Once every six months or so, the North Carolina Rabbit Hole experiences the perfect storm. A Holeacane, if you will. In this case, I had story coming together, but then I ran out of time to finish it the way I wanted. So then I started working on a shorter, easier story, only to find that the easy version would be much better with an interview I couldn’t land in time. So then I tried one more thing, and it became clear that I have to at least ATTEMPT to ask a highly distinguished person an insanely dumb question.
But never fear! When these things happen, I turn this space over to you, the highly intelligent and slightly odd Rabbit Hole reader. I’m opening the comments once again for a Reddit-style Ask Me Anything, where you can pose questions to me about North Carolina, this newsletter, or, well anything. If you want to know how how this works, or want to see if I’ve answered your question before, you can check here to see how this went last time. Or maybe you’re a “This is more of a comment than a question” person and just want to get something off your chest. Go for it. And if you know the answer to a question you see, don’t wait for me! Just go ahead and answer it. All I ask is that you not be spammy or mean or spread conspiracy theories about Venus Fly Traps or whatever. I’ll try to get back to as many of these as I can over the next few days. Have fun!
I have always wanted to know the history of the cut off school buses used in the tobacco fields. I googled with no results periodically over the years. Logistically, I understand they need to move large leaves stacked flat so the surface area makes sense. But why not a long trailer? Why a school bus? Why are they unique to North Carolina? Who makes said school bus trucks? Is there a North Carolina fabricator specializing in them? Why aren’t they used in farming anywhere else in America? Are they street legal? Does North Carolina have a state car and, if not, could it be the school bus truck? I see them all the time in the fall down East. Inquiring minds wish to know the history of the mystery of school bus trucks at my house.
Have you ever done a story or deep dive on Long Sam from Lake Norman? There’s a small paragraph in the Lake Norman wiki page but I can’t find anything deeper about it and it seems like a tall tale.
I just read it and, it's a strange Wiki paragraph (I'm guessing editors don't visit that page with the same regularity as others). I hadn't heard about her until now! I'd only heard about the Lake Norman Monster.
I am sure you’ve addressed this before, but what brought you down to North Carolina from Ohio in the first place? Why didn’t you pursue an Ohio Rabbit Hole?
After college at Ohio University, the TV station in West Virginia that'd hired me as an intern and then camera guy brought me on as a full-time producer. I worked there for 3 1/2 years and then got a job as a producer at the NBC station in Charlotte in 2005. So I've been here for almost 19 years. As for why there's no Ohio Rabbit Hole? I mean, there *could* be one, but I think North Carolina has SO much more happening on so many different levels that it's a great place for a writer to find stuff.
An Adopt A Highway sign located on Hwy 321 N heading from Lenoir to Blowing Rock has intrigued me for years. It lists as the sponsor "Prince - Musician and Artist." Caldwell County, NC is not the kind of place I would expect to see this tribute.
More of an update and a result of your investigative and entertaining research vs a question: I recently got an EV car and tried to get a personalized NC license plate with gas in it, like GasEX, No Gas, etc. Now NC will not allow a license plate with ‘gas’ in it. Weird and a result of the FART situation in Asheville I’ll bet. Jeremy, I’ll give your highlight of those FART troublemakers the credit (or blame). No farts and now, no gas.
It's happened, like, three times, and it's not weird. Once (and I don't think he'll mind me saying this) Deans Eastman walked up to me at the North Carolina Zoo because he recognized my voice from the podcast. Another woman recognized me at the National Zoo in DC (what is it with zoos?). I think it doesn't happen more often because my avatar is a cartoon image of myself from a Charlotte magazine comic that was published 13 years ago.
Who knows! One of the reasons why I don’t often write a lot of personal essays is because you can only plumb your own depths so much before your returns start diminishing. Or, possibly, you start doing “stunts” to keep the momentum going and your personality changes. It’s easier to just keep your eyes open and stay curious about the world around you. It’s a big world! And this is a big diverse state, and if I do run out of stories, I hope it’ll be a long time from now.
I’d love to better understand the THREE food deserts we have in NC (West Charlotte, SE Raleigh, NE Greensboro). I’m sure systemic reasons are at play, but what are they? Is the solution as simple as building a grocery store? How are people in these areas getting fresh produce currently (if at all)?
Me too. I’ve read before that basically it’s simple economics: if a grocery store chain can build in a richer part of town vs. a poorer part of town, they’ll go to the richer part because they’ll make more money. The inverse is true for dollar stores.
