By Heather Mandelkehr
Carrboro Commons Staff Writer

The Orange County Social Club, sandwiched between Friendly Barber Shop and ACME on East Main Street, seems to be an ordinary storefront with tinted windows and plants outside the doorway.

Orange County Social Club owner Tricia Mesigian bartends on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Mesigian says that the close-knit relationship of both the employees and members makes the OCSC a place for friends to spend time together.

Staff Photo by Heather Mandelkehr

Enter, and find more plants from the Carrboro Farmers’ Market on the bar, a large portrait of Dean Smith on the back wall, and employees and members sitting at the bar, socializing and listening to the bartender’s music choices as DJ.

It’s formally a bar, yet the overall ease of the atmosphere blurs an official distinction.

Owner Tricia Mesigian said her vision of the Orange County Social Club (OCSC) was to be a place where people could come often and know they would get the same thing every time they came in. She cited great bars that were part of restaurant – where people would come just to socialize.

“There wasn’t a plain old bar in town,” Mesigian said of Carrboro.

Originally from Media, Pa., Mesigian studied business at Virginia Tech and moved in Carrboro in 1995. When she moved to North Carolina, she started at the Skylight Exchange and then worked at Merge Records in sales and tour promotion.

She joked that she knew that when she opened the OCSC, the people who she knew would come, but now her clientele is a mix of “extremely great people,” including students, professors, musicians, artists and former employees.

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Rik Hermanson sits on one of the countless sculptures that fill up his latest masterpiece, a garden in Chapel Hill that he has been working on for 7 ½ years. Before this project took over his life, Hermanson was at Weaver Street Market pretty much every day.

Staff photo by Clai Watkins

By Clai Watkins
Carrboro Commons Staff Writer

A sand sculpture by Rik Hermanson sits in the front corner of the Weaver Street Market lawn. Hermanson has been displaying his unique art work at “the Weave” since it opened 20 years ago.

Whether the art is a parade float, a totem pole or a sand sculpture, Weaver Street Market customers always can plan to see something unexpected in Hermanson’s work. “My nature is to always get wilder,” explains Hermanson.

Hermanson, a Greensboro native, is a self-taught artist and painter who, before moving to Chatham County, lived in Carrboro for 36 years. He has become a familiar face for Weaver Street Market customers – and not just because of his distinguishing dreadlocks. Benjamin Brodey of Chapel Hill shops regularly at Weaver Street Market and has watched Hermanson construct art on the grocery’s lawn before. Brodey says diversity is one of the things that he enjoys so much at Weaver Street Market and that Hermanson’s work really “adds character to the area.”

The sand sculpture that celebrates Weaver Street Market’s 20th anniversary has two very different and distinct sides. Damian Hoffman carved the side that is Weaver Street Market’s birthday party. Hermanson carved the back side, which is a whole tribe of starving Africans. According to Hermanson, even though Weaver Street Market is celebrating its 20th anniversary, it is important not to forget about all of the people in the world who are starving to death.

The sand sculpture that is currently displayed on the lawn at Weaver Street Market is by no means the first of its kind. Hermanson has created numerous controversial sand sculptures that are all distinct and provoking. Among his collection are a Sept. 11 memorial, an angry developer bulldozing away a castle, and a tribe of starving Indians with one, what Hermanson calls, “bulimic” pilgrim.

When asked about her favorite piece done by Hermanson, Cat Moleski, who does public relations for Weaver Street Market, recalls how moving Hermanson’s Sept. 11 sand memorial was seven years ago. The sculpture showed the Statue of Liberty being knocked down by an airplane and nearby firemen and policemen supporting the flame of liberty.

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By Jasmina Nogo
Carrboro Commons Staff Writer

Counselors at Carrboro High School assist their students in times of grief, crisis and confusion. Although there isn’t a formal grief counseling program yet, the first student support group will meet on Oct. 7.

Although they go about their normal days as they always have, students at Carrboro High School, particularly seniors who knew Chapel Hill High School’s football player, Atlas Fraley, are seeking more and more grief counseling and support. A new grief support group initiative is starting in early October, led by a Duke Community Bereavement Services specialist.

Staff Photo by Jasmina Nogo

The tragic death of Chapel Hill High School’s defensive lineman, Atlas Fraley, only two weeks before school started, affected the lives of many students who went to school with Fraley before they transferred to Carrboro High.

“We started to have enough students suffering and decided that this would be appropriate for a group, if they’re interested,” said Linda Bos, student assistance program counselor at CHS.

With only 770 students and no formalized grief support, the counselors at CHS are not set up for such long-term treatment, Bos said. Students who require ongoing treatment are usually referred out.

However, this year Bos has been in contact with William Holloman, from the Duke Bereavement Community Center in Hillsborough, and the counselors are planning for him to offer a grief support group to students who are interested.

The group is due to start in early October and will meet for approximately six weeks, with availability for continued meetings if needed.

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By Danielle Verrilli
Carrboro Commons Photo Editor

The directors of Hi Mom! 10 decided not to award flaming trophies this year, as in the first short film festival of 1998, but rather distributed software and $904 in prizes to filmmakers.

Audience members gather in the Carrboro ArtsCenter screening room on Saturday, Sept. 6, 2008, prior to a matinee showing at the tenth anniversary of the Hi Mom! Film Festival. The block included thought-provoking films by both local and international filmmakers.

Staff Photo by Danielle Verrilli

“The flaming trophies were not exactly the safest thing,” said Tom Laney, one of the core directors of the tenth “no-fi-too-lo-or-hi festival of short films” held at the Carrboro ArtsCenter on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 5-6.

