SportsTalk: Remembering Cotton Clayton

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SPORTSTALK WIZS

If you know where the Cotton Clayton Country Club was located, chances are you’re from “around here,” as folks like to say. And it’s just as likely that you were saddened to learn of the passing of Lawrence Howard “Cotton” Clayton, who died Wednesday evening at the age of 82.

Clayton, a native of Vance County, was an outstanding athlete who excelled at the high school, college and professional levels. His North Carolina high school basketball scoring record stood for more than four decades and he played both basketball and baseball at East Carolina University in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

“He was one of Vance County’s greatest athletes,” said George Hoyle, who remembered Clayton and his family on Thursday’s SportsTalk. “He was a great athlete, but an even better person.”

He was named an All America in both basketball and baseball between 1959 and 1961; he led the ’61 Pirates baseball team in the NAIA national championship in hitting and played third base and outfielder. That same year on the basketball court, he averaged 14.9 points per game, 9.9 rebounds and shot 61 percent from the field. In 1984, he was inducted into the ECU Sports Hall of Fame.

Clayton spent seven years playing pro baseball in the Baltimore Orioles organization.

Anyone who spent time at his tire shops on Chestnut Street or in Bearpond at the “country club” no doubt heard about sports.

“Those were great times spent with Cotton and Alton, his brother, and the whole Bearpond “crew,” Hoyle said. “Cotton was a wealth of knowledge about sports…if you wanted to know (something), he knew.”

When a high school junior named JamesOn Curry was closing in on Clayton’s long-standing scoring record, Clayton was at the Southern Vance High School gym to witness it.

Not to take anything away from the young man who did break the previous points record, but Hoyle did note that Clayton managed his feat playing in a shorter season and without benefit of a 3-point line.

Wilson Hoyle shared his memories of visiting the Chestnut Street shop when he was home during college breaks. “One of the very first things I did,” he said, was head down to that shop where a group of regulars gathered in the mornings, “smoking cigarettes, hanging out and talking junk,” he said.

Clayton had a huge impact, Wilson said. “The first one that gave me belief that I could do just about anything was Cotton,” he said.

“When you think about community, you think about people and places,” he continued. “Cotton was always there.”

Hoyle said he loved to be able to add to the timeless argument about which player was the best in North Carolina. “I loved when I’d hear a Jordan-David Thompson argument break out,” he recalled. “I’d say, well, who’s the all-time leading scorer in North Carolina high school basketball history, and they’d throw out Jordan and Thompson…Sleepy Floyd and James Worthy. And the answer was ‘no, no, no – it’s Cotton Clayton.”

Drug, Firearm Charges with Large Bond for Local Suspect

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HPD Press Release: 06/30/2022

Wednesday evening at approximately 5:30PM, while investigating a complaint of a stolen firearm, Investigators of the Henderson Police Department observed Jammee Duchea Terry (30) leaving the residence of 167 Lincoln Street with a firearm visible on his person. With the knowledge of Jammee D. Terry being a convicted felon and his active federal probation status, a traffic stop was conducted.

During the traffic stop, Terry was found in possession of approximately 29 grams of cocaine, 243 dosage units of heroin, drug manufacturing equipment, 1 semi-automatic handgun, and $3,685.00 in US currency.

In continuation of this investigation, a search warrant was obtained and served for the residence of 167 Lincoln Street. During the search, 1,620 dosage units of heroin, drug packaging material, and 1 semi-automatic rifle were located and seized.

Terry was charged with five counts of Trafficking Heroin, two counts of Trafficking Cocaine, one count of Manufacture Cocaine, one count of Possession with Intent to Manufacture/Sell/Deliver Cocaine, one count of Possession with Intent to Manufacture/ Sell/Deliver Heroin, two counts of Maintaining a Vehicle/Dwelling for a Controlled Substance, one count of Possession of Drug Paraphernalia, and two counts of Possession of a Firearm by Felon.

Jammee D. Terry is currently under a $580,500.00 secured bond and a Federal Detainer. Terry was remanded to the Vance County Detention Facility.

Authority Chief Marcus W. Barrow

TownTalk: Police Chief Barrow Discusses Gun Violence Resolution

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The increase in gun violence plaguing the country is something that Henderson Police Chief Marcus Barrow thinks a lot about, but he said he and his officers often are frustrated by the process to get offenders off the streets and successfully processed through the judicial system.

