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Download this August
2007 article as a
Here is “Round 35” 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 Jay Honeycutt, Sophia
- The house you grew up in had holes in the walls big enough to throw a cat through.
From Bill Hinton, Mebane
- You remember when drinks went to 6 cents.
- You remember when $3.50 would fill your gas tank.
- Everyone ate at home.
- Your date had to be home at 10:30 sharp.
- Only one older lady in the county could remove warts with a straw, and it would not work.
- Males drank Pepsi and females drank Coke.
- You found a still and knew enough to keep your mouth shut.
From David Harris, Mocksville
- After the first frost you helped Mama pick up simmerns to make a puddin.
- For dinner you had beans and taters, for supper you had taters and beans.
- When the weather warmed up, your daddy would take you sucker giggin’.
- When a stranger would stop and ask Granddad for directions, he would point and say, “It’s down yonder a piece.”
From Kay Simmons, Mt. Airy
- You’ve been fishing at the Yadkin River all night long.
- Your favorite dog is the German shepard.
- You have a honey bee tree and walnut tree in the yard.
- Breakfast and dinner was a pot of pintos.
- Your toys were made from crooked sticks and old tires.
- You know that reaching tobacco means no tobacco tier.
- You sat in the garden with a box of salt, eating tomatoes.
- You know what mustard dines are.
- You’re used to being stuck by briers.
From Hazel Hall, Roseboro
- Cabbage and potatoes are called “Weak Trembles.”
- It was time to go barefoot when you heard the first whip-poor-will.
- You know the first frost is three weeks away when the first dog fennels bloom.
- You searched in the woods for fat lightard to start the morning fire.
- Your daddy dug a big shallow hole in the ground and drove sticks in the ground around the hole and stretched a piece of fence over it. He built an oakwood fire nearby and shoveled red coal into the hole, then laid a butchered hog on the fence to barbeque.
From Carlye Kearns, High Point
- You rubbed Raleigh’s Linament on rheumatism.
- Before going on a date, you had to round up the cows for milking and bring them to the barn, and you couldn’t get the smell off your hands.
- You saved grease from anything fried to use for seasoning vegetables.
From Joyce Futch, Smithfield
- Granny could heal your scratched knee by paintin’ it with iodine she kept behind the clock on the mantel.
- Your neighbor would “coast in home” by gaining up speed, then turning off the engine of the car.
- Daddy hand-cranked the Model T, and you knew you were going to church, town or Granny’s.
- On the Easter Monday holiday from school you lay on a padded toe sack picking tiny weeds from the tobacco beds and singing “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” and “In Your Easter Bonnet.”
- You clipped out Blue Horse heads from the wrapper of school notebook paper hoping to save enough for a big prize.
- You and your date rode around on Sunday afternoons listening to the radio for your special song request on the program called “Dedicated to the One I Love.”
From Laura Shoemaker-Atwell, Statesville
- You went to the Tastee-Freeze for a shake.
- Muscadine wine was called Tylenol.
From Gerald Yates, Mt. Gilead
- Your mama made gravy out of every kind of meat: fatback gravy, Banner sausage gravy, pork gravy and hamburger gravy.
- You thought if you put a piece of coal in the ground you could come back in 10 years and see the coal turned to gold.
- Your grandma sent three coal sacks to your house: one containing coal, another containing wood, and the third containing potatoes.
- Your mama took in sewing and ironing.
- Your mama made you wash the soot off the walls when company was coming.
- Your neighbor built a 10-foot chicken wire fence and threw her two boys in it along with two bottles of milk and a sack of cookies.
From Dwight Murray, Pembroke
- You pulled weeds out of your uncle’s bean fields so you could go swimming in Lumber River.
- You drank from an overflow at Burleigh’s Landing or Brook’s Landing.
- You picked cucumbers for 50 cents a bucket.
- You got shotgun shells for Christmas.
- You tune your TV by hitting it on the side or turning the outside antenna by hand.
- During the fall you couldn’t wait to get off the school bus so you could ride in the corn trailer pulled by a one-roll harvester that was pulled by the tractor.
From Derwin Trigleth, Swansboro
- You know what it means when you hear, “It’s blowing so hard it’s peelin’ the green!”
- You know that moonbeams are the uppermost tier poles in a tobacco barn.
- You know what people mean when they tell you to “get shed” of something.
- You know how dull a knife, hoe or ax is if it’s “duller than a fro.”
- Hearing the first whip-poor-wills in the spring tells you that killing frosts are past.
- You look forward to Good Friday so you can plant the garden.
- You walk along Bogue Banks and watch the sun set in the ocean.
- You cut marsh grass to put on tobacco beds.
- You go in the woods and cut long stems of hog briars or saw briars, shove them up in hollow trees and twist them to tangle in possums fur to pull the possum out.
- You played on and in the WWII gun emplacements on Bogue Banks and Core Banks.
- You can walk out in your backyard and catch clams, scallops, crabs and fish for supper.
- You know that Bettie, Stacy and Otway are not only your neighbors, but also the names of Down East communities.
- You know what folks mean when they take asburns, gather chicken aigs, put awl on bicycle cheens, catch turkles, watch for the partial post man, and talk about seption tanks.
- You know someone is really hard of hearing when they are deafer than a conch.
- You go to play in the corn crib in the barn and you are told not to bother the snakes because they are there to catch mice.
- You watched the tobacco report on WNCT Channel 9 and heard Eck Wall call out, “Hang that one on the line!”
- You lay on the floor in front of the TV and sang the “Frosty Morn” jingle to the three little pigs dancing across the screen.
- If you kill a snake you make sure he is laying belly down so it won’t rain.
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