Live and Let Live”
Cows graze peacefully in a
nearby pasture, the swimming
pool is drained carefully for the
winter, the mother of three sits
inside her house finishing a quilt
- all watched over from the
yellow eyes of the three
dinosaurs in the front yard of
Mr. and Mrs. Carl Weaver.
“Why, of course you can look
at the dinosaurs,” Mrs. Weaver
says, answering the door with a
thimble still on her finger.
“We’re right proud of them.”
The dinosaurs - actually con
crete molds of the giant, extinct
reptiles - have often brought
Mrs. Weaver to the door to talk
to incredulous visitors since she
and her husband bought them
about ten years ago and placed
them In their front yard in the
Flint Hill Community.
People seem to have trouble
believing what they’ve just seen
-one ten-foot model and two
five-foot models of dinosaurs
painted bright green. “One
fellow saw them at night and
went back to tell his friends,”
Mrs. Weaver says, “and they all
said, ‘Oh, you just must have
been drinking.’ He brought them
back the next day so they could
J
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Si.
ii?:
‘‘I heard a thump! ”
—Mrs. Carl Weaver
see for themselves.”
The Weavers bought the
green monsters from the in
heritor of an amusement track
near Chimney Rock. At the time
the couple sold concrete garden
fixtures, and they decided to br
ing the concrete creatures home
to join the bird baths, fountains,
and concrete fawn in front of
their eight-room house.
“Some people may not want
us to have them here, but we’ve
had a lot of fun with them,” Mrs.
Weaver says. “Children seem to
enjoy them so much, so we try
to have a live-and-let-llve at
titude.”
Apparently some who saw the
dinosaurs liked them so well they
wanted to take them home.
There have been two apparent
attempts to steal the dinosaurs,
both stymed it appears by the
heavy weight of the models.
“Easter about a year ago I was
in bed reading,” Mrs. Weaver
recalls, “when I heard a thump!
thump! At first I thought it was
just the furnace starting, but
then 1 heard the dog start bark
ing and I looked outside. Both of
the little ones were turned over
like someone had tried to carry
them off.”
One of the “little” ones - that
is, under ten feet - suffered the
indignity of a broken tail fin
when turned over. Its mouth still
gaps open in a grin, however, a
toothy smile at least a foot wide.
The Weavers no longer sell
concrete fixtures, but did the
20-plus feet of concrete dinosaur
satisfy their desire to collect con
crete statues? Not exactly.
“Sometimes 1 tell Carl, let’s
just go look, and just see what’s
available...”
Above, one of the three dinosaurs
owned by the Weavers gazes over
pastureland at Flint Hill. Above at
center a smaller dinosaur still has
a grin of sorts despite a tail fin
broken during an apparent at
tempted robbery.
The Foothills View
P. O. Box 982 Boiling Springs, N. C. 28017
THURS.. JAN. 6, 1983
BOILING SPRINGS NC
A^^ress Correction R^equesteff~
Blk. Postage Pd. Permit 15
SINGLE COPY 15 CENTS
Shelby
Workshops
Sign Of Patience
Counseling and Guidance
Associates has scheduled the
following workshops for
January.
Monday, January 10: Getting
To Know Yourself, 12:00-1:00
p.m., $10.00.
Tuesday, January 11: Hand
made Gift Items, 10:00 a.m.,
$5.00 plus material fees.
Wednesday, January 12:
Stress Management, 12J)0-1J)0
p.m., $10.00.
Thursday, January 13:
Secretaries and Administrative
Assistants, Lunchtime Seminar,
12.-00-1:00 p.m., $10.00.
Friday, January 14: Financial
Family Planning Seminar, Free
Consultations.
Monday, January 10: How To
Talk So Children Will Listen,
7JX) p.m.. Day Care Workers
and Teacher Certification credit,
3 hours. Kindergarten through
grade 4. $8.00 per session.
Wednesday, January 12: How
To Talk So Children Will Listen
And How To Listen So Children
Will Talk. Teacher certification
credit-3 hours. K-4. $8.00 per
session. 3:30 p.m
To register, call 487-8421.
Funeral For
Suratt Here
l'
•t/f.
For about 25 years Ray W.
Surratt was busy meeting people
as he drove a route truck for the
Cleveland Sandwich Company
and operated restaurants here
and at South Carolina. Many of
those people came to his funeral
Tuesday at Boiling Springs Bap
tist in what a church official call
ed “one of the biggest crowds”
he had seen there.
Surratt, 68, died Sunday at
Cleveland Memorial Hospital.
He was buried at Cleveland
Memorial Park following ser
vices at Boiling Springs.
“He was a steady, consistent
man,” recalled his minister, Rex.
Max Linnens. “Never a moody
man, he seemed always in con
trol, always friendly.”
A native of Cherokee County,
South Carolina, Surratt was the
son of the late John Licious and
Mamie Vinsette Surratt. He
served in the U.S. Army during
World War II.
He is survived by his wife,
Nell Greene Surratt; two
daughters; Mrs. Bobbie Beam of
Shelby and Miss Martha Surratt
of the home; four brothers: J.L.
Surratt of Boiling Springs, Con
rad Surratt of Gaffney, S.C., J.E.
Surratt of Cliffside, and Jack
Blanton of Charlotte; and two
sisters: Mrs. Lucille Blanton of
Kings Mountain and Mrs. J.B.
McCraw of Gaffney, S.C.
Richard Blanton, a Boiling Springs sign
painter, carefully fills in the letter of each
word as he moves left to right toward comple
tion of this job at Davis Photography in Boil
ing Springs.
