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Old friends still find time to gather
One thing we’ll have to say about Sharon Ridley – she’s persistent, which means she doesn’t give up easily.
That trait likely worked to her advantage during the 31years she spent teaching literacy classes to help others learn to read.
And it worked to my advantage this week when Sharon made me see a story that was about to be overlooked. The fact that the picture (page 9A) Sharon brought in of her father, his brother and several of their cousins did not initially seem to fit in any of our news categories did not prevent Sharon from accomplishing her goal of seeing the photo published in The Sylva Herald.
“It’s not just a birthday, it’s history,” she said of the shot that captures five octogenarian cousins, including her father, Lloyd Cowan, 83, and his brother, Leo, who turned 85 on Feb. 18.
Another way Sharon’s persistence helped me was that it gave me a good excuse to call Leo, a favorite of mine since I first met him when I came to Jackson County 30-plus years ago. Leo gave me the lowdown on the “East Fork Gang” who turned out for his birthday event.
In addition to his brother Lloyd, the table included first-cousin Carlin Cabe, 82.
“He’s not ‘Carlin’ to us, he’s ‘Boolie,” Leo said. “His daddy gave them all nicknames, and that’s what he called Carlin.”
Next to Carlin is another first cousin, Clayton Deitz, who Leo said is about the same age as Carlin.
Then there’s a third cousin, Oliven Cowan, who lives in Lake Junaluska. Oliven’s father grew up on East Fork but left for the cotton mills during what Leo described as the “great migration of the 1920s.”
When I asked about the person with the non-local-sounding name, Dusty DeStefano, Leo agreed he isn’t native to these parts.
“He’s a foreigner,” Leo said. “He married my mother’s brother’s daughter Norma Lou Hall.”
In other words, Dusty isn’t a cousin, but he’s married to one.
Leo went on to say that his Uncle Norman, Norma Lou’s father, kept a house on East Fork even after moving his family to Maryland.
“Norma grew up in Maryland and met Dusty up there during the war,” Leo said. “Then her father came back here and she did too – now there’s a whole colony of them building houses on East Fork.”
The last member of the birthday group, Richard Wilson, is “only a kid,” according to Leo.
“We used to take him fishing – he was a nice little kid,” Leo said of Wilson. “We called him ‘Dickie’ when he was small. He lived in town over near where the swimming pool is now. I was already grown and married when he was a little boy.”
When asked how long he’d been hanging out with the others, Leo said, “way too long,” and said Clayton and Carlin grew up in “cussin’ distance” of him and Lloyd.
I asked Leo about Panther Knob, the highest point on Savannah Ridge, which separates East Fork from Cullowhee’s Long Branch area.
“Well, it’s spelled ‘panther,’ but you say it ‘painter,’ he said. “That’s the way people used to say it. It’s named for the animal and not after any person named Painter.”
Then he couldn’t resist a chance to take a jab at his younger brother.
“Lloyd thinks it’s named for the Painter family, because there were some Painters that lived around Cullowhee, but he’s wrong,” Leo said.
With that he told me how the knob actually got its name.
“The way I heard it, Ning (his name was ‘Ninian’ but everybody called him ‘Ning’) Bryson had a dog that went up there and came down scared to death.
“Ning went up there to see what it was that upset the dog and bagged him a panther,” Leo said, allowing as how the incident he’s relating as gospel actually happened awhile before he was born, around 1870 or so.
The old Bryson place was at the head of Long Branch and eventually was sold to the college (Western Carolina University) to be used as part of the school’s early water system.
Leo also recalled stories he’s heard about families from East Fork, Little Savannah, Long Branch and Cullowhee all meeting at Panther Knob and building a bonfire to celebrate the new millennium – the one that happened in 1900.
Then Leo thought a minute and remembered that Cullowhee doesn’t have a “Long Branch” now because “Long Branch Road” became “Little Savannah Road” with the advent of the 911 addressing system.
“They’ve changed everything around, and I don’t know where I am anymore.”
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