[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

ROB AMBERG:

I'm with the town manager from Mars Hill, North Carolina. Darhyl could you just introduce yourself to me and I want to make sure we're getting you on—

DARHYL BOONE:

Sure. Rob, I'm Darhyl Boone and as you said, I'm a lifelong resident of Madison County and lived here all my life. I guess that's in a nutshell all I need to say.

ROB AMBERG:

How old are you Darhyl?

DARHYL BOONE:

I'm forty-five, be forty-six here in just about two days.

ROB AMBERG:

So Darhyl we were just talking about your family restaurant, and I wanted to just relay quickly just for the tape that your grandmother and grandfather I believe both ran the Little Creek Café out on Highway Twenty-three which is just below Sam's Gap.

DARHYL BOONE:

Right.

ROB AMBERG:

And that has been there since 1951, I think.

DARHYL BOONE:

'51 yeah. They actually moved there before '51. Grandma, my grandmother was from Arkansas, and my grandfather was from New Mexico.

ROB AMBERG:

Is that right? Wow!

DARHYL BOONE:

He met her in Arkansas. Of course, they had kinfolk here. Some of his kinfolk had moved here. They lived right back here, Earl Boone, a fellow Frank Boone. He owned the gas station right here where the flag poles are at. It used to be a gas station, one of the most unique gas stations. I wished it had never been torn down. It had an awning out over it, and you pull up under that awning and get you gas. It was really unique. But anyhow, yeah, they moved here in the '40s, I think. They moved here

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because of Grandpa's health, temperature was too hot in that part of the country, and they told him to find a cooler climate. They came here.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow.

DARHYL BOONE:

He was a country doctor. I don't know if you knew—

ROB AMBERG:

No, now this would be Shelby Boone?

DARHYL BOONE:

No, Shelby is my grandmother's second husband.

ROB AMBERG:

Okay.

DARHYL BOONE:

Her first husband was Laddie Boone. Of course I was named after him. I'm Laddie Darhyl Boone. I was named after him. He was the first doctor in this area. He was an old country doctor,delivered the majority of the kids. I mean I found his old documents when Grandma died. I went back through some of his, and I found people I knew that live here now who he delivered. He delivered my two brothers. I was the only one he didn't deliver.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow.

DARHYL BOONE:

Every time I run into some old timers as I call around here, they say, 'Yeah, Doc Boone delivered all my young 'uns.' Grandma'd go with him. His health was poor. Grandma would go with him to carry his medical bag. They'd go back into these hollows, and he'd deliver babies, and that's what she had to do. So when they first moved here, they weren't actually running a restaurant. He had his office upstairs.

ROB AMBERG:

But that building was there.

DARHYL BOONE:

Umm. They built the building. He actually built it.

ROB AMBERG:

They built it as a house and a doctor's office.

DARHYL BOONE:

As a house and office, yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

What about that.

DARHYL BOONE:

They went from that, of course, Grandpa died with a heart attack. There Grandma was.

ROB AMBERG:

Do you know about how old she would've been about that time?

DARHYL BOONE:

About the time he died?

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah.

DARHYL BOONE:

No, I've never sat back and calculated that out. I was thinking the other day when I was born, Grandma was about my age.

ROB AMBERG:

Okay.

DARHYL BOONE:

I got to thinking about that, and so Grandpa, she probably would've been thirtyish when Grandpa died, and she was left with two boys. She had to raise those boys. So she was there and ran a café and raised grand-young 'uns, myself, my two brothers, two cousins because her sons died real early.

ROB AMBERG:

Both of them?

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah. One—

ROB AMBERG:

So your father died.

DARHYL BOONE:

My father, my uncle Berlin died at thirty-four and my daddy died two years after that at thirty-eight.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow.

DARHYL BOONE:

We were all, that's why that café is special to me because that café raised us young 'uns. We were all raised out of that café. She fed us, and she not only ran that café, but when they built that—let me give you this before I forget it.

ROB AMBERG:

Please do.

DARHYL BOONE:

When they built that road through here, the first road, the one we're traveling on now.

ROB AMBERG:

Right.

DARHYL BOONE:

I remember that road being built. I remember the construction of that road going on.

ROB AMBERG:

So the two lane, what is now Twenty-three—

DARHYL BOONE:

Twenty-three.

ROB AMBERG:

Before that it was just a—

DARHYL BOONE:

It was just a real remote road. I mean, it was—you can still see some of the signs of the old road if you get—I still know where some of it is at and can see it.

ROB AMBERG:

But it was off the track of where it is now.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah. It just went around the ridges, and it would just wind and went all over the place.

ROB AMBERG:

Was it paved?

DARHYL BOONE:

No.

ROB AMBERG:

Okay.

DARHYL BOONE:

It didn't have any paved. It was real unique. But when they were building that road, I don't know it just came to mind. Grandma and all ran that café, had five grandchildren right under her heels, trying to help raise us. She kept workers that were building the road in the basement of the café. She had the upstairs. She lived upstairs back there where they dine now, she had a bed and all back there. She kept these fellows downstairs and fed them three meals a day and housed them to get extra money.

ROB AMBERG:

Man, oh man.

DARHYL BOONE:

She was a work Trojan. I mean, just a horse. And not only that, I can still remember her making me shirts. She'd fix me shirts. Phew, I'll get emotional here if I'm not careful. Man. I'm sorry.

ROB AMBERG:

No, that's okay.

DARHYL BOONE:

She'd fix me, phew, man, I don't know why that came back so close. She'd fix me winter coats and sew those coats. Man. I'm sorry. I apologize for this.

ROB AMBERG:

Now, were your, when your daddy and your uncle died, where were your mothers, your cousins' mother and your mother?

DARHYL BOONE:

My Aunt Betty who worked the café with her. She worked here for years. Of course, my mother when my daddy died, she had to go to work. So she was working in the factories here in Asheville, in sewing factories. Of course, that sort of put us with Grandma. That was the hub. That was where we went. It was just a unique place because—

ROB AMBERG:

That's not so much in a way, an unusual situation.

DARHYL BOONE:

Not at all.

ROB AMBERG:

For around here.

DARHYL BOONE:

As a kid, that was a congregating place. I know when I was a boy, it was a pretty large community over there then, especially younger. Of course, we had a school over there, Epps Chapel School was where I went to elementary school. They had the school bus. We congregated there at the café, all the kids would ride around that immediate area. There'd be as many as twenty or twenty-five kids there in the morning to meet the school bus. So I'll start giving you all these memories and stuff.

ROB AMBERG:

No, that's exactly what I want. We'll hopefully, this will cover a whole lot

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of ground like that because this is again fascinating for me I think. Now was the church there?

DARHYL BOONE:

The church right beside the café?

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, I've seen that church there. They've added on and remodeled and bricked over the years. I remember when that church was there, it was much smaller before they added on and had little wood siding on it and all. They had two outside toilets there. That, that's what they had. They didn't have running water. They had outside toilets there. I don't know, that just popped into my head. I can remember those days.

