I am continually amazed that thirty-one years later a summer job project continues to hold space on store shelves. Foxfire summer students Kim Hamilton [McKay], Dana Holcomb [Adams], and I spent two summers planning, visiting, researching, and interviewing what felt like hundreds of Appalachian cooks, including our grandparents. We traveled to the elegant Swan House and lunched with the ladies of the Atlanta Historical Society to view wonderful antebellum books of handwritten “receipts” [recipes]. We had our first taste of kiwi, something never seen in our small rural grocery stores in the late 1970s.
With almost a half century of wisdom, I now shudder, remembering the three teenaged Rabun County High School girls scrunched into my two-seater MG Midget, never giving the first thought to a seat belt, a vision that stands in stark contrast to the fight with my granddaughter’s five-point-harness car seat I curse each time she visits. Without a care in the world, we set off each morning that there was no staff meeting held in the old log chapel, where students and staff alike sat on the wooden plank floor, mist-covered mountains visible from the open door, the scent of coffee in hand-thrown [pottery] mugs. Little did we know that it was our first taste of a truly democratic process that would ruin our tolerance for future starter jobs with petty managers threatened by our opinion. It was a summer of freedom—talk of cute boys, strict parents, college, and endless possibilities for our futures, a celebration to end an era, the last vestige of life before the pressures of tuition bills, mortgages, endless housekeeping chores, and running the carpool.
We zipped along Highway 441 with the convertible’s top down, radio blaring, wind in our hair, packed lunches, my camera, a ratty tape recorder, and backup batteries stowed in the tiny trunk. Every day was a new adventure. With no GPS or navigation application on a cell phone (actually, none of us had heard of a mobile phone), we bounced down the mountain roads, finding our way with vague directions scribbled on a recycled piece of typing paper—from a real typewriter. As the photographer in the group, I would occasionally pull over to shoot roll after roll of black-and-white film if something related to gardening or food caught our eye. Holding photo credits for the majority of photographs in the original Foxfire’s Book of Wood Stove Cookery, I was always behind the camera.
My grandmother, Lettie Ruth Chastain, was the impetus of my interest in the Foxfire classes. The summer after our move to extreme north Georgia, we talked while picking blackberries in her field, a sharp eye out for snakes. She told me how much she was enjoying reliving the old times through her Foxfire books. Never a strong English student, I knew the classes offered at my high school were for what would later be known as “language arts” credit, and the seeds of an idea were planted that hot summer day. I made my granny a promise over those five-gallon buckets of juicy berries to interview her for the Foxfire books.
Those summers were filled with fodder for the future Foxfire’s Book of Wood Stove Cookery as I spent hours in her kitchen watching her pull a large, faded-green Tupperware container full of flour from underneath the kitchen counter. She would snap off the lid, make a well in the center, and scoop a couple of fingers into the Crisco can. Never breaking eye contact, she would patiently explain the process—“You just mix you some grease and milk in your flour, then roll ’em out on your pan”—her agile, lined hands making finger indentions in the dough. I once asked for her recipe. “Recipe, for bread?” was all she said, with a chuckle. Snacks were leftover homemade biscuits with a thick slice of garden tomato; our afternoons were spent stirring a large black iron pot filled with Brunswick stew, cooking over an open fire in the backyard. We cooled down from garden work in front of the television, snapping green beans or shelling peas until our fingers were raw. Those days were deadly dull for a fifteen-year-old girl with a Tiger Beat magazine hidden under her pillow, never dreaming they would later serve as precious memories.
One of the last things my grandmother told me was how very sorry she was that she could not make my son one of her hand-sewn baby quilts. On my next visit I brought my own baby quilt, tattered and worn, to let her know the work she had put into it a quarter century before would be once again enjoyed. Today that forty-nine-year-old quilt hangs in my granddaughter’s bedroom. It did snuggle my son and, in turn, his child, soon to wrap its love and warmth around a new grandbaby. Three generations have experienced the love stitched into each small piece of blue and pink fabric.
In contrast there is a crocheted bedspread that hangs over the bay window in my study made by the even hands and temperament of my maternal grandmother. Both of these strong, caring women’s handiwork represents, like the antique clock in our living room from my husband’s lineage, an intricate part of the history that is our lives. Although I have photographs of both grandmothers and my husband’s ancestors, a vast chasm lies between how much of these personalities I can share with our grandchildren. The difference lies in a high school English project. The tape-recorded interviews, which became articles published in The Foxfire Magazine and later books, are an eternal piece of her life and personality that I can share with my descendants. We can reach out and touch her work, a quilt made with pieces of my father’s baby clothes, feed sacks, and leftover cloth, as they hear her words read from that tattered magazine and know the significance that the art of quilting held in her life. The recorded tape, spoken in her rural north Georgia accent and tucked away in the Foxfire archives, can allow them to catch the smile in her voice. I am forever grateful for preserving this precious piece of my granny and saddened that I did not have the foresight to interview my maternal grandmother or my grandfathers. In the naïveté of my youth, I thought they would all live forever.
