Free meals on Thanksgiving

Since this story ran Tuesday, I’ve learned of a few more places that will be serving free Thanksgiving meals tomorrow. I’m posting the entire list here. If you know of others, please post them or let me know. I’ll add them. Note: The linked story also lists volunteer opportunities for Thanksgiving Day and restaurants that will be open.

Look here to see a map showing all of these locations.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

*Vick’s Drive-In parking lot at 506 West Rowan St. The Caring 7 will start serving at 11 a.m. and end by about 2:30 p.m.

*The City Rescue Mission at 331 Adams St. Thanksgiving dinner will be served from noon to 4 p.m.

*The Salvation Army at 245 Alexander St. It expects to serve Thanksgiving dinner to several hundred people between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

*Highland Presbyterian Church at 111 Highland Ave. will be serving meals during the day as well as packing them up to send to other places.

*Parks Chapel Free Will Baptist Church at 2503 Murchison Road will be serving, presumably at lunch, but I haven’t been able to confirm the hours.

*College Heights Presbyterian Church at 1809 Seabrook Road. Meals will be served in the fellowship hall from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

*Kingdom Builder Ministry, a new church, will be serving Thanksgiving dinner to any and all from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the cafeteria at Alger B. Wilkins Elementary School at 1429 Skibo Road. That’s according to Pastor Angela Walker. She said she is planning to feed at least 300.

*Smith Temple Church of God In Christ at 2296 Slater Ave. TCL Ministries will be serving Thanksgiving dinner to the needy from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

*True Vine Temple Reasoning Center at 910 McNeill St., Spring Lake. Meals will be served to all comers from 11 a.m. until the food runs out. They served 75 to 100 last year.

Our own mini Woodstock, back in 1972

Most of today’s Live Wire deals with a music festival in Rockingham back in 1972 — the Peachtree Celebration — which drew tens of thousands of people to the grounds of the N.C. Motor Speedway to hear (and watch) acts like Alice Cooper, Three Dog Night and the James Gang.

It was a huge event for this area — a kind of one-day Woodstock — but there’s only a minimal amount of  information about the festival online.

You can check here and here for some attendees’ reminiscences and even some snapshots from that time. One guy talks of having ridden his bike to Rockingham from Whiteville, where he was a rising high school senior. Another guy remembers the sweltering late-August heat did Poco in after its set so the band couldn’t do an encore. He remembered the MC announcing, “Poco is puking!”

Meanwhile, go here to see photos of that day’s performance by a little-known, but well-received all-girl hard-rock band called Birtha.

In the top poster, you’ll see it talks of the event being “a hit of fresh air and sound,” playing on the drug term, and, from an Observer report of the show, it sounds like there was plenty of pot around, as well as some LSD.

I didn’t find any video from the festival but if you want to see and hear what some of the festival’s artists looked and sounded like then, check the following YouTube videos from 1972 or thereabouts:

*Alice Cooper, doing “School’s Out,” his mega hit which had just been released at the time of Peachtree.

*Three Dog Night, doing “Black & White.”

*The post-Joe Walsh James Gang, doing “She Runs, Runs, Runs.”

*Fleetwood Mac, doing “Spare Me a Little of Your Love.” (If FM doesn’t look/sound like the FM you’re used to, well, that’s right. This was that band’s earlier incarnation.)

*Poco, doing “Just For Me and You.”

*Rory Gallagher, doing “Going to My Hometown.”

The festival was put on by a group of people, including Fayetteville attorney Tony Rand and Fayetteville accountant Lyndo Tippett. Rand would later become a state senator and he’s now the Senate majority leader. Tippett would eventually become the state’s secretary of transportation under Gov. Easley.

Ask a question here

Welcome to Live Wire!

I’ve said it before — in the text over there to the right — but I want to say it again: Please feel free to pose questions to Live Wire. You can do it here at the blog, by replying to this post. Or you can e-mail livewire@fayobserver.com. You can also call the Live Wire line — 486-3516 — and leave a message.

You can also respond to other posters here if you know the answer to a question or if you have a comment or suggestion. Please chime in! Greg and I will keep an eye on the blog and we’ll try to answer your questions here or in the column itself.

