Hit songs memorialize extraordinary women

One of the most popular songs in music history is “The Girl from Ipanema,” a gift to the world from Brazil. The tune ranked as the second most played song of the 20th century, trailing only “Yesterday” by The Beatles.

Helô Pinheiro is keeping score, for she is the one-and-only “girl from Ipanema.”

As a teenager, known as Helô de Menezes at the time, she would walk daily to Ipanema Beach, on the south side of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to enjoy the sun, sand and surf along the South Atlantic Ocean.

Observing as she walked by Veloso, a local café, one day in 1962 were composer Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim and poet Vinicius De Moraes.

Dagnabbit. What a beauty they proclaimed…and proceeded to write a song on bar napkins about the “girl from Ipanema” and set it to a romantic bossa nova beat. The recording featured vocalist Pery Ribeiro.

“I couldn’t believe it, “Pinheiro said. “This song is about me? It can’t be. I’m so average, even thin.”

In 1963, Norman Gimbel wrote the English lyrics for the song. Jobim and the legendary saxophonist Stan Getz brought in Brazilian João Gilberto, known as the “father of the bossa nova,” to help produce an album featuring “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Jobim played the piano for the album while Gilberto sang in Portuguese. His wife, Astrud Gilberto, who was bilingual, was selected to sing along in English. The duet was released in 1964, and the song climbed to the top spot on Billboard magazine’s “adult contemporary” chart.

Younger generations were introduced to “The Girl from Ipanema,” as the centerpiece of the opening ceremonies at the 2016 Summer Olympics, known as Rio 2016. Portraying the dramatic role of Helô Pinheiro was Gisele Bündchen, a Brazilian super-model and wife of Tom Brady, an all-pro football quarterback in the National Football League.

At Rio 2016, the spotlight zoomed in as Bündchen walked the walk. She strode across the stage in the highest of heels, wearing a spectacularly sparkly evening gown, as Jobim’s grandson, Daniel Jobim, performed “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Helô Pinheiro, now in her mid-70s, said she was honored to be selected as one of the Olympic torchbearers for the Rio Olympics. She stays busy as a volunteer ambassador for Brazilian tourism.

She is the mother of four children and had a successful career as a professional model, television talk show anchor, actress and entrepreneur.

“The Girl from Ipanema” brought Helô Pinheiro instant fame. “I’ll be walking down the street and somebody will come up behind me and start whistling the song,” she says. “Even after all these years, I still get a kick out of it.”

Barbara Ann Fassert Rizzo was another “woman of song” who was instantly recognized during her lifetime.

“Barbara-Ann” was recorded in 1961 by The Regents, a five-member doo-wop vocal group from the Bronx in New York City. Chuck Fassert was the second tenor, and his older brother, Fred Fassert, wrote the song. They previewed the song for their younger sister, Barbara Ann Fassert, who was 13 at the time.

“When they sang my name, I was so excited,” Barbara Ann said. “I thought, ‘I’m a movie star!’” As an adult, she would say: “Whenever the song plays in public, I blush. I feel the same way I did the first time I heard it – amazed.”

“Barbara-Ann” reached Number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and the song proved to be the biggest hit for The Regents. “Barbara Ann” was covered by the Beach Boys in 1965 (dropping the hyphen) and peaked at Number 2.

Barbara Ann Fassert married Pat Rizzo, and the couple had three children. The Rizzos lived in West Nyack, N.Y., and owned a small chain of supermarkets. They retired in 2004 and moved to Palm Beach, Fla. Barbara Ann Rizzo died in 2010, at age 63.

‘Trash talking’ is the way it goes…in politics

Did the 38th U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican, “play too many games of football without wearing a helmet,” as the 36th U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, once suggested…or might it have been jealousy over the fact that Johnson didn’t play football?

As Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1965-73, Ford often clashed with Johnson, who occupied the White House from 1963-69.

Ford opposed almost all of Johnson’s domestic legislative agenda, including the “Great Society” programs that the Democrats said were designed “to end poverty, reduce crime, abolish inequality and improve the environment.”