I don’t know any geotechnical engineers but maybe you’ll meet one at a cocktail party. Piedmont houses don’t have basements because of the thick clay soil. However, in engineering, rarely is the answer “this is impossible” but is instead “this is out of your budget.” If you had unlimited money to sink into an unremarkable suburban North Carolina home to build a basement what would the design look like, what is the ballpark cost and what geotechnical forces does your design have to overcome?
The basement thing bothers me a lot because everyone I grew up with in Ohio had one. I’ve read a lot of different reasons why NC doesn’t have as many and there’s no clear answer. Maybe, like, one big builder decades ago was like “nah, I’m not doing basements” and it accidentally became the norm?
Hello! I'm a civil engineer and have designed single family residential developments in the Charlotte area at several previous jobs. We were often discouraged from grading lots for basements and crawl spaces by clients for a simple reason: it costs more to do so and they make less money on the product. We would often have lots that would be good candidates for basement homes that we would then regrade to allow them to be built as slab on grade products.
Okay! Thank you! Follow up! Are they more prominent up north because it's colder and the footer/foundation has to be deeper? As in, if you're gonna dig down deep already, just go ahead and make a basement?
Unfortunately I can't explain why they're more prominent up north for a couple reasons - I don't have design experience in those regions and foundations and geotechnical engineering are outside of my area of expertise.
A couple thoughts - we have a pretty high water table in the piedmont, so water intrusion into basements can become an issue if they're not constructed properly. This would be an additional cost for home builders.
I think you are also onto something re: foundation depth since water lines need to be below the freeze/thaw line. We usually bury our utilities at a depth of +/- 3', but I would expect that would be deeper up north where the freeze/thaw line is also deeper to keep them from freezing. Not having a need to bury deeper would mean there's less incentive to over-excavate for basement installation.
With what I've seen, the only places we've designed lots for basements have been where the slope falls away at a fast enough rate that it would be prohibitively expensive to bring in fill dirt to level the lots, especially if that fill dirt has to come from off-site. Anything greater than 5-10% grade would usually get a basement or crawl space if we couldn't flatten it. Since the ground is already sloping away on a hill there's even less material for the contractor the excavate.
Yeah, I know a ton of people down here with walk out basements but barely anybody (in, say, a development where the same builder is doing the whole neighborhood) that has a straight up basement on a flat-ish piece of land.
Just passing along some recently learned info: the Australian state of Queensland is Sister-States with South Carolina. Maybe you can get a business trip Down Under to investigate.
It is a byproduct of natural gas development, and I think the op has it backwards: once it's released it goes into space and can never be retrieved again! It's lost forever!
Interstate on ramps sometimes have two lanes that merge before you actually merge again onto the Interstate! I understand why this happens, but sometimes the right lane merges, sometimes the left lane merges. It SEEMS random but there is probably some method for this decision. How does NCDOT decide?
On a similar topic - on NC state roads sometimes NCDOT takes a lane away. Sometimes the right lane, sometimes the left lane. Not talking about "truck" lanes on hills here, just regular roads. We joke that a lane is being "punished" or put in "time out", but how do they (NCDOT) decide which lane must be sacrificed?
Whose idea was it to put pimentos in olives in the first place? Why only the green ones? Are the black olives not good enough for your precious pimentos?
Thinking about the Carrowinds amusement park ride safety issue that went viral last summer. I asked this same question a few years to Axios for a follow up story. The park is straddling the North and South Carolina border with portions that appear to be in each state, mostly South Carolina. The border has been in a sort of minor flux where some properties are being ceded back and forth between the states in the adjoining counties. Ever so curious which state, or maybe both is actually responsible for safety inspections, tax revenues, fire and police responses. Always curious because each state even had different COVID responses. I might add Carrowinds seems to have done a good job of straddling the fence and keeping each state satisfied to provide revenues to the area.
First thing: They've already resurveyed the border, and I think the Carowinds line was EXACTLY where it was supposed to be. Second: I asked about quirks of having an amusement park in two states a few years ago for a story for Our State. The biggest thing was that beverage carts couldn't move between states, and that a store on the state line calculated sales tax based on which door the customer came in. https://www.ourstate.com/the-border-that-binds-us/
I have another Carowinds-specific story idea that I haven't gotten to yet. Soon, maybe!
Props for being honest and finding a way to still get something interesting. Question: What's the rabbit-holiest rabbit hole you've ever rabbited down?
There are two others deep rabbit holes that I'm still trying to get to the bottom of. One's a mystery I've actively been trying to solve for 15+ years now, and I recently filed a federal FOIA request on it, and expect to get the documents back sometime after I die. The other, which I'm not currently trying to figure out but MIGHT: A weird internet mystery involving key lime pies and a long-closed restaurant in Asheville.