PLATE 2 “Every day was a new adventure. With no GPS or navigation application on a cell phone (actually, none of us had heard of a mobile phone), we bounced down the mountain roads, finding our way with vague directions scribbled on a recycled piece of typing paper—from a real typewriter.”
In juxtaposition to those days of no computers in the classroom, I use this story in a college communications class that I teach online to adult, evening, and weekend students at Brenau University. With much grumbling about time constraints and busy family duties, they head out with handheld video cameras, PDA devices that record and take photos to fulfill the assignment of collecting a story from a family elder. The results make my heart sing. With enthusiasm these busy adults rarely have the energy to express, they post messages in our virtual classroom, telling how much the exercise meant to them and thanking me for the assignment. More often than not, they conclude their findings with plans to continue to collect family stories.
As an administrator in higher education and a freelance magazine writer with delusions of grandeur for my young-adult fiction, I look back to that summer day in my grandmother’s garden and fondly remember the knowing smile she gave my grand plans. It has come full circle. The voice that the Foxfire staff, sitting on the rough, plank floor of the old log chapel all those years ago, helped me find has led not only to a career but to a lifelong passion to share that experience with my own students as they capture the stories of their own heart.
Lawton Brooks, a longtime friend of Foxfire, was interviewed by students more than twenty-five times from 1970 until 1998.
Lawton Brooks: I used to go ’round with Suzy Angier, a former Foxfire staff person, and hunt people to interview. That Foxfire was the best thing that ever happened to Rabun County! That done the kids more good than anything; it gave them so many different things that they could do. I think it’s wonderful. People will forget our past if it isn’t recorded, but I will never forget! I think Foxfire has been a benefit to me. I’ve seen lots of things and done lots of things that I wouldn’t of done if it hadn’t been for Foxfire. When Foxfire first started, I never thought to myself it would make it. I thought to myself, “Will that ever be worth anything to anybody?” It has, though! It built up fast, too, and it’s still a-goin’!
PLATE 3 “I used to go ’round with Suzy Angier and hun
t people to interview.”
I’ve got Foxfire books everywhere! I wouldn’t take the world’s fancy for them. I get them out ever’ once ’n a while and go through them. It’s one of the best things that has ever come along. Foxfire 3 has more about my old life than any of ’em. It has the whole story. I get a lot of letters, and I’ve had three or four people who’ve come by from Texas to get me to sign their Foxfire books. They come from everywhere! They come all the time, dad blast it! All the time! I’ve made a lot of friends with Foxfire on account of I got to meet so many different people. I had two come from California! I’ve signed more books out of Florida than any place. Every place in Florida, I reckon, has ’em. You can go anywhere and pick up a Foxfire book, in any town you go to. I’d never thought they’d went like that, but boys, they went! Didn’t they? People are still huntin’ them. They ain’t no one gettin’ mine! I’m keepin’ mine!
Margie Bennett joined the Foxfire staff in 1972. Over the years she has worn so many hats at Foxfire! She started primarily as the typist, but because of her various talents, she rose to be, among several other things, a coteacher in the Foxfire classroom. Margie’s love for the kids and for the elders of our community endeared her to all who met her, and even though she left in 1988 to pursue other opportunities, Margie has always been just one phone call away anytime Foxfire has needed her.
Margie Bennett: Sixteen years, 1972 to 1988, could anyone have told me I would have the most fun of my life doing things I was never trained for and being with teenagers almost twenty-four/seven and getting paid for it? I began by typing Foxfire 2 the summer our family, my husband, Bob, and our teenage son, Bruce, moved to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School for Bob to work with the boarding students through the campus work program and outdoor environmental program and Bruce to attend tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades and graduate from there.
I learned a lot that summer, and I was having a ball. One thing I still remember quite clearly was on my second or third day working for Foxfire, several of these older students asked if I’d like to go meet Aunt Arie Carpenter, a widowed lady who lived alone in nearby Otto, North Carolina. Of course, I jumped at this opportunity, so we piled into the Foxfire Blazer—a very warm July day—and one of the students drove us there. I was introduced and we visited with Aunt Arie a short while, and then something was mentioned about her garden. The kids got the hoe and rakes, and we all went out to her garden to weed. Several hours later, very hot and sweaty, we bade Aunt Arie good-bye and headed back to school. The kids dropped me off at my house and drove back to the office. I collapsed in a swing on the front porch and felt terrible. I suppose that was heat prostration, but I survived their initiation and felt I had earned my place and passed the test to stay with Foxfire. I didn’t think about it till later that they were probably planning to make me or break me!
PLATE 4 “Several hours later, very hot and sweaty, we bade Aunt Arie good-bye and headed back to school.” Aunt Arie with visiting students, working in her garden
After that, I often drove up to Aunt Arie’s by myself and had a cup of coffee. We just wanted to be sure she was all right and didn’t need anything. There have been lots of others that we tried to keep in touch with; there were no telephones, you see. We might have a tape recorder with us, so if Aunt Arie had something to tell us about that we wanted to record, we’d do that. She welcomed the attention. We asked her so many things about her husband and their life together, and she was so philosophical about her life. That’s how we came to publish a whole book just about her life and how she made and did things. [Editor’s note: Aunt Arie: A Foxfire Portrait is available at www.foxfire.org.]
