News & Observer | newsobserver.com | 2008 NCAA Men's Bracket

Here's a look at our front page tomorrow:

TWO MUSEUMS IN ONE: Remember that commercial where the person eating peanut butter rounded the corner and ran into the person eating chocolate? Well, two ideas come together in another great collaboration this month when the Chapel Hill Museum teams up with the Kidzu Children's Museum in a benefit for children's arts programs. Read about it in Debbie Meyer's Brush Strokes column.

REBECCA CLARK: Jesse DeConto wrote the definitive story on Rebecca Clark in 2006 on the occasion of the town's naming a day for her. Sadly, he wrote about the community leader again this week upon her death. If you missed today's abridged version in the N&O read this story and learn why many say we will not see another like her.

AIRPORT PICS: Photographer Jesse Kalisher has turned his lens on subjects close to his home for his latest exhibit "No Airport: The Faces of White Cross." The show opens as part of this week's 2ndFriday Artwalk in downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro. We speak to him about why he chose this subject and his artistic process.

PET INSURANCE: More pet owners are buying it. (With two dogs and a cat, I don't know what I'm waiting for.) Correspondent Robin Hilmantel talks with a Chapel Hill pet owner and veterinarians about the trend.

And the holidays are over, judging by our mail bag. Read what readers have to say about our recent story on the UNC animal storage facility in White Cross, Augustus Cho's "Driving while Asian?" essay and other recent stories in The Chapel Hill News.

Thanks for reading,

Mark 

Family, friends and community leaders from around Chapel Hill will honor the late Rebecca Sellars Clark with a funeral service on Friday at 1 p.m. at the Chapel Hill Bible Church at 260 Erwin Road, Chapel Hill. Her body will be on view from 11 a.m. until the service begins.

Clark, 93, worked her way out of poverty and segregation to become a voice for the local black community, a labor advocate at UNC-Chapel Hill and a political organizer. 

In lieu of flowers, her surviving son John Clark Jr. asks for contributions to the building fund at his mother's beloved church, St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal, 101 N. Merritt Mill Road, Chapel Hill, N.C., 27516. For more information, call the church at 967-3961. 

Rev. William Holliday, a Methodist minister who used to work in Mebane but transferred to Wilson, left me a voicemail after an article about the seating limitations at the Fiesta Grill restaurant appeared in the News & Observer last week.

 "I drive 180 miles round-trip on occasion just to go eat at the Fiesta Grill," Holliday said. "180 miles. So I'm hoping that they find some solution for this restaurant."

Some members of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen want a bigger say in the future airport authority that could site, build and operate a future airport in Orange County.

Legislation passed last summer authorizes a 15-member panel. Eight members will come from UNC and the UNC Health Care System. One will get picked by the state House leader, one by the state Senate leader, three by the Orange County Board of Commissioners, one by the Chapel Hill Town Council and one by the Board of Aldermen and the Hillsborough Town Board on a rotating basis.

Alderman Dan Coleman says that doesn't make sense. "For some unknown (to me) reason, the legislature gave the permanent municipal seat to "the largest municipality" rather than to those most proximate to the potential sites," he writes in an e-mail to Mayor mark Chilton. "This seems short-sighted given that any airport will have the greatest impact on those municipalities to which it is closest, namely, Carrboro or Hillsborough."

Coleman proposes asking Hillsborough Mayor Tom Stevens to join Carrboro in asking that instead of sharing a seat on a rotating basis, the towns each get a permanent seat on the board.

 Alderman Randee Haven-O'Donnell agrees. "The airport authority's up-coming decision making is of critical concern to our area and citizens would deeply appreciate a permanent voice," she writes in another e-mail.

Gov.-elect Bev Perdue has named former longtime Orange County Commissioner Moses Carey Jr. chairman of the state Employment Security Commission.  