ROB AMBERG:

Now were you and your brother and your mom, were you living right there also?

DARHYL BOONE:

Right where the café sits right now, they have a, if you go by there sometime look. There's a dumpster sitting there right—there was a block house that sat there, and that's where we were raised, in that little block shack house is what it was. We liked to froze to death, but we survived it. Didn't have any running water, and we had what they called the pee pot. You had your pot by the bed, and if we needed to go to the bathroom, we'd go to the café. So there again, that was the hub where everything was—we ate out there most of the time, the biggest part of the time. We ate out there. We were out there eating. Times at that time, well I'll never forget this were struggling. She was doing everything; we were doing everything to survive, which we weren't unique. That's what the whole community did over there. Everybody was just surviving barely. She'd let us kids, five grandkids, we were only allowed one soda a week, and we got that soda on Sunday. That's the only day you got a soda because she just couldn't afford to do that,

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and we ate whatever she had cooked. I know I broke a storm window after my cousin Teresa, and she had made me mad about something. She had run in the door, and when she did I was trying to hit her and busted the storm window out. I was all worried about how I was going to pay for it. I told her that I just wouldn't have my drinks on Sunday until I got that paid for. I was going to pay her back.

ROB AMBERG:

Well, that's a pretty good little swap to make there. That's—

DARHYL BOONE:

She was a good one. She'd teach you how to work.

ROB AMBERG:

She taught you how to work I guess.

DARHYL BOONE:

Oh yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

What were your chores when you were growing up? What did you do when you came home from school?

DARHYL BOONE:

If you came home from school with her, she'd put you to washing pots and pans. You'd sweep the floor. She kept the driveway out there where the cars were parked, we kept that swept, just getting in wood, doing this, doing that.

ROB AMBERG:

Were you heating with wood and?

DARHYL BOONE:

We were heating with wood. She finally got an oil-fired furnace. I forget when that came in. We still, until I was in college, I was actually living over there in the basement of the café when I went Mars Hill. They were still heating with wood then. They had the furnace plus wood but to save money you were using wood and heating the café really with a wood stove.

ROB AMBERG:

Now, what was the, was the café busy? I'm thinking it was opened in '51 or so, and the road like you were saying wasn't completed even until mid-fifties or something like that. Was there a lot of traffic? Was it a—

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, you had a pretty good volume of traffic traveling that road, amazingly so, really. There for a while, they stayed open—that was when my father was alive. I can barely remember this. They stayed open at night. They had a twenty-four hour. They were up all night.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow.

DARHYL BOONE:

So apparently it must've been a pretty good flow of traffic going through there, picking up a lot of truckers. I worked out of South Carolina when I got out of college for about a year and a half. The truckers even down there when they'd come in—I worked for a textile company. They would, we'd get to talking, and I'd ask them if they ever traveled Twenty-three. They'd say, 'Oh yeah.' I'd say, 'You ever stop at Little Creek Café.' Oh man they'd say, 'We'd look that one out when we were going.' So she is known by the truckers everywhere because they could get a country-cooked meal. We're talking, people today, my wife says I've been spoiled. But they don't know how to cook country cooking. She knew how to do that. That style of cooking dies with the person because it's hard for them to hand it down for somebody to pick up. I picked up a little bit on her biscuit making. I'm getting better with that, but nothing like that.

ROB AMBERG:

That's really true what you're saying. I think it is passed down and unless a person is there all of the time watching and studying and just picking up things. Then, now a days too, it just seems like we just don't even have the ingredients that people had for the food back then.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's different.

ROB AMBERG:

Did they, did your Grandma basically prepare her own meats and things like that? Did she butcher hogs and cows, things like that?

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, we kept hogs right across the road there. We had a field there, raised tobacco in some of it and the other parts we raised beans, corn and potatoes, and then right down in the corner of the field, we always kept a couple of hogs over there and killed those hogs.

ROB AMBERG:

Those went into the restaurant.

DARHYL BOONE:

She'd sell that, and we'd cook that. The family would eat, we would get the opportunity. I always enjoyed that time just because we'd get to eat the tenderloin. She'd have tenderloin biscuits until all the tenderloin was eaten. Man, I could eat six biscuits with that gravy and tenderloin.

ROB AMBERG:

Fresh tenderloin is pretty hard to beat.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's good, fresh. Yeah, we did that, raised gardens. She had a, down in the basement, may still be down there, had big potato bins on one side of the basement. On the other side, you had the shelves that canned beans, corn, and all those canned goods. See, that's what she served. No wonder people loved it. You're talking about fresh green beans when they're in. When you're picking them out of the garden, serving them. Fresh corn out of the garden over there, which is a huge garden.

ROB AMBERG:

Then canned stuff.

DARHYL BOONE:

Then we'd can that. My goodness. She'd get apples. She never wasted anything. I remember watching her peel peelings, I mean, peel peaches and some of the best jelly you've ever eaten in your life. She'd take those peelings, and she'd cook those peelings and make peach preserves out of those peelings.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow.

DARHYL BOONE:

Because she wouldn't waste anything. You didn't waste anything. People

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asked for that. That's what they wanted. They wanted jelly, they wanted to know if she had any of that peach.

ROB AMBERG:

She was not only running a restaurant, she was also running a farm in a sense that was producing everything for the restaurant, not everything, but a good bit of it.

DARHYL BOONE:

A big part of it. Especially when she was younger and able to do more. Yeah, she'd make us and I hated it. Gosh, I hated stringing and breaking those beans. But when she got through, see she'd get up and be in the café by about four thirty in the morning and did that until she died. She was there at four-thirty making biscuits and gravy. Then she'd work the breakfast, and then get the lunch worked. Lunch would be over by around two or three, and she'd get, when we were there, we'd be sweeping and help her do that. Then she'd sit down, and we'd start stringing and breaking beans. So she had to get ready for the next day preparing, so she was unique.

ROB AMBERG:

Did she take a day off?

DARHYL BOONE:

Uh uh.

ROB AMBERG:

So y'all were open on Sunday's too.

DARHYL BOONE:

She'd work a seven-day week. We'd ask her, we'd say, we'd ask her, 'Grandma, why don't you at least shut down on Sundays?' She said, 'Well I don't know how these people are going to eat. Where are they going to go to eat?' She wouldn't shut down. I'll never forget her, she got up in years and there was an old fellow who lived down on Laurel. If you know where Laurel is, right there, you cut left. His name was Lawrence Whitt. He was a single fellow, never did get married and lived with his mother. His mother died, and he was just by himself. She was in the café one day, and I

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came by and I've got a picture. She was just exhausted just sitting there. I said, 'Grandma, why don't you go on down there to the trailer.' She'd bought her a trailer out there. 'Why don't you go on down there to the trailer and just rest? You need to go on down and get out of here.' She said, 'Well I will here in just a little bit,' She said, 'But now I've got to wait and see if Lawrence comes by. He might not have any supper. So he needs something to eat.' So she'd stay there and make sure. She knew about what time he'd come in. He came in about five-thirty, six o'clock. Once he'd come by, and she got him fed, then she'd go on down and rest. But she wouldn't leave. When she died, we went to the funeral home. People after people would come up and say, 'She fed me meals and never charged me. Fed me this. Done this for me, kept me.' One of the people came up to me and say, 'She kept me. We got stranded over there in the snow, she kept me.' She would do that. She wasn't afraid of anything.

