Well lookee there! My Letter to the Editor got a nice placement with a big headline.

I love Jesus and Dolly, but keep them off the ballot

A little election-season plea from someone who has spent many long hours watching votes being counted:

Please don't write in a name on your ballot just for fun!

Over the years, I've frequently served as an election observer and ballot adjudicator for the Democratic Party. I've worked alongside Republican counterparts, and together we've had a front-row seat to the extraordinary care our election officials take to ensure that every vote is counted fairly, accurately, and as promptly as possible.

It's painstaking work, and I have enormous respect for the people who do it.

One thing that can slow the process considerably is the frivolous write-in vote. A write-in can cause a ballot to be flagged for individual review and adjudication.

Now, the first write-in vote for "Mickey Mouse" might bring a chuckle. But after hours of examining ballots, when everyone is tired and ready to go home, the novelty wears pretty thin. We've encountered votes for Jesus, Dolly Parton, assorted sports heroes (living and dead), and other unlikely and ineligible candidates.

Here's something those voters may not realize: Nobody is going to be impressed by their cleverness. Their little joke won't make headlines. The only people likely to see it are some very tired election workers who would dearly love to finish their work and get home to their families.

And here's the important part: In Georgia, write-in votes for candidates who have not properly qualified are not counted as votes for those individuals. They're effectively non-votes in that contest.

There are legitimate write-in candidates, of course, and voters have every right to support them. But please make sure your intended candidate has qualified under Georgia law.

So here's my modest request: Vote your conscience. Vote for the candidates you believe in. But please don't use your ballot to make a joke.

Our election workers have an important, demanding job. Let's not make it harder than it needs to be.

And while we're at it, let's thank them for the care they take in protecting one of the most precious rights we enjoy as citizens of this republic: the right to vote!

John Schroeder

John Schroeder waving a Save Rome's Central Park sign during one of our 2015 demonstrations along Turner McCall Boulevard

 John Schroeder has died.

I was deeply saddened to learn of John's death this morning.

In the summer of 1982, I paid a visit to Georgia Baptist Hospital in Atlanta, where doctors performed a rather personal procedure they referred to as minor surgery. Minor surgery, of course, is surgery performed on somebody else.

As the doctor prepared me for anesthesia, I asked whether my recovery would prevent me from attending an event I was looking forward to that weekend. He assured me I could attend anything I felt like attending. I wasn't watching his face at the time, but I suspect he was silently chuckling. He knew perfectly well that I wasn't going to feel like attending much of anything for several days.

John Schroeder probably never heard that story, but I've thought of it often over the years when our paths crossed around town.

You see, 1982 was, like 2026, a gubernatorial election year, and I was up to my ears in politics. We had established a Democratic campaign headquarters in a storefront just off Broad Street, next to the Greystone Building. Since I wasn't up to much walking, I spent a good many days that summer tending headquarters.

When lunchtime rolled around, if no other volunteer was handy, I'd hang a "Gone to Lunch" sign on the door, lock up, and gingerly make my way up Broad Street to a still fairly new and trendy little hole-in-the-wall called Schroeder's New Deli.

There I'd order one of John's signature creations — a Pita Max, a Salvadore Deli, a Crummy Pita, or one of my favorites, a big ol' Veggie (with ham!). Then I'd feed quarters into the tabletop Ms. Pac-Man machine for a while before making my way back to headquarters.

I'd met John before that summer, but those lunches were when I first came to appreciate his gentle, unassuming manner. He was a kind and humble man.

The following year, Sheila and I welcomed our first daughter, Brannon. About that same time, John and Tracy welcomed their son James. Before long, we were running into the Schroeders at Kids Stop, the daycare center where James and Brannon became buddies. I remember their Kids Stop graduation program at Second Avenue Baptist Church.

Years later, those two became close friends in high school, both immersed in Brian Sikes's outstanding drama program at Rome High. Once again, the Shaws and Schroeders found ourselves together, watching our kids perform and traveling to one-act play competitions.

Meanwhile, John's little deli was growing into a Rome institution.

John was a hardworking, imaginative businessman who wasn't afraid to try something new. He expanded into the building next door, opened the wall between the two spaces, and doubled the size of his restaurant. Then he transformed the small space behind the restaurant into a courtyard with a substantial stage, decks, and tables. What had been an unremarkable space behind Broad Street became a popular downtown gathering place for music, poetry, storytelling, and fellowship.

When we organized the Ridge & Valley Storytelling Guild, we partnered with the Rome Area Council for the Arts to present annual Story Nights in Schroeder's courtyard. For six years, storytellers entertained audiences there, and John made us welcome. I have many happy memories of those evenings.

Storyteller Mike Mount performing at the 2019 Story Night in Schroeder's courtyard.

But John's contributions to Rome extended well beyond his restaurant.

For years, he had supported the Coosa River Basin Initiative, our local riverkeeper organization, whose headquarters happened to be right next door to Schroeder's. Many of us had been working to preserve the roughly 80 acres of greenspace at the foot of Jackson Hill and connect it to our beautiful Ridge Ferry Park along the Oostanaula River.

In late 2015, with only weeks remaining before the city elections, we learned that the future of that greenspace was in immediate jeopardy. The property appeared headed for development. We hurriedly organized a political action committee, Save Rome's Central Park, and began a determined campaign to protect it.

John joined the effort.

John was not a man who sought the spotlight. He was much more comfortable working quietly behind the scenes than standing before a crowd. Public speaking was certainly not his favorite activity.

But when something mattered enough, John was willing to step forward.

He was among the citizens who stood before the Rome City Commission and spoke in defense of that precious greenspace.

The Rome News reported his remarks this way:

"John Schroeder described the drive on Turner McCall, and how this one bit of greenspace with our Civic Center and Visitors Center area makes a welcome break in an unattractive typical urban strip."

I appreciated John's willingness to speak up. He recognized something that many of us were trying to communicate: that the character of our city depends not just on what we build, but also on what we choose to preserve.

In that election, the people of Rome made it clear that they wanted the greenspace protected. John had played his part in that effort, just as he had in so many other worthwhile endeavors around town.

John and I were never close friends, but we were friendly acquaintances and, from time to time, coworkers in one community effort or another. Our paths crossed in a surprising variety of ways over more than forty years.

Looking back, I realize how much I admired him. He built a successful business that became part of the character of downtown Rome. He provided a place for musicians, poets, and storytellers to share their talents. He supported causes he believed in. And through it all, he remained the same modest, approachable fellow I remember from those lunches in 1982.

I think that is a pretty fine legacy.

My sympathy goes out to Tracy, James, and all of John's family and friends.

Rome has lost a good man.

Click this picture to see a very short video John took while walking his dog along Burwell Creek and posted on Facebook during our Save Rome's Central Park battle: 

A Log Cabin Swallowed

For five nights during our annual trip to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Sheila and I stayed in an Airbnb on Deacon Creek Road near Erwin, Tennessee.

In the backyard of the house next door—was a little log cabin.

Naturally, I noticed it.

It looked old to me. Really old. The broad hewn logs, the chinking, the notched dovetailed corners—I wondered about it each time we passed by. I took some pictures and began wondering how long it had been there and what its story might be.

As it turned out, those logs had stood on Deacon Creek Road only a couple of decades, but they had been fitted together perhaps more than a century and a half ago.

As I loaded the car for our trip home, an elderly gentleman across the lawn hailed me. He was making his way toward us with the aid of a walker. It was Mr. Yates, owner of the cabin.

And, just like that, my idle curiosity turned into a personal tour. We must have spent close to an hour talking with this retired miner and history buff.

Mr. Yates invited us inside the cabin and began telling us its story.

The logs had once stood on Masters Street in Erwin—but you couldn't see them there. An old log cabin had been swallowed up inside a much later clapboard house.

When that house was being torn down in 2008, removal of the siding revealed the old cabin hidden within its walls. Mr. Yates says the cabin dated to about 1840.

He acquired the cabin—or, more precisely, the portion of it that could be saved. He carefully tagged and numbered the logs before taking them apart so that they could be put back in their proper order on his property there on Deacon Creek Road.