Have you requested the FBI record for any famous NCers or past interview subjects? I know that when someone dies you can get it via a FOIA-like process which I’ve used on every deceased relative since I found out about it.
There's a song written by an Ohio bluegrass group called Northwest Connection about a man from North Carolina who had a house full of rattlesnakes, purportedly to keep thieves away. Any truth to the story?
Why is there a statue Andy Taylor and Opie, who never visited the Capitol City , in a park in Raleigh, instead of a statue of Barney Fife , perhaps in the YMCA sauna, since he frequently made comments about going to Raleigh for the weekend?
The TV Land network paid for the one in Raleigh, and people in Mt. Airy complained, and then they had to put ANOTHER statue there. There IS a monument to Don Knotts, but it's in his hometown of Morgantown, WV. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/statue-of-don-knotts
I think it really depends on whether I find it interesting, mixed with how much has already been done about it in one place. For example: I don't think I'd delve into the true history of pimento cheese because someone else already wrote a deep, comprehensive story about it (which I linked to elsewhere in the comments). But nobody'd really written much about why North Carolina doesn't have speed traps like other states. I thought that was super interesting. So it came together. https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/why-north-carolina-doesnt-have-any
Anything can be a rabbit hole. I just have to decide how far I want to go with it.
I grew up in Iowa so bring on that debate! But I've never been thrown out of an organic farmer's market for selling produce that wasn't organic... 3 TIMES!!
I have always wanted to know the history of the cut off school buses used in the tobacco fields. I googled with no results periodically over the years. Logistically, I understand they need to move large leaves stacked flat so the surface area makes sense. But why not a long trailer? Why a school bus? Why are they unique to North Carolina? Who makes said school bus trucks? Is there a North Carolina fabricator specializing in them? Why aren’t they used in farming anywhere else in America? Are they street legal? Does North Carolina have a state car and, if not, could it be the school bus truck? I see them all the time in the fall down East. Inquiring minds wish to know the history of the mystery of school bus trucks at my house.
Have you ever done a story or deep dive on Long Sam from Lake Norman? There’s a small paragraph in the Lake Norman wiki page but I can’t find anything deeper about it and it seems like a tall tale.
I just read it and, it's a strange Wiki paragraph (I'm guessing editors don't visit that page with the same regularity as others). I hadn't heard about her until now! I'd only heard about the Lake Norman Monster.
I am sure you’ve addressed this before, but what brought you down to North Carolina from Ohio in the first place? Why didn’t you pursue an Ohio Rabbit Hole?
After college at Ohio University, the TV station in West Virginia that'd hired me as an intern and then camera guy brought me on as a full-time producer. I worked there for 3 1/2 years and then got a job as a producer at the NBC station in Charlotte in 2005. So I've been here for almost 19 years. As for why there's no Ohio Rabbit Hole? I mean, there *could* be one, but I think North Carolina has SO much more happening on so many different levels that it's a great place for a writer to find stuff.
An Adopt A Highway sign located on Hwy 321 N heading from Lenoir to Blowing Rock has intrigued me for years. It lists as the sponsor "Prince - Musician and Artist." Caldwell County, NC is not the kind of place I would expect to see this tribute.
Interesting, considering late musicians are no longer with us to drop new tracks and/or pick up trash.
More of an update and a result of your investigative and entertaining research vs a question: I recently got an EV car and tried to get a personalized NC license plate with gas in it, like GasEX, No Gas, etc. Now NC will not allow a license plate with ‘gas’ in it. Weird and a result of the FART situation in Asheville I’ll bet. Jeremy, I’ll give your highlight of those FART troublemakers the credit (or blame). No farts and now, no gas.
☹️
I've noticed a great many women in headscarves panhandling in the Triangle lately. I see that I'm not the only one: https://www.reddit.com/r/raleigh/comments/uxvxu6/the_panhandlers_wearing_scarves/?rdt=43593
This has been going on for some time in California, where it seems that they are Roma. Is that true here now?
I had not seen that (I was out in Raleigh earlier this month, but I’m mostly out in Greensboro/Winston-Salem) but I’ll check it out.
Do you ever get recognized by fans while out in public? Have they ever made it weird?
It's happened, like, three times, and it's not weird. Once (and I don't think he'll mind me saying this) Deans Eastman walked up to me at the North Carolina Zoo because he recognized my voice from the podcast. Another woman recognized me at the National Zoo in DC (what is it with zoos?). I think it doesn't happen more often because my avatar is a cartoon image of myself from a Charlotte magazine comic that was published 13 years ago.
