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It was Day Three of the highly charged Rachel Crook murder trial. The well-liked 71-year-old had mysteriously disappeared from Crook’s Corner, her Chapel Hill fish store, in the late summer of 1951. Her body was discovered the next day outside of town. She had been brutally murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped.  “Bold as Lions” is the fourth and final installment of the Who...

In mid-century Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Rachel Crook was a familiar figure around town. The 71-year-old ran a fish store called Crook's Corner. That same site, under the same name, would eventually become a celebrated restaurant. But back in the Forties and Fifties, Crook's was a modest shop, selling fish, fabric remnants, pecans, and featuring the town’s first laundromat. Rachel Crook...

In mid-century Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a beloved 71-year-old woman was found murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped. Rachel Crook was a familiar figure around town. She ran a fish store called Crook's Corner. She'd also been pursuing her doctorate in economics at UNC for 20 years. Everyone was mystified. Who in the world would want to harm the well-liked woman? W...

In 1952, bulldozer operator Hobart Lee faced a jury of his peers at the highly charged murder trial of Chapel Hillian Rachel Crook. The previous August, the beloved 71-year-old woman had been found murdered, and initial reports were that she'd been raped.  In Episode Three of the "Who Killed Rachel Crook" podcast, "Thanks for the Memories," Lee is on trial for his life after a preliminary hearing...

Keeping deer out of a garden is a challenge. But at Montrose, the famous and expansive gardens in Hillsborough, North Carolina, it required an installation of tall fencing, followed by a coordinated effort to drive the lingering deer through the garden gates. There is an art to it, and novelist Craig Nova, a veteran deer driver, led the way. Craig Nova is the author of a memoir, Brook Trout and th...

Writer Celia Rivenbark reaches back to her high school days to explore the humor and challenges of waiting tables at her small town’s only sit-down restaurant. It served the best food in town, and featured the most elaborate salad bar east of Raleigh. It also came with a sizeable portion of unapologetic Lost Cause nostalgia. It might have been 1974, but social change, and extending a warm welcome...

Journalist Hal Crowther is a connoisseur of green places. He has a particular reverence for trees, sparing neither effort nor expense to keep the beautiful maples and hickories in his yard as healthy and as upright as possible. When he’s overwhelmed by politics, Hal heads outside. Back inside, he’s still writing up a Menckenian storm about the state of things. Hal Crowther is the author of six boo...

Diya Abdo has settled into life in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s thousands of miles from Jordan, where she, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, was raised. A professor at Guilford College, Diya is working hard to reshape the refugee experience in America. She is challenging university campuses everywhere to step up and host families fleeing war and violence around the world. It stems from her...

Poet Michael McFee talks about his anticipation of winter ending and spring beginning when he strolls through Coker Arboretum on the UNC–Chapel Hill campus. The harbinger of spring is the First Breath of Spring, also known as Lonicera fragrantissima, or winter honeysuckle—also known as “a gorgeous weed.” Michael talks about his years of visiting the arboretum, “the Central Park” of Chapel Hill, an...

Journalist Paul Cuadros has written a lot about the Latino communities of North Carolina. He moved here more than 25 years ago to write about life in Siler City, a small town in the central part of the state that was experiencing a seismic demographic shift. When Paul joined the faculty of the journalism school at UNC–Chapel Hill, he got to know another Latino community, when he headed each day to...

It’s that time of year when we remember Hillsborough’s favorite self-taught mortician, RWB Latta (aka writer Allan Gurganus). Now retired, he offered trick-or-treaters a coffin full of candy, and his sales pitch promising deeply discounted and artistic funeral services, with examples galore of his work. To clinch the deal, he treated potential clients to a mash-up of skits, full of fright and poli...

In a world of "boomburbs" and generic downtowns, Hillsborough, North Carolina, stands out. Cohesive, walkable, its streets lined with 250 years of architectural styles, the town has gone from sleepy to vibrant in the last 20 years. Journalist Bob Burtman lives and works there, and keeps a watchful eye for storm clouds on the town’s horizon.  A veteran investigative journalist and radio D...

Retired judge Beverly A. Scarlett recounts her life in the small Southern town of Hillsborough, North Carolina—from Jim Crow, through the tumultuous years of school desegregation, to her successful judicial career. Scarlett digs deep into the town’s past and her family’s roots along the Eno River, and discovers the complicated place she calls home.  A lifelong resident of Hillsborough, Beverly A....