It’s illegal to discharge a firearm within the city limits, but that hasn’t done much to curtail the use of guns and shootings.

On Tuesday, the City Council adopted a resolution declaring gun violence a public health issue. One of the upsides of having this resolution in place, he said during Thursday’s TownTalk, is increased access to grant funding to combat a wide-ranging list of underlying issues that contribute to gun violence.

“We have a crisis and it’s a health crisis,” Barrow said. A mental health crisis, to be precise. He cited as an example that in a 12-month period, his officers were involved in 538 involuntary commitments. And that’s just for the city of Henderson – it doesn’t include numbers from the sheriff’s department.

Other underlying societal issues feed the problem, he said, from socio-economic issues to substance abuse. According to CDC statistics, men account for 87 percent of firearm deaths in the U.S. Firearm deaths are the leading cause of premature death, he said.

Councilwomen Melissa Elliott, founder of Gang Free, Inc. and Sara Coffey initiated the resolution, and Barrow said the audience present in Council Chambers on Tuesday applauded when the resolution passed.

“She did a great job with it,” Barrow said of Elliott’s work crafting the resolution. “She sees a problem and tries to address it.

Now it’s time for the community to address the problem, he said. “We need to get motivated behind this thing,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of the mindset that we’re going to arrest our way out of this.”

His department has secured various grant funding to help tackle the problem, and Barrow discussed one program that was able to go live in January 2022. The process took almost two years, but now his officers can enter data about shell casings into the database and within 24 to 48 hours, get results on whether the gun has been used in other crimes.

This is a great improvement on the six months’ to a year that it could take to get results from the SBI, Barrow said.

“I think we do a really good job here at the police department,” Barrow said. Currently, there are more than 1,800 firearms in the police evidence room. Federal indictments are on the increase in the past five years, but the backlog of cases in the court system means sometimes lengthy waits for convictions.

“We’re trying to do our part,” Barrow said, “keeping our finger stuck in the dam.”

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The Local Skinny! Bean Spotlights NC Education Corps

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The current buzz phrase is “high-impact literacy,” but what it all boils down to is this: Helping young students become better readers through relationship-building and consistent small-group tutoring.

North Carolina Education Corps is a nonprofit initiative to get literacy tutors in elementary schools to help children who need a little extra support with reading skills.

Ashley Bean was a reading tutor last year and worked with second graders; she is currently helping NC Ed Corps recruit more tutors for Vance County schools and spoke with John C. Rose on Thursday’s The Local Skinny! to provide details about the program.

Bean said there were probably a dozen or so Ed Corps tutors working in Vance County schools last year but school officials would like to see that number grow to 20.

The pay scale for tutors ranges from $15/hr. for high school students to $25/hr. for tutors who hold advance degrees.

Visit https://nceducationcorps.org/ to find the application. Once the application has been completed, Bean said Ed Corps staff will contact the prospective tutor to complete the screening and training process. The tutor is hired by the local school system, but is supported throughout the school year by Ed Corps staff. Each tutor gets support from his or her own private learning coach who shares proven skills and techniques to help children improve their literacy skills.

Vance County schools officials expect a tutor to work at least 10 hours each week, providing a minimum of three 30-minute sessions to a small group of students – between 1 and 3 children, Bean said. But tutors can work as many as 26 hours a week, she said. That expectation could vary by county, she added.

She said she decided to become a tutor last year because it fit her schedule: She’s in graduate school, but also has three children at home.

“It was a great opportunity for me to do something for the community,” while being available to attend her children’s activities and to do her schoolwork as well, she said.

NC Ed Corps may be a perfect fit for a retired educator, a college student or a stay-at-home mom with school-age children to get out of the house, make a little money and help a children become better readers.

For Bean, the best part of being a tutor was establishing relationships with the students she worked with. She said she didn’t really know if her work was truly having an effect on her second-grade students. But one student’s answer quelled her uncertainty when she came to get him from the classroom, she said.

“You’re 22 min late – I thought you weren’t coming,” the boy said, as he happily left his classroom for his session with his tutor.

Contact Bean at 252.432.3995 or ashley.bean@nceducationcorps.org .

 

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Cooperative Extension With Jamon Glover Communication, Part 2

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Listen live at 100.1 FM / 1450 AM / or on the live stream at WIZS.com at 11:50 a.m. Mon, Tues & Thurs.

