The postman rings 100!

Tom Griffin carrying his RFD route

 Dec. 27, 2022, marks the 100th anniversary of my grandparents' wedding. Thomas Jackson Griffin and Macie Sherard were married Wednesday, Dec. 27, 1922, at the parsonage of the First Baptist Church in Anderson.
 He was 37 and she was 35. They were late to the courtship, because they were both busy taking care of elderly parents. They were married 29 years before he died of a heart attack.
 Tom and Macie met when he delivered mail to the office of Dr. J.O. Sanders, where she worked. Dr. Sanders delivered my mom on Sept. 8, 1925.
 Mom and Dad also had a Christmas wedding at First Baptist on Saturday, Dec. 26, 1953. Dr. Anne Young expected me to be born around Christmas 1954, but I tarried until Jan. 18, 1955. Mom and Dad were married 63 years before his death in 2017.

William Sherard was my
 third great grandfather

 I come from a long line of postmen. Macie's uncle, great-uncle, and great-grandfather were postmasters of the Moffettsville Post Office near Iva in southern Anderson County. Tom Griffin's dad, Pierce Butler Griffin, also served as the postmaster of the Crayton post office in the Craytonville community. Tom Griffin carried one of Anderson's early RFD routes in the Hopewell community north of Anderson.

 William Bratton, my fourth great-uncle, was postmaster at Brattonsville, S.C. His father, my fifth great-grandfather, Col. William Bratton, was a hero in the American Revolution. 

 Warren Harding was serving as the 29th president when Macie and Tom were married.

Best is the standard ... right?

 The old sportswriter in me erupted when I heard Dabo Swinney describing Clemson’s gritty but clumsy victory Saturday against Florida State as one of the top five of his career. 

 With greatest respect for what Dabo has done in Clemson: C’mon, man!  You're the one who always preaches, "The best is the standard."

 We can assume that the two “natties” vs. Alabama would be top-2 on Dabo's list. But those two plus Florida State would leave room for only two other victories in his Top Five.

 Off the top of my head, with a little help from Wikipedia, I came up with this list of Dabo's greatest wins, as ranked in order of consequence from my perspective. Which ones would you omit to make room for Florida State?

1. 2018: 44-16 vs. #2 Alabama. Bougie like natty #2.
   
2. 2016: 35-31 vs. #1 Alabama. The night DeShaun Watson declared, "Let's be legendary."
3. 2008: 31-14 vs. South Carolina. Without this victory, the Dabo era probably ends with “interim.”
4. 2016: 31-0 vs. #3 Ohio State. Can’t spell Ohio without a zero."First team from the state of South Carolina to win a BCS game," Dabo reminded us.
   
5. 2012: 25-24 vs. #8 LSU. Anything is possible, even fourth-and-16. Thanks, Tajh Boyd and Nuk Hopkins.
6. 2013: 36-35 vs. #5 Georgia. Ask a Clemson fan—would you rather beat Georgia or South Carolina?
   
7. 2014: 34-17 vs. South Carolina. Exorcising five years of Steve Spurrier.
   
8. 2018: 30-3 vs. #3 Notre Dame in a playoff semifinal.
9. 2011: 38-10 vs. Virginia Tech, the first ACC championship in 20 years. That one was probably wiped from the memory banks by what happened in the Orange Bowl against West Virginia.
10. 2011: 38-24 vs. Auburn, dethroning the national champs and atoning for the "snap infraction" of 2010.
11. 2015: 37-17 vs.Oklahoma. Two straight wins vs. a benchmark program.
12. 2016: 56-7 vs. South Carolina.
13. 2020: 34-10 vs. Notre Dame, sixth straight ACC championship.

 Sorry, but I don't see a place on that list for Saturday against Florida State. This is a team that lost to the other Gamecocks (Jacksonville State, whose quarterback Zerrick Cooper, is a former Dabo recruit. He's had a nice season, but he threw a couple of pick-sixes Saturday against Central Arkansas). 

 The one possible explanation for Dabo's comment is that there was something going on behind the scenes that we don't know. Was there an ultimatum to win or fire somebody? That doesn't sound like Clemson, and as feebly as the team has played, it's not like the season is lost. This isn't Florida. 

 By the way, give Dabo and Clemson credit for a nice tribute to Bobby Bowden in Death Valley, including a long-deserved welcome home for Tommy Bowden. I watched every punt with anticipation that somebody might run an honorary puntrooskie.

 Speaking of Tommy Bowden, I'm reminded of the upcoming home game Nov. 20 against undefeated Wake Forest. It was a Thursday night loss to Wake Forest in 2008 that doomed Bowden's tenure at Clemson and opened the door for Dabo. And it was a home loss to Wake in 1993 that sent the dominoes tumbling for Ken Hatfield. 

 In fact, the last four Clemson coaches who lost to Wake Forest have not survived. Dabo, to his credit, is 12-0 against Wake Forest. 

When Fake News Was Fun: The Mendacity Medal

 Friends know how nostalgic I am about newspapers and how sorry I am about what has become of them. I am a proud heir of the Fourth Estate, an ink-stained wretch who had a hand in writing the first draft of history in my corner of South Carolina.

 There are good reasons I subscribe to newspapers.com rather than a contemporary paper. Newspapers.com is not cheap, but it is less expensive than an online subscription to my old paper, the Greenville News, which charges $10 per month. There's no local news in the paper anymore—there's barely even any paper in it—so either way, I'm missing last night's scores, the obituaries, and any news I can use.

 Newspapers.com is an electronic archive of newspapers going back more than a century. It's way deeper than Google. Newspapers.com was a fountain of information when I was publishing The Stoneman Gazette, and it also is serving as a rich resource on Mount Le Conte, which will be the focus of my next publication.