Ford and the Republicans, however, were highly critical of what they believed to be “excessive governmental involvement in all aspects of society.”

Johnson lashed out, saying: “Jerry Ford can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” (Johnson actually used bleeped-out words to that effect.)

Ford chose the high road. Although Ford, a native of Grand Rapids, Mich., was a star performer on the University of Michigan football team in the early 1930s, he had talents and interests in other sports.

Perhaps just to irk Johnson, Ford sounded a lot like baseball legend Yogi Berra when he said: “I love sports. Whenever I can, I always watch the Detroit Tigers on the radio.” And he offered this self-assessment: “I know I am getting better at golf because I am hitting fewer spectators.”

Baseball historian and author Curt Smith said succinctly: For President Johnson, “politics was his only game.” Growing up in rural Texas, Johnson worked on the family farm; he had no time for sports.

Johnson graduated from Southwest Texas State Teachers College (now Texas State University) in Sam Marcos, where he was a member of the debate team and an editor of the student newspaper.

He went to Washington, D.C., as an aide to U.S. Rep. Richard Kleberg of Corpus Christi in 1931.

On a trip back to Texas in 1934, Johnson met Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor, a recent University of Texas graduate. They married three months later.

U.S. Rep. Sam Rayburn of Texas helped engineer Johnson’s appointment in 1935 as the Texas director of the National Youth Administration, a federal youth-employment program that was a pet project of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

When Rep. James Paul “Buck” Buchanan of Texas died in 1937, Johnson, at age 28, threw his cowboy hat in the ring and hitched his wagon to Roosevelt’s sweeping social policies.

Johnson coasted to an easy victory to enter Congress, and he was re-elected to the House in 1938 and 1940. Another door of opportunity opened, when U.S. Sen. Morris Sheppard of Texas died in 1941.

About 30 candidates filed in an open, special election. It was a wild and wooly, Texas-style campaign. In the end, Johnson came in second, losing by 1,311 votes to W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” O’Daniel, who was the Lone Star state’s popular sitting governor.

Was the final tally influenced by Pappy’s skill at “passing the ballot box?”

Pappy O’Daniel was a maverick within Texas politics…unconventional and unpredictable. He was an entrepreneur with a flair for entertainment, a Fort Worth flour mill salesman who hosted a popular radio show that featured western swing bands.

“Passing the biscuits” to recover from the Great Depression was the slogan that O’Daniel used to win the governorship in 1938.

Mary Margaret McAllen Amberson, a Texas historian and author, said: “Pappy O’Daniel was a great salesman. His approach to politics was to give it a lot of hucksterism and music and fill the airspace with himself.”

Johnson would have another shot at moving up to the Senate in 1948. The outcome would come down to the discovery of what the elections officials found…when they reopened “Ballot Box 13” in Alice, Texas.

We’ll have to take a peek inside to solve this dagnabbit-it-all mystery.

‘Bubba’ is a revered college football name

President Gerald Ford’s good friend Peter Secchia jovially referred to the president as “Bubba.” Secchia explained: “I used to joke around with the president because he was a football player at the University of Michigan, and I went to Michigan State.”

Ford would ask: “Peter, why do you call me Bubba?’ Secchia replied: “Football players are all Bubba.”

Secchia had to back-pedal on that statement, however, and was more than glad to do it, once Charles Aaron “Bubba” Smith of Orange, Texas, walked into Spartan Stadium on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing in the mid-1960s.

As a 6-foot-8, 285-pound defensive end, Smith was a menacing giant during that era, and he instantly became college football’s one and only “Bubba.”

As Jerry Ford led the Michigan Wolverines to national titles in 1932 and 1933, Bubba did the same for the MSU Spartans in 1965 and 1966.

The very first former U.S. president to suit up and play college football in 1911 was Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was a demon on the gridiron, playing for the Army Black Knights while attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

Eisenhower was a two-way star, the premier running back on offense as well as a linebacker on the defensive side. He was known as the “Kansas Cyclone” for his speed.

