NOTE: Hello! We’re back! This is the first newsletter since we switched email and hosting providers from Substack to Beehiiv. I’m still working out the kinks, but all of your old links to old stories on ncrabbithole.com still work, and I think I’ve ported over all of your email addresses and paid subscriber information. If you’re having issues, please reply to me at this new email address: [email protected]. I appreciate your help and patience during this brief sabbatical. For your troubles, here’s a new story for you to enjoy on this Christmas Eve. Happy holidays to you all! -Jeremy

Roger Briles had a mantra: Take a hobby, and make a living out of it. He liked cars, and he knew sales, so he started the Briles Auto Company in Stanleyville early in his career. Later, he got really into bass fishing, especially on Belews Lake near his home. As he hitched up his trailer to head to a tournament in the early 1980s, he got grease from the jack all over a new shirt. Again. So he went inside, found a cardboard Christmas wrapping paper roll, and made a prototype of a product that would eventually become the Protect-a-Jack, which kept thousands of fishermen from getting grease all over their new shirts.

Briles realized that even though the Protect-a-Jack was both patented and selling well, he couldn’t make it as an inventor with a single product. So, he started thinking of other problems he’d had out on the lake. He remembered that he couldn’t see his depth finder very well in direct sunlight. So, he created a plastic cover called the Sonar Shield. He invented a new rod holder because he didn’t like the ones he had. He got tired of getting spray-on fish scent attractor on his hands and clothes, so he created the Juice Jug so he (and other fishermen) could just dip their lures in the liquid instead.

In 1988, Briles quit selling cars and started a business to both create and sell his inventions full time. His products were popular, but it wasn’t like Briles was rolling in money. “I walk around (boat) shows … and people come up to me and talk to me like they think I’m making millions, but I’m not,” he told the Winston-Salem Journal in 1988. He wondered how long it might take for a company in Japan to start creating knock-offs of his stuff.

Around that time, Briles got another idea that had nothing to do with fishing. What if he could make a better Christmas luminary? He didn’t do much with that idea until the mid-1990s, when he figured he could make a round plastic luminary for half the price of a rectangular one. Then, he needed a way to light them up. So he found a way to build an electrical cord with 12 sockets, each six feet apart. The resulting product, Simply Luminaries, became his 21st invention, and the only one that didn’t have to do with fishing or boating. He was excited about his new product because…he was always excited. “I don’t care if you’re selling automobiles or Popsicles,” he told the Journal in 1996. “You need to believe in your product and be enthusiastic.”

Simply Luminaries did…fine. But, like most of Roger’s products that he sold at his company, Roger’s Products, nothing was a breakout hit. Still, Briles kept inventing. He eventually took some of the electrical cords from his luminaries, stuck blinking bulbs in the sockets, and hung them up in the trees around his house in Belews Creek. Like a lot of things, it was an idea that he was sort of tinkering around with.

Then in late 2009, a man named Rick Pierce was looking for a way to honor his late sister, Pam Pierce-Smith, who’d died of cancer a few months before. He’d seen the blinking lights at Briles’s house the year before, and asked him if he’d string some up along North Main Street in Kernersville in his sister’s memory. So Briles made the lights, and Pierce and his family hung them up on 22 trees across downtown the week before Thanksgiving. One of the lights was red to represent Pierce-Smith’s membership in the Red Hat Society.

Instantly, people started talking about the lights. One woman told the Journal that she took a different route home from work, just to see the lights. A downtown business owner said the lights reminded him of a wood-burning fire. “This is the prettiest downtown’s ever been,” he told the Journal in 2009. “There’s just something about it you can’t explain.” Other business owners asked for the blinking lights. Homeowners wanted to know where to buy them.

Roger Briles, once again, had a new product: Blinkies. This one was a hit. By next Christmas, Briles was working for 14 hours a day to keep up with demand. People around Kernersville started calling him Mr. Blinkie.

After ten years, Briles had gone from selling them at a single location—Farmer’s Hardware in Kernersville—to stores nationwide. They’d become a phenomenon. His son Brad remembers his father’s reaction to it all: “Dad always said it was a 20 to 30 year overnight success.”

I can’t tell you exactly when I bought our first set of Blinkies. When we moved to the Greensboro area in 2015, we noticed a few trees had them up. My mother-in-law had some. At some point, we liked them enough to go track down the only place in the area that had them in stock, bought a set, and wrapped them around the crape myrtle tree at the end of the driveway.

This, according to Brad Briles, is how many people end up buying their own set. Sure, you can get them on Amazon now, but they don’t translate very well to a digital image. “You can’t see it online and say ‘I want that,’” he says. “You have to see it in person.”

I get that. Pictures don’t do them justice, especially since only half of the lights might be on at any given moment. They’re sort of the same as the lighted balls that spread high into the trees in Greensboro’s Sunset Hills neighborhood. You can take a picture, but that pales in comparison to seeing them with your own eyes.

That paradox, a beloved item that doesn’t photograph well, means that Blinkies are both extremely popular among the people who love them (and their neighbors), but spread mostly by word of mouth. Just this year, my neighbor asked me where I got my blinking lights. They liked them, and wanted to find some of their own.

Which means that, even though you can order Blinkies online and ship them wherever you want, they remain mostly a North Carolina phenomenon, unlike, say, the Shibumi Shade, which has spread like wildfire from this state up and down the east coast. “If this article turns Blinkies into a Shibumi-like success, I’ll be very happy with you,” Brad Briles says, chuckling.

For now, that means that Roger’s Products, which now makes only Blinkies and Blinkie-related products, is a shoestring operation. There’s Cathy, who handles the books (and has for the last three decades). There’s Brad, who’s now the company president and has helped streamline things. And then there’s the family members who come in and help out during the busy period, which usually runs from mid-November to mid-December. “We’re a three-month business,” Brad says. It’s also a constant struggle to get them made. “Getting a product made isn’t as easy as people think, especially with electric lights,” says Brad. Supply chains are a lot different than they were in the 1980s.

That said, they’re seeing growth, especially online. And the lights are spreading beyond this state, mostly carried forth by Kernersville ex-pats. A bunch of them are up in a neighborhood in Colorado. They’re also a big deal in Daphne, Alabama, where the locals wanted to know where their new North Carolina neighbors got their lights. And Brad, ever the salesman, would like to remind me that the lights also work year-round and look great around, say, a pool deck.

Roger himself enjoyed the attention he brought to Kernersville. “If I can bring just a bit of magic to the town, then I’m happy,” he told the Journal in 2014.

Through it all, Briles kept running everything out of a warehouse in Kernersville, and spent the rest of his time fishing from his house on Belews Lake, shag dancing, camping, and driving 4×4s. He loved Jesus, a cold beer, and chocolate, his family said.

Then, one day, he came into work, sat down in a chair, and said, “I’m tired.”

It was the beginning of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, which affected him for the last few years. His family put him in hospice care in High Point before he died on November 20th. “He had a very full life,” Brad says.

A few times, when Brad knew the end was near for his father, he would drive down from Belews Creek to see him in hospice. On his way, he swung through Kernersville, through the tunnel of blinking lights that his father had invented. “We knew his time was short,” Brad said. “But I kept thinking: Dad’s getting ready to leave, but this is going to be here for a long time.”