What stands there today, therefore, is not the 1840 cabin simply picked up and moved bodily from one place to another. Mr. Yates told us that he saved the logs from the bedroom side of the original two-room cabin, but not the kitchen side. The floors and interior walls are new, as are the stairs leading to a little loft bedroom. Some of the old floor joists got a second life as upright supports, including posts on the porch.

But those weathered horizontal logs are the real thing.

Inside were family pictures on the walls, an old treadle sewing machine, an iron bed—the sorts of things that seemed perfectly at home within those old logs.

Then Mr. Yates invited us into his house, where the story got even better.

He showed us an October 7, 2008, copy of The Erwin Record. Across the front page was an article headlined “‘Hidden’ log cabin uncovered in Erwin.”

The article described contractors peeling the clapboard siding from the old Bailey home on Masters Street and discovering beneath it an intact two-room log cabin. The newspaper said the logs were believed to be native hemlock and chestnut. William F. Wilkins, who had lived across the street for nearly fifty years, told the paper that he had heard there was supposed to be a cabin somewhere inside the house but had never believed it.

Local historian William Cooper, however, had known something was there. In his 2001 book, Old Log Homes of Unicoi County, Cooper had written that a log structure survived within the Bailey house. He described two front rooms served by a double-sided fireplace.

Mr. Yates remembered that double fireplace.

Then our visit wandered—as the best visits often do—into other stories.

He brought out old family photographs and pictures from the Embreeville mines. There was his great-grandfather posing with fellow miners there about a century ago. Mr. Yates had worked in the mines himself—and so had his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather.

Four generations of one family connected with the same East Tennessee mining community.

The Embreeville mining district produced iron, zinc, lead and manganese at various times during its long history. Mr. Yates named the particular mine where his family worked and told us what they mined there. Unfortunately, I wasn't taking notes. This was supposed to be a quick conversation with a neighbor while I loaded the car!

There were other photographs and other stories: a handsome young soldier home from Korea with his arm around his beautiful wife; their little boy, Leonard, who would grow up to become a Marine and later a successful baker, only to be killed much too young in an automobile accident while on his way to his bakery.

Leonard and his wife Rhonda had owned Mountain View Bakery. Rhonda continued the bakery after Leonard's death and eventually sold it. Today she is one of the three women behind Three Sisters Conservers, along with Amanda and Lisa, two sisters whose family cooking traditions eventually became a business. Rhonda, with her culinary training and bakery experience, first became their adviser and friend and eventually joined them.

And then Mr. Yates showed me his wood stove.

I hardly needed to be told where that came from.

Cast right into the iron were the words:

EAGLE STOVE WORKS
ROME, GA.

Here I was in Erwin, Tennessee, investigating an old log cabin, and Rome had followed me there.

Rome was once quite a center of ironworking and foundry work—Griffin Foundry, Noble Foundry, Eagle Stove Works and others. And there in Mr. Yates's house was a heavy old Eagle stove that had somehow made the journey from my hometown into the Tennessee mountains.

But the Rome connections didn't stop with the stove.

The whole story of Mr. Yates's cabin reminded me immediately of two log houses back home in Floyd County that were similarly “swallowed” by later buildings.

One is Chieftains, the Major Ridge home in Rome. The old log house was enlarged and altered over the years until the earlier structure was enclosed within the later house. Today those old logs remain part of the fabric of the Major Ridge Home.

The other example is even more like the Masters Street story.

For decades an old log structure in Cave Spring was hidden inside what most people knew as the Green Hotel. When the later building came down, the old Vann Cabin emerged from inside it.

Friends of mine were deeply involved in saving that cabin. Michael Burton, Steve Craw, Billy Abernathy and many other Cave Spring folks worked to see that it survived. Michael even arranged to have new logs hewn to replace several of the originals that were too badly rotted to save.

I was there for the dedication of the reconstructed cabin in 2016...

    

 and went back the following year with my friend Mike Bock for a personal tour with Steve and Laurie Craw.

In a blog post at the time I called the Vann Cabin a treasure that had been “hidden in the walls of the Green Hotel for many decades.”