ROB AMBERG:

That's great.

DARHYL BOONE:

She. Unique woman.

ROB AMBERG:

What a wonderful legacy too that is to leave.

DARHYL BOONE:

Oh yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

That's a great thing, God.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

So y'all were raising tobacco too.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, raised tobacco there in that field, just everything that you could do to survive. We had, even out there by my little blockhouse, we had a small tobacco patch there plus more garden area. We'd raise potatoes over there. We'd raised the best potatoes in the world. As a matter of fact, I may go raise some over there this year.

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They're different than any you'd taste. Just does something to them, that soil. We just, every little spot of ground you could, you'd raise something on it. I was thinking about that here a while back talking to my wife. My wife don't relate to, she came up differently than I did.

ROB AMBERG:

Is she from this community?

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, she lived, she was raised right here in Mars Hill. Her father was a professor at Mars Hill College.

ROB AMBERG:

Who was that?

DARHYL BOONE:

Arthur Wood, a physics professor.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, okay.

DARHYL BOONE:

He's still, he's a fine man. I was telling her, we all over there, we didn't have anything. We were just barely living, but the rest of the community was just about the same way, there was nobody that had anything. We didn't know we were poor. We were eating, and we had clothes on our back. We felt pretty fortunate.

ROB AMBERG:

Well, there wasn't really a whole lot of money in the community period. Just, I've had other people tell me, the real big influx of any kind of cash seemed to be like mid-sixties when the Federal programs started coming in and pumping some money in.

DARHYL BOONE:

That's the first time you started seeing any money. So I don't want to get off of that one.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, so your, was your mother from this community also?

DARHYL BOONE:

My mother actually was from Alexander up here. My father, I don't know exactly how they met. I've forgotten right now. That doesn't come back to me how they

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met. They got married real young. Mom was only sixteen when they got married. I think she had my oldest brother Larry when she was probably sixteen, sixteen, seventeen and went from there.

ROB AMBERG:

But she, it sounds like she maybe had, I mean, was her family a farm family do you think, your mom's? Was it—

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, they farmed and did just survival farm and raise enough to eat and live. Her daddy worked a sawmill. He worked a saw mill job. I remember that. I can't remember what Grandma did. She made, yeah she made quilts. She made quilts.

ROB AMBERG:

And sold them?

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah. They quilted a lot, her mother and her sister made a lot of.

ROB AMBERG:

Do you think that would've been over in Alexander, that was a pretty heavily trafficked road through there at one time.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, they lived right over in the Alexander area there. They moved from, well they moved from Weaverville, Alexander. They were in the Weaverville area and then Alexander. So that's the approximate area. I forget how they came in contact with each other and met.

ROB AMBERG:

You're saying when you were younger, and there'd be twenty of you waiting for the school bus out there. That was a small road but there was traffic because again, that route, that's what we're seeing now is really I don't know, I've read where that route has been trafficked since Native American times. Its been a commercial trade route for that long. But there was not so much traffic there that you all felt, it's not like it is out there now.

DARHYL BOONE:

It wasn't as bad.

ROB AMBERG:

You can't even set foot out on the road.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's funny how you get used to it. When we're living right there at it, the trucks were pretty heavy. But you get so used to that that you don't even pay them any attention. They go by, and you just sort of get used to it. Pretty good volume of traffic, but as the years went by the traffic got more and more and more. You got much more volume.

ROB AMBERG:

You were saying you remember when it was paved and when it was changed and rerouted and all that.

DARHYL BOONE:

I remember when some of the road on toward the Sam's Gap they were still working on that road that I can still recollect because I remember back in behind the café there where the trailer and mobile home and all is, that originally wasn't in there. There was a pond, they had a lake back there right behind—

ROB AMBERG:

Wow.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, had a lake. I've got some pictures, some old pictures of the café, and they had a lake back there. That water that comes off the hills, there's two areas there where you have tributaries that come into it, and they just build a lake there for that water to come in. They had fish. I remember that lake. I remember it well. So when the road, when they started finishing that road on toward Sam's Gap they had excess dirt, just like they're trying to find places now for dirt and rock and all. Well, Grandma decided to go ahead and drain that lake because she just didn't see the need of having it anymore. She drained the lake, and they filled that area in for her.

ROB AMBERG:

Okay.

DARHYL BOONE:

And did away with the lake.

ROB AMBERG:

The trailers were put in and the mobile home.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, I can still remember the lake being there, just a little point there.

ROB AMBERG:

Wow.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, we all gathered. Of course there were a lot of young 'uns. You had the White young 'uns right over, their mother and daddy still live right near the café. They had two, three, four children. Then we had the Englishes. There were two or three of those. The Sheltons right there, I mean, you're talking another two or three. The Whites on down the road. I mean, you can just keep naming. The Cartrettes up here. There were a lot of young 'uns, a lot of kids. It was a big bunch of us around. We'd just sort of congregate there for the bus stop.

ROB AMBERG:

When you were, you were saying you went to school at Epps Chapel, where did you as a family go if you needed to go shopping or if you needed to, if you wanted entertainment or things like that. Where did you—?

DARHYL BOONE:

Shopping, we would come to Mars Hill and didn't go a whole lot, didn't have an opportunity. I know my entertainment when I was a boy mostly, Grandma'd come out here once a week or whatever to the beauty shop, and it's still up here. She'd get her hair fixed, and I'd come with her and just come browsing down into town.

ROB AMBERG:

You'd roam around town.

DARHYL BOONE:

Roam around town, and we knew one of her friends that lived right below the beauty shop, I mean just a house or two down below it. We were good friends with her, and we'd go down and see her, and she'd feed us. We'd visit her, and then we'd browse on down here and check things out. But every once in a while when I got on up eight, nine years old somewhere in that neighborhood, we'd every once in a while go to a

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movie, and we'd go to the drive-in in Asheville. We'd drive up to a drive-in movie. That was not very often, but we got to do that.

ROB AMBERG:

Occasionally you did.

DARHYL BOONE:

Occasionally we would drive in. That was mostly the entertainment. Every once in a while you'd get to drive the parkway. We'd get in an old car and ride along the parkway.

ROB AMBERG:

[Unclear.]. Jeez.

DARHYL BOONE:

Some fond memories.

ROB AMBERG:

It's interesting to me that you'd come into town with your Grandma, and she'd be in one place, and you'd be roaming around town, and she felt obviously comfortable enough to let you kind of do that. Just as a young child you know 'Well he's not going to get hit by a car or he's not going, or somebody's not going to kidnap him or-'

DARHYL BOONE:

You didn't have to worry about it back then. You just didn't, you never locked your houses. You never locked your car doors. Back then, you didn't even take the keys out of your car. That was just something that never thought of it. That was, never came into mind. I don't ever remember locking our doors when I was a boy, never.