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, young Daniel Wallace was drawn to William Nealy’s world. William was brilliant, talented, a maverick, an adrenaline junkie. He was the boyfriend of Daniel’s sister Holly. Daniel had been pegged to take over the family’s successful import/export business, a role he instinctively knew he wasn’t cut out for. William became like a brother to him, showing him how to l...

The vegetables on the Moore family’s supper table, along with the potatoes and the fish, more often than not had been harvested and/or caught, cleaned, and cooked by the family themselves. Lenard D. Moore— now a poet, a gardener, a writer, a lover of jazz—learned early the value of reaping what you sow, in the best and most literal sense. Food on the table was the result of teamwork. Lenard’s fasc...

When author Jill McCorkle reaches back to her earliest memories, she is a toddler sitting in her grandmother’s kitchen sink taking a playful bath. She remembers the smell of good things baking in the oven, the carefully tended African violets that line the windowsill, the sound of her grandmother humming, and the sight of a bright red, polka-dotted bowl on a nearby shelf. Growing up in Lumberton,...

Bridgette Lacy knows her tomatoes. She was indoctrinated at an early age, when her grandfather would shower her family with plump tomatoes he grew in his garden. Come July, young Bridgette looked forward to tomatoes for lunch, dinner, and even breakfast. Fast-forward to Bridgette Lacy, popular features writer at the News and Observer in Raleigh. There she was introduced to the unofficial summer ho...

When writer Michael Malone moved back to his native North Carolina, he discovered that fiction came pouring out of him, as did other creative pursuits—plays, songs, imaginative parties, and fundraisers. He was the impresario the small, formerly quiet town of Hillsborough had been waiting for. Among the work inspired by his new hometown was a young adult (YA) story, entitled “Uncle Tatlock and the...

The Lloyd family reunion was, and still is, a summertime ritual for chef and cookbook author Nancie McDermott. Generations have gathered for over a century in rural Orange County for an afternoon of feasting and visiting. Nancie savors the dishes, the shared experience, and the meaningful connection with her big extended family. Nancie McDermott has published fourteen cookbooks, most of which are...

Chef Bill Smith worked in the kitchen at Chapel Hill’s famous Crook’s Corner for 25 years. He talks about foraging for honeysuckle and blackberries on the local bike path, his mostly friendly exchanges with other bike path regulars, and the work of keeping Crook’s Latino kitchen staff safe through the Trump years and the pandemic.  Bill Smith is the retired chef of the now-defunct Crook’s Corner,...

Georgia Carroll was a supermodel in the 1930s, a Hollywood star in the 1940s, and a Chapel Hill resident from the 1950s until her death in 2011. How did this glamorous young woman end up in Tarheel country? Cookbook author and designer Moreton Neal remembers the late Georgia Carroll Kyser, her generosity, her leadership, and her precisely decorated Christmas tree. Born and raised in Brookhaven, Mi...

Pecan pie is serious business to Steven Petrow. It’s not just a cherished and delicious family tradition, but also a memory bank of shared gifts, goofs, and changes. Over the years, he has come to appreciate the value of mixing into each pie a good story, regardless of where it lands on the truth meter. He also attempts to sort out the pronunciation controversy over p-e-c-a-n. Steven Petrow is an...

Living in neighboring towns in North Carolina’s Piedmont, writers Elizabeth Spencer and Allan Gurganus were close friends for decades. A few months before she died in 2019, he visited her one afternoon to talk to her about her story, “Rising Tide” (featured in Eno Publishers’s 27 Views of Chapel Hill: A Southern University Town in Prose and Poetry). They discussed writing, and how leaving her nati...

Novelist Allan Gurganus tells all… about his beloved home, Sunnyside, in small-town North Carolina. He and Sunnyside have been together for decades, and like most long marriages, it’s had its up and its downs, its joys and sorrows. A celebrated storyteller, Allan reads from his essay, “Old Houses & Young Men” (featured in Eno Publishers’ 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Small Southern Town in Prose...

An autobiography told through food: North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green knows food. Long before the farm-to-table movement took hold in popular culture, the garden was a rite of summer for families everywhere. Jaki's family was no exception. As soon as the garden “came in,” they would spring into action—pick, snap, shuck, peel, rinse, freeze, stew, preserve. At a young age, Jaki learne...