Blanton says he traces each letter before
painting it on the glass. He has worked at the
trade about four years, he saysl.
Melon Bites The Dust
(Editor’s note: the View's
Dec. 16 edition carried the re
quest of reader Maynard
Philbeck for information on an
early polebean seed that perhaps
has been hybridized out of ex
istence; the seed, believed to
have been brought on the
Mayflower, was last noticed
recently in North Carolina and
Philbeck asked'for anyone who
had saved the seed to write him.
Another seed saver - and
hunter - is Allen Lacy, a writer
for the Wall Street lournal,
whose column on his hunt for
the Jenny Lind melon is
reprinted below.)
Last summer “Jenny Lind”
disappeared, perhaps
forever—not the 19th century
Swedish soprano, but a
muskmelon named for her in her
heyday. My Jenny Linda was an
“heirloom vegetable,” a cultivar
whose survival depends on peo
ple saving its seeds each summer,
since it isn’t produced commer
cially or listed in any standard
garden-seed catalog that I know
of. Until last year, a handful of
farmers in my area did save the
seed so they could sell this excep
tionally flavorful melon during
its fleeting season of perfection,
the first two weeks of August.
Jenny Lind was no beauty. Its
fruit bordered on the grotesque,
considering the misshapen tur
ban—a large, lumpish pro
tuberance—on the blossom end.
My private name for it was
Quasimodo, for it brought to
mind Charles Laughton in “The
Hunchback of Notre Dame”
much more than The Swedish
Nightingale. But the trip into the
country to buy a bushel was
always worthwhile, and a bushel
never lasted very long. The spicy
sweetness of its luscious pale
green flesh was unmatched by
any other melon.
But this year I couldn’t find
Jenny Lind. At one roadside
stand after another someone
pointed out a new hybrid melon
as its replacement. The farmers
in my area have been badly
misinformed. The melons they
are growing now are so
flavorless that they might have
been picked before they were
ripe and shipped here from
thousands of miles away. I wish,
too late, that last year I have sav
ed seeds from Jenny Lind to
grow on my own.
Maybe some holdout farmer
somewhere,' properly skeptical
about the common superstition
that newer is always better, still
grows my favorite of all melons.
But even if it hasn’t utterly
fanished, its survival at best is
precarious. And its disap
pearance in my own area is more
than a personal disappointment.
The fate of Jenny Lind is
merely one instance of a far-
reaching problem which some
critics of present practices and
tendencies in the world’s
agriculture find alarming and
dangerous—the loss of genetic
diversity in our major food
crops.
The problem is fairly recent.
As late as the end of World War
II, the production of seed for
food was decentralized and
richly varied. In the U.S., as in
many other countries, hundreds
of private firms sold seed, much
of it produced on their own
farms, of cultivated strains they-
had developed. Most of these
firms were owned by families
(Burpre, Harris, Park and so on)
that handed down control from
one generation to the next, ac
cording to the fortunes of time
and mortality.
All of these houses offered a
dizzying variety of vegetable
seeds. Most were purebred
strains rather than FI hybrids,
meaning that gardeners could
save seeds one year and plant
them the next with little dif
ference in the crop. Further
more, many small growers saved
their own, purely local varieties
every year as treasures to be
passed down from parents to
children. As a result, the pool of
genetic material for such food
crops as beans and corn and
squash was broad and deep. To
vary the metaphhor, the result,
though unplanned, was extreme
ly prudent: many eggs in many
baskets.
Today a good many plant
scientists are getting edgy about
the probability that we now
have far too few eggs in far too
few baskets, that the gene pool
on which we ultimately depend
for our sustenance is en
dangered. The old stereotype of
botanists as carefree, gentle, and
untroubled souls with a passion
for collecting and classifying
plants for storage in a herbarium
doesn’t hold these days. A lot of
botanists have worried looks,
feel a sense of urgency about
Please turn to Melon, Page 3
Who’s Who In
Evolution
A recent national survey of gradually over millions of years.
1348 “opinion leaders,’’ To support their views, they cite
representing the sciences, evidence gathered during the last
business, the arts, and many two centuries from geology,
other fields, shows 73% saying paleontology, molecular biology,
they agree more with evolution and other scientific disciplines,
as an explanation of the origin of Those believing in crea-
life and 13% saying they prefer tionism, on the other hand,
“creationism” as an explanation. generally hold that the earth and
While those who believe in most life forms came into ex
evolution outnumber those who istence suddenly at some time
believe in creationism by nearly within the last 10,000 years,
a 6-to-l margin, most evolu- resulting from an act of God.
tionists surveyed say they Following is the question ask-
believe in either a personal God ed of the opinion leaders,
or some sort of spirit or life force. selected at random from the
Four in 10 (40%) of these latest edition of Marquis’s
leading citizens say they believe WHO’S WHO IN AMERICA:
in a personal God (that is, a God As you know', there has been a
who observes one’s actions and renewed debate betwen those
judges people), while 34% who believe in the theory of
believe in “some sort of spirit or evolution and those who believe
life force.” Another 6% fall Into in the theory of creationism. Do
the category of agnostics and in- you agree more with the theory
dicate that they “don’t really of evolution or more with the
know what to think,” while 14% theory of creationism?
can be considered' antheists, in- Here are the national findings:
dicating they “really don’t think EVOLUTION VS.
there is any sort of spirit, God, or CREATIONISM
life force.” Evolution 73%
Evolution theorists believe the Creationism 13
earth is billions of years old and Undecided/both 14
that life forms developed
100%
View On Holiday
Due to staff vacations, the The View will resume
Foothills View will not be publication the following
published next week, Ian. 13. week.
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