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Download this July
2006 article as a
Here is “Round 25” of your
insights into how to know if someone is from North Carolina. You
may also want to check out
If you can think of anything to add to this
list, send it to us:
E-mail: Carolina.country@ncemcs.com
Mail: P.O. Box 27306, Raleigh, NC 27611.
Phone: (919) 875-3062.
From Peppi Mixon, Bessemer City
- To have running water meant your brothers running back and forth to the spring.
- Your grandmother called “soo heifer” to call the cows.
- Cornmeal and coffee gravy were breakfast.
- You pulled ragweeds to feed the hogs.
From Arnold Pope, Stedman
- You used Udder Balm to heal hemorrhoids.
- You played in or attended a high school football game called “The Goober Bowl.”
- You knew where Buzzard Town was located in Halifax County, but no one would admit living there.
- You enjoyed haslet hash even though you knew what was in it (heart, liver and lungs of a pig, chopped up into small chunks and stewed with lots of sage and red pepper).
From Sharon Moore, Carthage
- Your grill consists of two cement blocks, the rack from your Mama’s oven, and a bag of Matchlight charcoal.
- Your Mama used fatback to draw a wooden splinter out of your foot.
- Your Mama tied raw potatoes on your feet to break a fever.
From David Blayton, Stanly County
- In the spring you put golf balls in the hen’s nest so the snakes that were eating the eggs would swallow the balls instead and die.
- When it gets real cold, Grandpa says it is a “two-dog night,” because one dog cannot keep you warm enough.
- You picked bugs off beans and put them in a soda bottle. Then your daddy poured in kerosene, corked the bottle and gave it back to you to bury. Then he gave you a nickel.
- You put a stuffed owl on the porch to keep birds away.
From Darlene and Guy Brittain, Connelly Springs
- You were the only one in the 5th grade with your bus driver’s license.
- You got your Halloween mask off a box of corn flakes.
- Your dad ground up roasted peanuts on the sausage grinder then added Wesson oil and salt and butter to them to make peanut butter.
- Your mom, your aunt and your grandma made homemade flowers for Decoration Day out of crepe paper and bailing wire, then took them to the graveyard on Saturday evening so they would be there for Decoration Day on Sunday.
- You can remember when school children never did have to sell anything for school.
From Judy Pate, Mount Olive
- You scratched for doodle bugs under a tobacco barn shelter.
- Your weekend entertainment was parking your car on Main Street and watching shoppers walk by.
- The highlight of your summer was going to White Lake.
- You could buy a Pepsi for a nickel and a carton of six for a quarter (30 cents if they were cold).
- You didn’t know what kindergarten was until you had children.
- Girls weren’t allowed to wear jeans to school.
- You know what a grading bench is.
- You didn’t know you were poor because everyone else was just as poor as you were.
- You were baptized at Scottie’s Pool.
- You had to take home ec in the 9th grade and the boys had to take FFA.
From Chris Hamlet, Greensboro and Florida
- You need a blender to stir your sweet tea.
- You know what they mean by “nose to tail” during a NASCAR race.
- You know what Petty blue is.
- You mix your coleslaw with your barbecue.
From Sue Brewer, Hayesville
- Uppity means getting above your raising.
- A gulley washer is a heavy rain.
- Rat-cheer means right here.
- You tell a person, “Well, ant-chew sumthin’”
- Piddling time is as important as hard work.
From Jack Martin, Rockingham
- Your sisters took you to the Sandy Ridge two-room school where students kept lunches in a box at the spring and “Sugar Sack” Bullard and the other bigger boys toted wood inside the schoolhouse to burn in the pot-bellied stove.
- You fed your grandpa’s mule some horse apples that were too far gone for people to eat, and you put the apples on a stick to be on the safe side.
- You watched your sisters put tin cans behind crawdads and spook them. They backed into the cans just about every time.
- A really good mule was called a “root puller.”
- Your daddy took you to the Winston-Salem tobacco market to hear Billy Sunday preach. Two men carrying washtubs took collection.
- Your daddy chinked the cracks between the logs every year.
From Sue Huss, Lincolnton
- You had roller skates that you let out with a skate key and clamps that fit on your shoes. If you lost the clamps (which you did frequently), you would tie your skates on with a string or strong rubber band.
- You worked in the school cafeteria for a week during lunch and you got your lunch free.
- You and your best friend played with cut-out paper dolls and dressed them up in evening clothes and sometimes in a casual outfit.
- The milkman came on Tuesdays and Fridays and left your milk on the front porch and picked up the empty jugs.
- Your dad brought home a big round bundle of raw cotton from the textile mill to unravel and use as a tree skirt under the Christmas tree.
- The only salad you knew was the lettuce leaves from the garden. Your mother poured hot grease over the leaves and called it “scalded lettuce.”
- You wore bobby socks and rolled the top down as thick as you could get it.
- For breakfast you had pork chops with brown gravy (called “red-eye gravy”) and your coffee was brewed on the 3-burner kerosene stove.
- Your job was to fill that kerosene container on the side of the stove when it got empty.
- Your water came out of two separate faucets, one for hot water and the other for cold water.
- When a double feature was playing, you rode the bus to town for 10 cents then stood in line a block or two long before getting into the movie theater.
From Ann Latimer, Emerald Isle
- You love that light green color in the air after a summer storm.
- You know that when the blues are running at the coast, you can catch ’em two at a time, on almost anything.
- You know that if you whup okra, it produces more pods.
- You remember the smell of cottonseed oil, and the sound of a steam locomotive’s whistle.
- You know collards are less bitter after the first frost.
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