Near the end of his sophomore season in 1912, Eisenhower severely injured his knee in a game against Tufts College of Medford, Mass., and his playing days came to an end. Dagnabbit all.

Fortunately, West Point chose not to discharge Eisenhower on grounds that he would be physically incapable of military leadership. He graduated in 1915 and became a highly decorated U.S. Army general.

President Eisenhower said: “I believe that football, perhaps more than any other sport, tends to instill in men the feeling that victory comes through hard work, team play, self-confidence and an enthusiasm that amounts to dedication.”

In the early 1930s, former president Richard Nixon was a backup lineman at Whittier (Calif.) College, a small college named after poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The team was aptly nicknamed the Poets.

Nixon “was undersized for a tackle, but he was too uncoordinated and slow-footed to play in the backfield,” wrote his biographer Evan Thomas.

Former president Ronald Reagan played three years on the varsity at Eureka (Ill.) College. He was known as “Dutch,” and helped anchor the Dukes’ line as right tackle in the early 1930s. Reagan went on to star in motion pictures. “Just win one for the Gipper” was one of Reagan’s most famous lines from his film career.

While president in 1982, Reagan returned to the Eureka campus for an alumni event. A reporter asked him about the miracle touchdown he scored to “save the game” against Normal (now Illinois State University).

“We were one point ahead, as I remember,” Reagan said. “And there were just seconds to go. I’d been in the entire game, and Normal was passing, throwing bombs all over. So, I decided to charge against my man, and then when I felt it was going to be a pass, duck back into the secondary and see if I could help cover for passes.”

Reagan amped up the dramatics: “I saw everyone sucked over to one side of the field, and this Normal fellow was going down the other side of the field all by himself. I took out after him, and pretty soon, as he was looking back, I knew the ball must be coming. I turned around, went up in the air and got it.”

“But by this time, as I say, having been in the entire game, I knew that there wasn’t anything left in me.” It was a lineman’s dream…intercepting the pass…about 75 yards from the goal line with a clear field down that sideline. But Reagan’s legs gave out; he couldn’t run and was easily tackled to the turf.

“I told the reporter: ‘That was my touchdown that was never made, my lineman’s dream.’”

You might say, the four college football playing U.S. presidents arranged by their “presidential numbered jerseys” – Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Reagan – all lined up on the right side of the ball (as opposed to the left)…as all were Republicans.

President Ford earned his stripes in Chapel Hill

Gerald Ford’s early training, which helped prepare him to become the 38th U.S. president (1974-77), included two “tours of duty” in Chapel Hill, N.C.

He arrived on campus for the first time in the summer of 1938 as a student to take classes at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Ford grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich., and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1935. He was an outstanding football player there and after graduation, he accepted coaching jobs at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., hoping to also go to law school there.

But, dagnabbit! Those Yale administrators frowned on the idea of Ford being a full-time employee as well as a law student. Eventually, they agreed to allow Ford to enroll at Yale.

Harry Shulman, a Yale law professor, handled things. Shulman was a visiting professor at UNC in the summer of 1938, and it was agreed to allow Gerald Ford to start law school at Chapel Hill, then “transfer” to Yale.

Roland Giduz, editor of the Carolina Alumni Review, wrote about President Ford’s “Carolina connection” in 1975. Technically, UNC cannot claim Gerald Ford as “an academic alumnus,” but his “presence on campus” has historical significance.

Ford was described by UNC law school faculty members as “mature and serious of purpose.” Giduz noted that President Ford mentioned two classmates by name – Harry McMullan Jr. of Beaufort County and William F. Womble of Winston-Salem.

World War II brought Gerald Ford back to Chapel Hill in a teaching capacity.

Ford was a young lawyer in Grand Rapids when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He promptly enlisted and was commissioned in the U.S. Naval Reserve on April 13, 1942. After attending flight instructor school at Annapolis, Md., Ford was assigned as one of 83 instructors at Navy Pre-flight Training School in Chapel Hill.

