The original intent
While reading the article "Group fights Reynolds stadium plan" (June 17), I was greatly troubled. I took offense at the remarks that "Save Hanes Park" spokesperson John Coyne made.
I would like to point out that Hanes Park was given in conjunction with Mary Reynolds' gift of a school to the city. It was a gorgeous plot of land on which was built a gymnasium for the school along with other recreational facilities and fields for the school's use. Of course, it was meant to be shared with the residents of the city, but the original intent was to allow for the most impressive high-school sports facilities of the day.
Reynolds High School is one of Winston-Salem's most beautiful establishments and is a vital part of its history. If any other high school wanted to build its own stadium, it would not be an issue, as proven by the fact they each have one. Why should Reynolds and Parkland High School students be given any less?
All I ask is that the city and its residents do right by the iconic high school, its students and the land by allowing it to be used as was intended.
In closing, the committee in charge of the building plans is full of intelligent, conscientious people, some of Winston-Salem's finest, and I have faith that they will not allow the stadium to be distasteful, intrusive or anything that will dishonor the beautiful school or the surrounding community they support.
HAYLEY BOLING
SENIOR, REYNOLDS HIGH SCHOOL
Winston-Salem
Enforcing deportation
Let the outrage begin! Conservatives were determined to hate President Obama, so I guess he figured he may as well give them a reason to ("U.S. eases deportation policy," June 16).
They're going to be so upset that he's not going to enforce deportation. I have two things to say about that.
- At least he's doing something. Congress has been messing around with immigration policy for decades and never could get anything done. Obama said, that's enough arguing about it, let's do something.
- Conservatives didn't like it when Obama was deporting more illegal immigrants than Bush did — why should he worry about what they think now?
Crazy will only get you so far. It looks like the president is finally standing up against it.
JAMES T. FULLER
Winston-Salem
Enough
To all of those who are so concerned about obese people, stop it. The last time I looked, it wasn't just fat people lying in caskets.
KEITH P. McCLURE
Kernersville
Sum It Up
Are you satisfied with the state budget approved by the legislature?
Respond to letters@wsjournal.com and put "Sum It Up" in the subject header. Only signed entries, please; no anonymous ones. Briefer responses receive preference in print.
Correspondent of the Week for June 24
orcing religion
I am stunned by the response of the Catholic Church to the Health and Human Services mandate and cannot be silent anymore. I cannot understand how our freedom of religion has turned into forcing our religion on others ("About 70 rally against health-care mandate," June 9).
It is frustrating that the stories are different depending on the source of information. The Catholic sources say that Catholic employers who are not exempt will still be forced to provide contraception. The information from news sources say that the health insurance provider will be forced to provide coverage for contraception, not the Catholic employer. I believe both — while employers will not provide coverage directly, it is likely they will provide them indirectly through other monetary means (increase in premiums, since the insurer will have to pay for it, or some form of tax).
I am a Catholic. I am also an American. As an American, I know that my tax dollars pay for many things with which I do not agree. That is the price I pay to live in the United States, where we are allowed to believe and practice as we wish as long as it does not interfere with the rights of anyone else.
These views to me are completely compatible. My priority is God, who tells me my only purpose in life is to love and care for others. I am not loving or caring if I tell others what to do, invalidate their life experiences and pass laws that stop them from acting on their beliefs.
JENNIFER FLANAGAN
Mocksville
Yep, that troll photo and resume describes the breed pretty well. They are universally about as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't know why Rush does the things he does. He fits that 'Troll' person to the 'T'!
DeleteWW, I think a troll and a turd are pretty much the same thing. When we were kids, some guy put a dog turd in one of our public swimming pools. Three little girls saw him do it and reported him to the lifeguard, a strapping high school football player. The lifeguard made him eat it. I doubt if I have ever laughed so hard.
ReplyDeleteWe seem to have a new administrator. Thank you, Phargo, for the excellent post. Oh, and another characteristic of a troll is that he doesn't recognize himself when he looks in a mirror...as has already been proven here.
That was one mean lifeguard. I have been away enough that I don't quite figure out "Phargo". Maybe I have missed too much. Hope it isn't kin to psoriasis....
DeleteIt's random, WW. :)
DeleteThe kid had it coming. One time he put ketchup all over himself and laid down in the street like he was dead. A lady swerved to miss him and ran over his foot, so he was a gimp for weeks afterward.
DeleteFinally his parents, no saints themselves, threw up their hands and sent him off to a military boarding school. He was so unpopular there that one day the other kids grabbed him out of the shower, threw him out of the dorm and locked the doors.