Have ya ever been to Toad Suck, Ark? Asking for a friend.
I have been to Arkansas for a total of 15 minutes in my entire life (I ran across a bridge in Memphis and then turned around), so no.
Jeremy,
Do you ever worry that you’ll run out of topics?
I admire your enthusiasm to actually experience what you write about instead of just researching and reporting from a desk chair!
Who knows! One of the reasons why I don’t often write a lot of personal essays is because you can only plumb your own depths so much before your returns start diminishing. Or, possibly, you start doing “stunts” to keep the momentum going and your personality changes. It’s easier to just keep your eyes open and stay curious about the world around you. It’s a big world! And this is a big diverse state, and if I do run out of stories, I hope it’ll be a long time from now.
I’d love to better understand the THREE food deserts we have in NC (West Charlotte, SE Raleigh, NE Greensboro). I’m sure systemic reasons are at play, but what are they? Is the solution as simple as building a grocery store? How are people in these areas getting fresh produce currently (if at all)?
Me too. I’ve read before that basically it’s simple economics: if a grocery store chain can build in a richer part of town vs. a poorer part of town, they’ll go to the richer part because they’ll make more money. The inverse is true for dollar stores.
I don’t know any geotechnical engineers but maybe you’ll meet one at a cocktail party. Piedmont houses don’t have basements because of the thick clay soil. However, in engineering, rarely is the answer “this is impossible” but is instead “this is out of your budget.” If you had unlimited money to sink into an unremarkable suburban North Carolina home to build a basement what would the design look like, what is the ballpark cost and what geotechnical forces does your design have to overcome?
The basement thing bothers me a lot because everyone I grew up with in Ohio had one. I’ve read a lot of different reasons why NC doesn’t have as many and there’s no clear answer. Maybe, like, one big builder decades ago was like “nah, I’m not doing basements” and it accidentally became the norm?
Hello! I'm a civil engineer and have designed single family residential developments in the Charlotte area at several previous jobs. We were often discouraged from grading lots for basements and crawl spaces by clients for a simple reason: it costs more to do so and they make less money on the product. We would often have lots that would be good candidates for basement homes that we would then regrade to allow them to be built as slab on grade products.
Okay! Thank you! Follow up! Are they more prominent up north because it's colder and the footer/foundation has to be deeper? As in, if you're gonna dig down deep already, just go ahead and make a basement?
Unfortunately I can't explain why they're more prominent up north for a couple reasons - I don't have design experience in those regions and foundations and geotechnical engineering are outside of my area of expertise.
A couple thoughts - we have a pretty high water table in the piedmont, so water intrusion into basements can become an issue if they're not constructed properly. This would be an additional cost for home builders.
I think you are also onto something re: foundation depth since water lines need to be below the freeze/thaw line. We usually bury our utilities at a depth of +/- 3', but I would expect that would be deeper up north where the freeze/thaw line is also deeper to keep them from freezing. Not having a need to bury deeper would mean there's less incentive to over-excavate for basement installation.
With what I've seen, the only places we've designed lots for basements have been where the slope falls away at a fast enough rate that it would be prohibitively expensive to bring in fill dirt to level the lots, especially if that fill dirt has to come from off-site. Anything greater than 5-10% grade would usually get a basement or crawl space if we couldn't flatten it. Since the ground is already sloping away on a hill there's even less material for the contractor the excavate.
Yeah, I know a ton of people down here with walk out basements but barely anybody (in, say, a development where the same builder is doing the whole neighborhood) that has a straight up basement on a flat-ish piece of land.
Just passing along some recently learned info: the Australian state of Queensland is Sister-States with South Carolina. Maybe you can get a business trip Down Under to investigate.
WRONG STATE
Did you know there is a shortage of helium. We get helium from outer space.
Every time I go to the store to get a kid's birthday balloons blown up they tell me this. I thought it was a natural gas byproduct?
It is a byproduct of natural gas development, and I think the op has it backwards: once it's released it goes into space and can never be retrieved again! It's lost forever!
Interstate on ramps sometimes have two lanes that merge before you actually merge again onto the Interstate! I understand why this happens, but sometimes the right lane merges, sometimes the left lane merges. It SEEMS random but there is probably some method for this decision. How does NCDOT decide?
On a similar topic - on NC state roads sometimes NCDOT takes a lane away. Sometimes the right lane, sometimes the left lane. Not talking about "truck" lanes on hills here, just regular roads. We joke that a lane is being "punished" or put in "time out", but how do they (NCDOT) decide which lane must be sacrificed?