ROB AMBERG:

Even living right out there on the road.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah. Living right by the road, never had any problems. I don't recall. I'm sure there were, but I don't recall stealing. No sort. I just don't. Lot of respect. I remember I'd look and see—I don't know why I'm getting into this but my wife teaches school, and I see the difference in the youth now. I was saying there was a lot of respect for adults, respect for Christian beliefs, and respect for the church. I see such a change in

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that now from my generation to this generation now. I see my wife teaching in the high school. It's astounding.

ROB AMBERG:

Is she at Madison High?

DARHYL BOONE:

No, she's at North Buncombe, just out here right in Buncombe County. I think that's the one thing that I notice that I think we've missed. Maybe we have come a long ways in our material possessions. We have more. But I think we've missed the mark there somewhere in maybe time with the family is staying together. Mothers and fathers—I don't know why I got off on this. Mothers and fathers, I see these kids now that she's teaching, it's unreal. Since I was there and I haven't been out. Well, I've been out thirty years here in 2002. She's having to deal with things that I would've never dreamed of as a teacher.

ROB AMBERG:

I see the same thing, and I wonder how much of it is, what that's all about. I, some of it to me it seems like would be, I'm not really sure. I think times have just gotten, are so different then when we were growing up. I grew up outside of DC. It was in the suburbs. It was a fairly fast place even back then. It was certainly much slower than it is now, but it was still faster than ever was going to be around here. I grew up the same way though with really good manners and respect for things, respect for people and all that kind of stuff. It's not that my children don't do that, but you can tell that just the whole atmosphere is different. I—

DARHYL BOONE:

I don't know. It's just real strange though in just that short a period of time how it could get—I don't know. I didn't mean to get off there.

ROB AMBERG:

No, that's fine that we did. That's okay because I think, I wonder partially one of the things that I really wonder about is like the affects say of the I-26 corridor

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when that comes in. Is that going to magnify those kinds of effects? Is it going to be even more different after that's done? Will things get faster and faster? Will we—

DARHYL BOONE:

I've seen a lot of change in the community in my time, but time does change things. It does. Its been a whole different, the pace of living is faster. The crime, we're seeing things here now that we didn't used to see. A lot of this is brought on by the traffic. The motel down here now, it breeds some things we didn't used to see. I think as you get more and more traffic especially off an interstate like that, you're going to have things that we didn't. You'll have robberies and other things. But the crime rate has gotten up somewhat, not panic level. You're going to get things. You've got more people, more people coming through.

ROB AMBERG:

I guess that's more, well, more people. I mean, I was talking to Sam this morning. We were talking about the fact, I've been in the community twenty-eight years now. There was a time when I moved here when you, Sam and I were both saying, when you not only knew everybody's truck but you knew the sound of everybody's truck. It didn't matter—

DARHYL BOONE:

That's pretty good.

ROB AMBERG:

What time of night, you knew that that's so and so coming through.

DARHYL BOONE:

You do.

ROB AMBERG:

Oh, yeah that's John coming home or whatever, that kind of thing. Now like you were just saying, there's such an increase in traffic, an increase in people and new people constantly moving into the community.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's not the same, never will be, and can't be. What I still like about, I'm still real partial over there in that area. I still go to church over there at Upper Laurel, still

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over there. That's just where I brought my boys up over there. But I just like those people in that community. You lose some of this. I'm not saying that people that move in here, they're bad. That's not what I'm getting at. But you lose some of the what there was when I was a boy, so and so got down and got sick, you went and pull his tobacco up. The community's still got that over there. That's one of the unique things about it. You go in there, one church helping another church and one family doing something for another family. That, we've lost some of that over the years. My grandmother again, the Whites that lived out from her, still do as a matter of fact, they were just real good friends. I wondered why they were always so close. But didn't find this out until just a few years ago, their house burned down. They lost everything they had. They had, I guess they had their oldest son Terry. Might not have had Margaret, but when their house burned down, they didn't have anywhere to go so Grandma, she came over here and lived with us. So she just took them in, and they stayed with her until they got another house put back together. They lived with her in the basement of that café somehow. I don't know how.

ROB AMBERG:

That's remarkable.

DARHYL BOONE:

I got to talking to June and Clyde White about that, and Clyde said something one night at church or something. Just talking about you don't realize you, he said, 'I thought I had everything in the world and I didn't need anybody.' Then he said, 'And then my house burned down, and I didn't have anything.' He said, 'Then I realized how bad I did need people.' He said, 'It was amazing how that community came to me.' Then he said something about my grandmother taking them in. Then other people, people bring you this and somebody'd hand you money and somebody'd bring you

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clothes and dishes and all that. That's still over there in that community to a great degree.

ROB AMBERG:

You know, I think, I wonder, it seems to me it's like that in a lot of the smaller communities. I know when you get over to—I live over on Little Pine area and have lived on Big Pine. I know how it's basically the same over there.

DARHYL BOONE:

I think your smaller communities, well you know everybody.

ROB AMBERG:

Exactly. It's still—.

DARHYL BOONE:

You just get to, well, you get close to them is what happens.

ROB AMBERG:

Well you're always throwing your hand up, or you're stopping and visiting and things like that. It's one of the things I love around here is just the sense of people coming over to see you and visiting. People are very open that way here I think.

DARHYL BOONE:

We don't seem to have time to do that like we used to when I was a boy. Of course that was your entertainment a whole lot though when you were younger. You'd visit. That was, we were talking about entertainment earlier. That was your entertainment. You went and visited people and see people and talk to them. That was the entertainment. Play with their kids' kids, and so that was your bulk of your entertainment because it didn't cost anything.

ROB AMBERG:

It was close at hand too.

DARHYL BOONE:

It was close.

ROB AMBERG:

You didn't have to travel a lot into Asheville or something like that. Well, people just couldn't travel back in those days. It was a long way.

DARHYL BOONE:

It took you so long. I remember when we had the car, and we'd go to Asheville. Good gosh. From over there it was over an hour to get to Asheville on a

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winding road. It'd take you an hour to get into Asheville. So it was a big ordeal to leave out.

ROB AMBERG:

I have a clear memory of when I first moved here, and it was still two-lane all the way from Asheville on out. The old road was still there past [Unclear.], and it was a long way just [Unclear.] because I was teaching at the college then for a couple of years. It was a long way to get out there just to get to work it seemed like to me.

DARHYL BOONE:

It was a pretty big hassle wasn't it then?

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah. Just that old winding, windy road. Then they put the four-lane in; it must have been '77 or so.

DARHYL BOONE:

I believe they were working on that—

ROB AMBERG:

'76

DARHYL BOONE:

In '75, '76ish somewhere around there they put the four-lane in.