Carey, 63, has over 40 years of experience as a professor, public official, manager and health care leader. For the past three years, he has served as program director of NCCU’s Department of Health Education’s health disparities program. He previously was executive director for Piedmont Health Services, Inc. where he oversaw 210 employees, managed an annual $12 million budget, and was responsible for leading a multi-service Primary Health Care program that serves over 345,000 residents in a seven-county area.

In 1984, Carey was elected to the Orange County Board of Commissioners. He was reelected five times. Carey was elected president of the N.C. Association of County Commissioners in 1993. He was elected president of the N.C. Association of Black County Officials in 2004 and 2005. He was elected President of the Alliance of North Carolina Black Elected Officials in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

In addition, Carey has taught graduate and undergraduate health law courses at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health, as well as teaching graduate health law courses to Health Science Students at Central Michigan University.

Carey is married to Peggy Richmond. They have three children, Phillip, Anndrea and Zenzi.

“We will not see another of her ilk because of her history, someone who was born in the darkest hours of segregation and having a great personal tragedy to befall her. ... To have someone overcome the kinds of obstacles she overcame to achieve the kind of influence, respect -- almost reverence that she had in this community -- that would be hard to match."

That's what UNC professor Reginald Hildebrand told staff writer Jesse DeConto this morning, upon the death of Rebecca Clark.

If you knew Clark, we'd like to hear from you. You can respond here or send an e-mail to Jesse at jesse.deconto@newsobserver.com. If we get enough responses, we may add them to our story or publish them in the Chapel Hill News.

And a thank you to Elsie Pickett, who called this morning to get us started on this important story.

If you're one of those people who is afraid the socialists are taking over the country, fear not: Capitalism is alive and well, even amidst this economic collapse, even in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, bastion of anarchy and universal healthcare.

My cousin, a college senior in the Bay Area, took me to the Haight on the Saturday night after Christmas and drove through a McDonald's parking lot looking for a spot. He said he usually parks there when he goes to Haight Street, but he saw a security guard and decided not to risk it. He drove around for a while and finally found a space on a back street. I drove myself back there a few days later, circled the neighborhood for 20 minutes looking for parking and unexpectedly found myself in front of McDonald's nearly empty lot. Seeing no security guard, thinking of my own secret and borderline-illicit parking spots in Chapel Hill and figuring no one would mind on a Tuesday night, I pulled into the lot, had to back out of a space reserved for a ZipCar and then parked in the next space.

Channeling my hippie heritage in good GenX/hipster/capitalist fashion, I went looking for used cowboy boots and western shirts in the many vintage clothing stores that line Haight Street. I couldn't find any suitable boots, but I did purchase two cowboy shirts and an old Village Voice t-shirt (incidentally, when I got back to my aunt's house to show off my new/old clothes, my 17-year-old cousin did not know what the Village Voice was, so I even got to feel smugly esoteric in my retro-writerly hipness). I spent a total of $42 before taxes. Not bad, I thought, for gently worn Left Coast fashion. Wearing the French military jacket I had bought in a Paris thrift store last year, I settled into the People's Cafe to drink herbal tea and read a book. Fortunately, it was a book of theology, in case anyone might have mistaken me for a militant Marxist preparing for ideological battle.

My aunt had volunteered to watch my kids that day, so I basked in a leisurely pace, reading my book, sipping my tea, glancing out at the street scene. Meanwhile, they were towing my aunt's car from the McDonald's parking lot. By the time I got back to the lot, I had been in the Haight for about 2-1/2 hours. Of course, when I saw the car was gone, that's when I noticed the sign warning that vehicles would be towed at the owner's expense. I had to walk 15 blocks to an auto-body shop and pay $285 to retrieve the car. $285. That is not a typo. TWO-HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-FIVE DOLLARS. I tried a sob story about how I had spent two-weeks' pay to fly my girls to San Francisco to see their cousins and this was really ruining my vacation, but the poor tow-truck driver said there was nothing he could do. He told me the city would have charged even more if the car had been towed from a public space. His basic message was: Don't come to San Francisco if you want easy parking. "Well, maybe I won't!" I thought, mentally gritting my teeth. But "Happy New Year!" is what I said, with all the irony of a hipster moustache.

