In the early ’90s, more than 20 people filed for the Asheville City Council primary election. Instead of Mountain Xpress reporters interviewing the candidates, the paper asked for community volunteers to help. A group of volunteers met with Julian Price in an upstairs room on Page Avenue. We were given a set of questions to […]
Author: Xpress Contributor
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We were dirt poor, but had a wealth of pride
One of the first connections I made when arriving in WNC in 1991 was with Green Line and Jeff Fobes, and right away I got the go-ahead to do a piece on the proposed passenger rail service to Asheville. Now, 20-plus years later, rail service to Asheville is still “proposed” (dream on), but Green Line […]
Tapping into the local debate
In the days before commenting on websites, Facebook and other social-media platforms, Mountain Xpress got readers talking each week. Every issue featured two, three and sometimes four commentaries, often from wildly different worldviews. The Aug. 31, 1994, Xpress featured four, including the first “Gospel According to Jerry [Sternberg].” Readers reacted strongly to Sternberg’s support for […]
Covering local government, one meeting at a time
Talk about the people. Find the drama. Look where no one else is looking. That’s what Mountain Xpress publisher Jeff Fobes told me and Neal Evans when we started covering local government in 1994. Neither of us was on staff for the nascent publication, despite what the masthead said. Seemingly there were 15 or so […]
The day Hazel Fobes showed me up
When I look back at the early ’90s, I can remember a lot of issues that everyone worked on. Specifically, though, when I think about Green Line and then the Mountain Xpress, I am reminded of publisher Jeff Fobes’ mother, Hazel Fobes. She attended meeting after meeting, waiting to speak her opinion on all kinds […]
Pre-millennial Asheville: No renovation required
In 1994, the year Mountain Xpress started, I was sharing a $365/month place in Montford with my sister. It was a narrow little flat in a Victorian-era home, its backyard adjacent to the property where Zelda Fitzgerald died in a mental-hospital fire in 1948. The same apartment, no bigger but much refurbished, rents for $950 […]
An Xpress roll call
Miles Building, Elwood Miles, hot summer days, sketchy Lex Ave (Welcome to Wally World), Grey Eagle in Black Mountain, Leni Sitnick, Julian Price, Be Here Now, Gatsby’s, Danielle Truscott, Marsha Barber, phones with cords, fax paper rolls, boot leather and notebooks, Carey Watson, Wanda Edney, paper ballots for Best of WNC, Patty’s little girls roaming […]
Xpress made the community’s housing a priority
I moved to Asheville in 1989 and remember how excited I was to read the Green Line. As Western North Carolina director of the Self-Help Credit Union, I’ll always remember the day that Julian Price walked into our little office at 12 ½ Wall Street and made a substantial deposit. I know his support of […]
A journalist’s rite of passage
I remember editor Peter Gregutt helping my writing recover from four years of grad-school jargon and two years of technical writing. I remember the excitement of working on emerging social issues, such as the gay rights movement (still a work in progress). I remember thinking that my job was to “take down the bad guys” […]
It must be a Coincident…
When the Green Line, Asheville’s monthly environmental newspaper, decided to go weekly, all of us who worked on it got together to talk about what that would entail. How would production be affected? Would there be enough to fill a weekly? And what toll would a new ramped-up schedule take on all of us? I […]
We lost Green Line, but we gained Xpress
remember being relieved and deeply pleased in the late 1980s, when Jeff Fobes and the WNC Greens formed and initiated Mountain Xpress’ predecessor publication, the Green Line. Asheville and Western North Carolina had lacked intensive, in-depth coverage of controversial environmental and social-justice issues.
Challenging the status quo, cleaning up local government
Twenty years ago, law enforcement in Asheville and Buncombe County was unaccountable, environmental regulations were a joke and local government was a perpetual backroom deal. Mountain Xpress’ investigative reporting and commitment to community involvement helped changed all that in ways that I might not believe possible if I hadn’t seen them myself — from the […]
On Wednesdays, everyone was reading it
Mountain Xpress added to the vibrancy of an already out-of-control energy level around Asheville in the ’90s. Events and causes finally had a voice, and everyone pitched in to get the word out. We knew it was a successful publication because you would go through downtown on a Wednesday and everyone was reading it. It’s […]
Dear Jeff
Dear Jeff… It is hard to believe that it has been 20 years since you began publishing the Mountain Xpress. During that period of time, Asheville has changed a great deal and the Mountain Xpress has been a big part of that process. It is really hard to comprehend the changes that have taken place […]
Congratulations, Xpress
In 1994, the renaissance of downtown Asheville was still in startup mode. Jeff Fobes and his family were recent arrivals to the mountains. Vacant storefronts were plentiful, and no one had to circle the block to find a place to park their vehicle.
Cheap rents, open mics and writing lessons
People ask me how the Asheville of the ’90s compares to Asheville now. The easiest way for me to explain it is to tell them that, back then, if you were semi-employed (maybe a student or part-time bartender) you lived in a big Victorian house in Montford. Those who were unemployed or in a punk […]
We faced strong resistance from mainstream advertisers
In a nutshell, the political climate in Asheville/Buncombe County in the early ’90s was quite polarized. We had the good ol’ boy network in place and a growing progressive arts-and-political community wanting to assert itself. I served as the director of advertising for the Green Line newspaper in its last year before it morphed into […]
Balancing act: Q&A with novelist and attorney Kim Church
This weekend Asheville hosts Booktopia, an author-reader retreat. One of the authors at that Malaprop’s event will be Raleigh-based novelist Kim Church.
Between a rock and a soft place: Glamping sinks its fancy tent poles into WNC
by Elspeth St. Paul Camping is wonderful. Except when it’s not. The stars in the night sky, the roar of the campfire, the birdsong at sunrise — all memorable. But then, too, there are the nagging mosquitoes, the potentially disease-bearing ticks, the ache of sleeping on the ground. For a novice, setting up the dreaded […]
Buncombe County ranks lowest for immunizations in NC
Buncombe County usually ranks high in the state for healthy behaviors and quality medical care. Unfortunately there is one area where we are dead last: immunizations. The percent of Buncombe County kindergarteners who have not received all their required immunizations is about five times higher than the North Carolina average. Most of these children’s parents claimed a non-medical reason for not vaccinating their children. Our goal at Buncombe County Health and Human Services is to assure that parents and our community understand the benefits of immunizations.
Community group hosts forum on CTS contamination July 29
The struggle to clean up the long-shuttered CTS manufacturing site on Mills Gap Road in South Asheville continues this Tuesday evening, July 29, with a town hall meeting organized by one of the community groups involved in the case — the POWER Action Group.