UNC President Frank Porter Graham pledged that the university would offer “all its resources to the nation for the defense of freedom and democracy.” Graham campaigned hard to have the university’s newly built Horace Williams Airport designated as one of the Navy’s four sites to offer the pre-flight training programs. It was, and in all, about 18,700 Navy cadets trained on the UNC campus during the war years.

The young Navy flight instructors found housing within the community. Ford was matched with recent UNC graduates Earl Baker Ruth and Bill McCachren. They moved into a rented cabin near the airport.

Ruth and McCachren had played basketball together at Charlotte Central High School and were recruited to attend UNC. They were standouts on the Tar Heel basketball teams of the late 1930s, coached by Walter Skidmore.

Ford attained the rank of lieutenant in March 1942 and was sent to sea two months later aboard a newly commissioned light aircraft carrier, the Monterey. The ship was assigned to duty in the South Pacific. In 1944, she suffered damage when a fire broke out, requiring the vessel to return to the United States mainland for repairs. Ford was released from active duty on Feb. 23, 1946.

As an attorney in Grand Rapids, Gerald Ford was elected to the first of his 13 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1948.

Meanwhile, after Ruth was discharged from the Navy in 1945, he settled in Salisbury and joined the faculty at Catawba College. He went on to earn his master’s and doctorate degrees at UNC. Ruth won a seat in the U.S. House in 1968. Ford, as the House Minority Leader, was quick to welcome his old Navy chum and fellow Republican to Congress.

Ruth was elected for two succeeding terms. A “series of political events” led to the swearing in of Gerald Ford, as the U.S. vice president, under Richard Nixon, on Dec. 6, 1973.

One of the first congratulatory wires to Ford was sent by George Barclay, a former All-American football player at UNC. As an offensive guard, Barclay, lined up next to Ford, the center, when the two participated in 1935 East-West All-Star Shrine Bowl football classic.

They became friends there in the trenches on the gridiron. Barclay’s advice to Ford was: “Just keep centering the ball straight back!”

In 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed another old friend, Earl Ruth, as governor of American Samoa. Tough duty, but someone had to go to the paradise capital of Pago Pago in the South Pacific tropics. The Samoan people said: “Talofa, governor,” meaning “welcome…with love.”

President Ford’s football career is historical footnote

For official presidential appearances, U.S. President Gerald Ford, a “Michigan man,” frequently asked the U.S. Marine Corps Band to play the University of Michigan’s college fight song, “Hail to the Victors,” in place of the traditional “Hail to the Chief” Presidential Anthem.

Ford was a big man on the U-M campus in Ann Arbor and played football. He was the Wolverines’ the center on the offensive line and played linebacker on defense.

He helped his team go undefeated and win national titles in 1932 and 1933. He was Michigan’s MVP in 1934 and graduated in 1935.

Forty years later in 1975, imagine President Ford’s surprise when he arrived in Peking, China, on Dec. 2, 1975, and was greeted by a band of Chinese musicians who were belting out the melodic refrains of “Victory for MSU,” the Michigan State University fight song.

There was no whodunit mystery about it. With great pride, the jovial Peter Secchia, a businessman from Grand Rapids, Mich., and an MSU alumnus, took full credit for the dagnabbit “mix up.”

Secchia fessed up when he was interviewed by Ford biographer Richard Norton Smith in 2008.

Peter Secchia spent a lot of time at the White House from 1974-77 and was introduced as “a friend of the Ford family.”

Secchia said: “When the president went to China, the White House called me and said, ‘We don’t have the sheet music for the Michigan fight song.’ I said I’d get it to them right away…and I sent them the Michigan State fight song.”

Secchia got the better of President Ford once again when dignitaries gathered in 1978 to dedicate the Gerald R. Ford Freeway (Interstate 196) – an 80-mile stretch of highway from Grand Rapids to Benton Harbor in western Michigan.

Secchia slyly rigged the unveiling of the large highway sign. It was innocently covered with a Michigan-colored (maize and blue) sheet. When they pulled the rope, however, it revealed not the highway sign, but a second banner – in the Michigan State colors (Spartan green and white).