ROB AMBERG:

That was a big change I think. It really—

DARHYL BOONE:

Oh, that was real big yeah. That was real big. We're seeing a lot of people that are moving to this area, and I think we're going to see that a lot more. They're working in Asheville and these areas, but they like living because they like the style of lifestyle here. They like what you and I were talking about, what we like. They'll sacrifice driving thirty or forty minutes to work to be able to have that lifestyle.

ROB AMBERG:

It's interesting. I think one of the things that a good road brings is not only brings people in, but it gives people who are already in the access to get out and work someplace else. That changes the relationship of that person to where they live. So if you live on Upper Laurel or something or out there on Foster Creek or somewhere, but if you're working in town, if you're just hopping on the interstate now and getting into

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town, it changes your relationship with your place because you're not there as much. You're not around. You're not in the community. You're involved in another place for work or something, and it's just, you're just not there.

DARHYL BOONE:

I think we're seeing a lot more of that. I mean, where I live, which is out on Gable's Creek, just right out here. I don't see anybody out on Gabriel's Creek. I mean, I just don't. I come to work, and I get home in the evenings, and I've got my chores to do and get those done, and I don't visit. That's just what you do. You don't seem to have time. We entertain ourselves now with other things, TV and other stuff instead of visiting.

ROB AMBERG:

That's stuff we didn't have back in the '40s and the '50s, things like that. [Unclear.]

DARHYL BOONE:

Sure is. Sure is.

ROB AMBERG:

I wonder what effect this new highway is going to have on all that. How that is going to, what the effect of that will be on all these things. Like all the things that we were talking about earlier to me are kind of cultural things that we're really—. Like you were saying, everybody in the community was poor and kind of did this. How then does something like an interstate coming in affect those cultural values, affect those cultural traditions?

DARHYL BOONE:

I'd say you have a hard time hanging on to a lot of that. I think you're going to lose a lot of it because probably the ones coming in, they don't know anything about those cultural values, and it doesn't mean anything to them. Some of the things that means something to me, that's close to my heart about the things that I value, doesn't mean a whole lot to them unless they would really be interested in finding out. It's not, so you're going to, like you say some of these old people they die out, not only do they,

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you lose a person, but you lose a part of that culture. That's just the way it is. You can't help it. You lose it. I've seen some of the old timers over there—. I know another lady over there, Big Mama we called her. Big Mama. She could cook, boy. She was another one of those country, all her and her husband did was farm all her life, and she'd cook for the farm hands. Boy she could lay it out there, cooked on that wood stove, cook them biscuits on that wood stove, and I'm telling you. She'd have four or five meats and table, big table, just stuff all around it. Of course when you're a boy you remember all that foodstuff.

ROB AMBERG:

Yes.

DARHYL BOONE:

Well, you'd worked like a dog and then come in and get that, and boy that'd get you through the rest of the day.

ROB AMBERG:

Some of the time, well I've worked a lot of tobacco when I first moved here. It was a similar kind of experience. When you work for somebody, and you're out with a crew of people working, cutting and hanging [Unclear.] and that kind of thing. It's time for dinner, and you go in, and you've been kind of wondering where the guy's wife has been all day, and then you go back to the house, and you find out.

DARHYL BOONE:

Found out that she's been preparing a lot of food.

ROB AMBERG:

She hasn't been sitting down watching the stories. She's been doing something else.

DARHYL BOONE:

I guess we lose some of that. But not always all those good old days are, not all that's good old days either. There are some of the good old times back there that I'd just as soon not have anymore.

ROB AMBERG:

Like what? Give me a sense of examples.

DARHYL BOONE:

Well, what I was telling you there about only cold water running in the house. A pot by the bed, the cold house, not being able to go to and fro like you'd like. It's things like that you'd just as soon, getting wood in all the time. It's things like that that today the lifestyle is a lot better. There's—

ROB AMBERG:

So you as a person kind of raised and born up here, you can appreciate being able to get into Asheville now.

DARHYL BOONE:

Oh yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

As quickly as you can.

DARHYL BOONE:

Oh yeah. You've got to admit, it's nice. There's some disadvantages, yes. I mean, I'm sure there's disadvantages, but there are a lot of advantages too. So it maybe it's a weigh here, you weigh it out with the good and the bad. There will be change. There has been. When I really started seeing a change I think around here was when Wolf Laurel started developing. You saw the cost of your land starts skyrocketing. Used to you could buy a huge farm around here for a reasonable price. Once they came in and started paying the prices they did for some of the land, that value just really started getting up there quickly. Since Wolf Laurel—

ROB AMBERG:

That would've kind of been early, mid-seventies I guess Wolf Laurel.

DARHYL BOONE:

Let's see. I worked up at the restaurant in at Wolf Laurel when I was about fourteen. I bussed tables and cleaned, I guess it was about fourteen. So that would've been in the '60s. That was when they first started just really cranking up pretty good. Used to have a restaurant up there, built a restaurant.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, Sam was telling me I guess there was an unpaved road for part of the way up there and, then you got up to it, and it was this little thing going on. It was just

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starting.

DARHYL BOONE:

It was just going good. Yeah it was, a part of it was gravel and a part of it was paved. I can't even remember how far it was. I mean, that's not important. But that's when I started really noticing the change. You have a lot more people coming in then. Of course lot more money started coming in then too.

ROB AMBERG:

Does that seem kind of amazing to you that growing up here, working the restaurant, bussing the tables, stuff like that, and it's kind of like gosh who are these people up here out in the middle of nowhere on top of this mountain.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, it was quite different because I remember going up there when I was a boy, and good gosh that was remote. My goodness, go up there. We'd go camping up there on top of that. That was another entertainment we did, camping. We'd go over to Twin Springs there and camp out up there at the Bald Mountain. Man, you couldn't get back in there. It was so remote. Yeah, that was quite different for a fellow of my age seeing those people. You'd see people that actually had money. Boy, they had some money. You didn't see that, and there's a lot of work that started happening then. A lot of people were working and building houses. I'd say some of those fellows over there in that community now that are heavy equipment operators. Wolf Laurel is probably where they got their start. They've done real well. Some of them have made real well with it. Without that they would've been struggling.

ROB AMBERG:

Right.

DARHYL BOONE:

They'd have been hurting. So there again, there's some good from all this too. Yeah, you do lose some of your culture. You lose that. But there's some good out of it too.

ROB AMBERG:

What, how would you, I know we're seeing—

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

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[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

ROB AMBERG:

There was a demographic shift from [Unclear.] . How would you characterize the people that you're seeing move into the Mars Hill, Upper Laurel kind of community? Just, who's moving in here? Who's—

DARHYL BOONE:

You see a little mix of everything. We're seeing some families coming in. We're seeing a lot of people that have already made their living per se and coming in. They've probably sold their house or whatever and are coming. I'm seeing quite a bit of that. They don't have to worry about employment very much. They're coming in. We're not getting as many families. This one here is a little nerve. We're not getting as many families coming in here. Our, the setup on our school system, this is running that away. We're seeing that in the Mars Hill area here.

