Ripe tobacco waits for no man, not even N.C. Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler.
Troxler was still trying to get across the crowded fairgrounds — he claimed his golf cart wouldn't start — when it was his team's turn at the annual tobacco tying contest in Heritage Circle this afternoon.
"I told him to be here on time," said Billy Yeargin, a professor of Southern culture at Duke University and emcee of the contest. "He's disqualified."
But Troxler showed up just before the timer started and took his place as one of two "handers," taking cut leaves of Granville County tobacco off a cart and handing them to the team's "looper," who quickly tied the bundles with cotton twine onto a stick.
A dozen teams registered for the competition, which showcases a skill once known to thousands of farm workers in Eastern North Carolina.
For the competition, judges consider how long it took each time to fill the stick, the size of each bundle, the length of stem above the stick and how tight the tobacco is tied.
Troxler's team was a little slow, at a minute thirty-eight seconds. Other teams whisked through the chore twenty seconds faster.
Thad Ogburn is The N&O's Metro Editor, overseeing most local news reporting. His previous jobs have included editor of North Raleigh News and Features Editor, during which he learned that comics attract more reader response than just about anything else we do. His guilty pleasure is reality TV, which he finds not very real at all. That's assuming, of course, there is room on his DVR amid his daughter's "iCarly" episodes and his wife's daily installments of "One Life To Live."