Another time they took him to the top floor and held him by the ankles, upside down, out the window. As you might surmise, none of this had any effect, and yes, he ended up down in Central Prison for some really stupid crime.
Can't figure out who Phargo might be. Guess we'll have to ask "Bob".
I'm not surprised the kid ended up in Central Prison. Seems that sort winds up there or inventing their own soft ware company.
DeleteHa, ha...one or the other. What a choice!
DeleteLTE #3... Enough
ReplyDeleteEnough IS enough. Of course there is concern for obesity and its cost to the individual and to society, but there is also the moral issue of consuming more calories than one needs (enough is enough) while nearly 1 billion people in the world go hungry. Because the demand for calories is so great in our country, it drives up the costs of calories world wide.
Well said, "Phargo". Not to mention the aesthetic horror of having to walk down the street behind a trio of roiling rumps.
DeleteLTE #1 - Hate to pick on a high schooler, but Hayley Boling has the history a bit scrambled.
ReplyDeletePH Hanes gave the land for the park to "the citizens of Winston-Salem". Katharine Smith Reynolds (her first name was Mary, but no one ever called her that), gave the land for the new high school, not the building itself. She then paid for the auditorium as a memorial to her late husband. There were originally plans for another building, a twin of the existing high school building, on the other side of the auditorium, to be known as the Fine Arts building. Katharine might have been planning to pay for that one, but she died at age 43 and the building never happened.
RJRHS (known throughout the state as Winston-Salem High School) played their football games at Hanes Park until Bowman Gray Stadium was built in the late 1930s. Annie Graham Caldwell was for many years the librarian and sponsor of the cheerleaders at RJR. Her brother, whose name I cannot recall, was killed there during a football game against Charlotte in the mid-1920s. His portrait still hangs in the media center at RJR.
As for the stadium, it is a matter of aesthetics as much as anything else. One of my favorite views in W-S is from near the foot of Glade Street, looking up through the willows past Wiley School and the RJR gyms to the high school and auditorium atop the hill. The stadium would rise right in the middle, a major detraction. There is also the matter of noise coming from the stadium on Friday nights, right in the middle of one of our most pleasant neighborhoods, which was planned at the same time as the park and highs school.
I'm agin it, and I think that both PH Hanes and Kataharine Reynolds would agree.
I do like the title of the LTE…the argument made is roughly the same as that made by Scalia and Thomas for the same reason, lack of understanding what the true original intent was.
LTE #2 - Yep, damned if you do, and damned if you don't and to hell with what is the right thing to do.
Those old haters just can't wait to get back in power and start transporting us straight backward to 1910, no, make that 1810 (no, because the ban on importing slaves had already kicked in by then)…let's make it 1710 and run up the British flag.
Yep back to slave times, women in their place and a king, to boot.
I think they'd like that.
LTE #3 - Phargo already said what needs to be said.
Sum It Up : Nobody does except the special interests who made out on the deal and Don East, the perpetual teenager who likes to drive his stupid car 140 mph on US 52. Nice knowing that such responsible people have control of our money and our well being.
OT, her brother's name was Leo -I believe.
DeleteBoy, the forum 'Troll' is just jibber jabbering away today.
DeleteIt's too bad Rush didn't take the hint.
DeleteGot it...it was driving me crazy...thanks.
DeleteShe had another brother, nicknamed Nutt, who ran a downtown soda fountain/newsstand/tobacco store called, I think, the Oh Boy! Very popular with the college crowd in the 1920s.
Oh-Boy & Nutt Caldwell.
I wonder if the Clinard in the photo is the first Clinard of the insurance company of that name?
DeleteCould be...I don't think the Oh-Boy lasted all that long, and the insurance business was very popular with young go-getters in those days...the city was growing so fast and somebody had to insure all those new buildings...in addition to downtown, a good chunk of Buena Vista, West Highlands and Ardmore were built between 1915 and 1930.
ReplyDeleteI'll ask my man at the library check it out...he may already know.
WW, good guess!
DeleteI figured out a way to get the info without calling on my friend…he hates it when I do that.
The city directories for W-S from 1879 into the 1940s are online at library.digitalnc.org, created by the Wilson Library folks in Chapel Hill. The NC Room at our library took all of them down there and had them digitized.
Caldwell soon got out of Oh-Boy and Clinard changed its name to Pinkie's Place. It was located at 234 N. Main, where the Hall of Injustice is now.
