American golf: ‘Carolina born and bred’ at Pinehurst

Selecting just 50 objects to tell the “story of North Carolina” must have been a difficult assignment for editors of Our State magazine, but they gave it a go to produce the lead article that appears in the September issue.

The items mentioned range from the North Carolina mountains to the coast and include the mile markers on the Blue Ridge Parkway, mandolins and banjos, textile bobbins and shuttles…as well as boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. It’s a fascinating piece.

 

Interestingly, one of the smallest “pure North Carolina” objects featured in the article is a souvenir golf ball from Pinehurst Resort, founded in 1895 in Moore County. 

The Titleist ball is stamped with the image of the iconic Pinehurst “Putter Boy.”

Widely known as the “Cradle of American Golf,” Pinehurst was carved out of “ravaged timberland” that was acquired by James Walker Tufts of Boston, Mass.

 Tufts bought 5,800 acres of land from the Henry Page family of Aberdeen, N.C., paying $1 per acre.

Tufts hired the development firm owned by Frederick Law Olmsted of Brookline, Mass., to design the Village of Pinehurst. 

(Olmstead was the landscape architect for the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C., as well as the developer of New York City’s Central Park.)

Tufts’ grand scheme was to provide a comfortable resort for New Englanders to come south and experience mild winters. Obviously, golf entered into his thinking. In 1897, a nine-hole golf course was built…for starters.

In 1900, the well-known Scottish golfer Donald J. Ross arrived in Pinehurst “to take charge of all matters pertaining to the sport.”

 

Ross designed Pinehurst’s legendary No. 2 championship course as well as three others on the property. He borrowed what he learned growing up as a lad on the links of Dornoch, Scotland. (A seaside resort town, Dornoch is located near the wee northern tip of Scotland in the Highlands region.)

In Pinehurst, Ross discovered landforms that harkened to his homeland – sandhills. He set about retooling Pinehurst’s modest golf offering and expanding it.

 

Pinehurst’s archivist reported: “Golf’s popularity was spreading like wildfire in the early 1900s, and Pinehurst was at the epicenter.”

Writing for Golf Digest, Shane Ryan (shown below) said Tufts hired Frank Presbrey, who ran an advertising agency in New York City, to attract guests who were looking for recreation and relaxation. 

Presbrey created a young character known as “Golf Lad” to appear in magazine advertisements…and say: “Come to Pinehurst.”

 

Golf Lad wore a white floppy hat, a billowing red shirt, baggy trousers with unhooked, flapping suspenders and boots. 

He made his advertising debut in 1905, as Presbrey sought to promote an escape from a stuffy, urban existence to a “casual, informal, carefree, open-air lifestyle found in the North Carolina Sandhills,” centered around golf.

 

In 1912, Leonard Tufts (shown below), son of James Walker Tufts, hired Lucy Currier Richards, a Boston sculptor, to create a bronze statue for placement in the area between the two practice putting greens near the Pinehurst clubhouse.

 

“She knew very little about golf, but she was taken by the Golf Lad,” Ryan remarked. “With the help of Ross (who demonstrated the proper way to grip a golf club), she created the 18-inch statuette that still graces the grounds today – a boy with a floppy hat, face inscrutable, lining up to hit a ball.”

 

Richards’ bronze piece took the name of “Putter Boy.”

 

“The shaft of the club appears unusually long,” Ryan said. “That’s because Richards’ intent was to make the statue a sundial, and to make it accurately tell time, the angle of the club had to be longer than would appear normal.”

Luck’s Pinto Beans grew up in Seagrove, N.C.

Updating a previously published column:

Pinto beans are a Southern food, and Alfred Spencer of Seagrove, N.C., is the fellow who figured out how to put them into a can in 1950.

He and Ivey Luck opened Mountain View Canning Co. at Seagrove in rural Randolph County in 1947. Clay Presnell became a third partner in 1948. They started out canning beef and sausage products.

Chip Womick, a local journalist, learned that the men who gathered to play checkers at Ernest Spivey’s store in 1950 were pretty firm in their belief that “nobody can can a pinto bean fit to eat.”

Their wives, mothers and grandmothers knew the proper way to cook pinto beans was to soak them and slow cook them on simmer for hours in water seasoned with pork fatback and salt in a big old pot on the kitchen stove.

 

Spencer figured out how to make it work in a commercial kitchen. The company’s canned pinto beans were a hit. (Ivey Luck is shown below.)

Sales really took off when the partners changed the company name to Luck’s Incorporated in 1953.

 

Spencer also came up with the idea of bringing in Tommy Floyd and the Blue Ridge Buddies, a popular country music band, to help promote Luck’s beans. The group did a live show at Asheboro’s WGWR radio station. It was broadcast every Saturday morning.