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SportsTalk: Zarzour Discusses LIV Golf

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Most golf fans know that the PGA’s Masters tournament is held at Augusta National in April – except when postponed by a global pandemic as it was in 2020. It remains to be seen, however, if the newly formed LIV tour will manage to create its own signature event like the Masters, the U.S. Open or the British Open.

Taylor Zarzour covers golf for ESPN and has a morning show on the PGA Tour radio channel on Sirius XM. His knowledge base and experience reporting on the sport gives him a unique perspective, which he shared recently during a SportsTalk interview with John Rose.

The LIV is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. The first tournament was played earlier this month in England and the second is set to tee up this weekend in Portland, Oregon.

In Roman numerals, LIV is 54, which refers to the score a player would get if he birdied every hole on a par-72 course. It also is the number of holes played at all LIV events, according to online research.

Fifty-four holes represents three rounds of golf, one round short that the PGA sponsored events have.

This is just one difference between the well-established PGA and its new rival, which has lured several top golfers with multi-million dollar joining incentives. The only problem is that players must choose – they can’t play in both, Zarzour said.

“It’s disrupting the PGA tour by taking away the top players,” he said. Top-ranked golfers like Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia and Bryson DeChambeau already have signed on, as well as Phil Mickelson, a familiar name in golf circles. And Australian golf star Greg Norman, “The Great White Shark,” has been hired to run the LIV, he noted.

Zarzour said the LIV has caused PGA officials to look at its own model and to make changes so more players won’t abandon their tour.

As Zarzour sees it, the big problem for golf fans is that they aren’t going to be able to see the top players compete against one another at tournaments sponsored by either group.

“In every other sport, you get to see the best players playing,” he said. As it stands now, “not every great player will play in the same tournament,” but only in the major championships. In the official world golf rankings, players get points based on their performance at sanctioned events. The LIV doesn’t offer points at this time, although it has applied.

“There’s a tremendous pressure to not give points,” he said. And if that’s the case, those players are going to have to find somewhere else to play so they can earn those ranking points. But it won’t be in PGA events, because players who’ve joined LIV have been banned. It is uncertain whether LIV players will be able to play on the European tour, but they have been cleared to play – this year, at least – at the British Open in Scotland later this summer.

The top 50 or 100 players – based on world ranking points – are the ones who are invited to participate in the major golf championships, he said. Players could earn millions of dollars just for joining LIV – Mickelson reportedly got $200 million and Johnson $150 million – but would possibly forfeit their access to world ranking points, thus dropping them from the ranks of the top players.

The upheaval and confusion that the LIV has created could be too much for golf enthusiasts, Zarzour said.

If fans can’t watch the top players compete against each other in one tournament, they may become disinterested and quit watching altogether.

As the PGA continues to evaluate how to move forward, Zarzour said he predicts that players who defected to the LIV but soon after regret their decision would probably be re-admitted to the PGA with a little fanfare. It may be a “one-time only forgiveness,” Zarzour said, “and you’re able to come back and play.

Those players who stay longer and then re-apply to the PGA may find themselves facing a lengthy suspension, he said. “It could be years before players play again.”

Zarzour said the issue keeps coming back to whether this is good for the sport and for golf fans.

Given the dizzying amounts of money that the LIV has offered to players to join their circuit, Zarzour said, “a lot of us might do the same thing these players have done.”

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Carolina Carpet Broken Into; Local Suspect Arrested After Items Located, Foot Chase

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HPD Press Release:

On June 15th 2022, Officers responded to Carolina Carpet and Flooring for a breaking and entering that had occurred over night. The suspect had stolen numerous items, including drills, a TV, framing nail gun, and other various tools.

Investigators worked quickly to identify the suspect as 30-year-old, Jimmy Alan Reid. On June 17th, warrants were obtained for his arrest and a search warrant was obtained for his residence. After making entry into his residence at 602 Thomas Street, investigators located several items that were taken from the scene, but did not locate Reid.

On June 28thh 2022, at approximately 1:00PM, members of the Henderson Police Department located Reid through an anonymous tip. Reid was located in the area of Springwood Apartments, and began running after he saw officers approaching. A foot chase pursued, and Reid was caught after running through briars, and a densely wooded area.