ROB AMBERG:

So a decrease kind of in the number of students or you're getting—

DARHYL BOONE:

No, what I was getting at was families with children of school age, they're not locating here in this area like they would had we a better school system. Now I don't say our school system as far as the education, I think we're doing decent. But the way we've got our school system set up is the parents come in here and they say, 'Well, my kid's going to go over here to Mars Hill K Five. Then it's going to go down yonder for six, seventh and eighth.' What we're seeing happen is instead of locating here and staying here, they're just easing out here into Buncombe County.

ROB AMBERG:

Into North Buncombe or something.

DARHYL BOONE:

North Buncombe because they've got pretty much the same thing. They're paying a little bit more for land than house out there but not too much more. Yet they've got a school system that's compact. They can send their kids right here K Five, and they

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can send them within just a few miles. We're talking not two miles, send them for sixth, seventh, eighth and high school about another two miles over here. So they're right in a nucleus here just, and we're losing them. They're going out there. We didn't do in our school system, I guess we did as well, maybe I'll say, as we could have when we consolidated. Financially I guess we had to consolidate, but I don't know how much we accomplished. I'm afraid we didn't get what we wanted really.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, it doesn't seem to be, I think the high school that just opened maybe when I moved here I remember. The thing that's so unique about this county is it's so spread out geographically. I mean, think about going from Laurel, Upper Laurel out by the café out all the way over on the other side of Spring Creek up Meadow Fork or something.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's so spread out. Like I say—well, I guess there's no use elaborating on that one, but we, the committee that was formed to study this consolidation. There again dollars have a lot to do with what you do. They recommended we do a two-school set up, lower upper. I guess ideally that's probably what should've been done. Then I think you probably would've had a better growth on both ends.

ROB AMBERG:

On both ends.

DARHYL BOONE:

I think you would've had. Whereas now we may have hurt ourselves as far as if we're looking for some growth of business, industry because a lot of that tails right into your schools because these industries are not going to come if you don't have schools here for their children. If you have to bus all the children like that you think, then it's easy to shift over here. That could be good, and that could be bad. Like I say there's a way out there. Industry has some good but it also has some negatives. Oh well.

ROB AMBERG:

Mars Hills, seemingly there's the new retirement center that's opening in town or opened in town. So you're seeing older people too, retirees and Wolf Laurel, the set up initially kind of is second homes and retiree types. There's more families moving up there, aren't there than there used to be?

DARHYL BOONE:

You're seeing some more of that. You're seeing, still don't see too many families. You see a little, you are seeing some as I say instead of second homes; you're seeing people that have gotten their children out of the home. They can live there, and they are. We're seeing more of that now. We're seeing more full-time people up there.

ROB AMBERG:

Permanent residents and—

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, you're seeing more permanent residents up there than we had.

ROB AMBERG:

Still seems out in the middle of nowhere.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, it is. I'll tell you. It's a different world over there. Totally. I was raised over in that area. It's a whole different world, I mean, weatherwise and all that. It's rough especially if you've got to go out, and I've done it and go to work. It's a little rough getting over those mountains.

ROB AMBERG:

Well it's so high up there. It's just, Wolf Laurel itself is what, forty-five hundred feet or something like that. It's—

DARHYL BOONE:

I'd hate to be in there and have to come out. A lot of people don't. A lot of ones that are staying in there I don't know what their employment is. But not many I would think are having to travel in and out of there everyday. I think you're seeing more of that. It's the full-time people. Then there are some people in there that are full-time that probably aren't working mid-age, and they've apparently financially—

ROB AMBERG:

Like you say maybe they've made some money elsewhere.

DARHYL BOONE:

I think so. I think so.

ROB AMBERG:

I wonder if, it's almost, it seems like that's happening too in a lot of the county. I know a number of people over on the other side of the county in those kind of situations too. A lot of people too are running business; you're able to run a business out of your home if you're on the Internet and things like that.

DARHYL BOONE:

I'm sure we'll see more of that as years go on. That'll increase. I'll have to tell you this funny because this came to me, and I'll forget it. This is priceless. I tell it when I can think of it. My grandmother, they always called her Miss Boone. I mean, everybody called her Miss Boone. But she married Shelby Hamlin her second husband. Some people called her Miss Hamlin but not many. When they got married, they hadn't been married too awful long, there was a little bootlegger that he used to have a, he bootlegged liquor and all up at the top right when you started to cross into Tennessee. He had a little mobile home there, and he lived in it. He had beer and liquor, and you normally weren't supposed to have it. He had had it. The fellows would get up there, and they would gamble around a little and drink. Shelby, he liked to drink a little. He got up there, and he apparently got drunk. He could do that every once in a while. He couldn't drive home. Clindon, Clindon Honeycutt's a fellow. Clindon called, he called down there at the café, and he got hold of my grandma and he said, 'Edna,' He said, 'Shelby's up here, and he's so drunk.' He said, 'There ain't no way he can drive home. You're going to have to come get him.' She goes up, and I'm sure she's a little hot. She's goes up and gets him, and they're coming down the road. Well, right before you get to grandmother's there's a two unit apartment complex up there now. That used to be a country store, a gas station and all. Jasper Jenkins ran that. Jasper Jenkins.

ROB AMBERG:

He told me about that.

DARHYL BOONE:

Old Jasper's a good one. They were coming back down, and they got right there, and Shelby and this is what I've been told. He was sitting there. And he would, his head would get to bobbing when he'd get drunk, and his head's a bobbing down there. He saw where he was at, and he looked over there and he saw he was about at Jasper's and was getting close to the café. He was so drunk that he looked over and he said, 'If you don't mind there, you can drop me off down there at Miss Boone's.' He said—

ROB AMBERG:

[Laugh]

DARHYL BOONE:

He didn't know who had him. He was just talking.

ROB AMBERG:

She was driving. That's great.

DARHYL BOONE:

You can just drop me off. And he called her Miss Boone too. She'd married him then, Hamlin. 'Just drop me off down there at Miss Boone's.' I don't know why that one came to me. Oh goodness.

ROB AMBERG:

That must've been a really wonderful thing for her though to find Mr. Hamlin, Shelby and just be married again and just be able to do that. I would think that's—

DARHYL BOONE:

I'm sure it was. I'm sure it was a lot of help to her over the years. He was. He took us in. He and I got real close. We were close out in the field working with him, I'd follow him around, and we got real close.

ROB AMBERG:

Was he from this community?

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah. Yeah, he's actually raised in this area right here. So—

ROB AMBERG:

Farmed most of his life.

DARHYL BOONE:

Farmed. He worked with an electric company here for a few years, but I

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think he off and on farmed most of his life.

ROB AMBERG:

Right.

DARHYL BOONE:

Worked a few years with the electric company though. That was probably on up when he was in his fifties I guess.

ROB AMBERG:

You probably always had power over there from when you remember I would guess.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yes. I remember as long, as far back as I remember we had power. I do remember when the phones first came in. I can remember that. We had those old party lines. That was something. Had eight or ten houses on one line. You'd pick it up and see if anybody was on there and use it. You'd get on, and they'd pick up and listen to you.

ROB AMBERG:

Finding out things.

DARHYL BOONE:

Oh yeah. That was priceless. I can remember that. That was fun.

ROB AMBERG:

That must've been a real—I've always thought that telephones coming in around here probably were as a significant a change as anything because it allowed people to talk on the phone instead of making that walk down the road to go visit somebody. You could call. I would think that that was a really big change.

DARHYL BOONE:

It was big I'm sure to be able to call I mean Mars Hill.

ROB AMBERG:

Exactly.

DARHYL BOONE:

That was a big thing to be able to call out here. Yeah, that was a big one. I still remember, I still remember our first TV set. I can still see that thing. I remember those days. Of course, we were probably behind a lot of the area on things like that. I'm sure we were a few years behind.

ROB AMBERG:

Although I remember, I'm a little bit older than you are. I remember certainly party lines even in the DC area. I remember having those as a kid for a few years and thinking that that was pretty funny too. If you were a mean kid, you could really get yourself into a fix on those things.

DARHYL BOONE:

Oh boy yeah. My brother stayed in a little bit of trouble on those party lines. He was all the time into something.

ROB AMBERG:

Is that Larry?

DARHYL BOONE:

No, no. It was the middle one. Larry wasn't too bad. Bruce, he was into stuff. He was all the time doing something.

ROB AMBERG:

Now did you go to high school at Mars Hill?

DARHYL BOONE:

Um hmm.

ROB AMBERG:

Okay.

DARHYL BOONE:

We moved, see we had K-7. Well you didn't have K then, but we had one through seven and then eighth grade we came out here. So we transported from over there out here to eighth. We went eighth through twelfth over here. This was a K-12.

ROB AMBERG:

That must've been a pretty good little bus ride in and of itself.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, it was not a lot of fun. It wasn't great going over those mountains and all. But I can imagine now, some of those kids like I say down on the Foster and some of those areas going all the way down here to Brush Creek.

ROB AMBERG:

Right. Right.

DARHYL BOONE:

Man, that's a haul.

ROB AMBERG:

Right.

DARHYL BOONE:

I can't imagine.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, we have some friends that are way almost on the Yancey County line. They've homeschooled for years, but their oldest daughter decided she wanted to go to the middle school, and it's close to an hour for her to get out to the middle school.

DARHYL BOONE:

There's some of those kids over at Ebbs Chapel way, some of them have got as much as a two hour, a two hour morning and evening.

ROB AMBERG:

I can't imagine that.

DARHYL BOONE:

That's a ten-hour day. For a kid, that's tough.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, it is tough.

DARHYL BOONE:

You've seen, as I say, you don't see too many people locating with school aged children over in an area like that. They won't do it. They'll move into an area.

ROB AMBERG:

Unless they're determined to homeschool or something like that.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, they won't do it. A majority won't.

ROB AMBERG:

I have a nine-year-old. She goes to Walnut. We generally, we carpool in the morning with a couple of neighbors and take them out, and they all ride the bus back together in the evening. That works out pretty well.

DARHYL BOONE:

That's not bad. That's not too bad.

ROB AMBERG:

We're fifteen or twenty minutes from the school. It's splitting it three ways; it's not bad at all.

DARHYL BOONE:

That's not bad. If they just have to hop on it for either a morning or evening run, that's not bad. They can handle that. Have some good, really, back when I was going through, you had some pretty good social time on the bus.

ROB AMBERG:

Exactly.

DARHYL BOONE:

It wasn't bad.

ROB AMBERG:

It's a real education in itself, really I think.

DARHYL BOONE:

It really is. You learn to deal with a lot of things.

ROB AMBERG:

That's one thing about this new highway. You get out on Twenty-three the way it is now and increase traffic that's out there. Just, I was talking to Stan Hyatt last week, and he was telling me it's ten thousand vehicles out there.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's unreal. That's where I go. I go to church. I just sort of mentally as the years went by, I sort of kept a mental track, and my wife and I were just talking about how the traffic has increased. Goodness gracious. It's unreal. I mean, I know it's tripled. It has to.

ROB AMBERG:

You think about kids on the school bus. There are still busses out on that road. There's a lot of elderly people using that road and—

DARHYL BOONE:

The interstate had to happen. I mean, it just had to be. I don't see any way around it. It just had to come.

ROB AMBERG:

Do you remember as a child hearing talk that one day there was going to be a big new road going through there?

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

Do you?

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, I remember it well. When I was a little boy, I remember just crawling the mountains and finding some of the old survey stakes. They had survey, I mean when I was a boy. They'd done some surveying apparently deciding where this road. It was back over. I guess it was back near the Sam's Gap area that I remember finding some of the old stakes. I remember talking about a road going to come through there ever since I was a little boy. It took a heck of a long time.

ROB AMBERG:

And people were ready for that even back then.

DARHYL BOONE:

Oh yeah. I think so. I think they realized that these roads are hard to travel especially when you traveling them day by day. I have some friends, a lot of friends that live over in the Ebbs Chapel area. They'll, I know, they'll be pleased. I know there are some repercussions from this, but they'll be pleased to be able to hop and get on that road and be in Asheville, they'll probably be in Asheville in twenty minutes.

ROB AMBERG:

Right.

DARHYL BOONE:

Probably without any trouble once they hit the road. So that's, I think they're looking forward to that.

ROB AMBERG:

Do you think, did you spend a lot of time in the woods when you were growing up?

DARHYL BOONE:

Quite a bit.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah. Just being like a boy, just roaming the mountains riding a stick horse and all that stuff. We wandered, just wandered around. EA: That's got to be a real kind of shock for you then to see just that area again right across from where you grew up and what's, what has become now with the road.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, it's totally different. That's one thing. That's a little different then when I grew up. Used to you could, I never did hunt a whole lot, never cared for it, still don't, but I like to roam the mountains and still do. I still like getting out. There's a certain serenity to it. But back when I was a boy, nobody cared. You could go across their land. That's changed. That's not the same. That's not because of, I don't necessarily think, of different people moving in here. I think probably some of this got

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brought on by some people abusing, going across people's land and abusing it. But lot of people don't want you. That's a change of the time. They don't want you on their land. Of course, when I was a boy, you could just roam it all. It didn't matter, but that's changed a little bit. We did, we roamed the mountains. I picked blackberries. I can get back again reminiscing about what we did. We'd go over those mountains right across from the café, and there are some real blackberry fields over there. We'd pick blackberries, and we'd sell them blackberries. We'd set us up a little blackberry stand there in front of the café. We'd sell them blackberries so much a gallon.

ROB AMBERG:

That's great.

DARHYL BOONE:

Pick those until I got sick of picking them. Boy that—

ROB AMBERG:

Sicker eating them probably. You can only eat so many blackberries. I'm sure your grandmother probably put some of those up to or pies.