 

Soon, Tommy Floyd and his band were plugging Luck’s products on television with country music spots syndicated on stations throughout the Southeast. Here is the jingle: “Luck’s pinto beans. Luck’s pinto beans. Eat ’em and you’ll never go wrong. Luck’s pinto beans.”

“Tommy Floyd had a lot to do with Luck’s becoming a household name,” said Alfred Spencer’s son Bill Spencer.

 

“Luck’s beans served a changing world,” Womick wrote in an article for Our State magazine.

“The economy was in need of heat-and-serve things,” said Lucy Rice, who went to work at Luck’s in 1954. “Women were starting to work. They could open a can and have a nutritious meal when they got home.”

 

Families could enjoy the flavor of slow-cooked pinto beans without having to invest the time to prepare them.

“Vance Williams drove a Luck’s company truck for 42 years. Once a month, every driver received a case of beans to dole out as he deemed necessary: to the men who monitored the vehicle weigh stations, to state troopers and to others,” Womick reported.

“Most orders were destined for store shelves within about a 500-mile radius. In the early days, the cans were sometimes still warm when they got to the stores. In all, Luck’s introduced more than 40 products through the years,” he added.

A brief message from Luck’s management team to its customers advised: 

“Satisfy your Southern roots…we aren’t going back to basics. We’ve always been there. This is the South. This is Luck’s. Pull up a chair and grab a fork.”

In 1967, Luck’s merged with American Home Products. Then in 2000, Luck’s was acquired by ConAgra Foods. The company closed the Seagrove plant in 2002, moving production to Tennessee.

Lucy Rice said she “could taste the difference.” Luck’s beans packed in Seagrove used well water. They must have city water in Tennessee, she surmised.

In 2011, the Luck’s brand was purchased by Arizona Canning Company, which later merged with Minnesota-based Faribault Foods. In 2014, La Costeña acquired Faribault.

 

Translated por sabor means for flavor.

The old Luck’s canning factory in Seagrove has been re-purposed as the Luck Comer Lail Center, a community events venue, thanks to local philanthropist Jack C. Lail.

 It’s the site of The Celebration of Seagrove Potters, an annual two-day festival, which is held in mid-November. The event is highly recommended by the Folk Art Society of America.

  

Here’s a bit of pinto bean history and how to fix ‘em

Pinto beans are small, versatile legumes that have been growing in Mexico and Peru for more than 7,000 years and have always been a staple in the local diets. 

Pinto translates from Spanish to “speckled or painted,” referencing the reddish-brown spots on these beige-colored beans.

Today, most pinto beans for commercial production are grown in northern Mexico and the southwestern parts of the United States.

Pinto beans are a nutritious part of almost any diet, due to the rich vitamin and mineral content of the beans. Each serving of pinto beans includes a potpourri of things that are good for you, and no sugar.

Pinto beans grow best in warm climates where they can enjoy at least 90 frost-free days and in an area that gets a minimum of six hours of full sun each day.

After 90 to 150 days, the pinto beans are ready for harvest. Pinto beans can be shelled and cooked fresh from the vine, but mostly, they are processed and canned or dried.

 

Before cooking dried beans, it’s always a good idea to rinse them under cool running water. Most people will simply soak their beans in a pot of water overnight in the refrigerator. Drain the liquid and rinse the beans with clean water prior to cooking.

 

If you’re trying to feed a family of four and you’d like everyone to have the recommended ½ cup serving of beans, you’ll want to cook one cup of dried pintos (which will make 2 cups cooked).

To cook your pinto beans, cover them with water (approximately 2 cups of water for every cup of beans) and then bring them to a boil. Once they start to boil, turn the heat down to a simmer and continue to cook for 1 to 1½ hours.

 

While cooking, pinto bean speckles dissolve and fade into a uniform, deep pink or brown color as the starches hydrate and the pigment in the seed coat disperses.

There’s nothing better than pinto beans and onions, unless it’s pinto beans and onions…and cornbread.

 

“This is hands-down my favorite food,” writes country music legend and actress Reba McEntire in her new cookbook, “Not That Fancy: Simple Lessons on Living, Loving, Eating, and Dusting Off Your Boots.”

 

“I’ve loved pinto beans and cornbread forever. And I still love them,” she said.

Reba’s recipe for pinto beans uses yellow onion, carrot, roughly chopped fried bacon, chicken stock, sherry vinegar, bay leaves and freshly ground black pepper; served with hot sauce.

Lake Ontario: ‘Then…now…and always!’

Changing the name of Lake Ontario is a hairbrained idea.

One supposes the American side of the lake could technically be called something other than Lake Ontario…but why? What’s the point of stirring up controversy?

