Springboard

Feb 2

On February 1, 2010

Posted by AG under: Community; Downtown.

Fifty years to the day after the Greensboro Sit-ins began, the International Civil Rights Center & Museum was dedicated.

Here’s a bird’s-eye view.

Jan 29

February 1, 1960 plus 50

Posted by AG under: Community; Downtown; Economic development.

ICRCM photo

A half-century ago, four young men from North Carolina A&T State University broke the color line by sitting down at the lunch counter at Greensboro’s F. W. Woolworth store and asking to be served. It became a landmark event in the Civil Rights Movement.

On Monday, the International Civil Rights Center & Museum opens on the same site.

Greensboro continues to make history.

Dec 21

Greensboro’s rock authority

Posted by AG under: Noteworthy.

Parke Puterbaugh

Greensboro’s Parke Puterbaugh got an early Christmas gift. His just-published biography of the rock band Phish already has gone into a second printing.

Phish set the all-time attendance record at the Greensboro Coliseum, where they played to 23,642 fans on March 1, 2003. The band’s lengthy concert jams make it a favorite, especially among those who miss Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Phish will play four consecutive nights at Miami’s American Airlines Arena, December 28-31.

Puterbaugh ranks among the nation’s foremost rock music authorities. A former Rolling Stone senior editor and long-time contributor to the magazine, he is the co-author of a series of travel books and frequently writes on music for the News & Record. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame welcomes new inductees, Puterbaugh is the guy who writes their bios. He also teaches a course on rock history at Guilford College, which to him may be the most amazing thing of all.

As he said at a holiday music event Sunday night, “If you had told me I’d be in a college classroom, playing ‘Louie Louie,’ and getting paid for it …”

Dec 16

The 1960 Society

Posted by AG under: Community; Downtown; Economic development.

Tuesday night on South Elm Street.

A new, inclusive society in Greensboro is now accepting members.

The 1960 Society is for friends and supporters of The International Civil Rights Center & Museum (ICRCM). While the costs of remodeling and upfitting the former Woolworth’s to become a world-class museum are paid for, on-going operational costs are not.

Donations to The 1960 Society will help sustain the center in the years to come, and charter members will be recognized on the ICRCM Web site. Donations of $1,000 or more will be recognized in a permanent listing in the museum.

Former N.C. Supreme Court Justice Henry Frye, now a Greensboro attorney, and Neil Belenky, former chief executive of Greensboro’s United Way, are leading the initial membership drive for The 1960 Society. Both were on hand Tuesday evening for a pitch that began in the lobby of Triad Stage before moving to the lobby of the ICRCM, a block north on Elm Street.

The ICRCM will open February 1, the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro Sit-ins.

Interested in joining The 1960 Society? Call the ICRCM at 274-9199.

More photos from Tuesday’s event may be seen here.

Dec 15

Greensboro’s master gardener

Posted by AG under: Noteworthy.

Chip Callaway

Chip Callaway is one of those people who may be better-known outside of Greensboro than in the city where he’s lived and practiced his craft since 1980.

When people want to restore historic gardens, whether on Nantucket Island or in Colonial Williamsburg or at tony Palm Beach, Callaway often gets the call.

The renowned landscape architect, whose online photo gallery depicts garden projects in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, is the subject on a lengthy feature in the current issue of Garden & Gun, a South Carolina-based “Southern lifestyle magazine that’s all about the magic of the new South.”

Callaway lives and works in Fisher Park where, according to an online bio, “Callaway gardens on the grounds of his two, turn-of-the-century bungalows. He uses one house as his residence and the other as his office. As a happy circumstance, when he bought the houses, he was unaware that one of them was a childhood home of one of his mentors, legendary botanist William Lanier Hunt, after whom the botanical garden at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is named.”