DARHYL BOONE:

She'd buy some from us just to—we'd go out and pick them, and she'd buy them just to put up. She made a, she'd call me up here, call me here at work, and she'd say, 'I'm making a Blackberry Drop Dumpling Cobbler.' Man I'm telling you. She'd say, 'If you can get over here today for lunch, I'll save you some.' I'd say, 'Well, I'll try to get there.' I did usually. It was rare. Boy it was good, especially if you could get wild ones. My goodness.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah. There's a real different taste to them.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's totally different. She'd make jelly out of those too and jam. Unreal.

ROB AMBERG:

You were brought up, you were brought up working. You—

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

You were brought up with a kind of work ethic it sounds like to me. At least

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as a kid it sounds like you were always kind of doing things or scheming things or coming up with something to—

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, we worked mostly farming and just whatever in the café, washing and cleaning and doing that sort of stuff. Grandma made sure we learned to do that. She taught us to do all that stuff. I knew how to wash my clothes and all that stuff. She said, 'I'm going to teach you boys how to cook.' My wife loves for me to cook. I like to cook and I can. I cook some like Grandma cooked. I can do some of that. I learned some of it, not all of it. My wife, she loves for me to cook. She taught us to do, she said, 'You guys, you've got to learn to take care of yourself.' She made sure we learned how to cook and clean. She'd say, 'You've got to learn to clean house and all this stuff.'

ROB AMBERG:

That's pretty, for this area that we live in, that's pretty unusual.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah.

ROB AMBERG:

I mean, there are not too many local men that cook, and there are fewer still that'll clean house or wash clothes I'd say. I find that to be pretty unique. I mean, that's how I've raised my son too, doing the same thing. That's how my father was, but I always considered him to be a real oddball because he would be cleaning the house on Saturday morning.

DARHYL BOONE:

Well, I met my wife, I actually started dating her back in high school. We met I guess, I may have been a freshman in high school. I actually met her I guess it was. Yeah. Freshman in high school. We started dating some. I couldn't believe, I'd watch her father. Of course, I was raised most of my life without a father. He died when I was about eleven. I'd get to watching him, and I'd see him in there cooking in the kitchen, and he was doing this cleaning, doing all this stuff. You didn't see that. I mean, Shelby

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didn't do that stuff. But yet Grandma taught us that we had to learn to do this. I'd see him doing that. Man, so you do do that stuff. It, so I did the same thing with my boys. Hey, you need to learn to do this. Of course they didn't seem to be as apt to learn it as good as I felt like I did. I don't think they had to.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, it just hasn't been pushed on them I think. My son's a pretty good cook. He does pretty well with that stuff.

DARHYL BOONE:

Mine do pretty well too. They went off to college. When they did, it was good they knew how to do. They learned a lot. I'm sure they were glad they learned what they learned. A unique thing, I'll pop this out. I don't mean this as a brag or anything like that, but both my boys, I think I was working in South Carolina near Columbia when my wife got pregnant with my first son. I had just gotten out of Mars Hill here and I landed a job. And landed a job and I never will forget, I was planning on going one more year of college and a company, Milliken and Company, came in and interviewed. One of my professors asked me if I wanted to interview with them. I told him, 'Not really because I wasn't planning on getting out of school. So I wasn't looking for a job right now.' I funded myself through school, paid all my schooling, roofed houses, helped pay for that, drove trucks. But they came and interviewed me and offered me a job. So I went to two semesters of summer school to get out of college early to go to work. Anyhow I moved down there, and my wife got pregnant with my first son. When she got pregnant, I told her, 'Well, this is not where I want to live to raise children. I want to come back here and I want to raise my boys—boy, I didn't know whether it was a boy or a girl. I said, 'I want to raise my children here. This is where I want to raise them, whatever it takes.' We did that and brought them up here in his community, and I think

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we instilled some moral values in them that are worth more than any money we could've ever made. I look back on it now; I can do that now. It was the best sacrifice we ever made. Both my boys did this. I was pleased. A parent will be bad to brag he isn't careful. My oldest son has been off at Carolina, Chapel Hill. He's getting ready to graduate. He's got one more semester. He'd been there, starting on his second semester, I guess. Old Madison County boy come and there he is. He wrote us a letter. I saved the letter. Both of them did this. He wrote me a letter and he said, 'I just want to thank you 'uns for the way you raised me.' He explained what we did to him, and we had stuck together. Mom and Dad loved each other, and we had been a family. I guess when he got down there, and he saw kids that didn't go home when they had break and all this stuff, I think it probably came home to him what was really important. You can look back on that now as I'm sure. Boy, that's worth, that's worth its weight in gold.

ROB AMBERG:

It really is.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's worth something.

ROB AMBERG:

What was important to you about raising your children here? Why did you feel so strongly about that?

DARHYL BOONE:

Well I felt like raising my children and I see this now, in this community raising them around people like my grandmother, being exposed to that, I think grandparents from what I've seen and great grandparents have a profound impact on a child. My wife's parents, we wanted to be near family. That was just something we wanted to do. As I say I think the values they were brought up in. I think their beliefs that were instilled in them, by no means forced on them, but I believe their belief system and their faith. I felt like they got good rearing in that area, and something they've got to

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carry with them from now on. That was the thing. I think there again we didn't have a whole lot of things. We probably sacrificed some money and things and a bigger house and stuff like that to do this thing. I don't know, it was just something about this area. Maybe it was just me. It could just be me. She and I both wanted to come back here and be close to family, rear them in this area. They may not stay around here. They may not feel the same way we did. They may go off and do whatever, but we think we did the right move by bringing them here. There again, emphasize, I think the people in this area. There's just something about it. Again that's just maybe me. But it's unique.

ROB AMBERG:

I'm hearing you, yeah, it's almost like you're, I'm hearing you say a little bit, it's not, you're saying it's you, but in a way you're also saying that the community has helped to raise your children.

DARHYL BOONE:

Yeah, that's probably what I'm getting at. That's probably true because with the community and being exposed to that there's something about this area. It, maybe the whole, well, Madison County's unique.

ROB AMBERG:

That's true.

DARHYL BOONE:

It's unique. That was where I wanted to be. Mars Hill's where I came. Madison County in a whole is unique. I think it's still got something that, even you just drop off into Buncombe County.

ROB AMBERG:

Yeah, that's real different.

DARHYL BOONE:

And you don't have it. Dr. Underwood, historian here. She says it best in one of her books. Madison County, its greatest asset is its people. I think we've still got that. I think we've still got, you go down into where you live. You go over here into Ebbs Chapel. You go over into Shelton Laurel. You go back over here into Beech Glen.

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Just keep naming them, and by golly it's unique. It's the people. That's what I really wanted. It wasn't the same where I went back in '77. I really didn't like, I was living outside of Columbia, in a small town, Saluda, South Carolina. Right near Columbia. Man, it wasn't the same. It was a smaller town, and everybody knew everybody.