When you look at the boundary between Canada and the United States, the line runs pretty much east to west across the middle of Lake Ontario, but a tad more of the lake lies on the Canadian side.

 

The National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio, reports that Lake Ontario, as the easternmost of the five Great Lakes, is the smallest in surface area, with 7,340 square miles. About 53% of Lake Ontario is in Canada while the United States lays claim to about 47%.

And by far, the lakeside population in the Province of Ontario, Canada, is much greater than the population on the U.S. side in New York state.

 

Toronto, Ontario, with an estimated population of 3,358,275 is the fourth largest metropolis in North America, trailing only Mexico City, New York City and Los Angeles. Chicago is fifth in size.

 

The largest U.S. municipality on Lake Ontario is Rochester in Monroe County, N.Y., with a population of about 204,935.

“The New York side, by comparison, is sparsely populated and largely rural,” reported Dr. Daniel Macfarlane, a professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. 

“The lake is Canadian in every way that matters. No U.S. executive order can change that,” he said.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told Kevin Brannigan of the Northeast Times, a weekly newspaper published in Bensalem Township within Bucks County, Pa., that generations of American students have learned the names of the Great Lakes by the mnemonic HOMES – Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. (That’s a common clue familiar to crossword puzzle solvers as well.)

 

The Milwaukee (Wis.) Journal Sentinel reported that if Lake Ontario falls by the wayside and is replaced by Lake America, students may need to be reeducated about SHAME – Superior, Huron, America, Michigan and Erie. For now.

Brannigan also reported that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has shared a video of himself, jokingly (we think) changing the name of Lake Michigan to Lake Wisconsin, signed on a restaurant napkin.

 

It’s gotten ridiculous…but it’s also being hurtful. Canada’s government leaders have responded to defend their national honor…and rightfully so.

Edward Helmore of The Guardian, published in London England, said the rallying cry has become: “Lake Ontario. Now and Always.”

 

“Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has flat-out rejected the renaming, explaining that Lake Ontario derives from an Indigenous Wendat word meaning ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is great’ that dates back more than 400 years.”

 

Wendat Nation Grand Chief Pierre Picard criticized U.S. President Donald Trump for his “attempt to erase Indigenous history. I want to tell him that it is unacceptable for us, as a nation.” He cannot “eradicate our history, our culture and our identity.”

 

Ryan Mancini, a staff writer with The Hill, a political website based in Washington, D.C., said that Ontario Premier Doug Ford called the entire hydronyms scenario “so, so disappointing, because I love the United States. I love the American people. Canadians love the American people.”

 

J. Conrad Seneca, president of the Seneca Nation – one of the six Native American nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) in upstate New York – has called on Trump to rescind the order.

 

Seneca said it clearly violates the terms of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, signed by leaders of the confederacy and President George Washington, which laid out the Seneca Nation’s boundaries as “beginning on Lake Ontario.”

The Associated Press reported that Seneca accused Trump of showing “blatant disrespect” for the Indigenous people who gave Lake Ontario its name in the first place and lived in territory around and along the lake long before the creation of either Canada or the United States.

“The president cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action,” Seneca said.

The Iroquois Confederacy or the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse) was made up of five tribes: Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga and Seneca originating from New York. In 1722, the Tuscarora tribe, who came from North Carolina, joined the Confederacy as the sixth nation.

 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul offered her assurance that her office is not budging and will continue to refer to Lake Ontario as Lake Ontario.

 

U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan said she intends to introduce a bill in Congress, if necessary, to keep Lake Ontario as Lake Ontario. “The Great Lakes are a shared treasure that generations of Americans and Canadians have worked together to protect,” she said.

 

In a recent column in The Washington Post, Dr. Macfarlane, author of the book “The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History,” called out the White House for yet another aggressive verbal assault…one meant “to disparage and pressure Canada over tariffs and trade agreements. I highly doubt that lobbing this grenade had much serious forethought.”

“Moving too hard against Canada is likely to boomerang, inciting global outrage as well as domestic pushback from Canada’s many American friends,” Dr. Macfarlane said.

If there’s an upside, “it might bring more attention to the plight of Lake Ontario. This lake is arguably the most polluted and degraded of the Great Lakes – and the most degraded it has ever been,” he said.

 

“A litany of environmental insults has been poured into it: microplastics, sewage, forever chemicals and toxics. Humanity has radically altered what lives and swims in its waters,” Dr. Macfarlane asserted.

 

“In the 1970s, Canada and the United States signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Though initially successful, neither country has continued to adequately fund the efforts made through this accord. Lake Ontario needs more cooperation, not conflict.”

The document was signed in 1972 by U.S. President Richard Nixon (center) and Canada’s Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (right). Also shown is U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers.