Gone to Carolina, Part III

Sometime you just need a good snipe hunt.  Yesterday in Asheville, what with the rain and all, was such a sometime.

I'll admit that my primary curiosity about the Southern Appalachian Radio Museum was why it existed in the first place.  Asheville is not known for its electronics industry, after all.  I'd seen the museum listed on Trip Advisor and the fact that there were no reviews of it should have been, as they say, a clue.  But it's not like I was going to go hiking in the rain or anything so I set out to find it, armed with my trusty Droid and pretty good 4G cell coverage.

The museum is housed inside the Asheville community college campus, which made finding it somewhat challenging.  Luckily I knew from Trip Advisor that it was in the Elm Building and a friendly security guard let me park nearby.  Arriving at the Elm Building, I stuck my head in the first occupied office and asked where the museum was.  One lady had no idea they even had a museum but her officemate did, and directed me to the third floor.  On the third floor, I looked around a little and found a nice electronics techie guy who took time out from helping a student to show me where the museum was, down a hallway without benefit of signage.

It's only open Fridays from 1 - 3 p.m.  The window is as close as I got.

As you can see they've got a bunch of old radios, and this is Southern Appalachia, so the museum is well-named.  I've subsequently checked their website and it does clearly state their hours of operation.  Still, I don't have a definitive answer to my "why" question.  It may be as simple as somebody had a bunch of old radios and his wife (I'm comfortable profiling here) told him he had to get them out of the guest room.  Having a museum lets him keep collecting without marital conflict.  That's sort of the origin of the Wizard of Oz Museum (although in that case I don't know about marital conflict or, if so, whether a wife was involved).

But I was not terribly disappointed that I couldn't see the museum.  Sometimes the hunt itself is really all that matters.

The radio museum now beats out the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery and the Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans for shortest hours of operation of any museum I've encountered.  I wasn't able to see those, either.

Too bad about the Fitzgerald museum in particular, because then I could have compared it with the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.  In downtown Asheville, their visitor center is next door to an old 6,000 square feet boarding house where author Thomas Wolfe grew up.  Called "Old Kentucky Home" (the owner prior to Wolfe's mother was a retired Kentucky minister), Wolfe lived there from 1906 until he left Asheville for college in 1916.  It is the inspiration for his classic novel Look Homeward, Angel.  I like early twentieth century American writers but will confess I've never read Wolfe.  His stuff always seemed pretty depressing; since his childhood was, in the words of our docent, Jim, "dreadful," I guess he came by it honestly.  Wolfe's father was a violent depressive with an unfortunate tendency toward drunkeness.  Wolfe lived in the boarding house with his mother, a driven and largely successful businesswoman and real estate speculator who purchased the boarding house as a way to generate cash for her real estate investments, but who wasn't much of a mother to her youngest son.  (Wolfe was born in 1900 and was the youngest of eight children.)

Here's a picture, mostly just to break up all of this text.

The coconut is from one of the trips that Wolfe took with his mother to Florida.  Despite being pretty unattentive (regular meals, for instance), she did instill in him a love for travel.

The subtitle to Look Homeward, Angel is "A Story of the Buried Life" which I like a lot.  Everybody has a buried life, I think.

Anyway, when the novel was published in 1929, Wolfe became most unpopular in Asheville (called "Altamont" in the book, and the boarding house was called "Dixieland").  Jim said that there were even death threats - Wolfe apparently made it clear that part of his purpose in writing was to settle some old scores and I guess he did that.  (He went on to write quite a bit more before his death just three weeks shy of his 38th birthday in 1938.)

The tour was a really interesting way not only to learn about Wolfe but also about Asheville and boarding houses.  For instance, both Wolfe and his older brother, Ben, contracted tuberculosis (which eventually killed each of them), presumably from boarders.  Many people with TB came to the mountains in those days, and it was illegal for them to live in regular rooming houses due to public health concerns.  Still, there were a lot of TB patients and Julia Wolfe (along with many other boarding house owners) was not going to turn away their cash, so a number of people with TB lived at Old Kentucky Home.

Tourism in the region is nothing new, and Jim said that since the forests were logged out at the turn of the last century, it's been the primary industry in the area.  (Asheville's beauty, of course, is what brought George Vanderbilt here.)

Originally I'd planned to pass on the Wolfe Memorial, but I'm glad I found it.  Sometimes these snipe hunts turn productive.  In fact, I'd say that they usually do.

Planning your trip around weather can be as successful as trying to time the stock market, but I've done pretty well in Asheville so far.  I went to Biltmore on the nicest day (sunny and 50's - not too shabby for early March).  And I chose another sunny (although colder) day for driving the Blue Ridge Parkway.  This is a 469-mile road that runs from Roanoke, Virginia, to the Smoky Mountains National Park.  When it's all open, that is - right now you can't get north of the east side of Asheville or south of the west side due to construction.  But that's okay, it's still a nice drive around town and you can get to the Folk Art Center which is another must-see if you're in the area.  It's a lovely museum with a wide variety of beautiful pieces - pottery, textile, wood, and so on - plus there's a nice gift shop.

Something about Asheville that I neglected to say in earlier posts, is that because of its relative poverty for most of the 20th century, a large part of its downtown is relatively intact, leading to the existence of buildings like this:

And, of course, it IS North Carolina, so one shouldn't be surprised by the use of basketballs in public art.  Cute, huh?

Weather permitting, later this morning I am headed to or through the Smokies for a couple of days, then up to eastern Tennessee to see family.  If the roads are good, I'll go to Gatlinburg and if they aren't, I'll stay on the North Carolina side of the mountains until the end of the week.  What I'm saying is that there may be a Going to Carolina Part IV in our blogging future.  Stay tuned.