 And it occasionally turns up stories of when newspapers were fun. Such as this "Prize Lie of the Year" recently posted by my friend Terry Harmon.

 Sounds like a tale our beloved Ray Hicks might have told.

 As much as I enjoy a good old mountain yarn, what caught my eye was the reference to the Mendacity Medal. Mendacity is one of my favorite words. Call someone mendacious, and there's a chance they might feel flattered. So what if they don't know that mendacity means they are lying?

 I had never heard of the Mendacity Medal, so I looked it up on newspapers.com. The award was given tongue-in-cheek by the North Carolina Press Association to recognize creative fiction that was published as news. Evidently, it was intended to be presented over 10 years, but the only references I could find were in 1910 and 1911. 

 The Boone story was evidently written in response to the original Mendacity Medal winner: 

 Here's another nominee from the Oxford (N.C.) Banner, July 29, 1911:

 I was glad to see the name Grit. When I was a kid, I remember ads for a national newspaper called Grit, "America's Greatest Family Newspaper," which thrived on far-fetched stories. I have to presume the Siler City Grit was born of the same spirit. Though that paper died a century ago, it was ahead of its time in terms of reporting fake news.

 The Siler City Grit won the 1911 medal for this story, which somehow defeated the Boone windpipes story. Evidently, the Grit editor, Isaac London, was the son of the Chatham Record editor.

 The Grit editor deserves bonus points for the clever line about pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6), though he missed an opportunity to invoke honey-glazed ham:

  Here's a 1910 clipping from The Greensboro Record. Who knows if the second item about the Wilkesboro man is mendacious? I think it is healthy to encourage readers to be skeptical. 

 These dubious stories appeared on the same page. The first of these might even have been a wink at the competing paper, the Greensboro Sun: 

Looking homeward through the eyes of Wolfe

 My brother-in-law Greg Gambrell wrote a fine story in the Electric City News that described our hometown of Anderson through the words of Thomas Wolfe, the author of Look Homeward, Angel.

 Wolfe (1900-1938) was raised in Asheville, N.C., and his older sister Effie married Fred Gambrell, a grocer in Anderson, S.C. Effie (1887-1950) and Fred (1884-1952), portrayed as Daisy and Joe in the book, were Greg's grandparents. Anderson is named Henderson in the book, and Asheville is Altamont. 

 Wolfe evidently made several trips to Anderson, at a time when it was becoming known as The Electric City, thanks to the genius of William C. Whitner, an electrical pioneer associated with inventor Nikola Tesla. By the time Wolfe visited, our forefathers had electric streetcars and other conveniences. 

 Yet Wolfe did not see Anderson as a shining city on a hill. In his book, he described "Henderson" as:

"a haven of enervation, red clay, ignorance, slander, and superstition,
in whose effluent rays he (Fred) has been reared."

 I had to look up enervation. I hoped it was a deferential compliment to Mr. Whitner's energy and innovations. Instead, Mr. Webster defines enervate as a verb that means "to reduce mental or moral vigor."

 Ouch! That's my homefolks you're talking about, mister!

 On the other hand, I knew Wolfe didn't mind stepping on toes of those who recognized themselves in his thinly veiled fiction. In Look Homeward, Angel, he also insulted some of his old neighbors in Asheville—to the point that the city library banned his book for several years.

The Electric City (described by Wolfe as enervated) was enlightened through power generated by this hydroelectric plant that William Whitner built at Portman Shoals in 1897. As a boy, I remember visiting this dam and watching as it was inundated by Lake Hartwell.

 After learning that my hometown had caught the harsh gaze of Thomas Wolfe, I started to wonder: What other writers have left us impressions of primordial Anderson?

 The first who came to mind was Hannibal Johnson (1841-1913), who commanded the Union troops who occupied Anderson in 1865 and 1866. In 1905, Lt. Johnson returned to Anderson, which he described warmly in his memoir, The Sword of Honor. I encountered his book while researching my Civil War newspaper, The Stoneman Gazette. 

 With a 40-year perspective, Lt. Johnson described Anderson as "an obscure village ... grown into a thriving city." Johnson solicited the governor of Maine to support an Anderson teacher name Lenora Hubbard, who graciously tended for the graves of three Union soldiers in Anderson. Johnson's book includes letters from Miss Hubbard where she describes the hardships of life in Anderson in the Reconstruction era. 

 I will be on the lookout for other authors' impressions of Anderson. One I need to re-read is Clemson native Ben Robertson (1903-1943), author of Red Hills and Cotton: An Upcountry Memory. Robertson was a contemporary of Wolfe and wrote a sympathy letter to his mother, Julia Wolfe, after Tom died of tuberculosis at age 38. Robertson (a journalism graduate of Missouri like yours truly) died in a plane crash in Portugal while serving as a World War II correspondent. 

 Robertson's family homeplace is the Bowen House on Ireland Road, between Pickens and Easley, 30 miles north of Anderson. In an online search of his book, I found a passage referring to an 1876 parade in Anderson by the Red Shirts (a militant white supremacist group associated with Gov. Wade Hampton): "My father rode in the Red Shirts parade at Anderson in 1876, sitting in the same saddle with my Great-Uncle Alf, and ever since that time we have been very positive about the subject of the white and colored races."

 Atlanta author Lewis Grizzard visited Anderson in 1983 to speak to the Touchdown Club. I can't find any record of his comments, though he might have been in a sour mood, considering that he was going through a divorce from his third wife. Grizzard called Clemson "Auburn with a lake," so it would have been up his alley to describe Anderson as "Clemson without a college."

 If you know of other authors who have written of Anderson's formative years, please leave a comment.