“She rode into town on her white steed. And immediately found this silver serpent slithering slowly through the valley, passing the city and sorely in need.”

“She rode into town on her white steed. And immediately found this silver serpent slithering slowly through the valley, passing the city and sorely in need.”
“To be honest, it was those very acts of civil disobedience — the lunch counter sit-ins by dignified young Black people, the reasoned speeches of Martin Luther King and the angry voice of Malcolm X — that gradually opened my eyes.”
“I remember when the old passenger rail depot, now a restaurant, had a segregated waiting room.”
“When governing ourselves, listen to both sides of the argument and take your stand, but remember, efficient government is like walking in a culvert. There is plenty of room on both sides, but the water flows the smoothest in the center.”
“You cannot practice racism and bigotry and still call yourself a ‘patriot.'”
“Climate change is one of the most ridiculous rallying cries of the left lunatics. This doomsday scenario has been pushed on us for 50 years.”
“I grew up in the depths of the Great Depression, when money seemed to be the driving factor for almost everyone around me, because nobody had any.”
“As soon as outraged neighbors show up at municipal meetings screaming and shouting about traffic, quality of life and property values, our elected officials quietly slide down in their chairs and hide their faces behind their computer screens, concealing their shame about discouraging developers, both public and private, from increasing our woefully inadequate housing inventory.”
“The newcomers worshipped at the feet of the Right Rev. Wilma Dykeman, a local deity whose writings took on the prominence and influence of the Holy Grail.”
“Heroic young men and women who’d stepped up to defeat our dreadful enemies returned to us, many arriving at the same train station on Depot Street from which they’d departed.”
“Grown men don’t cry, but it was hard to keep a dry eye as we walked through these profoundly evocative memorials, knowing the gut-wrenching agony of the families of all these thousands of men and women who, had they survived, might have been on the bus with us this very day.”
“It was so bizarre that I started to laugh — but then I realized that there was something very unfunny about the situation.”
“As most of you may know, the sheriff is the most powerful official in Buncombe County, answering to no one but the voters.”
“But the best thing about most of these clubs was their food, probably subsidized by the under-the-counter liquor sales and occasional other nefarious activities, such as backroom gambling.”
The 65th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, got me reflecting on how much the 1942 attack changed my life—and changed Asheville. I have a particularly vivid memory of what happened that fateful day. My father had taken me and several of my little friends to the Isis Theater in West Asheville, where we […]