Around 1925, Ralph and his wife Theodora also opened Clinard's Art & Gift Shoppe on Main Street in Salem.
His father, William H. Clinard, had already started the insurance company, W. H. Clinard, Inc., where Ralph was already working as well. William Clinard is also listed as vice president of the art shop and Pinkie's. They all lived on Main Street in Salem.
Aha! It was truly a guess. We dealt with them quite a bit as we owned a good many properties in West End, West Highlands, and West Salem. None in Ardmore. We divested ourselves of all by July 2008--whew, just did make it. A close family of friends lived on Maplewood Ave in Ardmore in an odd looking 1930's style house. They also did business with the Clinards and were responsible for us doing the same.
DeleteI was out of the loop all day yesterday, so missed the LTEs altogether. But I cannot resist responding to Reid Joyce's usual racist bullshit, followed by the Dunce's equally racist and ill-informed comment, simply because I know a great deal about Bowman Gray Stadium and they don't.
ReplyDeleteLike Richard Childress, I sold peanuts there. Like Richard Childress, whose father Ralph raced there for many years, as a child I grew up knowing all of the great drivers, from my all-time favorite Curtis Turner to Junior Johnson to the brawling Myers brothers to the magnificent Perk Brown, who sold one of my best friends his first street racer. Like Richard Childress, I drove a race car there. It only took one race (actually 3 laps)for me to see that that was not my calling…Bowman Gray racing was then and still is, the roughest around…forget the Sprint Cup sissies.
1. The Dunce says that the city is trying to "give" the stadium to WSSU. Let's look at the facts.
Bowman Gray Stadium was designed and built by the WPA in 1937-39. The WPA required a 30% local contribution for any project. That contribution, $30,000, was made by Natalie Lyons Gray in memory of her late husband Bowman Gray, former president of the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company.
So the cost of the stadium to the taxpayers of W-S was exactly zero. The agreement reached with WSSU called for a payment of $7.5 million. Let's see how that works out.
Cost: $0
Sale price: $7.5 million
Profit: $7.5 million
No wonder the Dunce is an angry old white loser…he would turn down the deal.
Let's see what multi-millionaire Richard Childress ends up paying, if that even happens.
continued⬇
2. Both Joyce and the Dunce question whether WSSU would honor the 20 year contract with Winston-Salem Racing, an outfit that I'm sure neither Joyce nor the Dunce has ever heard of.
ReplyDeleteWell, first of all, white boys, there are several officials at WSSU who grew up attending the races there, so they see the racing as a great heritage, just as your racist pals do.
Neegroes at Bowman Gray races? Say it ain't so, Joe! Sorry, but Neegroes were allowed to attend races right from the start. Of course, because they were Neegroes, they were not allowed to sit in actual seats. They had to stand around the walls at the top of the stadium. Those of us who were there remember them well. They made up a significant portion of the Saturday night crowds, sometimes standing 4 and 5 deep.
Wendell Scott, the first black NASCAR racer, was welcome at many of the area short tracks, but not in Winston-Salem. But the Hawkins, who ran the place, like most white people, were always willing to take black people's admission money.
But the real problem for Joyce and Dunce is that they don't understand basic economics, one of the reasons that both of them are angry old white men.
Back in the glory days, Bowman Gray Stadium was a moneymaker. In addition to the NASCAR series, which began in the late 1940s, it hosted two or three high school games weekly during the football season and often an ACC or App State game on Saturdays. There were a number of other events during the rest of the year.
But once WF built Groves Stadium (now, through greed, renamed BB&T Field) and the high schools started building their cheesy aluminum "stadiums"*, business fell off. In recent years, the stadium has been bleeding local taxpayers at a rate of about $10,000/year.
There are really only two revenue streams for the stadium, WSSU football and the racing series. WSSU plays 5-7 home games there every year. The racing series puts on 16 events annually. They both pay proportionally.
The racing series, under terms of their latest contract, pays about $68,000 per year, against a gross in ticket sales of about $2 million. WSSU pays about $26,000, against a gross of maybe $60-80,000.
Of course, if they became the owners, Joyce and Dunce, being racist to the core, would throw WSSU out, thus increasing the annual loss to, say, $35,000. Again, that is why they are angry old white men, because they are angry old losers.
Fortunately, the Neegroes over at WSSU are way smarter than Joyce and Dunce. They would do whatever it took to keep their highest paying tenant, the racing series.
Simple logic, unless you are an angry old white racist fool.