Jimmy Alan Reid was taken before Magistrate Williams where he received a $50,000 bond for the Breaking and Entering of Carolina Carpet and Flooring, Resisting a Public Officer, and for an outstanding warrant of Hit and Run. Reid was remanded to the Vance County Detention Facility, but bonded out shortly thereafter.

Later that day, investigators were also able to recover additional stolen property from this incident from Sky Pawn, 943 W Andrews Ave Henderson. I am grateful for their aid in identifying these as stolen items and having the information we needed for further prosecution of the case.

Authority Chief Barrow

TownTalk: Pam Hester Talks Local Tourism Attractions, Events

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The executive director of Vance County Department of Tourism said she has a fear of being on the water, but she has absolutely no problem whatsoever promoting Kerr Lake and the variety of events it brings to town – and its contribution to the local economy.

Satterwhite Point is the site of Saturday evening’s fireworks display, sponsored by the local tourism authority.

Pam Hester told John C. Rose on Wednesday’s TownTalk that there will be numerous food vendors on hand for visitors to enjoy. DJ Jay will provide music for the event, she added. There’s a $7 gate fee per vehicle to enter the park and, as with all state parks, alcohol is not permitted.

The fireworks show will begin somewhere around 9:15.

A new food truck is in the lineup for the event in addition to several familiar vendors – King Southern Style Cookin’ – and Hester welcomes the owner to this year’s event.

“He has just moved into the area,” she said. “We’re lucky to have new people moving into Henderson, moving into Vance County,” she said.

“I think Vance County and Henderson have a lot to offer,” Hester added. “We are a great hidden gem.”

Apparently, not so hidden any more – Hester said the county is set to finish out the fiscal year with a record number of hotel stays. This is a sure sign that the many activities and events that happen in Henderson and in the county are attracting visitors like never before.

Although under the umbrella of county government, Hester said the tourism office is funded by the 6 percent occupancy tax that each hotel room generates per guest stay. The tax funds the staffing and events like the upcoming fireworks show at the lake.

“We’re going to have the highest amount of hotel stays (than) in the past 12 years,” Hester noted.

Some of those rooms will no doubt be reserved by folks who come to fishing tournaments at Kerr Lake – there are 24 tournaments that are taking place at the lake this year, up from last year’s 16.

She estimates that each fisherman brings $154 a day to the county. If each boat has a two-person team, that’s more than $300 a day. Multiply that number by the 200 or so boats on the water and the economic impact becomes evident.

But it’s not just Kerr Lake that is bringing in visitor revenue.

“We have things here that most little rural towns don’t have,” Hester said. Notably, McGregor Hall, a venue for concerts, live theater and dance competitions and recitals.

The young dancers who come to compete at McGregor Hall also bring their moms and dads, she said, which means stops for food, gas and other purchases as well.

“McGregor is bringing a huge economic impact” to the area, Hester said, adding that when the dance competitions are in town, the restaurants are packed.

Planning for additional events and attractions is something that she is always interested in, but Hester said she has a wish list for the future – she would wish for a convention center and more hotel space to accommodate the influx of visitors to the area.

A convention center could host a boat show or other large-scale events, she said.

“We have the perfect lake, but we don’t have facilities to accommodate it.”

Collaboration and partnerships create a strong network to keep activities vibrant in the county, and Hester attributes to local civic leader Debra Brown the following quote: “’Individually, we are one drop, but together we are Kerr Lake’. Together, we can make something,” Hester said.

Visit https://www.kerrlake-nc.com/kerrlake.php to learn more about the Vance County Department of Tourism.

 

 

Home And Garden Show

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On the Home and Garden Show with Vance Co. Cooperative Ext.

  • Now is the time to harvest your Irish potatoes.
  • Don’t be too alarmed by leaf spots on ornamental trees and shrubs. Although they cna detract from the appearance of the plant and even cause some leaf drop, generally they will not kill the plant.
  • Check your garden at least twice a week for insects and disease because warmer temps means disease and insects increase under these conditions
  • If you work outdoors a lot, consider treating your boots and pant legs with tick repellant.
  • Check your garden soil at 2 inches down if you feel moisture don’t water the garden. When you irrigate, water thoroughly once a week.
  • Don’t rely solely on your rain gauge to decide on your irrigation schedule. The trend is to get intense rainfall in a short period of time, which means less infiltration into the soil.
  • Blossom end rot is showing up in tomatoes, peppers, watermelons, this condition is a lack of calcium in the plant, water fluctuations is a major cause.

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