As you may know, the six-day-a-week Live Wire column is now authored by both me (Catherine Pritchard) and Greg Phillips. (He’s on the left — if you couldn’t guess. 😉 ) I now sign my answers C.P. and he signs his, well, G.P.

Besides Live Wire, we share responsibility for the Fay to Z breaking news blog and we both do other work for the paper as well.

If you’re new to Live Wire, the column tackles anything we consider to be of general interest or consumer interest — or both. Anything, as I have said, that’s outside of scary Dear Abby territory. Ask us something. We’ll see if we can answer — or if another poster can. If you’re not sure how to post or what’s involved in that, check here. Again, welcome. — c.p.

🙂

More questions

Ask ’em here.

Hear ye, wanna-be Community Gardeners

They hope to break ground on this project this spring. 

If you’d like a part and a plot in Fayetteville’s first Community Garden — or at least would like to know more about the project — you’ll want to attend a meeting on these very subjects on the last Saturday of the month.

The meeting will be at 10 a.m. on Feb. 28 in the J.S. Spivey Recreational Center at 500 Fisher St., off Old Wilmington Road. That’s the red star on the map –>. The garden, marked by the green X, is planned between nearby Vanstory and Mann streets.

I’ve written before about the plans for the garden. Check this post for that info, including an artist’s rendering of the garden’s design and associated links.

For more info, call 483-9028. The nonprofit garden is being sponsored by the Sandhills Area Land Trust.

NC National Guardsmen are the subject of a media project

C.M., who has a son in the Guard, had heard about this Associated Press project and wanted to know more. That’s the lead subject in today’s column.

AP will be following a number of members of this Guard unit for the next year, as well as the family, friends and neighbors they left behind at home, in the small town of Hamlet, N.C., which is in nearby Richmond County. The unit recently deployed back to Iraq — again (as is the case for so many service members).

Click here to check out the interactive AP project — and be aware it’s in its early stages so you’ll want to keep checking back. You’ll always be able to find the link here.

Encyclopedias

I’ve written before about the weighty problem of disposing of a set of encyclopedias.

And I’m writing about it again in today’s paper. E.S. has a set she doesn’t want any longer and she’d rather not throw the books away. After all, they’re full of useful and interesting information. She just prefers to use the Internet now.

Other times I’ve answered this sort of question, I usually get calls from at least one and often more people who would love to have the encyclopedias and I try to hook up the two parties accordingly.

As I suspect there are probably a number of people out there who’d like to have a set of encyclopedias — and others who have sets they’d like to get rid of but ideally without trashing them — I’m setting up this post where they can indicate as much if they want.

How about it? Anyone?

A photo of the 82nd soldiers who marched in the inauguration parade

Some of you may have missed this previous blog entry where I dorkily posted lots of screen caps taken from CNN’s live Web stream of the Inauguration Day events.

I happened to be watching — and managed a quick screen cap — when CNN briefly showed the 82nd soldiers marching in the parade. We’ve had a hard time hunting up official news photos of this and I know some of you would like to see at least this. I wish the quality was better and the quantity was greater. But this was the only picture that I could manage.

If you’d like to see other images from CNN’s coverage Tuesday, go here.

Lt. Col. Xavier Brunson, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, brought about 100 Soldiers from Fort Bragg, N.C., to represent the active-duty Army in the parade, according to this Army press release.
 

Images from the day

I’ve posted some screen shots from today’s events, taken very obviously from CNN’s live Web stream. (Thanks, CNN!) If you see just two pictures in this post, click on the link at the bottom to view the rest. Naturally, you can click on each picture to view it in a larger size.

I’ve posted all of the photos in chronological order except for the top two, though I also have them in chrono order down below. The first one’s up here for obvious reasons — President Obama is taking the oath of office, verbal stumbles and all.

And the other photo up top shows the 1st Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of Fort Bragg’s own 82nd Airborne Division marching in today’s inaugural parade. Hooah!

I do solemnly swear

They each recite the same oath. Below, watch 13 of Barack Obama’s predecessors swear to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.