A Plethora of Rabbit Hole Updates!

A Billy Graham statue! Steven Spielberg's yellow hat! A puppy! A goalie helmet! Here's a ton of new information on some old stories that might have left you hangin'.

It’s Billy Time

The new Billy Graham statue in the U.S. Capitol, moments after its unveiling.(Screengrab via C-Span)

Today, a bunch of dignitaries unveiled a new statue of the Rev. Billy Graham at the U.S. Capitol. It’s been a long time coming, as I noted last July in a story about the two statues that have long represented North Carolina in the halls of Congress. Before now, those statues were of Charles Aycock and Zebulon Vance. Both men were former governors and avowed white supremacists. As of today, Aycock is out and Graham is in. “Today we acknowledge that he is a better representation of our state than the statue it replaces, which brought memories of a painful history of racism,” Gov. Roy Cooper said during the statue’s unveiling ceremony.

(A bizarro aside: After my story last year, I received a pair of disapproving emails from former Georgia congressman Ben Jones, who 1.) famously played “Cooter” on The Dukes of Hazzard and 2.) was, unbeknownst to me, a Rabbit Hole subscriber.)

Cooper, lawmakers, and Graham’s family were all there to see the statue revealed for the first time. “My father would be a little uncomfortable with this being here because he would want the focus to be on the Lord Jesus Christ,” said Billy’s son Franklin, whose haircut is beginning to resemble that of his father. House Speaker Mike Johnson also noted that millions of people will get to see the image of Graham pointing to a Bible, along with the two verses—John 3:16 and John 14:6—inscribed on its granite base. “That’ll be a great conversation piece as we give tours,” he said.

Is everybody happy about this? Of course not. Some people have said that the statue violates the Establishment Clause that’s supposed to separate church and state, although technically no state funds were used to create it.

The statue of Aycock will be returned to North Carolina, although it’s not clear what’s going to happen to it. The other state statue currently in the Capitol, of Zebulon Vance, is set to remain, and there are no plans to remove it. “I don’t see anybody in our current history that exceeds his leadership,” Rep. Patrick McHenry told the Charlotte Observer. “He was in the Senate for 30 years. His story is sordid and not perfect, but less sordid than that of Aycock, in my view.”

One last thing: The sculptor, a self-taught artist from Charlotte named Chas Fagan, was there at the unveiling. Last year, he didn’t want to say much about the statue, since it hadn’t actually been cast in bronze just yet. He told me to contact him again after the unveiling. So I did. “I’m standing in Statuary Hall right now,” he told me by phone. Later this afternoon, Graham was set to move down to the Capitol’s crypt, where the only the original 13 states are allowed to place statues.

Fagan says his intent was to capture a man who was always in motion. To get an idea of what that was like, he watched a ton of archival video. The actual moment being depicted, Fagan says, is a pause in the action, when Graham is waiting for a reaction from his audience. It’s also meant to be dynamic. People have already told Fagan that his statue’s gaze seems to soften as they get closer to it. The bronze depiction of Graham is twisting as he looks for a response. His left foot is sticking out. “It feels like he’s gonna step off that thing,” Fagan told me. “That’s the fun part.”

I am now the Man in the Yellow Hat

Back in July 2022, I solved a stubborn yet inconsequential mystery: Why was Steven Spielberg wearing a North Carolina Highway Patrol hat on the set of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade back in 1988?

It took a while and required a lot of help from a lot of people, but eventually I found the man who gave Spielberg the hat: A former state trooper named Marcus Hammonds. He’d been helping out with traffic control in Anson County when Spielberg shot The Color Purple there in 1985. Hammonds met Spielberg, thought he was nice, and gave him the hat. Spielberg held on to it for three years, and then wore it in the Spanish desert while filming some Harrison Ford action scenes. Pretty remarkable.

The hat, though, had everyone stumped for a simple reason: Highway Patrol caps did not come in yellow. Even a patrol historian had never seen one before. Hammonds told me it was literally one-of-a-kind. He couldn’t get a standard issue hat from his post, so he bought a cheap blank yellow trucker hat, went home, took a patch off of an old uniform, and had his mother-in-law sew it on.

I haven’t heard from Spielberg himself (yet). But last month, I saw a Facebook post from Mark Hammonds, Marcus’s son. “Somebody tell Spielberg I’ve got a fresh lid on deck for him,” it read, above a picture of a collection of yellow patrol hats. After I wrote the story about his dad, he went out, bought more yellow hats, collected more patches from highway patrol friends, and had a local seamstress sew them on.

I sent Mark a message, asking him how much he wanted for one. Soon after, a hat arrived in the mail, and it’s now up on a place of honor on the shelf in my office.

LOOKIT THE PUPPY

Our family’s dog, Lucy, tragically died in August 2021. Her death hit me really hard, and I wrote about it as part of the grieving process. Back then, I just wasn’t sure if I’d ever want a new beginning with a dog because I know how the story always ends.

Well. About that.

This is Millie. She’s technically 3/4 poodle and 1/4 golden retriever, but when she runs, she’s 100% Muppet. We rescued her back in March, back when she was five months old. She’s already grown quite a bit since then, including on us. She can’t replace Lucy. She’s her own dog, with her own distinct personality. She’s great at fetch. She’s also incredibly poofy.

I say all this as I’m reading Dogland, a fantastic new book from

Tommy Tomlinson

. Tommy’s gone to a lot of dog shows over the past few years to learn about why dogs are A Thing for so many people. I’m not finished yet, but I already read an excerpt in The Atlantic, which gets at something that I’ve been thinking about since Lucy died: Why do we sometimes cry more about the loss of a dog than the loss of a human?

I’m glad that I’m reading Dogland as my family and I get to know Millie. Maybe it’ll help me understand why she keeps stealing my shoes.

A Piece of Art That’ll Stop Pucks

Me playing goalie at an outdoor rink in Youngstown, Ohio back in the late 1990s, wearing a New York Islanders jersey for some reason.

I’ve played ice hockey since I was in high school in Ohio. I started off playing goalie, but I moved to defenseman about 15 years ago after I moved to Charlotte. I just wanted to skate, and every team in my rec league already had an established goalie. Over time, my gear either got lost or rotted, and it was really old anyhow. Earlier this year, I was able to buy some used, modern-style gear and got back into playing in net. I’ve really enjoyed it. I can’t tell you why, but it’s exhilarating to me to have people shoot pucks at you really, really hard. At least, it’s exhilarating when you make the save.

I digress. I got a new white goalie helmet, and I’m considering getting it painted or wrapped in vinyl. There’s one big problem, though: I’m not currently on a team, so I don’t really have an easy theme or color scheme. It’s sort of like choosing a tattoo! Or so I’m told! I don’t have any!

The easy play is to do something North Carolina-related here, and so I could use your suggestions/ideas. A fellow goalie who runs a motorcycle repair shop up near Pilot Mountain has offered to paint it, so I need some good ideas. What would you put on the chin? On the sides? On the top? Shoot me any ideas in an email, or in the comments below. I’ll hopefully update you later this summer, after it’s done.

Also, go Canes.