'^7. , vnV !i I . Mars Hill College Will Unveil 'Heritage' Mural On September 8 F The unveiling and formal dedication of Douglas Terguson's ceramic mural, "Heritage," will be held on 4Sept. S, which has been Obsignated "Doug Ferguson J>ay" by the college. | Ceremonies will begin at 3 ?.m. and will include early American, traditional, and string band music by the Ap palachian Folk, a group com posed of Lou Therrell on ban jo, Byard Ray on fiddle, Vi vian Hartsoe on guitar and Craig BuBose on base fiddle. Dr. David Smith, campus jninister, will give the invoca tion, and college president Dr. Fred Bentley will address the assembly in a tribute to the ar tist. The dedicatorial prayer will be given by Dr. Hoyt Black well, president emeritus of Mars Hill and namesake of the building where the mural was placed. Ferguson is a native of Yancey County, born on "Possum Trot," a small set tlement near Bald Creek. He grew up there and attended grammar and high school at Bald Creek. He enrolled in Mars Hill and completed his studies in art in 1933. He work ed for the Tennessee Valley Authority until 1946, gaining invaluable training and ex perience in the ceramic research laboratory at Norris. Together with his father-in law, Ernest Wilson, he found ed the Pigeon Forge Pottery on the banks of the Little Pigeon River about five miles northwest of Gatlinburg. Since then, Ferguson has become renown as a potter, artist, and designer. His business has drawn tourists from all over the world; and he has been commissioned to create special pieces for such dignitaries as Queen Elizabeth ; and he has lectured all over the world. Ferguson began thinking of a gift for the college when he visited the campus last year at the invitation of Dr. Bentley. He originally thought of a mural on a long, low wall, but Dr. Bentley directed his atten tion to the major entrance of the school's new $1.3 million administration building, Blackwell Hall. That entrance features a glass front which intersects with a brick wall and rises for three stories. At the juncture of the east wall grows Ferguson's "Heritage," a ceramic tree of Appalachian life that spreads its branches inside and out, and bears the symbols and ar tifacts of life in this region. The mural reaches a total height of 32-feet-8-inches, weighs 5,090 pounds, and has a surface area of 323 square feet. To mount the mural, Ferguson cast it in 496 pieces, putting it together like a giant jig-saw puzzle. Ferguson spent a total of 15 months on the project, filling book after book with sketches before finalizing a design that set everything at an angle. Then piece by piece, he created the mural at his Pigeon Forge Pottery. "It became a spiritual thing with me," he notes, and admits that he let business go for the 15 months it took to finish his largest work. The public is invited to at tend the unveiling, and Ferguson will be available to answer questions about the work and sign autographs dur tag a reception following the ceremonies in the Peterson Conference Center of Blackwell Hall. DOUGLAS FERGUSON rvears com pie- trance of Blackwell Hall, tion of the "Heritage" mural at the en Students Learn About Banking Typically, people have had to go to banks to learn about banking. Today, however, the banks are going to the school classroom to teach banking. This is one of the manifesta tions of a new filmstrip pro gram "BANKING IS..." which the First Union Na tional Bank presented as a public service to the students at Madison High School. Mak ing the presentation was R. Bryce Hall, vice president and city manager of the Marshall office. Receiving the mulitmedia filmstrip unit at a presentation meeting Aug. 28 at First Union Bank at Mar shall was Patricia Waldrop, consumer marketing instruc tor. In making the presentation, Hall said, "The program "BANKING IS..." gives the student first-hand experience with the basic banking ac tivities he will use throughout his life. "Writing a check, applying for a loan, computing interest and using a bank's services are things most adults take for granted, we have done them all of our lives. But these ac tivities must be learned, and for many of today's students they are as foreign as any new endeavor. "Many adults learned bank ing by trial and error; but, in today's world of advancing technology, this is no longer a satisfactory solution. For in stance, today checkwriting is as much a part of life as driv ing is. Ninety percent of all financial transactions are made by check and the American public will write over 21.5 billion checks this year. "We strongly believe that the more financially secure a student becomes through knowledge and practice of good banking the better a citizen he becomes, and the better our young citizens, the better our tomorrow." Hall said that as part of the program an officer of the bank is available for a follow-up classroom question-and answer session and the stu dent may be given a tour of the bank to see the operations at work. Editor's Column A couple of weeks ago I made a request that all copy for the News Record be in by 3 p.m. Mon days, and that request has inspired a number of questions. Why do we need the copy then? Why not Tuesday morning, or Monday morning, for that matter? For this reason, and because many of our readers have asked out of curiosity, I would like to give a brief description of how this paper is "made." It will be a little vague in parts, because I haven't yet figured out some of the details myself. But I promise you one thing, in this age of high technology, no matter how efficiently the paper is put out, there is plenty of room for human error. It all starts Wednesday mornings, the day after print day. That's when the weekly cycle begins, and we begin collecting copy from cor respondents around the county and from the mail. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the days when most of the reporting is done; deadline pressure has not begun, and those are the days when I can move around the county. Friday after noon the first packet of copy is mailed to Waynesville to be set in type. ' Some more reporting is done on weekends - holiday festivals and athletic contests are work for journalists - and then on Monday the ads are collected. By then our advertisers usually have an idea of what they want to emphasize during the coming week, or what they want to put on sale. Monday at 4:00 the second packet of copy is mail ed, along with some of the ads. This packet ar rives at the office of The Mountaineer Tuesday morning, when it is set in type by three full-time typesetters. These people use photo-typesetters, machines that "set" type photographically. The hot lead of the old Linotype machines has been replaced by light. Each time the operator presses a key, it causes a beam of light - shaped lika an "a," for example, or "g" - to hit a roll of photographic paper. After a story is finished, the roll of paper is fed through photographic developer, basically the same stuff used to make Girls Launch Message Barbara Ray and Deborah Boone's third-grade class at Marshall Elementary School launched a bottle into the French Broad River on Aug. 22. The group decided to launch the bottle after reading the ?tory "A Letter by Bottle Post." The bottle contains the third-graders' versions of islanders' distress notes. The class is asking that anyone who finds the bottle please contact Marshall Elementary School. The phone number is 649-2434. & fp'ri -3^ /'iqf^ou U/,ll be/ />7^ ?Wa<* -?bet~X './Te. ^you irery -Wms/n /^y /?qaK ?-r (S /T)rs Bo?a?- 0?\ K ?, ^\tn\ ? -f- b e.f Fl*f /o u uJ o I t~b i F U^grt / y^> 4 -Mm ^-jp- ; friend - just like you art. photographs, and all the {daces that have been hit"1 by beams of light- all the a's, b's, and so on - come out black. So you end up with strips of photo paper * with stories printed on them. All this typesetting is being done Tuesday! morning, while I am getting the last stories in without Pop's supervision, I changed cars at' home and left my briefcase, and all the above, in' the wrong car. I was in East Canton before L discovered this disaster, and it was Pop who sav-' ed me, bringing the briefcase himself. And only last week I got two miles from Marshall before realizing I had brought everything but the stories and photos! After the hour's drive to The Mountaineer, where the paper is printed, there follow several' hours of pressure-filled, high-tension work while the typesetting, layout, plating and printing are' done. J In simplified form, here is what happens. The ? rest of the copy is set, and all of those strips of.[ paper ? stories, headlines, captions, ads, everything - are coated on the back with sticky, li quid wax and laid out flat on the slanted chest high work tables. At the same time, layout sheets the size of each News Record page are laid out next to the strips and we begin sticking the strips to the sheets. We also put in the ads, which have been put together by several people who specialize in graphic layout, and the photographs v which have been reshot to specified size. It usual ly takes about two hours to make everything fit;-' reset headlines that don't fit, look for missing cap-' tions, rewrite lost headlines, and have last-minute stories set and waxed and laid out. ?' Then each page' is carried upstairs to be "shot" by a huge camera, which produces a single negative of the entire page. Then that negative is; set in another machine, against a photo-sensitive metal sheet. After several chemical steps, this machine produces a plate bearing the entire im age of the page. The plates are then carried to the pressroom and bolted onto the huge drums in pro per sequence. As the drums turn, the plates are in-J ked and pressed against paper, producing The News Record. The papet Is printed/ once the presses start rolling, in a mere 20 minutes. ' That, in fact, is the easy part. After printing, all the papers must be addressed for mailing, one at a time, and bundled for easier handling for the, post office. A single machine - or human - error , and some unlucky subscriber doesn't get a paper that week (until they call the office and advise us that we have fallen short of perfection once, again). When bundling is finished, about 6 p.m., I sw~ ing the bundles into my bus and drive the return: trip to Marshall, where the bags are left at the post office for mailing early Wednesday morning/ Other bundles go to racks or counters throughout1 the county. * If this whole process sounds fast, it is. And if it sounds like we might make mistakes, we do. Last" week, for example, Bryce Hall, the Marshall; manager of First Union Bank, was startled to. learn in The News Record that he was manager of: Wachovia Bank (Frank Moore of Wachovia may have been even more startled). The Board ofc Elections was startled to learn that it was meetings at the same time as the Board of Education (my only defense is that "elections" has the same number of letters as "education"). And a number of people wondered whether the woman pictured picking blueberries was not Inez King (she was^ and is). & But things are getting better, I tell myself;4 the mistakes are becoming slightly harder to find, and perhaps fewer in number. And oh, that day L mislaid my briefcase: I forgot to mention that the-* moon was full that day. Something was bound to; go wrong. I The News -Record NON-PARTISAN IN POLITICS (USPS 39a^?i) ALAN H. ANDERSON. Editor JAMES I. STORY, Editorial Consultant And Columnist Published Weekly By Madison County PuMsMng Co. Inc. BOX 369 MARSHALL, N.C. 28753