* I feel sorry for today's high school football players, because they play in those cheesy aluminum stadiums before pitiful crowds. Back in the 1950s, they got to play in a real stadium, before real crowds. The Reynolds-Hanes and Reynolds-Gray games put up serious attendance numbers, well over 10,000. And many years, the Reynolds-Greensboro Senior (now Grimsley) and High Point Central games were sold out.
In the end, as always, stupid is as stupid does.
I hope everybody saw the contempt hearing by the Congressional Oversight Committee concerning the U.S. Department of Justice headed (DOJ) by AG Eric Holder.
ReplyDeleteIt was a national embarrassment that such conduct would be tolerated by the head of DOJ.
As usual, the Democrats tried to stall and impede the investigation even though a federal agent is dead at the hands of wrongings of othe agents during an approved operation by DOJ regarind 'Fast and Furious'.
We simply cannot have this type of 'government' and 'justice' continue. Obama must be voted out of office this November, and AG Holder removed from office.
It's shaping up to be a bad week for Democrats.....Obamacare could take a beating this week. Democrats don't like it when they lose.
ReplyDeleteI'll try not to rub it in too bad if it takes a tumble.
Hee...Hee.....liberals. You gotta love 'em.
Guess Who
ReplyDelete;-}
DeleteYesterday, the Dunce posted one of his "trivial mistake" items, which also got overlooked, so I thought that I would correct that one as well. Below is his exact comment, as cut and pasted from this forum:
ReplyDelete********************
Bucky June 23, 2012 6:01 PM
Good idea or not to repeal don't ask, don't tell?
An investigative report obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act says the hazing was directed at a sailor who had reported that another man pulled a knife and tried to rape him while in the port at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SUBMARINE_HAZING_VAOL-?SITE=VADAR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
*******************************
The source cited above is a typical Dunce source, which contains an incomplete account of what happened. The "trivial mistake", however, is the fault of the Dunce and no one else, since he makes a habit of jumping to conclusions based on incomplete or erroneous "information".
This incident was reported fully several months ago on military websites. The AP did not need a freedom of information request to get the details because they had already been published.
continued ⬇
The story involves the Gold Crew of the Ohio Class ballistic missile submarine USS Florida, (SSBN-728/SSGN-728). It began in 2011 in Diego Garcia while the crew was waiting to deploy to Libya, where they fired a number of cruise missiles at Libyan army forces in support of the Libyan revolution.
ReplyDeleteDunce, due to his poor reading and comprehension skills, seems to think that this was an incident between two gay sailors. It was not. The sailor involved is not gay, and the person who attempted to rape him is a foreign civilian who has no connection with the US military.
One night the crew were visiting a bar in Diego Garcia and got into conversation with a Philippine civilian, who offered to connect them with some women. One sailor agreed.
When they got to where the women were supposed to be, the civilian pulled a knife and attempted to rape him. The sailor escaped and told his friends that the man had tried to rape him.
Even though hazing is forbidden under Navy regs, it still goes on, especially in the sub force. Prior to this incident, the USS Florida already had a rep for hazing and sexual harassment of females.
Eight other sailors from the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) were recently given general discharges for hazing. Since the sailor in question was new to the crew, hazing began.
It soon took a gay baiting slant, involving the Diego Garcia incident. Why? Who knows? The sailor himself is most decidedly not gay. Maybe it was because the sailor was smart, athletic, good at his job and was making much faster progress on his certifications than the others. Losers always hate that kind of thing.
Who can read the minds of morons? Maybe they thought that what they were doing was funny, kind of like idiots who put turds in swimming pools. Studies have shown that homophobes have lower than average IQs and are less successful than most, especially when it comes to social skills.
The sailor put up with it in the stoic spirit of the old Navy, assuming it would soon stop. But it only got worse. The other sailors began calling him "Brokeback" and leaving crude drawings on his bunk and locker. All you need do is read some of the Dunce's crude posts to see how that works.
Eventually the sailor broke down and wrote a suicide note, which came to the attention of the command. After an investigation, the Navy decided to only give administrative punishment to the other sailors. The commanding officer and his executive officer also received admin punishment. But the Chief of the Boat, Master Chief Machinist Mate Charles Berry, who knew about the hazing and did nothing, was fired. The sailor who was being harassed was transferred to another command.
This incident had nothing to do with "Don't Ask, Don' t Tell". It had to do with a bunch of losers like the Dunce. Birds of a feather flock together in the same sewers.