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.

My book! And a library of friends

 For years, I said I didn't have a book in me, but along came the centennial of LeConte Lodge, which my colleague Mike Hembree recognized as a fine story-in-waiting. We collected the tales and photos, found a publisher (McFarland Books), and jumped through the editorial and licensing hoops. 

 On Jan. 10, just before my 70th birthday, I received my "author copies"—just in time for the Lodge centennial in this summer. (If you bought a 100th season T-shirt last year, then you should understand how the 100th birthday comes after the 100th season.) Hundreds of our books were aboard the 2025 airlift in March, so that lodge guests can buy a copy. 

Sneak peek

 Another book is taking shape: The story of four national parks (the Great Smokies, Shenandoah, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Mammoth Cave) conceived during the Roaring Twenties and born during the Great Depression.  

 I've been blessed to know dozens of authors in my journalism career. Off the top of Google's head, I came up with close to 200 books written or edited by friends and acquaintances. 

 Following is a catalogue of authors whose paths I have crossed. 

My only previous book

The bibliography says a lot about me and my circle of friends. My little library has shelves for baseball, biography, the Civil War, Clemson, history, Jesus, mountains, and NASCAR, not necessarily in that order. It includes two books titled Rebel With A Cause, as well as the synonymous Intangiball and The Intangibles; not to mention Chasing Moonlight and Chasing the Smokies Moon.

 If I have overlooked your book, please let me know so I can add it. One good thing about a blog is the ink never dries.
 Here they are, arranged alphabetically by author:

JERRY ALEXANDER (1937-2018): Jerry manned our Oconee-Pickens bureau at the Anderson Independent and knew those storied hills better than anybody else.

• 2004: The Cateechee Story
• 2006: Where Have All Our Moonshiners Gone? 
• 2008: Antebellum: Old Pickens District S.C., 1828-1868
• 2009: Blood Red Runs the Sacred Keowee

DR. FRANK AYCOCK: Frank teaches electronic communications at Appalachian State University. If you wonder why your TV won't function like a wall-sized iPhone, join us on Wednesday morning for bagels, and Doc can explain it to you.

• 2012: 21st Century Television: The Players, the Viewers, the Money 
• 2014: Television in the Cloud 

 
BILLY BAKER: We share a deep appreciation for high school sports in South Carolina. I burned out after a decade of statewide coverage for The Greenville News, but Billy's High School Sports Report is about to turn 30 and still thriving. He wrote the book on the granddaddy of them all:

• 1993: John McKissick: Called to Coach

PETER BARR: I had the honor of welcoming Peter to the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain in Rutherford County, N.C., when he became just the second man to reach the highest point in all 100 counties in North Carolina; and he was on Mount Guyot to welcome me when I became the fourth member of the club:

• 2008: Hiking North Carolina's Lookout Towers
• 2021: Exploring North Carolina's Lookout Towers

Once Upon a Time, Fake News Was Fun

 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.

 Back then, we could trust newspaper editors to filter out "fake news."

Asheville Citizen, March 27, 1911

  Nowadays, I get my newspaper fix from newspapers.com. It's not cheap, but it's no more expensive than an online subscription to my old newspaper. There's almost no local news in The Greenville News anymore—so either way, I'm missing last night's scores, the obituaries, and any news I can use. If I'm going to get outdated news either way, give me the classic version.

 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 was a rich resource for my centennial history on LeConte Lodge.

 And it occasionally reminds me of days when newspapering was fun. Such as this "Prize Lie of the Year" recently posted by my friend Terry Harmon.

 Sounds like a mountain yarn spun by by our beloved Ray Hicks. As much as I enjoy tales of old Boone, 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 is 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 award medal, appropriately, included a "lyre."

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

Durham Herald-Sun, June 11, 1910

 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 long before Andy Griffith made Siler City famous, 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 named 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."

 Dot Robertson Jackson was related to Ben Robertson, and there are allusions to the Anderson area in her novel, Refuge.
 My sweet mother-in-law, Elsie Holcombe, used Anderson as the backdrop for a novel she published at age 98: "It Happened in a Parish," is based on a 1960s scandal in Anderson, which is called Andrews in the book.
 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."
 My former newspaper colleague Steve Biondo wrote a fictionalized profile of an Anderson outlaw, The True Story of Manse Jolly. The local history is true, but some of the episodes may be imagined.
 If you prefer facts vs. fiction, I recommend A Faithful Heart / The Journals of Emmala Reed, 1865 and 1866, edited by Robert Oliver; Traditions and History of Anderson, written in 1928 by Louise Vandiver; No Means, No Government, No Hope / Anderson SC After the Civil War, by Brian Scott in 2018; or Hidden History of Anderson, by Liz Carey (2018).
 If you know of other authors who have written of Anderson's formative years, please leave a comment.