But it IS a new year, a time for hope -- and gratitude that if I ever get towed from one of my favorite parking spots in Chapel Hill, it won't cost me more than $100.

Got another report from a reader about a mountain lion sighting.

The reader was driving on Highway 54 west of Carrboro Dec. 21 when "I saw a large tawny mountain lion lying on the side of the road. It appeared to have been hit by a car. It was larger than our Labrador retriever and had a cat face. ... I didn't have time to wheel back around and examine it more closely."

This is the fourth reported sighting I've received since and including my story about Linda Janssen and her nephew seeing what they say was a mountain lion outside Janssen's back window off Pinehurst Drive.

I called Animal Control and the Department of Transportation, neither of which had reports of a dead mountain lion off the state highway. A few minutes ago state wildlife biologist George Strater called back and said he also had not received any reports. Of course, common sense says if there had been a dead cougar by the side of the road last week we (probably) would have heard about it by now.

But yet another e-mail frm someone reading our blog posts and stories says not so fast.

John Lutz of something called the Eastern Puma Research Network says as long as there is adequate prey, water and cover, "there is NO reason why any region of North carolina could NOT have WILD, NATIVE cougars." (HIS caps, not mine.)

The network has been collected reports since 1965 and has had more than 200 from the Tar Heel state. I have a call out to him.

Strater, meanwhile, told us his office has a higher standard: a track or other physical evidence. In most cases that have been investigated, he told us last month, the animal was likely a big dog.

Read more on this latest reported sighting here.

Got an e-mail from reader Philip Cohen this morning upset about writer Augustus Cho's My View column in Wednesday's Chapel Hill News: "Driving While Asian?".

Cohen is a sociology professor at UNC and a friend of mine. We used to work together at The Ithaca Times, in central New York. The gist of his complaint is the column was unfair, probably racist and we shouldn't have run it. (Here's a link so you can read Cho's essay if you missed it.)

I ran Cohen's complaint by my partner over the breakfast table. He agreed with Cohen and said Cho was probably a self-loathing Asian and we shouldn't have run it. I asked whether he had read the whole column. He said he did. I asked whether he knew Cho was the chairman of the town of Chapel Hill's Transportation Advisory Committee. He laughed, said he didn't and that we still shouldn't have run it.

I knew Cho's essay, and the headline he gave it (I added the question mark to tone it down just a bit) would be provocative. Cohen's is the first feedback we've received, though he said it had been linked to on a friend's Facebook page, so we may get more. And we may get more still after I post this.

But Cho's column, if you read the whole essay, is that there is a reason why many Asians -- or Mexicans or any immigrant group new to a new country (and often new to driving altogether) -- may have problems driving.

"It is difficult to comprehend the Asian driving eccentricity ... unless you've lived and driven there [in Asian countries]," he wrote. "Then, the 'why's and the 'what's' begin making unconventional sense, bringing sympathy."

So what do you think?

Our religion writer Flo Johnston reports in her next column that Mark Acuff, pastor at the Chapel  Hill Bible Church for the past eight years, has resigned his post, effective Dec. 15.

In a letter of resignation to the congregation in early December, Acuff wrote, “Over the past several months the Elder Board has been involved in conversations about the vision and direction of the church. Our church has experienced many transitions over the last eight years and we are still seeking to know what we should most be about. What vision, identity and approach to ministry should most characterize us. It has become clear to me that it is time to conclude my leadership in this process.”

Acuff and his family will continue to live in Chapel Hill. The Elder Board has provided the pastor a sabbatical that began on Dec. 15 and will continue until July 1, 2009.

During the next three months, preaching will be rotated among three pastors on the staff, Randy Russell, Scott Vermillion and David Ward, said Cyndi Whisnant, communications director.

We'll have more on this story coming in The Chapel Hil News. Look for Flo's column next Wednesday.