were not a priority for the rebuilding Braves, so they traded him to the Padres on Opening Day.

 When Craig Kimbrel was a hot-shot kid and I was a rookie blogger, I posted that he might become the first Hall of Famer who never batted in a big-league game.
 Despite the inglorious way he was defenistrated by the Atlanta Braves in June, Kimbrel might yet make the Hall of Fame. He ranks fifth all-time with 440 career saves. Three of the men ahead of him have plaques in Cooperstown: Mariano Rivera with 652 saves, Trevor Hoffman with 601, and Lee Smith with 478. The only active player with more saves is Kenley Jansen, 461. Kimbrel does have more saves than six Hall of Fame relievers: Billy Wagner, Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage, Bruce Sutter, and Hoyt Wilhelm.

 As a closer—a game-ending relief pitcher—Kimbrel's job description did not require him ever to come to bat. But he actually batted twice in his career, missing his opportunity to be Cooperstown's version of Moonlight Graham, who played only half an inning in 1905. Dr. Graham, the sage of the movie Field of Dreams, never fulfilled his dream to stare down a big-league pitcher, nor to "feel the tingle in your arms as you hit the ball."

 Kimbrel batted for the Padres in 2015 and for the Cubs in 2021 (the year before the National League instituted the designated hitter). Both times, he entered the game in the next-to-last inning, and then took his turn at bat so he could finish the game in the bottom of the inning. (Whatever happened to the double switch?) 

 As I researched this, I googled "Craig Kimbrel" "plate appearance" and look what AI came up with: 

 What in the name of Rick Camp? or Bartolo Colon? 

 AI's source was a Red Sox notebook story from the 2018 World Series. The lead item was an accounting of Kimbrel's gloomy season, and the second section discussed Mookie Betts' first home run in 98 post-season plate appearances. 

 Whiff! AI can't read subheads, nor tell Mookie from Craig. 

 I googled "Hall of Fame pitcher with fewest at-bats" and discovered that the record-holder is actually Jack Morris, who batted just once in a DH swap-out in 1987. At least, rather than striking out, he hit a foul ball that was caught by the right fielder. 

 Morris (elected to the Hall of Fame in 2017, 23 years after his retirement) and Rivera (who went 0-for-3) are tied for the lowest batting average in the Hall of Fame. Colon was a lifetime .084 hitter who hit his first home run at age 42. 

 Morris did make his mark in some box scores as a pinch runner. Though he never made a hit, he scored four runs over the course of his career.

Memoirs: Three-Score and 10 Blessed Years

I found this viewpoint on my 11th climb on Mount Le Conte in 2024. 
Daredevils sometimes pose on the ledge behind me.

My daring friends,
Bernie and Dewey

 Having completed my 70th year, I'm dwelling on the 90th Psalm, a prayer of Moses, where the 10th verse declares, "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their boast is only labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
 Moses finished strong, and at age 120 he climbed Mount Pisgah, where the Lord showed him the Promised Land and then laid him to rest.
 At 70, I haven't had much toil or trouble—never a headache nor a heartache, even my heart attacks were painless—but the years are rolling up on my odometer. After 25 years in the newspaper business and 26 years at Samaritan's Purse, I'm contemplating retirement at the end of 2025.

 Lest all my lessons, adventures, puns, and Dad jokes pass away with me, I've jotted down these memories, on the chance that someone someday might wish they had asked me.

 Before we get into the chronology, I should deal with eternity and share my Christian testimony. When I was growing up, I wasn't sure where I stood with God. I knew that some of my friends had been baptized as babies, and I didn't know if that applied to me, and I was too terribly shy to ask.
 When I was about 11 years old, my Sunday School class made a field trip to the Anderson County jail. While we were there, in a stark chapel with wooden benches, a preacher gave a scared-straight sermon, and I remember being terrified by the prospect of hell. I remember that someone led me in the sinner's prayer, then told me to tell my parents when I got home. I assume my Sunday School teacher told them, but shy Tommy never did.
 Our family regularly attended Sunday School, though we didn't often stay for "big church." One night in November 1972, we went to a revival service at Concord Baptist Church, where the evangelist warned us that this might be our last chance. He used the illustration of a mountain climber who had reached an overhanging ledge, only to see his rope swing away from him. As it swung back, he knew he would have to make the leap, because the lifeline would never get any closer. (Of course it took a mountain-climbing example to move my heart.)
 I didn't have a load of sins to confess, but on the last stanza of Just As I Am (No. 240 in the Baptist Hymnal) I walked the aisle to "join the church," as we described it back then. Nov. 15, 1972, was my born-again birthday. My little sister Martha Ann also came forward at that revival, and we were baptized on the same day.

 If you are like I was, and not sure where you stand with God, I want you to know how dearly He loves you (John 3:16), and how you can know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Here is how Billy Graham explained it. 

How about that Olde English typewriter font?

1955: I was expected in 1954 but tarried until Jan. 18—costing my parents a tax deduction. I was 20 inches long, although Grandmama Essie (who worked at the hospital) proudly told everyone I measured 20 feet. The Layton kids were among 10,509 babies delivered by Dr. Anne Young, who was one of the first female doctors in South Carolina. Mama's baby book says I was adventurous: "Walked out the back door at 9½ months, received bad bump, skinned place, and a scare!" At age four, I fell and knocked out my two front teeth. I'm told my first words were "Mama" at 7½ months, followed by "Da-Da," "Bye-bye," and "Patty-cake."