If my life was an airline, this would be my route map

     I recently came across a neat website called Great Circle Mapper that makes it easy to display customized airline routes. I decided to enter all the flights I've ever taken (anyone surprised that I keep track of such things?) so I could visualize all the places I've been privileged to go.
     This globe shows the result. It's my version of the Bible maps of Paul's missionary journeys—only without any shipwrecks.
     The green routes span my newspaper career, mostly in Greenville. I wore a leisure suit on my first flight, at age 20, when my benevolent editor/great uncle Slim Hembree sent me to Omaha to cover the College World Series for the Anderson Independent. I have to thank Woodruff's Tony Rice for getting me to Phoenix, and Clemson's Rick Barnes for the junket to Puerto Rico.
     The yellow routes are flights I've made since joining Samaritan's Purse in 1999. Back in 2005, I departed on a 22,664-mile round-the-world trip to report on our tsunami relief work in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. We flew east via London and the Maldives to Sri Lanka, and after we continued over to Indonesia, the most direct way home was to keep flying east via Taipei and Los Angeles. (On a 40-minute backwards hop from Kuala Lumpur to Medan, we crossed a time zone and landed earlier than we took off.)
     The flight over the North Pole was from New York to Beijing to report on the 2008 earthquake in China. That yellow dot in the Sahara Desert is Timbuktu, where I had the privilege of helping to hand out Operation Christmas Child shoebox gifts. Most recently was a five-leg 17,330-mile round trip to Burundi to report on the ministry of one of our surgical teams.
     Here is the flat-earth view:

     Great Circle Mapper says I've flown 327,090 miles to 90 airports in 35 countries. If you figure 500 miles per hour, that's about two weeks of my life spent jammed into airplane seats.
     (On the other hand, I've probably driven close to a million miles. At 50mph, that would be over two years behind the wheels of the Mustangs, Spitfire, Bobcat, Hyundai, Lumina, Windstar, Saturn, Tribute, Accord, and CX-5.)
     These maps only show the places with airport codes like ATL, JFK, and 34NC (the helipad atop Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte). Some of the places I've flown don't have codes, including several dirt strips in Africa and a float-plane landing at Dick Proennecke's cabin in Alaska.

SILLY JET! What else can you do with Great Circle Mapper? Well, the navigators of a Boeing 787 used an 18-hour test flight to draw a self-portrait. Click here!

En route to Darfur, Africa, I had a photo-op in the cockpit of a DC-3 built for World War II.

The pun is mightier than the sword

     We're having a headline party over at my other blog, The Stoneman Gazette.
     Feel free to drop in. Bring your own pun. (Because the pun is mightier than the sword.)

Riddler on the roof: When did N.C. stand tallest?

When Frenchman Andre Michaux stood here in 1794 and declared Grandfather Mountain "the highest mountain of all North America," he overlooked the obvious: The blue ridge on the distant horizon to the right is Mount Mitchell, which was actually the highest peak in the United States for 56 years.

     Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings writes a blog called Maphead where he posed this question: Before Alaska became a state, where was America's highest mountain?
     It's really more of a riddle than a question. Because for most of our nation's history, no one was sure.
     The answer is California, which owned America's rooftop from the day it became the 31st state in 1850 until 1959 when Alaska became the 49th. Yet Jennings points out that well into the 20th century, atlases mistakenly listed Washington's Mount Ranier as the nation's highest mountain.
     In fact, California was 75 years old before surveyors verified that Mount Whitney was the highest point in the Lower 48. (Even then, there may have been a 10-foot error because the engineer was in such a hurry to get home to his fiancé.) 
     Early topographic maps that used 100-foot contours show a virtual three-state tie among California's Whitney (14,495 feet above sea level in the 1925 survey), Colorado's Mount Elbert (14,431), and Washington's Rainier (14,408). All three have inched up in the latest satellite surveys: Whitney 14,505, Elbert 14,433, and Rainier 14,410.
     Before California, which state stood tallest? Texas had the highest peak in the nation* for five years after it became the 28th state in 1845, though I doubt that anyone knew it. (*I'm not counting the Louisiana Territory, which included Mount Elbert.)
     And before that? The whole country assumed New Hampshire's Mount Washington was highest until this news broke Nov. 3, 1835 in the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette (back in the days before headlines were invented):