Secchia, the clever prankster, said he has a videotape of the moment, showing former President Ford turn to Michigan Gov. William Milliken and muttering, “Where’s Secchia?”

Professional football was an option for Gerald Ford, after he graduated in 1935. The Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers both dangled offers. Earl Louis “Curly” Lambeau of the Packers sent Ford a letter, agreeing to pay him an annual salary of $1,540 ($110 per game for a 14-game season).

Ford once joked that “Detroit and Green Bay were pretty hard up for linemen in those days. If I had gone into professional football, the name Jerry Ford might have been a household word today.”

Yale University needed an assistant football coach and, hoping to…find a way into Yale’s prestigious law school, Ford took the $2,400-a-year job in 1935.

At first, the Yale administrators refused to allow Ford to take classes full time due to his coaching duties, but Ford persisted and went on to earn a law degree from Yale in 1941.

Ford returned to Grand Rapids to practice law, but Pearl Harbor put his legal career on hold. Ford enlisted in the U.S. Navy in April 1942 and served four years in the South Pacific.

In 1948, Ford was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Ford would serve continuously in that chamber until President Richard Nixon tapped the Michigan congressman in 1973 to become Vice President Ford (replacing Spiro Agnew).

Ultimately, Watergate misdoings led to Nixon’s demise, and he resigned on Aug. 9, 1974.

Ford automatically ascended to the presidency – the first person ever to occupy that office who had not been sent there by voters.

Immediately after taking the oath, President Ford appealed to the American public: “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers.”

Three other past U.S. presidents also donned varsity football jerseys while collegians. We’ll have to check the box scores.

Scouting is all tied up in knots

Both young and old Boy Scouts across the land are saddened and maddened by what is happening at the national level, with the apparent meltdown of a once-esteemed organization that stood tall and proud for more than a century.

Bankruptcy for the Boy Scouts of America? Dabnabbit all to heck; who would have imagined?

Writing for Newsday, Michael Dobie commented that the “Scouts’ future is all in knots.” That may be putting it mildly. We could have a Gordian knot situation here, seemingly unsolvable.

Scouts must keep the faith, however.

It’s time to re-read the words of John Henry Goldfrap, who was born in England in 1879 and moved to the United States, where he became a newspaper reporter at the New York Evening News. Goldfrap also was a prolific writer of action books “for and about boys.”

He always used a pseudonym and went by several different pen names. One was Lieutenant Howard Payson, who appeared as the author of a series of 14 volumes of “Boy Scout” books. The second in 1911 was “The Boy Scouts on the Range.”

One of the lead characters is Bob “Tubby” Hopkins, who tells us: “Boy Scouts don’t cry when they get in a difficulty; they…try to figure some way out of it.”

Learning by doing is a hallmark of the Scouting program, and every Scouting experience requires an application of problem-solving skills.

The Boy Scouts organization was founded in 1907 in England by British Army Gen. Robert Baden-Powell. He was knighted as Lord Baden-Powell in 1909.

He was an articulate man and offered pearls of wisdom to guide adult leaders. Some were:

“The open-air is the real objective of Scouting and the key to its success.” Nature is a great teacher, an inspiration and a source of lifelong experiences. The word “Scouting” is 75% “outing.”

“A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.” A leader may describe and demonstrate a Scouting skill at a meeting, but the way Scouts truly learn outdoor skills is to do it themselves.

All that is right about Scouting was on display Jan. 25, 2020, when five members of Troop 130, sponsored by the First United Methodist Church in Morehead City, N.C., were awarded their Eagle Scout badges. Former Scoutmaster Bob Guthrie served as the chief celebrant at the Court of Honor.

He reaffirmed that Baden-Powell determined that Scouting “would be centered on the concept of ‘God and Country’ above all else. So, from the very start,” Guthrie said, “a boy had to raise his hand in the Scout sign and promise to do his duty….”

“The emphasis on religious duty has been carried over into the Scout Law as well, which states, in part, that a ‘Scout is Reverent,’” Guthrie said. “The Scout Oath and Law and all other precepts of Scouting conform to the goals of Christianity.” He noted that Scouting’s core group of sponsoring units are religious institutions.