It's a partisan thing. Blue counties merge from the left and those are for Dems. Red counties merge from the right and those are for Dems too.
As a road nerd, I too must learn the answers here.
Is pimento cheese really the "pate of the South"? Whose idea was it to take pimentos out of olives and stick them in cheese?
Whose idea was it to put pimentos in olives in the first place? Why only the green ones? Are the black olives not good enough for your precious pimentos?
(whispers softly) Pimento cheese was invented in New York (runs away) https://www.seriouseats.com/history-southern-food-pimento-cheese
Seriously? cream cheese? smh.
Thinking about the Carrowinds amusement park ride safety issue that went viral last summer. I asked this same question a few years to Axios for a follow up story. The park is straddling the North and South Carolina border with portions that appear to be in each state, mostly South Carolina. The border has been in a sort of minor flux where some properties are being ceded back and forth between the states in the adjoining counties. Ever so curious which state, or maybe both is actually responsible for safety inspections, tax revenues, fire and police responses. Always curious because each state even had different COVID responses. I might add Carrowinds seems to have done a good job of straddling the fence and keeping each state satisfied to provide revenues to the area.
First thing: They've already resurveyed the border, and I think the Carowinds line was EXACTLY where it was supposed to be. Second: I asked about quirks of having an amusement park in two states a few years ago for a story for Our State. The biggest thing was that beverage carts couldn't move between states, and that a store on the state line calculated sales tax based on which door the customer came in. https://www.ourstate.com/the-border-that-binds-us/
I have another Carowinds-specific story idea that I haven't gotten to yet. Soon, maybe!
Props for being honest and finding a way to still get something interesting. Question: What's the rabbit-holiest rabbit hole you've ever rabbited down?
In terms of Rabbit Holes I've published, I think it's the Steven Spielberg hat story: https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/steven-spielberg-indiana-jones-nc-highway-patrol
There are two others deep rabbit holes that I'm still trying to get to the bottom of. One's a mystery I've actively been trying to solve for 15+ years now, and I recently filed a federal FOIA request on it, and expect to get the documents back sometime after I die. The other, which I'm not currently trying to figure out but MIGHT: A weird internet mystery involving key lime pies and a long-closed restaurant in Asheville.
Have you requested the FBI record for any famous NCers or past interview subjects? I know that when someone dies you can get it via a FOIA-like process which I’ve used on every deceased relative since I found out about it.
There's a song written by an Ohio bluegrass group called Northwest Connection about a man from North Carolina who had a house full of rattlesnakes, purportedly to keep thieves away. Any truth to the story?
I have never heard of the band (sorry Ohioans), nor the song, nor the house full of rattlesnakes, and now I'm highly intrigued.
Glad it's piqued your interest!
I first heard about it here, which provides a video and some missing lyrics: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bluegrass/comments/17is9qo/esoteric_bluegrass_song/
Why hasn't these been made into a movie, you slacker... 🤪 "" Rate Hike Mike Gone Wild"
Why is there a statue Andy Taylor and Opie, who never visited the Capitol City , in a park in Raleigh, instead of a statue of Barney Fife , perhaps in the YMCA sauna, since he frequently made comments about going to Raleigh for the weekend?
Which park?
Pullen Park.
The TV Land network paid for the one in Raleigh, and people in Mt. Airy complained, and then they had to put ANOTHER statue there. There IS a monument to Don Knotts, but it's in his hometown of Morgantown, WV. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/statue-of-don-knotts
The only statue of Andy and Opie that matters is the one in Mt. Airy.
How do you decide whether a story is Rabbit Hole worthy or simply not bizarre enough to bother?
I think it really depends on whether I find it interesting, mixed with how much has already been done about it in one place. For example: I don't think I'd delve into the true history of pimento cheese because someone else already wrote a deep, comprehensive story about it (which I linked to elsewhere in the comments). But nobody'd really written much about why North Carolina doesn't have speed traps like other states. I thought that was super interesting. So it came together. https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/why-north-carolina-doesnt-have-any
Anything can be a rabbit hole. I just have to decide how far I want to go with it.
Will I win the NC Primary for Insurance Commissioner?
Only if you're able to out-duel Mike Causey in a debate in which a tractor question comes up. https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/boone-police-chased-a-john-deere-tractor#footnote-anchor-5-97684901
I grew up in Iowa so bring on that debate! But I've never been thrown out of an organic farmer's market for selling produce that wasn't organic... 3 TIMES!!