     The editor's note (above right) promoted a lengthy front-page article written by Dr. Elisha Mitchell, a professor of geology at the University of North Carolina. (If this link asks you to subscribe to newspapers.com, email me and I will send you a copy.)
     Dr. Mitchell surveyed several mountains in western North Carolina before concluding than an unnamed peak in the Black Mountains was the highest. He measured it at 6,476 feet above sea level, which underestimated Mount Mitchell's actual height of 6,684. Still, that surpassed Mount Washington, which then was believed to be 6,234 feet and is now listed at 6,288. 
     Dr. Mitchell's barometric measurements were generally shorter than the summit elevations we know today. He measured Grandfather Mountain at 5,556 feet (it is now known to be 5,946), the Roan at 6,039 (Roan High Knob is 6,285 and Roan High Bluff 6,267), and Table Rock at 3,421 (rather than 3,920).

Following Dr. Mitchell's footsteps

     He came closer on Yeates Knob (5,895 then, 5,920 now), which is important because Yeates is one of the viewpoints he used to triangulate Mount Mitchell and other peaks in the Black Mountains. (Yeates is now known unfortunately as Big Butt.)
     Dr. Mitchell was aware of other high mountains further west in North Carolina, including the Great Smoky Mountains (where Clingman's Dome rises to 6,643 feet, just 41 less than Mount Mitchell) and the Great Balsams (where Richland Balsam reaches 6,411 and the Blue Ridge Parkway crests at 6,047). His newspaper article said that the Unikee Mountains (the Cherokee name he used for the Smokies) "appear to the eye to be lower than the Black."
     Grandfather, on the other hand, appears to the eye to be even higher than it actually is, because of the way it towers almost a mile above the North Carolina Piedmont. When French botanist Andre Michaux climbed Grandfather on August 30, 1794, he broke into song and wrote exuberantly in his journal, "Reached the summit of the highest mountain of all North America, and, with my companion and guide, sang the Marseillaise and shouted, 'Long live America and the Republic of France! Long live liberty!'"
     From that hyperbole, we can assume the skies were relatively clear and Michaux had a view to the horizon. If so, he overlooked the obvious: Just 36 miles to the southwest, Mount Mitchell stood over 700 feet higher.

Lying here "in the hope of a blessed resurrection,"
Dr. Mitchell has a head start on Heaven.

     Through his 1835 trip and subsequent research, Dr. Mitchell was the first to prove conclusively that North Carolina had the highest ground in the 24 states that existed at the time. This had been the case since we became the 12th state back in 1789. 
     In 1857 (when there were 31 states, including California), Dr. Mitchell returned to the Black Mountains to verify his measurements and settle a dispute with one of his former students, Thomas Clingman, who insisted that his professor had not reached North Carolina's highest peak.
     On June 27, 1857, hiking after dark on the way down the west side of the Blacks, the 63-year-old professor slipped over a small waterfall and fell to his death. The following year, Dr. Mitchell's body was laid to rest on top of North Carolina's highest mountain, and in 1882 the peak that had been known as Black Dome was renamed in his memory as Mount Mitchell.

Anderson's Dr. Anne welcomed 10,509 of us

     Dr. Anne Young of Anderson, S.C., delivered 10,509 babies in her 71-year medical career.
     In the pre-dawn hours 62 years ago today, I became one of them.
     Reminiscing with my mama about the blessed event, she reminded me that I arrived later than expected (setting a lifelong pattern), that Daddy delayed checking into the hospital until after midnight (to avoid an extra day's charges) and that Grandmama Essie was so overwhelmed that she told everyone I was 21 feet (rather than inches).
     When I was born, Dr. Anne was 62 years old—the same age I am today. When she retired in 1983, she was 91—the same age as my mom today.
     On the occasion of Dr. Anne's final delivery, my friend Deb Richardson-Moore did a wonderful job putting her life into perspective: "A girl who will graduate from high school in the 21st century delivered by a woman pioneer of the 19th century."
     If you can't read the clipping below, try this link.

There once was a Wobegon headline

 "There once was a man from Wisconsin"
 How does that headline sound to you?

 Like the start of a naughty limerick?

 Or the unedited demise of a once-trendy newspaper?

 Or don't you recognize Garrison Keillor, the unmistakable voice of ... Minnesota? 

 Not Wisconsin, for heaven's sake.