Guthrie commented that “recent controversial events and efforts to modernize our brotherhood have not altered the fact that Scouting still has much ‘that is of supreme value and importance’ to offer to those within its ranks, and to the church and society as well.”

Some adult leaders have tarnished the image of Scouting through their heinous acts of sexual abusiveness and must be held accountable. Many people believe Scouting should be more inclusive and diverse, and open to boys and girls of all races, creeds and ethnicities. Some think a youth’s sexual orientation should not block his or her ability to participate.

These and other issues can be thorny, but within the faith-based framework of Scouting, there ought to be enough brainpower to heed Tubby’s advice and “figure out” how to overcome the obstacles.

Perhaps this is a “collective Eagle Scout project” that would truly be worthwhile.

Planets align for local author and her agent

North Carolina’s own Kristy Woodson Harvey has been termed a “shooting star” – a book author who has burst forth and risen into the stratosphere of the literary world.

One member of the launch team who has been at Harvey’s side for the ride is Kathie Bennett, another Southern spirit, who hails from Panama City, Fla. She’s a certified “author advocate.”

Kristy Harvey, a native of Salisbury, now calls Beaufort home. She affectionately refers to “Agent Bennett” as her “fairy book mother.”

They laugh and bless each other’s heart, for they are connected by their “Southerness,” their love of reading and their passion for books. Each has a father who served as his respective city’s mayor. (Isn’t that dagnabbitly ironic?)

Val Schoger, publisher of Panama City Living Magazine, wrote: “When Kathie reminisces about her love for books, it is her grandmother, Katherine Wells, she thinks about.”

“Her fondest childhood memories are of summers spent in the small library her grandmother founded in the 1960s” in Blountstown, Fla., on the second floor of the local Piggly Wiggly grocery store, Schoger said.

Laura J. Perricone, writing for GoUpstate.com, in Spartanburg, S.C., said Kathie Clemons Bennett’s “love for literature was sparked at an early age.” Kathie graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South (in Sewanee, Tenn.), majoring in English.

Bennett spent 35 years working with Delta Airlines as a flight attendant, but her flight plan changed course in 2008, when she founded Magic Time Literary Publicity in Spartanburg.

Essentially, Bennett and her team are focused on introducing book authors to a wide audience of readers, and generating “over-the-top book sales” as a result.

“Building audience is all about making friends in the book world,” Bennett explained, “with other authors, readers and booksellers.”

Bennett’s company currently represents about 40 active authors, and she includes Kristy Harvey within the group of “featured authors” who are hot-hot-hot. A prominent photo on the company’s website shows Bennett with Harvey and fellow author Mary Alice Monroe.

Bennett said her firm specializes in arranging author tours that are longer than most publisher-designed tours. “Our tours almost always involve 15 to 20 presentations or keynotes in book clubs, civic clubs, nonprofit organizations and in the academic and bookstore arena,” she told Perricone.

Hence, Bennett’s authors need to be physically fit to endure countless opportunities to form friendships with as many people as possible while on the road. Harvey is clearly among the most “hale and hearty” of the lot. Her energy is boundless.

Bennett confessed that her favorite book tour stop is Panama City. She said: “I love bringing my authors home!”

That old library room above the grocery store in Blountstown was the venue where Bennett introduced America to author Karen Spears Zacharias. Her book “Will Jesus Buy Me a Doublewide?” came out in 2010.

“We had great press; sold 60 books and raised money for literacy projects my grandmother began,” Bennett told Perricone.

Bennett tells of the time she brought author Pat Conroy of Beaufort, S.C., to Panama City in 2014, and “put him up” at her father’s house. Pat Conroy and Gerry Clemons “got along marvelously,” Bennett said.

Conroy “absolutely loved Panama City. His second visit was Pat’s idea, and he insisted on staying in my father’s home.”

Conroy died from pancreatic cancer in 2016. Bennett continues to represent his widow, author Cassandra King Conroy. Today, Cassandra and Kathie are the dearest of friends, Perricone reported.