When I came to work for Foxfire, Suzy Angier was the only other adult working to help the teacher, taking the students on interviews and getting magazines ready for the publisher. Foxfire’s original goal was to help ninth- and tenth-grade students get interested in school, to find something different to do at school, so they’d stay in high school to graduate.
By the time I got there, royalties from the first Foxfire book were coming in. That summer of 1972 was about the time that IDEAS [Institutional Development and Economic Affairs Service], an educational program located in Washington, D.C., got in touch with us to host a program to start similar cultural journalism magazines in schools around the nation. The goal at that time was to reach out to a lot of high schools with specific cultures, which we did, so magazines like Bittersweet in Lebanon, Missouri; Salt in Kennebunkport, Maine, along the coast there; Dovetail in St. Ignatius, Montana; Tsa’Aszi in Ramah, New Mexico, and many more were created. Foxfire students who were home from college for the summer hosted representatives from these areas, teaching them how to interview contacts in our community, photography skills, magazine layouts, etc. In fact, a book came from these experiences, You and Aunt Arie, which was published by the Salt magazine students. Those same Foxfire students went to the areas where these young people lived, staying in their homes for several weeks to get their magazine staffs started with their own productions. Remember, the focus, as well as learning to interview, was to keep these students interested in school and writing.
There was a section of land, an old apple orchard, on the side of Black Rock Mountain available, and The Foxfire Fund was able to purchase it in 1973. At first, there were no buildings there, but we began to buy old log cabins and rebuild them with the help of a group of adults who were builders and, in addition, some Foxfire students during the summer months.
I typed the final copies of the Foxfire magazine and book articles there in a cabin furnished as an office. This was in the days of IBM Selectric, Ko-Rec-Type, electric typewriters—long before personal computers came our way. Today, in 2010, Foxfire students are able to transcribe their own articles on computer and actually lay them out for the printer with a computer program.
PLATE 5 “While writing articles, they were actually learning proper English and grammar and getting out of the school day once in a while to interview.” Foxfire student Brenda Carpenter, Mrs. Addie Norton, and Margie Bennett
The magazine was one idea—to write about their families, their Appalachian backgrounds. While writing articles, they were actually learning proper English and grammar and getting out of the school day once in a while to interview, to work in a darkroom printing pictures they’d made with Pentax cameras, all the elements of production of something printed to sell to their families and neighbors. It worked, and most of them did graduate, and some went on to college. Several of those students returned from college to actually work at Foxfire in real jobs.
Pat Rogers was probably the first to join our staff—about 1973; then a few years later, Mike Cook and Paul Gillespie were back from their years in college to teach video skills and photography, and George Reynolds, already a teacher from Virginia, to teach Appalachian folklore and music. Foxfire now had an income from educational grants, donations, and sale of the magazines.
In 1976, a consolidated high school for all the seventh through twelfth graders in Rabun County was being planned and built in the south part of the county. The Foxfire staff and students at RGNS met and voted to move to the new school. The principal for the new school met with us and worked out an agreement, providing Foxfire with classrooms and an arrangement where students in the Foxfire magazine class could get regular English credit; George was approved to teach music classes to students interested in banjo, guitar, dulcimer, fiddle, and other stringed instruments. Their specialties were primarily country and traditional mountain music. Enrolled were mostly students who did not want marching band or orchestra. In September 1977, the new school was opened as RCHS [Rabun County High School]. It was fun to have a large new classroom—with a darkroom and lots of space for tables and desks—and to be able to hire the new teachers from royalties of Foxfire book sales to teach photography, video, and Appalachian music. For English credit, Appalachian folklore and the regular magazine classes were taught with The Foxfire Magazine as the product. I took students on interviews
, helped them write transcriptions of those interviews with pencil, paper, and a cassette tape recorder, helped them print their photographs, and guided them through the layouts of their articles for the Foxfire magazines. At times, I taught the magazine classes, and I even went back to college and got my master’s degree in education. Since we had now moved our classrooms from RGNS to the new high school, we needed office space somewhere in addition to the new classroom. We had a part of the classroom there where the students processed subscription orders and answered letters from our readers, but it was not sufficient to handle all the business we now had, and our bookkeeper, Ann Moore, needed space for the expanded business we were dealing with. We refurbished several of our log cabins for office buildings and later some for residences. I worked there part of some days and helped in the classroom at the high school the remainder of the time.
About 1978, Bob came to work for Foxfire, establishing an outdoor education and environmental program for students at Rabun County High. It was shortly after this that we were involved in building a two-story log dormitory building, and our family—Bob, Bruce, and I—moved there and became the host family for overnight visitors to Foxfire. Also, there were several times when we became temporary parents for students who needed a home while their families were going through problems. There were six bedrooms and a bath upstairs, and we had a bedroom, bath, kitchen, large living and dining room on the first floor. We were a regular bed-and-breakfast of sorts. So we were truly with Foxfire twenty-four/seven!
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 3