Screeners showed the films in four thematic blocks, including an 11 p.m. “rude and raunchy no-prudes-allowed” showing on Friday and a more thoughtful matinee block the following day. The first block on Friday, originally scheduled to be shown outdoors at the Wallace Parking Deck in Chapel Hill at 8 p.m., was moved indoors because of rain.

“Hi Mom! 10 was a pretty amazing success,” said head director Ian Krabacher, who co-founded the festival with other volunteers while president of the Carolina Production Guild student group at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1998.

Each block was filled to approximately 85 percent audience capacity, with tickets selling for $5 or less per block or $10 for the entire weekend. Saturday’s final primetime block was sold out with standing room only and featured films about such things as bubblewrap, Hiroshima and lost girlfriends.

The directors chose approximately 50 films to show from the more than 300 locally and internationally submitted entries. Submissions were free until the deadline, after which entrants paid a $15 “slacker fee.”

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by Jock Lauterer
Carrboro Commons Adviser

In the middle of another all-nighter back in ‘69, Ron Paris, front, is joined by partners Jock Lauterer,right, and Bill Blair.
Photo by Jock Lauterer

In the recurrent dream I’ve had for years, I enter a small-town newspaper office that is strange and yet vaguely familiar. As I search for my desk, Ron Paris materializes before me, greeting me with his characteristically merry war-whoop, directing me to my place.

When my old partner of 30 years ago died in late August after a two-year battle with cancer, his family, former employees, friends and colleagues hailed the deceptively built Ron as “the little giant,” “the last true community journalist” and a “champion of the community” and “a pioneer.”

Ron was all that and more. I was privileged to serve as his junior partner and co-editor/publisher along with Business Manager Bill Blair during the best days of my working press life, the nine years from 1969-1978 when our start-up, THIS WEEK in Forest City, grew into arguably the best weekly in the state — a creation that was largely the result of Ron’s vision, hard work and unswerving dedication to excellence in community journalism. (The “little paper that could” went daily in 1978, but in my opinion the Daily Courier never measured up to the weekly. Our conversion to daily prompted me to sell to my partners and start the weekly McDowell Express in Marion in 1980.)

But I never lost touch with Ron, nor did I ever stop revering and respecting him. Ask anyone who ever knew Ron: he could be in turn loud, irreverent, fun-loving, outrageous, and boisterous — but at the same time he was our unflappable rock-solid leader, a newspaperman in every sense of the old expression.

Woe be unto the pompous business or civic leader who mistook Ron’s slight built for a sign of weakness.

“Powerful people would come and try to tell Ron what to do with the paper,” said friend and Forest City businessman Maxie Jolley, speaking at Ron’s memorial service on Aug. 28, “and he’d tell THEM what THEY could do with the paper!” (if you get Maxie’s drift).

High quality community journalism was typically accompanied by gonzo behavior at THIS WEEK in Forest City. Co-editor Jock Lauterer and typesetting Billie Faulkner crack up after Ron Paris has unsuccessfully attempted a cartwheel.
Photo by Joy Franklin

“You couldn’t’ impose on the Little Giant,” Maxie said, adding, ”He bought ink by the barrel and wasn’t afraid to use it!”

Or, as his daughters wrote in their tribute: “He was a DO-It man, not a say-It man.”

Ron left behind not just a loving family and a grieving community, but also a veritable THIS WEEK and Daily Courier alumni association. Over his 29 years as editor, he ran what many considered one of the state’s best community journalism graduate schools. “Graduates” include New York Times best-selling novelist Tony Earley and Asheville Citizen-Times Editorial Page Editor Joy Franklin, the latter of whom will never forget when she misspelled “threadbare” and received the following note from Ron:

“There are black bears; there are brown bears; there are grizzly bears; there are teddy bears, but there are no THREAD BEARS, you dumb@%*!”

Joy concludes, “Only Ron Paris could call you a dumb@%* and somehow make you feel it was a term of endearment.”

Tony Earley remembers the time as a cub reporter when he returned from a particularly fractious town council meeting, telling Ron, “If I write the truth, those people will come down here and kill me!” — to which Ron responded evenly, “You write the truth; I’ll take care of the calls.”

And you can bet the little giant did just that.

My memories of 11 wonderful years of working with Ron (with nary a angry word between us!) flash like a slide show with images of both the serious and comedic: cutting up in the backshop, installing the press, putting it all on the line editorially and financially when we came out pro-ABC in a historically dry county, covering the harrowing dragnet of a cop-killer, or the time Ron and I rode a bicycle-built-for-two down a major highway construction project to get a first-hand look at the progress.

Comrades-in-arms Paris and Lauterer exult as the new press arrives in Forest City, summer 1974.
Joy Franklin photo

We were always describing ourselves as “intrepid” reporters, quipping upon such zany occasions: “Bet they don’t do THIS at the Charlotte Observer.”

After selling the paper to Paxton Media Group in 1998, Ron threw himself into local humanitarian volunteer work, notably as a leader with Habitat for Humanity, the Jaycees, the United Way, the McNair Foundation, the local community college and Smart Start. Ron will also be remembered as past president of the NCPA, three-term member of the NCPA board and School of Journalism Foundation of N.C., Inc. board member.

I saw Ron for the last time this summer a month before he died. In spite of the obvious toll the cancer was taking on him, Ron had just come in from installing bathroom tile. We sat there over lunch telling newspaper war stories from old times, cackling like schoolboys. I shall miss him terribly, my veritable older brother, unstoppable and irrepressible to the end. And still showing me the way.