 That's the woe-begotten headline that USA TODAY published last week for a story on Keillor's retirement after 40 years as the host of the public-radio institution, A Prairie Home Companion.
 I wish I could give the newspaper credit for attempting a limerick, because Keillor would have appreciated that. In fact, he wrote several limericks specifically for Wisconsin when he performed in the beer town of Milwaukee.

There was a young man who loved Pabst
He drank it until he collapsed
He gave up beer
For Lent every year
And on Easter morning, relapsed.

 On his farewell broadcast this past Saturday night, Keillor recited or referenced several limericks, including bawdy verses about men from from Pocatello, Antietam, and Nantucket. This one even had an autobiographical first line:

There is an old man of St. Paul.
Put his desk in a toilet stall.
It was quiet, conducive,
And one had the use of
The plumbing with no wait at all.

 Even at age 73, Keillor still has a boyish love for limericks. "I intended to be a serious poet," he confessed in his final Lake Wobegon monologue. "Instead, I was fascinated by the limerick."
 I felt much the same way about my old medium—newspapers. And after I heard Keillor's farewell show and saw that headline, it got my my words pumping:

Back in the newspapers' heydey,
One called itself USA TODAY.
The going got tough,
Proofreaders laid off.
Wisconsin looks like Minnesotay.

 I feel entitled to pick on USA TODAY because I was associated with the McPaper from its revolutionary beginnings in 1982. They gave me one of most obscure jobs in journalism—contributing the daily sports item from South Carolina for the old Around the USA page. I earned $5 per item, and as I recall, those words were edited and cross-checked relentlessly. That's what newspapers did in the days of yore, when folks up and down the street were willing to pay for home delivery—twice a day, mind you—and newspapers found value in employing copy editors and proofreaders.

 Those were the good old days. In the 1980s (about the same time that Keillor made the cover of TIME magazine) The Greenville News was so ambitious we thought we could take over the state of South Carolina. If we could gain a few thousand readers and establish a semblance of a statewide audience, maybe we could pry the lucrative legal advertisements away from the Columbia paper.
 As part of this campaign, I was given a wonderful opportunity—not to mention a bottomless budget—to expand our high school football coverage statewide and cultivate a border-to-border audience. We catered barbecue for thousands of coaches every year and published special editions that were over a hundred pages. On the eighth Friday night of the 1984 season, we succeeded in getting every score of every game in the entire state in our first edition, which we felt certain had never been accomplished before. And for the next eight years, we never went to press without every score. We had radio ads bragging about it.
 If a coach didn't call in his game—and why wouldn't he, since we offered him $10 to dial us toll-free?—then we would make the midnight call to his house or the firehouse or the Waffle House to hunt down the score.

There once was a coach in St. Matthews.
Who'd rip out the phone if his boys lose.
So we'd call the town cop
Or the local truck stop
Where the quarterback gets his tattoos.

 In a different era and a different state, Keillor might have been the one calling in the game for us. One of the revelations I discovered in all the tributes published last week was that he, like me, began his career as a junior-high sportswriter. When a San Francisco reporter asked him about the happiest memory from his youth, he said: 

"The happiest was when I went out for football in the eighth grade and I took a physical, and the doctor told me I couldn’t play because I had a click in the valve of my heart. I was shocked, but I took this experience as a cue that I have to do something else that was brave, and I went to the local paper and asked if they needed someone to write up sports, knowing they didn’t have anybody. So they let me do it. So instead of sitting on the bench, I sat at the top of stands in the press box with men from the local radio station who were broadcasting the game. I sat with a tablet and a pencil and felt like royalty up there. I was a writer!"

Newspaper went down, but the soul was saved

     My newspaper colleagues will enjoy the following story, which I discovered in the April 26, 1865 issue of the Southern Watchman, published in Athens, Ga., the week before Stoneman’s Yankee cavalry invaded the Classic City and commandeered the press.

     Google finds more than a dozen versions of this story in various newspaper archives. The earliest I've found was in the Baltimore Patriot, which printed it in 1857 and folded in 1859. Of course, you can trace the roots of the story all the way back to the Garden of Eden. 
     I know of at least one Civil War newspaperman who prospered by selling his journalistic soul to the godforsaken Yankees. William Brownlow was a former Methodist preacher who was paid by the Federal government to publish a pro-Union paper in Tennessee. Brownlow's Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator propelled "the Fighting Parson" to election in 1865 as the post-war governor of Tennessee.