Bennett named her company Magic Time Literary Publicity in memory of another great Southerner and close friend – the late Doug Marlette of Greensboro, N.C.

Marlette was a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist (1988) and the creator of the “Kudzu” syndicated comic strip. He was 57 when he died in a car crash in 2007. His second novel, “Magic Time,” was published in 2006.

The principal eulogist at Marlette’s service in Hurdle Mills, N.C., was Pat Conroy. He reportedly said, “The first person to cry, when he heard about Doug’s death, was God.”

Author adopts Beaufort as her new home base

Kristy Woodson Harvey’s love affair with the Town of Beaufort, N.C., began when she was in college, well in advance of her journey up-up-up the charts as a top author. She wrote an essay that was published in Atlanta Magazine in 2018 that describes her first impressions of Beaufort. She begins:

“I was 19 the first time I ever drove over the drawbridge into Beaufort. One look, and I was absolutely smitten. The matching white rows of clapboard houses, the wild horses grazing on the Rachel Carson Reserve, the gougères at Beaufort Grocery Company that elevated my favorite pimento cheese to a downright cultural experience.”

“Beaufort had the look of New England and the soul of the islands, and after half an hour of walking up and down Front and Ann streets, I proclaimed that, one day, I would live in this charming town that time seemed to have forgotten,” Harvey wrote.

“It was an absurd thing to say. But as luck or fate would have it, several years later, I married a boy who spent his summers in Atlantic Beach, right over the bridge from Beaufort. He had a soft spot for the quirky, historic town too, so we pledged to spend our summers there and bought a ramshackle house that had been closed up for more than 10 years.”

“The day we signed the papers, family and friends said that this house was our worst idea,” Harvey wrote. “I just looked out the window at the sailboats coming into the harbor and the red double-decker bus carrying tourists past my bedroom. It would take at least two years to bring the place back to life. Maybe it was crazy. But, then again, the best things usually are.”

“Continuing my streak of impractical decisions, I indulged an idea I had for a novel. I initially resisted it, but realized that if I ever wanted a good night’s sleep again, I would have to get these characters out of my head and onto paper.”

That first novel, “Dear Carolina,” was released by Penguin Random House on May 5, 2015 – “two months before my 30th birthday,” she said.

Harvey returned to her hometown of Salisbury, N.C., for the book launch party, and uncovered her report on an assignment from her favorite journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“It was, essentially, a list of pipe dreams,” Harvey said. “I had two. One was to write a novel. The second was to buy a house in Beaufort, which seemed even less attainable, if that was possible. My target date? My 30th birthday, which, at the time, was the oldest I could ever imagine being.”

Somehow for Harvey, those dreams that had temporarily slipped out of her memory bank, not only returned but had come true.

“And I knew in that moment that if those two absurdly unlikely things had happened, surely the rest of life would fall into place.”

The boy she married is Dr. Will Harvey of Kinston. His thriving dental practice now has multiple offices throughout eastern North Carolina. The Harveys have a son, also named Will.

Kristy Harvey’s sixth novel will be introduced on April 22, titled “Feels Like Falling.” She can hardly contain her excitement. The book launch celebration begins at 6 p.m. at the Country Club of the Crystal Coast in Pine Knoll Shores, N.C.

Some of Harvey’s most ardent supporters are fellow authors. One is Cassandra King, who wrote: “Kristy Woodson Harvey cuts to the heart of what it means to be a born-and-bred Southerner, complete with the unique responsibilities, secrets and privileges that conveys.”

Harvey refers to bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe as “her big sister,” expressing thanks for “her guidance, advice, generosity and huge heart.” Monroe has in turn commended Harvey as “a rising star of Southern Fiction.”

Harvey says she is clearly a better writer and a better person because her life is influenced by her book publicist – Kathie Bennett. Harvey refers to Bennett as her “fairy book mother” –“a champion, a friend and the defender of all that is good in the book world.”

Dagnabbit. Maybe somebody should write a “fairy book mother” book. Maybe I’ll start it…and hand off the wand.