Nine years later, without looking for one at all, I had stumbled across another hidden cabin.

There are important differences. The Vann Cabin was reconstructed on its historic site and includes both surviving original timbers and replacement logs. The old Masters Street cabin did not remain on its original ground. Mr. Yates salvaged one portion of it, carefully numbered the logs, moved them to Deacon Creek Road, and built them into the cabin we visited.

But I love the common thread.

Somebody builds a log house. Years pass. Tastes change. Families need more room. Instead of tearing down the old house, another generation builds around it. Clapboards cover the logs. Rooms are added. Eventually almost everybody forgets that the first house is still there.

Then, perhaps a century later, somebody starts pulling away the newer walls.

And there it is.

A house hidden inside a house.

Had Mr. Yates not hailed me across the lawn as I loaded our car that morning, I would have driven back to Rome knowing only that there was an interesting old-looking cabin beside our Airbnb.

Instead, he invited two strangers inside.

He showed us his cabin and then his house. Along the way we saw his stove, and through old photographs we “met” his family—the great-granddaddy posing with fellow miners right there in Embreeville a century ago; the handsome young soldier home from Korea, his arm around his beautiful wife; the little son who would grow up to become a Marine and a successful baker before being taken too young in an automobile accident.

And one story led to another—the mines, Mountain View Bakery, Three Sisters Conservers, and finally that old newspaper telling the story of the cabin that had brought us together in the first place.

By the time we finally pulled away from Deacon Creek Road, that little cabin next door wasn't just an old building anymore.

It had become a story.

Bad Knee, Technology Disaster, and a Great Concert

 

On our drive to Joneborough yesterday I noticed a couple of these special Dolly Parton license plates, but today I got a picture of one in the parking lot for the Jonesborough welcome center where we picked up our festival swatches.

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I have so enjoyed my many long walks during the last month and a half but now I'm wondering if I might have overdone it. My knee was hurting me so badly today that we decided to forgo our planned hike and went back to the Airbnb where I slept, very uncomfortably for a while. My leg/knee ached the whole time. 

Later we decided to drive into Erwin to check out the Apple Festival.  Before we left I took pictures of the old log cabin next door. I spent a while conferring with ChatGPT about whether the cabin is as old as it looks!

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Before we left for the festival, I leaned in through the driver's side window to put something in the car and to tell Sheila, who was already seated on the passenger side, that I needed to wash my hands. I had just eaten a peach and gotten my hands sticky. I didn't want to get the steering wheel or anything else sticky, so I put down what I was carrying. I walked back to the door of our Airbnb, unlocked it again, and went inside to wash my hands. Then I locked up, walked back to the car, settled behind the wheel, started the engine, backed out of the driveway, and we were off to Erwin. We drove very slowly because I was sightseeing along that stretch of curvy highway that follows the Nolichucky River. Once in Erwin, we drove around town to see where they were setting up for the Apple Festival. No one noticed that something was perched on the roof of my car. On the return trip, I picked up speed, and as I rounded a curve with oncoming traffic, I heard a strange sound. I thought perhaps I had run over a small piece of wood in the road, though I hadn't seen anything. But somehow that explanation didn't seem quite right. It was probably only a few seconds before an image of a red rectangle sitting on the roof of my car appeared in my mind's eye. With dread, I felt my pants pocket. As I pulled off the road to turn around, the car behind us pulled in beside us. The driver told us he had seen something fall from our roof and that his car had hit it. "I'm sorry," he said. We drove back and parked near where he thought the phone had fallen. The Find My app on my watch seemed to think it was nearby. As we searched the ditches, a policeman pulled up, holding what you see in the pictures below. "Is this what you're looking for?" We never found the red protective cover.

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The Thursday night special pre-festival program was perhaps my favorite in all the years we been coming (since 2009). We've heard Jeanne Robertson several times, Kathy Matteo, and several others at those Thursday night programs. 

Michael Reno Harrell and Josh Goforth have been teaming for programs for a while now and this program was wonderful. I hope I can find the names of the bass player and mandolin player who added so much to the program. I could have stayed for another hour of their playing, singing, and storytelling.