Long live King John of Summerville

ESPN's 2012 portrait of John McKissick
with the ring for his 600th victory

     John McKissick won his first state championship the year I was born.
     And another one the year I graduated from college.
     And another one the year I retired from sportswriting.
     I figured he might win one more the year I died.
     Of course, it was inevitable that he would have to stop someday, but I always figured John had one more season in him—maybe even one more championship. So did he. If you ever asked him about retirement, he always insisted that coaching football kept him young. Even this past winter, at age 88, he sounded optimistic about one more year.
     However, after leading his team through spring practice in the Charleston heat, he confessed, "I think my age is catching up with me." On Tuesday, after 63 years on the job, McKissick announced his retirement as football coach at Summerville High School.
     Think about it—63 years in a profession where one bad year could be terminal. King John has reigned as long as Queen Elizabeth (and he has been crowned more often, too.)
     Public school teachers can retire after thirty years, but McKissick doubled that and still kept on working. His daddy taught him not to pay somebody else for work he was able to do himself, and he never did.
     McKissick became so iconic that Pat Conroy cast him as the standard of excellence in his 1986 novel, The Prince of Tides, where a fictional coach named Tom Wingo lamented:

"Never once did I defeat one of those awesomely disciplined teams of the great John McKissick of Summerville. He was a maker of dynasties."

     Conroy recited that passage when he wrote the foreword for McKissick's 1993 autobiography:

"That was my act of homage to John McKissick, and it expressed my utter admiration with how he has chosen to spend his life. A great coach teaches a boy or girl that the body is the temple of something sublime and wonderful. Coach McKissick has done this surprisingly well. I wish, in my heart, that John McKissick could have coached me in football when I was a boy. Quite possibly, he could not have made me a better athlete, but I think he could have made me a better man."

     Numbers are not the full measure of the man, but let's consider McKissick's accomplishments: 621 victories in 63 seasons, which is far more than any other football coach in history. 
     Now that McKissick has retired, he has established a distant target for John Curtis Jr., who ranks second nationally with 561 victories in 48 years at John Curtis Christian High School, a private school in suburban New Orleans that was founded by the coach's father. The younger Curtis, age 69, had an 11-1 record in 2016. If he averages 10 wins a year, he will be 75 before he catches McKissick.
     The winningest coach in college football history is John Gagliardi, five weeks younger than McKissick, who retired from St. John's of Minnesota in 2012 with 489 victories. Penn State's Joe Paterno, who was three months younger than McKissick, holds the major-college record of 409 after the NCAA restored his victories earlier this year. Dabo Swinney pointed out that McKissick won nearly twice as many games as Bear Bryant.
     The NFL record is 328 by Don Shula, who is four years younger than McKissick and has been retired for 20 years.
     Among all those giants, ESPN The Magazine called McKissick "Coach of the Century" in a 2012 story that I highly recommend.
     He was a child of the Depression and a member of the Greatest Generation. As he told ESPN's David Fleming: 

"During World War II, I was a paratrooper waiting to go to California with orders to ship out to the Pacific to join the 17th Airborne in battle. But then we dropped the bomb, and everything slowed down. The lives that decision saved or changed … I was one of 'em."

     I figure that McKissick has been carried off the field on his players' shoulders at least 14 times—10 state championships, plus his 347th victory in 1987 that broke Pinky Babb's state record, plus the 406th in 1993 that broke Texan Gordon Wood's national record, plus his 500th in 2003 and 600th in 2012.
      His last state championship in 1998 was also the last football game I covered, as Summerville beat Gaffney 31-23 to wrap up a perfect 15-0 season. What I'll remember most about that season was not the state final at Williams-Brice Stadium but a first-round playoff three weeks earlier on John McKissick Field—the only time I ever had an opportunity to see a game in Summerville. Knowing my career change was imminent, I asked John if I could eavesdrop on his pregame speech, and he graciously invited me into the locker room. Sixteen years later, all I can remember is how businesslike it was. John, then 72 and in his 47th season, let an assistant give the pep-talk.
      I dealt with John every week for 13 seasons when he participated in our state coaches' poll, and he was unfailingly pleasant, accommodating, and wise.
     In 1991, when I was working on a centennial history book for Mountain View United Methodist Church in northern Greenville, I asked him if he might be kin to our founding pastor, Eli McKissick. 
     "He was my grandfather," John told me.
     Now, this grandson of a 19th-century circuit-riding preacher has become the grandfather of Summerville's 21st-century coach. On June 25, school administrators honored McKissick's recommendation and promoted his 36-year-old grandson, Joe Call, to be the head coach for 2015.
     If Joe has his grandfather's success and longevity, Summerville won't need another coach until 2067.

John McKissick set a national record with his 406th victory—then won 215 more.